Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Signs of desperation


What’s New Today

Story number 1 is today’s sign of desperation story.  #2 brings up the Dinkins factor.  #3 and #4 looks at the gay marriage issue with the Democrats and its effects on the election.  #5 looks at the Democrats attempt to hide coming job losses.  #6  shows how with all the regulations on the books we are all criminals and at government whim can be prosecuted.  #7 looks at Obama and concludes it is time to fire the coach.  Finally #8 is a piece by John Stossel about much of what we know isn’t so.  


Today’s Thoughts

From the TV Show the West Wing  prophetically,  Sam Seaborn: “Henry, last fall, every time your boss got on the stump and said, “It’s time for the rich to pay their fair share,” I hid under a couch and changed my name. I left Gage Whitney making $400,000 a year, which means I paid twenty-seven times the national average in income tax. I paid my fair share, and the fair share of twenty-six other people. And I’m happy to ’cause that’s the only way it’s gonna work, and it’s in my best interest that everybody be able to go to schools and drive on roads, but I don’t get twenty-seven votes on Election Day. The fire department doesn’t come to my house twenty-seven times faster and the water doesn’t come out of my faucet twenty-seven times hotter. The top one percent of wage earners in this country pay for twenty-two percent of this country.  Let’s not call them names while they’re doing it, is all I’m saying.”  

Ronald Reagan:  "A taxpayer is someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take a civil-service exam."

North Korean Olympian Om Yun Chol joined an elite list of weightlifters to have lifted three times their weight at the London Olympics, and he has credited his world-record feat to late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.  See even Communists know Obama is right, that he didn’t lift that weight himself.  His supreme leader is responsible for it.

Obama appears to be getting smaller and smaller.  He went from peddling the “audacity of hope” to sheer hopelessness. From promising change to — literally — begging for change. Any spare change.



1.  Signs of Desperation

The latest web ad from Barack Obama's campaign goes after Mitt Romney for not releasing more tax returns than he already has. The ad, titled "Mitt Romney's Tax Returns: When Will He Come Clean?," at one point flashes two words onscreen, "FELONS" and "TAX RECORDS."
The words, "FELONS" and "TAX RECORDS," are displayed onscreen for at least six seconds, so the Obama campaign wants to make sure its viewers see the words.

Given the title of the ad--and the subject--the ad wants viewers to consider that Mitt Romney might not be releasing more tax returns because, the Obama campaign is suggesting, he might be a felon.
This isn't the first time the Obama campaign has accused Romney of possibly being a felon. Last month, Stephanie Cutter, an Obama deputy campaign manager, said that Romney is either a liar or a felon….


This ad reeks of desperation. Add to this, Harry Reid circulating a rumor that Romney didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years and you can see that nothing is beneath the Democrats.


2.  The Dinkins Effect

…There are numerous signs the Obama campaign is very, very worried. His fundraising has not been the money machine it was in 2008, despite Obama’s burning out the engines of Air Force One going, hat in hand, from one group of fat cats to another. He is running through the money he does raise at a furious pace, mostly running negative ads in toss-up states. He is trying to shore up his base rather than reaching out to the center as he would if his base were secure. That doesn’t bear much resemblance to Ronald Reagan’s “It’s Morning in America” campaign of 1984, does it? There are even those who say Wall Street’s recent climb, despite very gloomy economic news, is due to a growing conviction on the Street that Obama is toast.

And yet pollsters all have the race tight as a tick, as Karl Rove terms it. What’s going on?

I think what I call the Dinkins effect is in operation. David Dinkins was the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York in 1989, having defeated three-term incumbent Ed Koch in the primary. His Republican opponent was Rudy Giuliani. The polls all showed Dinkins well ahead, but he won the race only narrowly. In 1993, there was the same match-up. The polls all showed Dinkins (who had a lousy record as mayor) as narrowly ahead. Giuliani won in a walk. The reason the polls were so wrong, I think, was because Dinkins is black and some people were simply unwilling to say, even to a pollster, they were voting against the black guy. Racism is nearly extinct in this country, but the fear of being thought racist is pervasive, and the willingness of some people on the left to play the race card apparent.

Could that be why President Obama has high ratings in polls asking about his “likeability”? My dislike of his politics probably clouds my judgment somewhat, but I don’t find him likeable at all. He’s arrogant, often mean-spirited, sometimes downright nasty. He avoids taking responsibility for failure but takes all the credit for success. He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor that I can see. He’s, well, chilly. I don’t like Bill Clinton’s politics much either, but I’m sure I’d have a great time having dinner with him some night. He may be left-of-center and more than a bit of a scoundrel in his personal life, but likeable he most certainly is. Obama, simply, is not….


I am confident Obama is going to lose and it will not be a squeaker.  The Dinkins effect is part of it, but the other part is the constant state of over representing Democrats in the polls.  Obama is toast.


3.  Gay Marriage in the Democratic Platform

Democrats over the weekend put themselves on track to endorse a pro-gay marriage plank for their convention platform, but neither the party nor the Obama campaign wanted to talk about it Monday.
Six states have legalized gay marriage and three more have legalization measures on the ballot for the fall, but the gradual increase in acceptance of the issue hasn’t done anything to mitigate its political touchiness this election year. Though legalization is seen as a major boost to Democratic efforts to energize the base and stoke fundraising among an active LGBT donor community, wide swaths of voters — including in many swing states — remain opposed

Blacks and Hispanics are against gay marriage, so it makes no sense for the Democrats to do this to “shore up the base.”  In fact this is another move that looks like desperation, like the Democrats are looking for a game changer. 

4.  The Democrat’s Gaffe:  Homosexual Marriage

The President of the Coalition of African-American Pastors says supporters of traditional marriage are facing the same discrimination that blacks faced during the civil rights movement.

“Some people are saying because of the position that Chick-fil-A has taken - they don’t want them in their cities,” Rev. William Owens said at the National Press Club on Tuesday.

It’s a disgrace. It’s the same thing that happened when I was marching for civil rights, when they didn’t want a black to come into their restaurant, they didn’t want us staying in their hotels. Now they’re saying, because we take a Christian position, they don’t want us in their cities.”

Owens continued, “Well, we won’t take it. We will stand up and they will learn, they will learn that they can’t do that to any people, by destroying religion, by destroying the family, we will stand up.”
CAAP held the conference to announce it’s “Mandate for Marriage” campaign, a nationwide effort to urge black voters to refrain from supporting President Barack Obama unless he retracts his support for gay marriage….

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/black-pastors-banning-chick-fil-cities-same-thing-banning-blacks-restaurants

This is a losing issue for the left.  The polls say that 52% of the population support gay marriage but in every instance it’s been put on the ballot it has lost including traditional Democratic strongholds like California (see the Dinkins Effect).  And it is a sign of the actual democratic desperation.


5.  Obama Administration wants to hide big job losses before the election

Republicans accused the Obama administration Tuesday of intimidating defense contractors and seeking to hide job losses from pending cuts to the Pentagon’s budget in order to help the president’s reelection campaign. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other Republicans pointed to guidance issued Monday by the Department of Labor that said it would be “inappropriate” for defense firms to issue layoff notices to employees before the election due to the pending cuts.

“The president doesn’t want people reading about pink slips in the weeks before his election, so the White House is telling people to keep the effects of these cuts secret — ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ he says, ‘keep it a secret’ — until, of course, after the election,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Tuesday.
Democrats responded by accusing both Republicans and the defense industry of playing politics themselves with threats of job losses and layoff notices. Republicans have used the layoff threats to bash President Obama for not acting now to prevent the pending cuts to both the Pentagon and non-defense domestic spending. 

House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said that there was no reason to “needlessly alarm hundreds of thousand of workers” with the notices when sequestration’s outcome remains unknown….


It appears the Democrats are about to be hoisted on their own petard as there is a law requiring “large employers to notify employees 60 days in advance of layoffs caused by a foreseeable event.”  Since the sequester has a significant effect on defense contractors Lockheed Martin has warned it will issue this warning to all employees.  Obama obviously doesn’t want this happening days before the election.

6.  We are all criminals now

The huge humpback whale whose friendliness precipitated a surreal seven-year — so far — federal hunt for criminality surely did not feel put upon. Nevertheless, our unhinged government, with an obsession like that of Melville’s Ahab, has crippled Nancy Black’s scientific career, cost her more than $100,000 in legal fees — so far — and might sentence her to 20 years in prison. This Kafkaesque burlesque of law enforcement began when someone whistled.

Black, 50, a marine biologist who also captains a whale-watching ship, was with some watchers in Monterey Bay in 2005 when a member of her crew whistled at the humpback that had approached her boat, hoping to entice the whale to linger. Back on land, another of her employees called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to ask if the whistling constituted “harassment” of a marine mammal, which is an “environmental crime.” NOAA requested a video of the episode, which Black sent after editing it slightly to highlight the whistling. NOAA found no harassment — but got her indicted for editing the tape, calling this a “material false statement” to federal investigators, which is a felony under the 1863 False Claims Act, intended to punish suppliers defrauding the government during the Civil War.

A year after this bizarre charge — that she lied about the interaction with the humpback that produced no charges — more than a dozen federal agents, led by one from NOAA, raided her home. They removed her scientific photos, business files and computers. Call this a fishing expedition….

As [Judge Alex Kozinski and Misha Tseytlin put it, “most Americans are criminals, and don’t know it, or suspect that they are but believe they’ll never get prosecuted….”

…The vast scope of federal criminal law is a very serious problem. Because of it, most Americans are effectively at the mercy of federal officials whenever they might choose to come after us. We are used to thinking of “criminals” as a small subset of the population… most of whom have committed genuinely heinous acts. But when we are all federal criminals, perfectly ordinary citizens can easily get swept up in the net simply by being unlucky or because they ran afoul of federal prosecutors or other influential officials. Overcriminalization also leads to the longterm imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent people (mostly as a result of the War on Drugs, but many for other reasons as well) who haven’t caused any harm to the person or property of others. Some 55% of all federal prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders. In addition, the ability to convict almost anyone of a federal crime means that federal officials have wide discretion to punish people who are unpopular, politically weak, run afoul of the current administration, or otherwise become tempting targets…..


Prosecutor judgment can lead to Obama not enforcing the immigration law against Hispanics or shutting down a kid’s lemonade stands.  It can account for prosecuting Scooter Libby or not doing anything to Jon Corzine (at least not til after the election).  What we have created is dangerous and unfair. 


7.  It’s time to fire the Coach

… Over the last 50 years, the black community has, en masse, worn the uniform of an ideology that has left its communities and schools totally bankrupt.  Through decades of empty promises and investment of human life and capital, it has shown a total dedication to an ideology whose strategy has resulted in consistent and dismal losing seasons.  Unfortunately, unlike in the entertainment world of sports, where fans go home or simply turn off their wide-screen and then debate what might have been, these losing seasons have had dire human consequences that cannot simply be walked away from.  These consequences can be documented in every predominately black community where liberal and socialist policies rule.  From cities like Detroit, where the population has dropped by 25% over the last decade and 47% of those remaining are deemed functional illiterate, to Oakland, where a liberal school board attempted to legitimized a debased "urban" slang called Ebonics, highlighting its low expectations of its minority children, to D.C. and Chicago, which alternate as our country's murder capitals, these cities reflect the culminating impact of citizens trapped in government-mandated hopelessness.  They reflect the intergenerational failure that has been embraced as the norm, with statistics of single black mothers at an astounding 70%, where abortion profit centers find a welcome home and take the lives of an average of 325,000 black babies each year since 1973, where 50% of black teenagers are unemployed, and where a failed educational system guarantees that far too many are unemployable.  

The ideological teams of liberalism, socialism, and progressives have been granted over 50 years to prove the validity of their strategy.  For Americans of all backgrounds who are committed to a successful outcome for their fellow citizens, who won't settle for perpetual excuses, it has become crystal-clear that it is time for a new coach and a new strategy.  The message in November to Coach Obama and his Democratic team needs to be...it's all about the Team, and "Team America" is priority #1 with us.

It’s time to fire the Democrats.  If you look around the country, the cities and states which are basket cases overwhelmingly tend to be run by Democrats and the longer the Democrats have been in control the more hopeless their situation seems to be. 


8.  Much of what we know, isn’t so

The Olympics have gone smoothly despite — gasp! — America’s team wearing clothing made in China at the opening ceremony.

“I’m so upset,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “Take all the uniforms, put them in a big pile, and burn them. … We have people in the textile industry who are desperate for jobs.”

Here, Reid demonstrates economic cluelessness. It seems logical that Americans lose if American clothing is made overseas. But that’s nonsense. First, it’s no surprise the uniforms were made in China. Most clothing is. That’s fine. It saves money. We invest the savings in other things, like the machines that Chinese factories buy and the trucks that ship the Olympic uniforms.

The Cato Institute’s Daniel Ikenson’s adds: “We design clothing here. We brand clothing here. We market and retail clothing. … Chinese athletes arrived in London by U.S.-made aircraft, trained on U.S.-designed and -engineered equipment, wear U.S.-designed and -engineered footwear, having perfected their skills using U.S.-created technology.” That’s free trade. Trade makes us richer.
While making the clothes in America would employ some Americans, the excess cost would mean that the Olympic committee had less to spend on other products — many of which are made in America.

Losing jobs like cutting, sewing and working on a loom is a sign of progress because working in factories is unpleasant. It’s good for most Americans when factory jobs are replaced by engineering and design jobs. Art Carden, an economist from Sanford University’s Brook School of Business, explained that “one could argue that the American uniforms were not manufactured in China, but grown in the soybean field in Iowa. We export soybeans to China. Because we’re incredibly productive in the soybean market, we get more uniforms at lower prices (and) the Chinese get more soybeans at lower prices. … Everybody wins.”

Contrary to protectionists like Sen. Reid, if we insisted that everything be made in America, we’d be poor.
There is so much that we think we know — that is not so…
.

You need to actually think rather than emote.  We’ve seen what the world looks like with Democrats in charge, and somehow it never works out.   Rather than the country getting richer everyone gets poorer but as candidate Barack Obama said in 2008 that would be fairer.


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