op ed review 10/23
Reflecting national trends, businessman Herman Cain has jumped to the front of the Republican pack in Iowa. A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely Iowa caucus-goers shows that Cain is in front with 28% followed by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney at 21%. Congressman Ron Paul is a distant third at 10% followed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 9%, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann at 8%, and Texas Governor Rick Perry at 7%.
Whether Herman Cain’s surge in the polls is temporary or has staying power, he’s enjoying a big enough bounce to take a very slight lead over President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 matchup.
An unofficial gauge of human misery in the United States rose last month to a 28-year high as Americans struggled with rising inflation and high unemployment.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44970105
The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it five decades ago.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44962589
A truck filled with President Obama's teleprompters and audio equipment was stolen.
http://www.nbc12.com/story/15716468/thieves-steal-truck-with-presidents-equipment
So who are these OWS protesters? “Occupy Portland” protesters sing "F*** the USA"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZKzGbgSe8lg
The American Nazi Party, The Socialist Party USA, and the Communist Party USA have all endorsed the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.
One of the Occupy Seattle protestors has been accused of exposing himself to children at least five times.
http://www.komonews.com/news/local/132064518.html
A woman who leapt to fame for her proud and succinctly expressed Jew hatred at OWS Los Angeles, has been fired by the Los Angeles Unified School District.
President Obama has indicated his support for protesters
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/052226f8-f80c-11e0-a419-00144feab49a.html
The AFL-CIO is running ads promoting “Occupy Wall Street.”
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2011/ss_media1299_10_20.asp
In the minds of likely voters, Washington, not Wall Street, is primarily to blame for the financial crisis and the subsequent recession. That is the key finding of this week’s The Hill poll, which comes as the national Occupy Wall Street movement — a protest that objects to risky practices and excessive salaries at major banks, along with American income disparities in general — enters its second month. The movement appears to have struck a chord with progressive voters, but it does not seem to represent the feelings of the wider public.
http://thehill.com/polls/187837-the-hill-poll-voters-say-dc-worse-than-wall-street
Go figure. In spite of his demonizing of Wall Street, President Obama is blowing away his Republican challengers when it comes to soliciting Wall Street donations. Obama has raised more from the financial and banking sector this year than all of the GOP presidential hopefuls combined.
Campaign contributions to Sen. Maria Cantwell are off by 30 percent compared to the same point in her re-election campaign six years ago.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2016552972_cantwell20m.html?syndication=rss
The California man who lives part of his life as an “adult baby” and collects $800 per month in Social Security disability payments says the federal agency has cleared him of wrongdoing and will continue sending checks. Stanley Thornton Jr. now wants an apology from Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who called for the benefit review.
The 350-pound man dons a gigantic diaper, is bottle-fed, plays with action figures, and sucks a pacifier. He also runs a website, www.BedWettingABDL.com, for others who play-act as babies, wear diapers or wet their beds. He was employed as a security guard for a year and a half but now says he is unable to work because of trauma stemming from childhood abuse, combined with other mental and physical problems. When his disability was questioned, Thornton sent a letter to the Washington Times threatening suicide if his check was taken away: The Social Security Administration backed off and said his disability checks would continue to arrive.
Total compensation for federal workers, including health care and other benefits, last year averaged $126,369,
Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says Congress needs to worry about government jobs more than private-sector jobs. "It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers, and that's what this legislation is all about," Reid said on the Senate floor.
Senate Democrats say they aren't giving up on their push to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act
http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_44/Democrats-Eyeing-DOMA-Repeal-209583-1.html?pos=htmbtxt
Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department's $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job of assembling the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car has been outsourced to Finland.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/car-company-us-loan-builds-cars-finland/story?id=14770875
“One of the greatest feats of legerdemain has been accomplished by the administration in recent weeks. The Obama administration made $533 million disappear by giving it to a " green" company named Solyndra. Next came a "green" company named SunPower that manufactured photovoltaic solar panels. This time the money was upped to $1.2 billion of taxpayer money. However, they failed to investigate where the jobs were, and it turns out that SunPower was building a manufacturing facility in Mexico with our money. When we look a little closer we find that SunPower was a big contributor to the Democrat Party…..”
http://www2.hernandotoday.com/content/2011/oct/15/doe-in-the-headlights/columnists/
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Star Parker 10/17
It’s not just conservatives who are frustrated today. It is every single American who longs to see their nation regain its vitality, restoring freedom and prosperity at home and shining the light of human potential across the planet.
What is particularly frustrating is that the party out of power, the Republican Party, is supposed to be carrying the torch for these values. But it’s barely happening. The Party has become bogged down with careerists, rear view mirror thinkers, and its own establishment of inside the beltway elite. Nothing could speak more to this problem than establishment attitudes toward the remarkable Herman Cain. Take, for instance, a recent column by conservative columnist Mona Charen.
After extolling Cain’s compelling virtues – his rags to riches success story, his love of America and the values that make it great, and the courageous ideas he has put on the table in his campaign – Ms Charen dismisses his candidacy for president. “…he lacks the kind of experience the office requires…political skills… necessary in a political job.”
Others who dismiss Cain point to his lack of national organization essential for raising the kind of money a presidential campaign needs. I just don’t see it this way.
The American presidency is not a political job. The American president is the leader of the free world. The job, of course, demands political skills, but so does every job that requires working with other human beings. One of America’s worst presidents – the former Senate Majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson – had more of these political skills than perhaps anyone who ever held the office. What he critically lacked was a clear vision and commitment to American principles of limited government and personal integrity.
The single most powerful asset that a new American president can bring to Washington is the support of the American people. A president with a vision, and popular support for that vision, will have the Washington political establishment jumping to his beck and call. What makes Herman Cain so interesting is the passion and clarity of his view of American freedom, and his Reagan-like ability to communicate and excite grassroots Americans.
A new Gallup poll on candidate positive intensity – the percentage of those with strongly favorable opinion minus those with strongly unfavorable opinion – shows Cain so far ahead of the rest of the Republican field it is ridiculous. He has a positive intensity of 35. Number two is Romney at 15, with the rest lagging behind him. Cain is the only candidate putting concrete and simple ideas on the table for getting this nation back on track.
The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore said Cain’s 9-9-9 plan for simplifying our horrendous and highly politicized tax code would be “…rocket fuel for the economy.”
Cain’s support for getting rid of the confiscatory Social Security payroll tax and replacing it with personally owned private retirement accounts would be a boon to all Americans, but particularly for low income Americans. Personal retirement accounts would provide an unprecedented opportunity for every American to build wealth over a lifetime, as was done in Chile, where this reform was pioneered.
After adopting personal retirement accounts, along with other free market reforms thirty years ago, Chile was transformed from one of the world’s most sluggish to one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Returns on these personal retirement accounts have averaged over 9 percent per year since the program started in 1981.
America needs a new president who loves freedom and has the guts to pursue it without compromise. Freedom is not about warmed over conventional wisdom. It’s about ideals, humility, originality, and embracing the unexpected and unanticipated. The Republican Party establishment needs to start listening to grassroots Americans and asking why no one is exciting them like Herman Cain.
http://townhall.com/columnists/starparker/2011/10/17/herman_cain_rocket_fuel_for_america
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FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“One of the problems in trying to select a leader for any large organization or institution is the tendency to start out looking for Superman, passing up many good people who fail to meet that standard, and eventually ending up settling for a warm body. Some Republicans seem to be longing for another Ronald Reagan. Good luck on that one, unless you are prepared to wait for several generations. Moreover, even Ronald Reagan himself did not always act like Ronald Reagan.”
-Thomas Sowell
"In this election cycle, the battle isn't between the old media and the new media anymore. It is between the Tea Party and the GOP establishment. ... But the establishment GOP sees the Tea Party as a threat, for two reasons. First, they think that the Tea Party is more interested in principle than victory. ... Second, the establishment GOP is not aligned with the philosophy of the Tea Party. They like the philosophy of a Democrat-lite: more efficient, effective government, but not necessarily a smaller one. ... When conservatism is politically inconvenient, it sometimes wins (see Reagan) and it sometimes loses (see Goldwater). But when conservatism embraces the politics of convenience, it always loses."
-Ben Shapiro
"Many (OWS) protesters have told sympathetic reporters that 'it's our Arab Spring.' Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the 'Occupy' demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months' time. They're worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U. One sympathizes. When college tuition is $50,000 a year, you can't 'work your way through college' -- because, after all, an 18-year-old who can earn 50-grand a year wouldn't need to go to college, would he? Nevertheless, his situation is not the same as some guy halfway up the Nile living on $2 a day: One is a crisis of the economy, the other is a crisis of decadence……the 'Occupy' movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole. ... One of their demands is for a trillion dollars in 'environmental restoration.' Hey, why not? It's only a trillion. Beneath the allegedly young idealism are very cobwebbed assumptions about societal permanence. The agitators for 'American Autumn' think that such demands are reasonable for no other reason than that they happen to have been born in America, and expectations that no other society in human history has ever expected are just part of their birthright. But a society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance only for so long."
-Mark Steyn
“Most of us may lament the fact that so many more people are today dependent on food stamps and other government subsidies. But dependency usually translates into votes for whoever is handing out the benefits, so an economic disaster can be a political bonanza, as it was for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Don’t count Obama out in 2012.”
-Thomas Sowell
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BOOKS
The late Steve Jobs has a new book out. In it, he criticized America's education system, saying it was "crippled by union work rules….Until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform." Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.
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LEFTIST WATCH
A close look at the OWS “micro-socialist dictatorship” in downtown Manhattan.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/10/occupy_animal_farm_the_organiz.html?mid=twitter_DailyIntel
Susan Sarandon Calls the Pope a Nazi at the Hamptons Film Festival
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/susan-sarandon-pope-a-nazi-occupy-wall-street-249260
Michael Moore says republicans are trying to “reverse civilization”.
Keith Olbermann’s show on Al Gore’s Current TV (America’s least watched network) has lost nearly a third of its viewers in four months. Pretty impressive result for a $10 million a year salary . Olbermann’s average is down to 46,000 viewers.
http://www.bnet.com/blog/sports-entertainment/keith-olbermann-paid-10-million-to-lose-viewers/1680
National Public Radio host Lisa Simeone appears to be breaking the taxpayer-subsidized network’s ethics rules by acting as a spokeswoman for the Occupy D.C. group When asked about the apparent ethics violations, she replied, “Well, I work in radio still, but this is totally different”
http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/19/npr-host-a-spokeswoman-for-occupy-d-c-possible-ethics-violation/
“With each passing day, the Occupy Wall Street movement is picking up steam. The growing roster of A-list supporters at home and from around the globe is impressive, if that’s the right word. Iran’s chief mad mullah, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, loves the protests, the government of China applauds them, and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is positively gung-ho. Naturally, the American Nazi Party favors the lusty attacks on the “Judeo-capitalist banksters” while the Socialist Party USA and the Communist Party USA are happy passengers on the anti-Wall Street bandwagon. Oh, and Barack Obama hearts the movement, too.”
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/the_job_destroyers_jKzAjk6AR2kjkkLRRejQuN
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THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE
“So what’s my problem (with Romney)? My problem is that for all Romney's admirable qualities, the president must be a visionary, not just a picker-upper. He sets the course of the country and points it in a certain direction…..Barack Obama proclaimed his intention of radically transforming America. He has gone a long way toward keeping his promise and done a lot of damage. He has steered the country onto the road to socialist hell, and if his "accomplishments" are not undone, America will find itself in mortal peril. Assuming that in 2012 Obama goes down to defeat, as seems increasingly likely, it is paramount that the next U.S. president be as much a counter-revolutionary as Obama is a revolutionary. Zeal must be countered with zeal, persistence with persistence. For the U.S. public, ordinarily cautious and wary of dramatic moves, instinctively grasps the gravity of the situation and clamors for boldness. The 2012 election will be that rare instance when the American people will tolerate -- indeed, demand -- decisive, visionary action to arrest the country's seemingly inexorable slide toward the abyss. Tinkering around the edges won't do. What is required now is an all-out counterattack to roll back the socialist onslaught. In short, what the country needs is a transformative president.
Does Mitt Romney meet the specification? I am afraid not.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/10/why_romney_alarms_me.html
IBD: “John Holdren? Mitt, you have a problem. The GOP front-runner for 2012 sought advice on global warming and carbon emissions from the president’s current science czar — an advocate of de-developing America and population control. Politics is said to make strange bedfellows, but no coupling in our view is more bizarre than when John Holdren, now President Obama’s assistant for science and technology, once advised GOP presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney on environmental policy.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/280238/romneys-john-holdren-problem-greg-pollowitz
Mitt Romney’s camp is defending a controversial program he created that handed out free cars to Massachusetts welfare recipients — including state-funded insurance and AAA memberships. Under Romney’s Car Ownership Program, the state paid out one year’s insurance, inspection, excise tax, title, registration, repairs and a AAA membership for cars that were donated to welfare recipients.
http://bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view.bg?articleid=1374143&position=0
“Does Mitt Romney have a political death wish? When I heard him utter the phrase, "There are plenty of reasons to vote against Mitt Romney...," I cringed, imagining endless repetition of this sound byte in the attack ads that will be the basis of the Obama re-election campaign, funded with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign cash. Why on earth would a smart guy like Romney hand Obama a video moment so damaging to his cause? Then there is this, a picture surfaced from the past, and certain to become ubiquitous once the GOP is committed to Mitt……”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/10/romneys_smoking_gun_picture.html
Michele Bachmann became the first major candidate to sign a pledge vowing to construct a fence along the border with Mexico by the end of 2013.
One of the key economists who helped presidential candidate Herman Cain draft his 9-9-9 tax plan is backing away from the most controversial component of it, warning that the criticism Cain endured at Tuesday night's Republican presidential debate shows his proposed 9 percent national sales tax might have to go
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ARTICLES
So with the budget deals, there are cuts, right? “…..data released by the Treasury Department on Friday show that, so far, there hasn't been any spending cuts at all. In fact, in the first nine months of this year, federal spending was $120 billion higher than in the same period in 2010, the data show. That's an increase of almost 5%. And deficits during this time were $23.5 billion higher.”
Rock ‘n roller Ted Nugent: “Smart people quietly chuckle at the antics of goons like Michael Moore and Roseanne Barr. Smart people know that Mr. Moore and Miss Barr represent a fringe movement of people who are poor because they have made a lifetime of poor choices. Expecting others to remedy that by surrendering their wealth is a fool’s game. It’s also anti-American and downright anti-human. Occupy Wall Street is empty-headed. Stinky hippies, generational slaves to Fedzilla and the transparent entitled are the problem, not the solution.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/oct/14/nobody-needs-michael-moores-hypocritical-advice/
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LATE NITE:
Leno:……There was a truck filled with President Obama's teleprompters and it went missing. Meanwhile Joe Biden’s teleprompter shot itself
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WISE WORDS
"If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become an easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check."
-Thomas Jefferson
posted by gary at
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