op ed review 9/16
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for
Friday shows Mitt Romney attracting support from 48% of voters nationwide,
while President Obama earns 45% of the vote.
A study by two University of Colorado professors released
last month predicts that President Obama will win just 218 Electoral College
votes in November, far short of the 270 that he needs for reelection. “Based on
our forecasting model, it becomes clear that the president is in electoral
trouble.”
The Federal Reserve said it will start pumping $40
billion per month in an attempt to foster a recovery in the real estate market.
Must be just coincidence that the election is two months away.
The publishing industry is publishing anti-Obama books
authored by conservatives in numbers normally reserved for young-adult novels
about teenage vampires. More than 30 nonfiction titles blasting the president
have been released by publishers this year, with several more hotly anticipated
works expected to hit bookstores before the Nov. 6 election. You might expect
to see a similar deluge of pro-Obama books by liberal authors, but it’s not
even close.
“August’s abysmally weak job growth proved yet again that
President Obama’s economic policies are a miserable failure that will continue
to undermine our country until he leaves office. The government’s report noted that
the economy added just a minuscule 96,000 jobs last month. Analysts at the Federal Reserve Board,
economists and business leaders say Mr. Obama’s declining economy is not going
to get significantly better this year, next year or the year after that, until
there are dramatic changes in the nation’s fiscal policies.”
Mobs of Egyptian demonstrators stormed the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and pulled down the
American flag.
The U.S.
ambassador to Libya and
three embassy staff were killed as they rushed away from a consulate building
in Benghazi,
stormed by al Qaeda-linked gunmen. Islamists drag the dead body of the US Ambassador through the streets of Benghazi.
The Obama administration is attempting to walk back the
damage done by the apology issued by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo for criticisms of Islam made by
American citizens.
A timeline of yesterday's events shows that it took the
Obama administration 16 hours to disavow a statement posted on the US Embassy
in Cairo
website. It appears that the administration's failure to correct the embassy
and the doubling down by embassy staff 13 hours after the statement was
published prompted Mitt Romney's curt comments about the administration's
response.
The US State Department had credible information 48 hours
before mobs charged the consulate in Benghazi,
and the embassy in Cairo,
that American missions may be targeted, but no warnings were given for
diplomats to go on high alert and "lockdown", under which movement is
severely restricted.
Gov. Romney commented. “It’s disgraceful that the Obama
Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic
missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
During Romney’s press conference, reporters were caught on
tape coordinating their line of questioning to promote the administration spin.
U.S. Marines defending the American embassy in Egypt were not permitted by the State Department
to carry live ammunition, limiting their ability to respond to attacks like
those this week on the U.S.
consulate in Cairo.
Ambassador Chris Stevens did not have a Marine detail in Benghazi, Libya.
But White House Senior Advisor and Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett has a full
Secret Service detail on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard,
according to Democratic pollster Pat Caddell. That’s the pathetic foreign
policy of the Obama administration.
Unbelievable: “Last
night, as the German embassy in Sudan smoldered, Tunisian police fired tear gas
at US embassy rioters, the American military upgraded its presence in Yemen,
investigations continued in Libya, Islamists burned American flags in London,
Islamists invaded the US embassy in Tunisia, rioters went insane in Lebanon,
protesters in Jordan went crazy, protests continued in Egypt, and crowds began
to form in Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Iraq, the Obama campaign tweeted, “Beyoncé
and Jay-Z are hosting the President in New York—your chance for two spots on
the guest list ends at midnight.”
NY Times Puts Coverage of Cairo, Benghazi
Attacks on Page A4
al-Qaida comes to America: On
Friday there were telephoned bomb threats against university campuses in Texas and North
Dakota.
On the last night of
the Democratic National Convention, a retired Navy four-star took the stage to
pay tribute to veterans. Behind him, on a giant screen, the image of four
hulking warships reinforced his patriotic message. Unfortunately, upon closer
inspection, they were Russian warships.
Whoops.
Los Angeles
officials are considering a plan to turn the library card into a form of
identification that the city's large illegal immigrant population could use to
open bank accounts and access an array of city services.
Chicago: “In a city with double-digit unemployment,
teachers who can't be fired and who make more than double what their students'
parents make, have gone on strike. Anyone for school choice? Public sector
unions reared their burdensome and inefficient head Monday when some 25,000
unionized Chicago
Public School teachers
went on strike, unhappy with a salary the parents of their students can only
envy, leaving 350,000 students and their overtaxed parents struggling in the
educational lurch.”
The teacher’s union also objects to a new system for
evaluating teacher performance in which student improvement on standardized
tests will count for 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. No wonder they don’t
like it: Seventy-nine percent of the 8th
graders in the Chicago Public Schools are not grade-level proficient in
reading, and 80 percent are not grade-level proficient in math.
The California Senate passed a bill that would make it legal
for nurses, midwives and doctor’s assistants to perform abortions.
Christian-oriented Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. filed a federal
lawsuit challenging a mandate in Obamacare that requires employers to provide
coverage for the morning-after pill. The
lawsuit by the Oklahoma City-based chain claims the government mandate is
forcing the company's owners "to violate their deeply held religious
beliefs under threat of heavy fines, penalties and lawsuits." Failure to
provide the drugs in the company's health insurance plan could lead to fines of
up to $1.3 million a day, the company said.
Kentucky's
junior senator says the coal industry may not survive four more years of
President Obama in office.
A KING-5 television
poll shows Jay Inslee over Rob McKenna by a 49-to-44 margin with 7 percent
undecided. Poll. A huge gender gap for McKenna, who trails the
Democrat by 14 points among women identified as likely voters.
________________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Decades of leftist hatred for America's
middle class revealed in one terrifying moment in Charlotte.
Jeffrey Lord 9/11
Why Democrats hate the American middle class.
It's God's fault. God and plastics. And don't forget the
American flag. Which is another way of explaining just why it is today's
Democrats -- the very embodiment of the American Left -- literally hate the
American middle class. Hate that middle class with a visceral contempt. A
contempt that has been repeatedly and vividly documented over the course of the
last five decades in venues as varied as movies, music, politics and culture.
It is a contempt so powerful that the backlash from the
American middle class has provided not only huge and repeated election
majorities for conservatives and Republicans over the decades. The backlash to
this vitriol has powered one of the biggest revolutions in American
communications history -- providing an enthusiastic audience for Rush Limbaugh,
Sean Hannity and Mark Levin not to mention an entire talk radio industry. And,
of course, Fox News.
Mr. Limbaugh himself emphatically agrees that his audience
is composed of the American middle class that is so disdained by liberals,
telling The American Spectator that "My audience is comprised
of the people who make this country work." The very fact of the perpetual assault by the
Left on Rush Limbaugh is a case study all by itself. It perfectly highlights
the dilemma the Democrats found themselves in during their convention last
week Why?
Because liberals don't just hate Rush Limbaugh. The dirty
little secret here is that liberals hate Rush Limbaugh's 20 million member
middle-class audience! While at the same time desperately needing a
portion of that very same middle-class to win elections. Which is what makes
the already vitriolic hatred from liberals towards the American middle class
all the more poisonous -- for liberals. Without the middle class, Democrats
cannot possibly win a presidential election. Or, for that matter, most
elections. Which means in turn that it is critical, in a political sense, for
Democrats to always be seen as courteously if not warmly and lovingly, courting
the middle class.
Thus, under no circumstances can the mask that hides that
very real contempt towards the middle class ever be allowed to drop. Yet for
one-heart stopping moment in Charlotte
last week -- that mask did drop. And it was panic city. God was removed from
the Democrats' platform.
Followed within 24 hours by a defiant majority refusing to
restore Him to the platform yet being overruled as seen in the now famous video
of Convention chair and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa doing the dirty
deed. "Tony Two-Thirds," as we dubbed the mayor after his
performance, simply overrode the "no" vote on God and made it a
pretend "yes" vote of the required two-thirds. With that
"opinion of the chair", the deed was done. God was back in.
To see just how hair-trigger sensitive party leaders were
when they realized what had happened, one need go no further than this
contentious interview with Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the Democrats' Senate
Majority Whip. Hours after God's initial failure to make the platform cut,
Durbin was questioned by Fox anchor Bret Baier. Durbin had a meltdown, accusing
Baier and Fox of trying to make Democrats look "Godless." But why?
Why were Democrats suddenly in such a panic because their own delegates wanted
God out of the platform?
There is a reason -- and it's a big reason. A very big
reason.
God -- which is to say religion -- is forever associated in
American culture with arguably the largest, most influential voting bloc in the
country: the American middle-class. Middle class Americans may be Catholic.
They may be Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans or Jews. They may
be Evangelicals. Or fundamentalists. They may be… hmmmm… Mormon. Yes they may
even be Islamic non-fundamentalists. But whatever their faith may be -- and
we've only touched the surface by naming the above faiths -- what they all have
in common besides their middle-class status is God. Not to mention a belief
system, a value hierarchy of morals, hard work and patriotism that
revolves around God.
So it was no accident last week that President Obama and
former President Bill Clinton took pains to say some version of exactly the
same thing: Democrats just luuuuvvvv the American middle class. Really.
Honest. No kidding. Democrats have all these exciting,
especially-designed-for-the-middle-class programs old and new, you see, and…
Stop. Stop. Politely
put, this is not just another round of your average political snowjob. The
inevitable wooing and mooing by one group of partisans designed to win an
election. This is grimacing, clenched-teeth-with-a-forced-smile political BS.
BS designed to get must-have votes from a group of Americans today's Democrats
-- the embodiment of the American Left -- hate.
Yes, hate. Viscerally hate. Hate every bit as much as they hate Rush or
Hannity or Levin or Fox. Why do they hate the American middle-class, whether
lower, middle-middle or upper? They hate the American middle class -- hate it
passionately and precisely because it embodies the three values of religion,
capitalism and, oh yes, love of country -- patriotism.
EXAMPLES OF HOW the Left so disdains the middle class would
fill three Internets. This special contempt, which began spreading like a virus
in the 1960s, now permeates not only the nation's politics but its culture --
its movies, music, books, television and now the Internet………..
What relevance does all of this have to the next two-months
of the 2012 election? Plenty. Every time
you hear Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Bill Clinton sing the praises of the
middle class it's because they are scared witless there are millions of that
American middle class who are long on to the Democrats' game. Americans who understand in detail that when
God is booted from the Democrats' platform it is not just an attack on God.
It is yet another liberal attack in a five decades-long
liberal war on the values of an American middle class that believes in God,
country, and capitalism. A war on the very people, in Rush Limbaugh's words,
"who make this country work."
Jeffrey Lord is a former
Reagan White House political director and author. This was edited from a longer article, worth
reading, many examples, read it here:
_____________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton again perpetuated the kind of intellectual dishonesty that cripples the
U.S.
response to radical Islamists. The president asserted we have to oppose “the
kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.” Clinton reinforced his
analysis when she said, “We condemn in the strongest terms this senseless act
of violence.” This concept of “senseless violence” is at the heart of the
left’s refusal to confront the reality of radical Islamists. These are not acts
of senseless violence. These are acts of war.”
-Newt
Gingrich
“This is the broken
and anxiety-ridden world Barack Obama has made. Our adversaries are stronger. America and her
allies are weaker. And yet, after spending practically a decade blaming every
last thing, including the bad weather, on President Bush, the media seem
determinedly uninterested in ascribing even the slightest amount of
responsibility to President Obama. Who’s ready for four more years?”
-Mathew Continetti
“Today, the Independent is reporting shocking details about
the attack on the Libyan consulate that resulted in the death of four
Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. The details are so explosive
that they will result in a Congressional investigation. In fact, they’re so
explosive that they should result in the resignation of Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton. The only question now: What did Hillary Clinton know, and when
did she know it?”
-Ben
Shapiro
“I just pray that Americans will open their eyes between now
and November when they know that they’ll have to make that choice between free
stuff or freedom. You can’t have both.”
-Sarah
Palin
______________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
Obama's Communist Party Endorsement: The wording of this year's endorsement is
particularly full-throated, however, which in itself ought to be disturbing to
anyone still on the fence about the nature of the man, his party, and his policies.
….why does the CPUSA, in speaking to its own members, urge them to support
Obama by citing the very policies and decisions that Obama himself is most
proud of? The answer is as unavoidable as it is straightforward: the Communist
Party regards Barack Obama's signature achievements and defining principles as
consistent with, and conducive to, its own defining goal -- namely, the
establishment of a socialist workers' state in America. And of course, as America's official defenders of the
Marxist flame, they certainly know whereof they speak. In sum, the Communist Party loves the same
Obama policies and accomplishments that the Democratic Party establishment
loves, that the mainstream media loves, that the unions love, and that Charles
Schumer, Jennifer Granholm, Harry Reid, and Dick Durbin love. They want more of the same. The CPUSA sees what most of us see, and what
the Democratic Party would somehow like to keep its permanent underclass -- um,
that is, its voter base -- from seeing: the Obama agenda is driving America
"forward" on "the Road to Socialism." The only difference
is that the communists are honest enough to spell it out.
The publisher of Hustler magazine, Larry Flynt, is offering
$1M for Mitt Romney's tax returns
For the New York Times, what better way to observe the 11th
anniversary of 9-11 than by exploiting it for political purposes and seeking to
blame George W. Bush?
What does the Chicago
teachers' strike have to do with rapper Common? The rapper's mother, Dr.
Mahalia Ann Hines was hand-picked by Rahm Emanuel in 2011 to sit on the city's
Board of Education? The same Board is now in negotiations with the Chicago
Teachers' Union. Hines has not only raised a
son who thinks it's okay to kill cops, she became the business manager of her
son's music company in 1996. She is CEO of his Common Ground Foundation and is
president of his company Hip Hop Schoolhouse, which publishes "educational
materials for children."
___________________________________________________________________
ACTIVISM
On his syndicated radio show Monday afternoon, Rush Limbaugh
predicted that if President Barack Obama wins re-election, it will mean an end
to the Republican Party and the triggering of economic collapse within 18
months.
How much is it worth to save America from four more years of
Obama?
____________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it
builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and
manufacturing experts.
______________________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
In a period of about three weeks she went from being a
virtually unknown 14-year-old Pakistani girl to making headlines around the
world as a Christian teen facing a life sentence for allegedly burning pages of
the Quran.
Kentucky Fried Chicken will launch a halal-only menu in
eight of its London
stores.
___________________________________________________________________________
BOOKS, FILM
Chuck Norris reviews “Last Ounce of Courage”
How well is 2016: Obama’s America doing? It has already
topped Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and every single Michael Moore documentary
except for Fahrenheit 9/11. Last weekend 2016 passed Bowling for Columbine.
This weekend it passed Sicko and An Inconvenient Truth. 2016 also had one of
the lowest falloffs in one of the worst movie weekends of the year with a
better falloff than 3 out of the top 5 movies. And it added more theaters this
weekend than any movie playing anywhere in America, showing that theater
owners are rushing to get on board the 2016 express.
___________________________________________________________________________
ELECTION
“This election should be a cakewalk for the Republicans. Why
isn’t it? I am afraid the answer may be that the country is closer to the point
of no return than most of us believed. With over 100 million Americans
receiving federal welfare benefits, millions more going on Social Security
disability, and many millions on top of that living on entitlement programs–not
to mention enormous numbers of public employees–we may have gotten to the point
where the government economy is more important, in the short term, than the
real economy. My father, the least cynical of men, used to quote a political
philosopher to the effect that democracy will work until people figure out they
can vote themselves money. I fear that time may have come.”
As the campaign settles in for the home stretch, there are
many reasons to believe that the Obama campaign will have trouble closing the
deal. Chief among them are the numbers:
“It’s a paradox. The economy is in the doldrums. Yet the
incumbent is ahead in the polls. According to a huge body of research by
political scientists, this is not supposed to happen. On the other side of the Atlantic, it hardly ever does. But in America today,
the law of political gravity has been suspended. “
“President Obama is headed to defeat in November, and it
won't be close. Forget about the polls, and forget about the cadre of
delusional Democrats who can't stop telling us how great and successful the
last three and a half years have been. Slick Willy can shill all he likes, but
seriously, he's preaching to the choir, because the only ones believing his
shtick are bought and paid for sycophants, crony capitalists, and members of
the mainstream media.”
Get ready for an all-out brawl in 10 too-close-to-call
battleground states as President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney begin a two-month
sprint to Election Day. They will deluge those states with personal visits,
stacks of direct mail, automated phone calls and an unprecedented barrage of TV
ads in tossup states Florida, New Hampshire, Virginia,
North Carolina, Wisconsin,
Iowa, Colorado,
Nevada, Michigan
and Ohio.
Blitz: Romney Campaign Releases
17 New Television Ads: We knew this push was coming, and now the ads
are up and running in nine swing states. Virtually all of the ads are built
around the passage in Mitt Romney's acceptance speech when he preemptively
answered the "are we better off?" question many voters are asking
themselves.
For years Democrats have been running ads against
Republicans accusing them of wanting to scuttle Medicare. Well, a conservative
group is turning the tables this time around. The American Action Network
(AAN), a right-leaning advocacy group focused on Congress, is launching a
campaign to, according to a press release, publicize the “cuts to Medicare
fee-for-service (FFS) and Medicare Advantage (MA) in the states and
congressional districts of Senators and Members of Congress that voted for or
to preserve Obamacare.”
Samuel L. Jackson will “film a provocative spot supporting
President Obama’s re-election bid” as early
as tomorrow — telling voters to “Wake the f--- up, Vote for Obama.” It’s paid
for by the Jewish Council for Education and Research Super PAC — which earlier
this summer aired an ad of comedian Sarah Silverman offering “free lesbian sex”
to billionaire Sheldon Adelson if he stopped supporting GOP nominee Mitt
Romney.
President Obama, interviewing with “non-traditional media”, appeared in a
pre-recorded interview in Miami
with a DJ nicknamed “the pimp with the limp.”
____________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Thomas Sowell: “Once
again, Bill Clinton displayed it with unchallenged brazenness. Politics takes a
lot of brass. And Bill Clinton is a master politician. His rousing speech at the
Democrats' convention told the delegates that Republicans "want to go back
to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place."
That is world class brass. Bill Clinton's own administration, more than any
other, promoted an unsustainable housing boom, which eventually and inevitably
led to a housing bust that brought down the whole American economy.”
“(Under Clinton)..for
the first time, banks were ordered to qualify low-income minorities with spotty
credit. The 1994 policy planted the seeds of the mortgage crisis, as lenders
abandoned prudent underwriting standards altogether…..Clinton set numerical targets
for lending in predominantly minority census tracts under a revised Community
Reinvestment Act, and added several hundred bank examiners to enforce the
tougher CRA rules. Banks that failed had their expansion plans put on hold, a
slow death sentence in an era of bank mergers and acquisitions. For the first
time, CRA ratings were made public, egging on Acorn and other radical
inner-city groups, who used the reports to extort banks for more than $6
trillion in subprime and other loan set-asides by 2008.”
“One of the legacies of the Obama presidency is that “white
male” as a term of embarrassment has now transcended the hothouse of the campus
and gone mainstream. We are lectured by media figures, celebrities, and
politicians ad nauseam that the November election is really about a new America of
diverse minority groups, gays, feminists, and greens pitted against a dying and
shrinking number of old white guys. Sometimes that narrative requires absurd
assumptions.”
A patriotic rock group. Yes, there is one. Named for a
Founding Father of the United
States? Yes, there is one. http://news.investors.com/politics-andrew-malcolm/091312-625573-madison-rising-records-a-new-inspiring-version-of-the-star-spangled-banner.htm
________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Michelle Malkin on
a roll: “You Go Girl! Michelle Malkin at
her very best. Malkin BLASTS feckless Obama administration over 4 dead
Americans in Libya.”
An Israeli website, “the premier science and technology
portal for Israel”,
published an article: “Long-Form Birth Certificate of Obama is a Forged
Document”. The website says the
publication “of such a blatantly fake document about something so basic as the
birthplace of Mr. Obama, should raise great concern about the suitability of
the person who is holding the reigns on the most powerful country of the
World.” The article has now disappeared,
but it’s summarized here:
“Here’s the Married Vice President Joe Biden Snuggling with
Some Biker Chick at a campaign stop.”
Dr. Barbara Bellar, a motor-scooter-riding animal loving,
Army veteran and Republican attorney who's taking on the Chicago political machine, made this
hilarious homemade video that captures the colossal stupidity of ObamaCare in
one (very long) sentence.
_______________________________________________________________________
AND ALL THE DEMOCRATS SAID, 'AMEN!'
"Bow down, all ye worshipers, to me, the god of the
almighty State, the god to whom everyone belongs from birth to death.
"Bring out the sackbut, the cymbals, and the gongs. Celebrate me, the almighty and compassionate
State, who is ready to provide you with all your needs. Are you sick? I, the god of state, will have compassion and
heal you. Are you hungry? I, the divine state, will feed you. Do you need a home? I, the holy state, will provide you with
shelter. "Are the oceans rising and the planet in need of healing? Do not fear. My new messiah will lower the ocean levels and
tend to our sick planet…..Of course, I require some sacrifices. I have some commandments you are to obey. Here are -- entirely coincidentally! -- ten
of them chosen at random from thousands. " "You shall not worship any
other gods than the State except maybe Gaia, my handmaiden. "You shall
observe strict dietary rules. Stay away from the temples of McDonald's, Burger
King, and Kentucky
Fried Chicken lest you pollute yourself with soda and fats. But most especially, stay away from the
blasphemous food temple
of Chick-fil-A. "You shall illuminate your residence with
special curly bulbs as holy lamp stands dedicated to me and Gaia, my handmaiden
of the Earth. "You shall speak the holy language of political
correctness. The appropriate lexicon
will be issued from time to time, as I am a god who often changes his mind.
"You shall tithe to me, the State, the fruits of the labor of your hands
in order that others be given their fair share. "You shall send your sons
and daughters to my temples of learning only. You shall recognize the messianic mission of
my Anointed One, contributing your time and energies to the missionary causes
espoused by the Anointed One. "You shall not covet a profit from what I,
the State, have built. You did not build
anything. I did it all. "You shall
accept my holy sacrament of child sacrifice."………
____________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"The timid civilized world has found nothing
with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity,
other than concessions and smiles."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"No people will
tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge
is diffusd and Virtue is preservd. On the Contrary, when People are universally
ignorant, and debauchd in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight
without the Aid of foreign Invaders."
-Samuel Adams
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