op ed review 9/9
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
It was a truly astonishing spectacle at Wednesday’s
Democratic National Convention. Bill Clinton, the once disgraced former
President was cheered, while amending
the Democratic Party platform to include a single reference to God as the
source of human potential was jeered and booed. Nothing speaks louder to what
is at stake in this election than the reaction of rank and file Democratic
Convention delegates to referencing God in their Party platform.
The DNC banned dozens of Charlotte churches from distributing gift
baskets to delegates because the congregations “hold values that are contrary
to the party platform.” 56 churches of mainline
denominations put together gift baskets featuring Carolina Pralines and a
letter welcoming them to the city... “We were just trying to display Southern
hospitality……They told us our views on women’s rights are contrary to the
platform.” So instead of gift baskets,
the churches asked if they could send welcome letters to the delegates. Again, the
DNC refused – “because the churches hold pro-life values.”
An illegal immigrant was given a prime-time speaking slot at
the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night, where she championed President
Obama’s recent decision to stop enforcing certain aspects of immigration law.
A record 88,921,000 Americans are ‘Not in Labor Force’.. The Labor Department counts a person as not
in the civilian labor force if they are at least 16 years old, not in the
military or an institution, and have not actively looked for a job in the last
four weeks.
The 69.9 per cent labor force participation rate for men is
at lowest level recorded since the US government began tracking it in
1948.
The White House response to
the jobs report: “Important Not To Read
Too Much Into (it)”
A record 46.7 million Americans received food stamps in
June, up 0.4 percent from the previous month.
The U.S.
government debt, which topped $16 trillion for the first time at the close of
business on Friday, now equals approximately $136,260 for every household in
the country.
The United States
has slipped further down a global ranking of the world's most competitive
economies, according to a World Economic Forum (WEF) survey. The US economy dropped two positions to
the 7th spot - marking its fourth year of decline.
A majority of voters
believe the country is worse off today than it was four years ago and that
President Obama does not deserve reelection.
After a week as topic No. 1 in American politics, former Carmel Mayor Clint
Eastwood said the outpouring of criticism from left-wing reporters and liberal
politicians after his appearance at the Republican National Convention last
Thursday night, followed by an avalanche of support on Twitter and in the
blogosphere, is all the proof anybody needs that his 12-minute discourse
achieved exactly what he intended it to. “President Obama is the greatest hoax
ever perpetrated on the American people,” Eastwood told The Carmel Pine Cone
this week. “Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and
that’s what everybody needs to know. I may have irritated a lot of the lefties,
but I was aiming for people in the middle.”
Feds quietly end probe of 'America's toughest sheriff' Joe
Arpaio; no charges.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s female aide
resigned amid allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior with men.
Are 60% of Milwaukee’s
black voters from 2008 missing? That’s what a study from the New Organizing
Institute claims, which estimates that as many as 160,000 black voters in the
city from the last presidential election have disappeared. ??????
________________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Janet Daly, The London
Telegraph 9/2
Whatever the outcome of the American presidential election,
one thing is certain: the fighting of it will be the most significant political
event of the decade. Last week’s Republican national convention sharpened what
had been until then only a vague, inchoate theme: this campaign is going to
consist of the debate that all Western democratic countries should be engaging
in, but which only the United
States has the nerve to undertake. The
question that will demand an answer lies at the heart of the economic crisis
from which the West seems unable to recover. It is so profoundly threatening to
the governing consensus of Britain
and Europe as to be virtually unutterable here, so we shall have to rely on the
robustness of the US
political class to make the running.
What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic
premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market
economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic
formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by
the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes
deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that
went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a
transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on
economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to
support the sort of universal entitlement programs which the populations of
democratic countries have been led to expect. The fantasy may be sustained for
a while by the relentless production of phony money to fund benefits and
job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal
recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union.
Or else democratically elected governments can be replaced
by puppet austerity regimes which are free to ignore the protests of the
populace when they are deprived of their promised entitlements. You can, in
other words, decide to debauch the currency which underwrites the market
economy, or you can dispense with democracy. Both of these possible solutions
are currently being tried in the European Union, whose leaders are reduced to talking
sinister gibberish in order to evade the obvious conclusion: the myth of a
democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished. This is the
defining political problem of the early 21st century.
Mitt Romney had been hinting, in an oblique, undeveloped
way, at this line of argument as he moved tentatively toward finding a real
message. Then he took the startling step of appointing Congressman Paul Ryan as
his running mate, and the earth moved. If Romney was the embodiment of the
spirit of a free market, Ryan was its prophet. His speech at the convention was
so dangerous to the Obama Democrats, with their aspirations toward
European-style democratic socialism, that they unleashed their “fact checkers”
to find mistakes (“lies”) in it. (Remember the old Yes Minister joke: “You can
always accuse them of errors of detail, sir. There are always some errors of
detail”.) When Romney and Ryan offer their arguments to the American people,
they are, of course, at an advantage over almost any British or European
politician. Contrary to what many know-nothing British observers seem to think,
the message coming out of Tampa
was not Tea Party extremism. It was just a reassertion of the basic values of
American political culture: self-determination, individual aspiration and
genuine community, as opposed to belief in the state as the fount of all social
virtue. Romney caught this rather nicely in his acceptance speech, with the
comment that the US
was built on the idea of “a system that is dedicated to creating tomorrow’s
prosperity rather than trying to redistribute today’s.” Or as Marco Rubio put
it in his speech, Obama is “trying ideas that people came to America to get
away from”…….
So how effective will all this turn out to be? Can Romney
and Ryan reawaken the self-belief in American independence and real community
solidarity? Quite possibly, but the odds are always in favour of the incumbent
in US presidential elections. There is, however, a wild card in this game. I
suspect that in 2008 a great many voters of good conscience would have felt the
moral force of voting for the first black president, in order to exorcise the
nation’s hideous racial history. But having proved that America is no
longer a land of bigots, they will not feel it necessary to make that point
again. Now they will be able to judge Mr Obama as they would any other
political leader, and the US
will truly have arrived at post-racial politics.
But in the course of this campaign, however it concludes, we
are all going to get an education in what it might be possible to say if
economic reality was actually confronted. Mr Ryan wound up his acceptance
speech for the vice-presidential nomination with the chorus, “Our nation needs
this debate. We want this debate. We will win this debate.” Some of us would
like to have that debate here. We even think we might have a chance of winning
it.
_____________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"The Democrats gathering in Charlotte this week are united behind President
Obama but more than a little nervous about their November prospects. The thrill
of 2008 is gone, replaced by an almost grim determination. The party of hope
and change has become the party of grind-it-out, slug-it-out, and hope to win
as less awful than Mitt Romney. ... Democrats of the Obama era are united by
cultural liberalism, but above all else they agree on the goal of expanding the
reach of government. ... The vanguard of ideas for the Obama White House is the
Center for American Progress, which churns out proposals for government to
mediate every sphere of economic life. In this view, the entire American economy
is a giant market failure…..Health-care costs can be controlled by dictating
prices and medical practice. The climate can be controlled by putting coal out
of business and subsidizing wind, solar and ethanol. Wall Street can be
controlled by more rules and hanging the occasional banker in the public square
as an example. Most important, government spending can conjure private growth
by 'investing' in whatever seems like a good idea.... Democrats made a
generational bet in 2009-2010 that the country was ready to be yanked sharply
to the left, and they know that nearly all of their grand ambitions will be
undone if Mr. Obama loses. ... Thus the frowning resolve to grind out a victory
by whatever means possible. It's hardly an optimistic vision and it's far from
commanding the oceans, but if Democrats win, what you've seen is what you'll
get."
-The Wall Street Journal
“While the vast majority of voters are more concerned
about jobs and the economy, the DNC grotesquely pushed the idea that any woman
should be able to get an abortion any time, anywhere -- and taxpayers should
pick up the tab if she can't afford it……..The Democrat platform from the
Clinton years called for abortion to be "safe, legal and rare." Now,
in a country that's becoming decidedly more pro-life, including a third of all
registered Democrats, the DNC is calling for abortion to be early, late, often
and free of charge.”
-Patriot Post
"It is poetic that as the Democrats unveil their 2012
platform, their 2008-12 legacy [reached] an important milestone: The official
national debt [crossed] the $16 trillion mark. There are tens of trillions more
in unfunded entitlement liabilities lurking off the official books, and the
Democrats' 2012 platform contains not one serious proposal for addressing these
potentially catastrophic obligations."
-National Review
"Obama never stops taking bows for keeping America's
automotive industry in business. What he fails to mention is that by turning GM
over to the UAW, he not only screwed the shareholders, he put 2,200 car
dealerships out of business. Thanks to Obama's stimulus, GM is still hanging
around, but the American taxpayer is out over $21 billion."
-Burt Prelutsky
______________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
The left's war on traditional marriage took a truly
disgraceful turn Monday. The folks at Salon actually published a piece entitled
"Gay Couples Have Happier Kids." The sub-headline read, "Studies
show that the traditional nuclear family is not better. It's a dying model --
and that's a good thing":
Among all the bizarre ideas that emanate from the callow and
sciolistic mind of the modern American liberal, the statistical disparity
argument is one of the most fallacious. It has permeated and destroyed so many
aspects of society. It is now being offered by Obama’s education secretary,
Arne Duncan, in the area of disciplining school students.
“Anti-Christian Hate Speech Spews From The Palm Beach Democratic Chair: “fundamentalist Christians….want Jews to
die..”
“South Carolina
Democratic chairman Dick Harpootlian compared his state's Republican female
governor, Nikki Haley, to Hitler's mistress….The comparisons of Nazis and
Hitler to the Republicans seems to be an emerging theme from this Democratic
convention. Yesterday, a top Democratic delegate from Kansas compared Republican vice presidential
candidate Paul Ryan to Hitler. The day before, a Democratic delegate from California compared Ryan
to Nazi Joseph Goebbels.”
There’s a name for this:
“Reductio ad Hitlerum”
"We can and
must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion and scorn
toward those who disagree with us."
-Vladimir Lenin
“The political history of the slogan "Forward" is,
of course, quite consistent with Obama's agenda of taking over industries,
punishing the wealthy, rallying citizens along class lines, assuming control of
health care, and "sharing prosperity." And Obama, raised and educated by communists
and socialists, knows this. His
campaign's catchword is meant, in part, to tease his opponents, like a child
waving a cookie just beyond the reach of a dog on a leash. Everyone knows what he is saying, but no one
can "pin it on him." The 2008
campaign was all about concealing Obama's personal history, his affiliations,
and his past statements, and portraying him as the model centrist…..This
time…..they are prepared to define Obama as the leftist that he has always
been, but to do so in a benign fashion, under the clever partial cover of dying
euphemisms. "We all know what the
words mean -- but surely he doesn't really mean them that way." He does.
Liberals will call this social progress: The Brazilians have granted their first civil
union to a trio, an act so unprecedented that there isn't a word for it in
Portuguese. Uniao poliafetiva is the label used. "Polyfidelitous union" is the best
guess for an English translation.
______________________________________________________________________________
DNC CONVENTION
So many things went terribly wrong on the first day of the
Democratic National Convention it’s hard to pick which one was the most
damaging. First, the Treasury Department confirmed yesterday that the federal
government’s debt officially passed $16 trillion. Then, Occupy Charlotte
protestors got into a fight with Obama supporters outside the convention hall….Then
Democrats kicked off their official convention program with a video from the host
committee titled, “Government Is The Only Thing We All Belong To.” Mitt Romney
immediately tweeted out in response, “We don’t belong to government, the
government belongs to us.” Realizing what an epic disaster the video’s message
was, the Obama campaign quickly retreated, disavowing all knowledge of it.
The second night was even
worse: “Horror show: Wednesday night at
the DNC…The day started off with the flap over platform language. That
in turn led to the spectacle of Democratic delegates booing the vote to put
back Jerusalem
and God back into the platform. It was even in the eyes of the most
Obama-sympathetic media a horrid disruption, signaling both incompetence and
hostility to things that many if not most Americans hold dear.
Monica Lewinski’s former Rabbi gave the benediction
after Bill Clinton’s address to the convention.
Needled by
Mitt Romney and other Republicans, Democrats hurriedly rewrote their convention platform Wednesday
to add a mention of God and declare Jerusalem
the capital of Israel
after President Barack Obama intervened to order the changes. The embarrassing
reversal was compounded by chaos and uncertainty on the convention floor,
requiring three votes before overruling the delegate voice vote and declaring
the amendment passed. Many in the audience booed the decision. The episode
exposed tensions on Israel
within the party, put Democrats on the defensive and created a public relations
spectacle as Obama arrived in the convention city to claim his party's
nomination for a second term. (“Democrats deny God three times?”)
First Lady Michelle Obama’s pitch to voters.. relied on the
premise that she and her husband understand what it is to struggle to make ends
meet. She spoke movingly about their early years--about how a young Barack
Obama drove a car that was “rusted out" and found his furniture “in a
dumpster,” how they both came from families that had to “scrape by.” Her fairy
tale--however well-delivered--was one great, big, colorful lie. Both Michelle
Robinson and Barack Obama attended elite prep schools, were accepted to Ivy
League schools despite undistinguished credentials, and both attended Harvard
Law School….They had expensive tastes, reflected in the $277,500 two-bedroom
condo they bought in 1993--a high price even by today’s standards. Several
years later, they moved into their $1.65 million mansion in Hyde
Park--with the help of fraudster Tony Rezko. If, as the Democrats
eagerly pointing out, Mitt Romney enjoyed the privilege of private wealth, the
Obamas have enjoyed privilege funded by public money and public life. And until
entering the national spotlight, they gave little to charity, contributing
instead to a church that preached racial grievance.
Charles Krauthammer:“If I hear one more story of people
walking eight miles in the snow, without shoes walking uphill both ways, I’m
going start longing for Clint Eastwood spontaneity out here.”
“The Kennedys who can't stay married, drive, handle their liquor,
drugs or govern, remain role models in the Democratic Party.”
Democrats passing out “vote black” buttons:
One of the hottest selling items at the Democratic National
Convention is a 2013 calendar titled "Keep the Dream" that features
16 flattering photos of the First Family and their dogs. In honor of the President's birth month, a
picture of Obama's birth certificate was used for August. The caption read
"Heaven Sent" and proceeded to quote John 3:16 underneath, as if he
were the actual Messiah.
Krauthammer on Obama speech: 'one
of the emptiest speeches I have ever
heard on a national stage'
_____________________________________________________________________________
BOOKS, FILM
Even as Democrats cheered the politics of big government in Charlotte this week, the books that Americans are actually
reading tell a different story about the America they want. “Obama’s
America,” a critical examination of President Barack Obama’s anticolonial
worldview and an analysis of his deeper agenda, by Dinesh D’Souza, claimed the
No. 1 spot on the New York Times Sept. 16 bestseller list, after debuting at
No. 5 when it was released in August
‘2016: Obama’s America’ shocks film industry after
becoming a box office success despite having virtually no promotional
budget
The Occupy Wall Street movement’s dark underbelly is on full
display in an explosive new documentary set for release later this month.
"Occupy Unmasked," produced by the non-profit group Citizens United
and the late Andrew Breitbart, in one of his last projects before his death
last March, examines the movement and its possible links to organized labor and
leftist groups
___________________________________________________________________________
ACTIVISM
Nickelodeon, the kids' TV channel, apparently sees no
problem with directing children to the Twitter feed of one of its voiceover
stars, Jason Biggs - even if Biggs tweets reprehensible things about
conservative political women like Janna Ryan, wife of VP candidate Paul Ryan.
It would be difficult to describe Biggs' tweets as anything other than the
worst sort of human depravity. You can see them here, but be warned, they are
offensive.
____________________________________________________________________________
ELECTION
Chuck Norris' dire warning for America 'Our country as we know it
may be lost forever'
Lloyd Marcus: “As We
Approach the Final Battle to Save America”
“The DNC platform reveals Obama's influence in many ways. He
is personally cited over 200 times -- on 38 of 40 pages -- in the official
party document. Obama's presence is so prevalent that the platform's writers
must have figured that any mention of God would either pale in comparison or be
redundant. So they removed any reference to God in the document -- at least
until public outcry forced them to put it back.”
-Patriot Post
Karl Rove's newest State of the Race commentary: "Mitt
Romney gained ground in two important swing states according to polls conducted
during the week of the Republican National Convention. "Both Nevada and Michigan
moved from "lean Obama" to "toss up" status.
____________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
If you’ve been waiting around to buy a new car, better hurry
up. If Obama gets his way, the only car you will be able to buy will be a small
hybrid cube and will cost more than you can afford. The Obama administration
has finalized new fuel economy rules that will require the fleet-wide average
of new cars and trucks sold in the U.S. to double over the next 13
years. The average fuel economy must reach 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, up from
28.6 mpg at the end of last year.
Interesting article on the history of envy: “Every writer in the Western tradition has
regarded envy as contemptible. It is
only among the followers of Saul Alinsky that envy is regarded as a good,
because for them, it is a useful tool for gaining power. Envy, according to the British philosopher Robert
Burton, is nothing less than "a foretaste of hell upon earth." Obama's campaign rhetoric offers more than a
glimpse of what that infernal world would be like.”
VDH: I’ve witnessed
two of the most radical developments in my lifetime the last four years —
changes far greater than those brought on by the massive new increases in the
national debt, the soaring gas costs, the radical decrease in average family
income, the insolvent Medicare and Social Security trajectories, or the flat
housing market. One is the fact of less than 1% interest rates on most savings
(well below the rate of inflation), and the other is an epidemic of
20-something unemployment. All that is the new normal……In short, in four years we
have become Europeanized: young people with no jobs who are living at home and
putting off marriage and child raising — a “lost” generation in “limbo,” etc.
etc……We have become emasculated Italians, our economy ossified and socialized
to such an extent that few are taking risks to open new businesses in Illinois,
build a pipeline across Nebraska, plant a 600-acre irrigated field, or open a
timber mill or mine in California. Only so many of the unemployed can land a
government job monitoring delta smelt populations or suing to shut down another
power plant………these days, the game has changed somewhat — or rather been
downscaled: the PhD is not being hired for anything other than part-time
teaching; the JD is reduced to the law library gofer; the freshly minted MD is
the equivalent of a salaried, high-paid nurse; the credentialed high-school
teacher is subbing; the engineer is a draftsman; the carpenter is cobbling
together home repair mini-jobs. The new plum job? Landing one of those federal or state
regulatorships, inspectorships, or clerkships, which are paid for with borrowed
money, produce little, and grow as those
they audit and fine shrink.”
VDH: “….today the liberal vision — the blue-state model, the Democratic orthodoxy, whatever we
wish to call it — is a rigid creed that demands ever more government spending and ever more government
redistribution. It fosters an ever-growing elite technocracy that oversees the
system but wins the capital and influence to be unaffected by the ramifications
of its own ideology. Reactionary liberalism, as some sort of cult, assumes that
its policies are exempt from audit, and that indeed to audit them casts
suspicion on the motives and aims of the auditor himself.”
________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Clint Eastwood reloaded
Compare the Republican and Democratic platforms here. Phyllis Schlafly thinks we have the most
conservative Republican platform ever.
Allen West’s video showing the Democrats at their
convention” “Three times”.
Stories from the Obama economy:
Women are in a bad relationship with Barack Obama….RNC urges
voters to “Breakup with Obama”
Romney uses Clinton’s
2008 words in latest ad:
____________________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno:……President Obama's speech was moved from
the Bank of America stadium to the Time Warner Cable Arena. They had to move
out of the big venue into a smaller place. Like a lot of homeowners in the past
four years…..In a related story, Vice President Joe Biden's speech also was
moved to a smaller venue — the back room at Denny's, the booth in the
corner……..The stoner comedy duo Harold and Kumar are starring in a new promo
for the Democratic convention alongside President Obama, which is pretty
impressive. The only other person to go from smoking pot with buddies to the
White House is President Obama……..President Obama's re-election campaign said
that this year they'll knock on 150 percent more doors than they did in 2008.
Well, of course they will. They have to. There's so many foreclosures it's
tough to tell where people live……..They announced today that they are moving
President Obama's speech tomorrow night indoors, from the 74,000-seat stadium
to a smaller venue due to the possibility of severe weather. See, apparently
the campaign is concerned about this well-known weather phenomenon known as
empty seats.
____________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"Can anyone look at the record of this administration
and say, 'Well done'? Can anyone compare the state of our economy when [this]
administration took office with where we are today and say, 'Keep up the good
work'? Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say,
'Let's have four more years of this'? I believe the American people are going
to answer these questions ... and their answer will be, 'No, we've had
enough!'"
-Ronald Reagan"
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