The Amateur

What’s New Today

Story #1 tells us a bit more from the new book The Amateur.  It appears Obama has a Mount Rushmore sized ego.  #2 tells how Obama keeps focusing on keeping us like Europe when he should be looking closer to home.  How about Canada?  #3 lays out the Romney strategy.  #4 tells us of the stumbling point between Democrats and Republicans on the Violence against Women act.  It seems women by Democratic definitions includes more than just women.  #5 looks at the Alinsky training the democrats are taking to try to reveal the “code” words the Republicans use to hide their racism.  I’m thinking freedom must be one of them.  #6 has 12 questions for Jonah Goldberg and his answers.  #7 is a “Beam me Up, Scotty” story.

Today’s Thoughts

A hazardous drug (scopolamine) derived from a particular type of tree common in Colombia can eliminate free will and can wipe the memory of its victims.  Sounds like what Obama needs to be reelected. 

With Newsweek featuring Obama as our first gay president (President James Buchanon may take issue with that), Glenn Reynolds suggested that the GOP may want to buy a lot of issues and give them to black barbershops in key districts. 

There are indications that the Obama Campaign team is panicking.  We are seeing polls where Obama is behind by 4 to 8 points.  It makes you wonder what do their internal polls say?  

A new ad from the Obama campaign calls Romney’s Bain capital “a vampire.”  It seems Bain bought a steel mill in 1993 and closed it in 2001.  Romney left Bain in 1999.  Desperation is showing. 

1.  The Amateur

Edward Klein's new book on Barack Obama, The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House, is a withering portrayal of a radical adrift, in over his head, drowning in his own incompetency -- while being weighed down by a small circle of "advisers" who are compounding the problem of the Amateur in the White House.

Klein's book begins with a talisman-like quote uttered by Barack Obama when his recently appointed Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner tried to boost Obama's ego by telling him, "Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression."  To which Barack Obama responded, "That's not enough for me."

As all of America knows by now, Obama has aggressively sought to "fundamentally transform" America -- one of the few promises he has kept from the days of 2008.  Five trillion dollars of borrowing, ObamaCare passed over the objections of the majority of Americans through legislative legerdemain and special deals made with resistant politicians, failed stimulus, green programs failing left and right as taxpayers are left holding the bag, a recovery that is the most anemic on record, an America that has been sundered by the man who promises to unite us, America weaker abroad and at home -- yes, America has been fundamentally transformed.  Mission Accomplished.

But how and why did Obama succeed in such a catastrophic way?  That is the question that Klein successfully answers in his extremely readable and enjoyable book, with enough spicy details to satisfy the craving of anyone interested in how President Obama and those closest to him have driven us to the condition we find ourselves in as we approach November.

One of the motifs that runs throughout the book is Barack Obama's sheer level of incompetency.  He has the fatal conceit of many politicians: an overweening ego.  That may be a prerequisite for politicians and leaders, but when it is unleavened by a willingness to consider the views of others, it becomes a fatal conceit.  And Obama has that trait in abundance….

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/the_amateur_barack_obama_in_the_white_house.html#ixzz1uqK76xnY

It’s become painfully obvious to most Americans that Obama is an amateur who is way over his head as the President. 

2.  Economic Growth 

Will Obama learn from Sweden?  Will he learn from Canada?  Or will he cling to the European socialist economic model that is currently failing?

Sweden
Anders Borg, Sweden's finance minister, reduced Sweden's deficit and created economic growth.  There is one thing that Borg did: "Since becoming Sweden's finance minister, Borg reduced the size of government and cut taxes.  His 'stimulus' was a permanent tax cut."

Canada 

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said that Forbes magazine selected Canada as the No. 1 country in the world in which to do business.  Forbes stated, "Credit a reformed tax structure."  On New Year's Day, 2012, Canada's corporate tax rate -- both federal and provincial rates combined -- fell to 25%, giving Canada the lowest rate in the Group of Seven countries and a more competitive economy on a global basis.  In annual steps, Canada lowered the federal rate from 22% to 15%, while the provinces now have a common rate of 10%.  The gradual lowering of the corporate tax rate appears to have resulted in little loss in corporate tax revenue.

Between 1992 and 1996, Canada's central government departments saw their budgets cut by an average of 20%.  Aware that efficiency savings and pay freezes alone would be insufficient, the prime minister Jean Chrétien (Canadian PM from November 1993 until December 2003) ordered that all non-essential national government spending be cut.  Under a system called Program Review, a committee of senior civil servants demanded that all departments nominate spending programs that a lean national government should not be funding.

Canada, in April 2012, added far more jobs than expected and marked the biggest two-month employment gain in more than 30 years.  With a Canadian population one-ninth the size of that of the United States, it would be as if the U.S. economy had added about 1.3 million jobs in two months.  Economists say the Canadian unemployment rate would be 6.4% if reported in the way the U.S. calculates its rate.  The Canadian economy has recovered all the output and jobs, including full-time positions, that it lost in the 2008-09 recession.

Now let's look at what has not/is not working in what is increasingly becoming socialist Europe -- namely, the European Union (EU); its (mostly rejected) austerity program; and France, Greece, and Spain….

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/can_obama_learn_from_the_successful_economies.html#ixzz1uqFoE8xP

Looking at March and April in the USA, we gained 270,000 jobs vs the 1.3 million equivalent in Canada.  I’m not so sure Obamanomics is working.

  

       3.  Romney’s Campaign strategy

Mitt Romney and his top aides are building a strategy, partly by design and partly because of circumstance, around what they consider John McCain’s disastrously run campaign in 2008.
The strategy: whatever McCain did, do the opposite.
Many of the current strategy discussions are centered on not falling into the traps McCain did: looking wobbly as a leader and weak on the economy in the final weeks of the campaign. The private discussions include ruling out any vice presidential possibilities who could be seen as even remotely risky or unprepared; wrapping the entire campaign around economic issues, knowing this topic alone will swing undecided voters in the final days; and, slowly but steadily, building up Romney as a safe and competent alternative to President Obama.. ..

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76260.html#ixzz1uqYp2DAv

I think this is a smart strategy.  Obama has already gone negative and as more and more time goes by, he will sound shrill and unlikeable. 

      4.  Violence against women “expanded” by the Democrats

The House this week will take up the Violence Against Women Act, legislation that in past years has been approved with little fuss. But it won't go that smoothly this time because the bill has become the latest election-year battleground in what Democrats claim is the Republican Party's "war against women." 

The bill, last reauthorized in 2005, is intended to reduce domestic violence and would call for $600 million to be spent on legal assistance, housing and programs that help victims of domestic violence. Democrats and Republicans are divided, however, over exactly whom the bill is supposed to protect.

House Democrats want a bill similar to the one passed by the Democratically controlled Senate. That bill would provide special protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals. It would also expand the authority of Native American authorities to prosecute non-Indians who commit violence against a Native American on tribal lands.

The Republican bill excludes all of those special protections….

http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/domestic-violence-bill-now-political-battleground/540236

As long as the Democrats can keep people only seeing the headlines they have an issue.  If people actually read about the difference, the Republicans have the issue. 

      5.  Alinsky comes to the Democrats in Congress

George Soros is behind a newly uncovered effort to teach Democratic congressmen how to smear their opponents as racist.

Last week House Democrats invited the radical, left-wing, Soros-financed group called the Center for Social Inclusion “to address the issue of race to defend government programs,” according to documentation reviewed by Joel Gehrke of the Washington Examiner.

“The prepared content of a Tuesday presentation to the House Democratic Caucus and staff indicates that Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral free-market rhetoric as being charged with racial bias, conscious or unconscious,” Gehrke writes.

According to Gehrke, trainer Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion blasted “conservative messages [that are] racially ‘coded’ and had images of people of color that we commonly see used” and suggested ways to combat Republicans’ supposedly racially-coded rhetoric.

Facts don’t matter in Wiley’s estimation. “It’s emotional connection, not rational connection that we need,” she said….

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/14/soros-funded-alinsky-smear-machine-invades-congress/

The left and facts tend to be strangers.  I remember an issue in the DC city council where a accounting guy got fired for using the term niggardly.  Look up the definition if you don’t know it.  But that fact didn’t stop them from firing him. 

       6.  De Pasquale’s Dozen with Jonah Goldberg

…Each week the De Pasquale's Dozen asks political figures and free market-minded writers and entertainers to take a break from politics and talk about their pop culture obsessions.  

1. If there were a television channel that only showed one movie over and over, what movie should it be?

Well, obviously, I’m tempted to say Groundhog Day, in part because it’s one of my favorite movies, but also because it’d be like an Escher painting to have it play over and over again. 

2. What’s one of your favorite movie quotes?

“The Delta House has a long tradition of existence to its members and to the community at large.” I think it’s from “A Man For All Seasons.”

3. In A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell is strapped in with his eyes propped open and forced to watch images until he was "cured." If you could give President Obama, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Leader Harry Reid the "Clockwork Orange treatment," what movie would you make them watch?

“Brazil.”

4. What pop culture souvenir do you own that people would be surprised to learn that you cherish?

“Surprised”? Hmm. That rules out my Spock plate from the Franklin Mint. 

5. What's your current “guilty pleasure” non-news television show?

“Spartacus” on Starz. I like other shows more, but none make me feel so guilty.

6. What's Simpsons character are you most like and why?

 
Maybe, Sideshow Bob? A rightwing misanthrope funnyman. No, wait. Kodos. Because as a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball. But tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!

7. Many have said that Washington D.C. is like Hollywood for ugly people. How do you think DC is like Hollywood? How is it different?

In Hollywood vanity is skin deep. In DC it goes to the bone.

8. What was the first rock concert you ever attended and where did you sit and who went with you?

The Kinks. I went with a couple buddies from junior high. We sat probably 20 rows back from the stage. Though I don’t remember a lot of sitting.

9. What books are on your summer reading list?

Ten Years of the Claremont Review, American Nietzsche, Still The Best Hope, The Walking Dead graphic novels

10. What advice do you remember your mother or father giving you? Did you take it?

When I was a little boy, my father told me that if I was ever pulled over by a cop in a south American country, I should be very apologetic and ask if I can pay the fine right here rather than go down to the station. I haven’t had a chance to take it yet, but it always struck me as good advice. He also taught me that the goal in writing is to make every sentence either good or important. If it’s good no one will care if it’s not important. If it’s important no one will care if it’s not good. It’s an impossible ideal, but all ideals are for the most part impossible, but it’s one I strive for as much as I can. As for mom, most of the advice boils down to “don’t take crap from anybody.” I try to take it as often as I can….

http://townhall.com/columnists/lisadepasquale/2012/05/14/de_pasquales_dozen_with_jonah_goldberg

I invite you to give some of you own answers.  Here’s a few from me.  #1 I would go with The Godfather.  Great movie which I have watched over and over again.  #2 from A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth.”  Great movie and that quote really works for most of us.  #3 The Butterfly Effect.  Perhaps they would understand what unintended consequences are.

       7.  Beam me up Scotty

Since 1997, researchers have been able to quantum teleport photons with a major record being set by researchers at the  University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai. In 2010, that team successfully teleported a photon over 16km. Now that same team has released new findings, in which they claim to have teleported photons nearly 100km, or over 60 miles.

Now, quantum teleportation isn’t quite the same thing as the teleportation in Star Trek. When researchers teleport a photon, they aren’t teleporting the actual photon, but rather the information contained in it through quantum entanglement. In essence, the second photon at the end of the teleport becomes the first one – or at least, it becomes an identical qubit of information. So the information is exchanged without actually travelling through the intervening distance.

(If that sounds bizarre and frightening, you’re in good company. Albert Einstein understatedly called the process of quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance.”)…

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/05/11/chinese-researchers-quantum-teleport-photons-over-60-miles/

Just for fun.

Socialism and Human Nature

As we watch Europe’s unfolding debt drama, it’s worth asking a question: If socialism and central planning can’t succeed in Europe, where can they succeed? After all, Europe possessed tremendous advantages when it launched its slow-running experiment in cradle-to-grave welfare statism and post-national political unity many decades ago: historically dynamic economies, educated citizens, relative religious unity (around a lack of belief), a commitment (born out of sorrow and blood) to peace, and military protection provided by the world’s great superpower. The result was something resembling a social-democracy Disneyland, a virtual theme park for believers in nationalized health care, progressive social views, soft power over hard power, and carefully managed democracy.

Yet human nature still prevails, doesn’t it? It turns out that the euro couldn’t turn Greeks and Italians into Germans, that cradle-to-grave welfare benefits have the same impact on the work ethic and productivity of millions of Europeans as they had on millions of Americans, and that “post-Christian Europe” was hardly a more-rational Europe.  

We can’t just shake our heads at the Europeans, however, not when our current president looks across the Atlantic and sees not a cautionary tale but instead a model for our American future. Name one Obama administration policy goal that wouldn’t make us more European. From nationalized health care to more “progressive” taxation to state/corporate ownership models to a shrinking defense, every significant policy choice is dragging us closer to the model that is collapsing before our very eyes. Does he think that Americans are better at being French than the French?... 

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/299900/socialism-and-central-planning-still-cant-defeat-human-nature-david-french

Read the first paragraph again.  Is there anywhere in the world that socialism would have a better chance than in Western Europe?  Socialism when introduced tends to chip away at the economy.  If you start with a robust economy, you have a fair amount of time until the chickens come home to roost.

Republicans lead in generic Poll

Republicans hold a seven-point lead on the Generic Congressional Ballot for the week ending Sunday, May 12. 
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 45% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Republican in their district’s congressional race if the election were held today, while 38% would choose the Democrat instead. This gap is much larger than it has been for the past three weeks when Republicans led by three but is consistent with the level of support the GOP has been earning since early March.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/generic_congressional_ballot
The House will remain Republican, the Senate will go Republican and the Romney will beat Obama.

What’s new Today

Story #1 is tells of how the Wall Street people are not donating to Obama like they did in 2008.  #2 covers the latest Battleground poll that is basically a dead heat.  But that’s not what it actually says.  #3 tells of the latest Rasmussen poll.  #4 is about the Democrats war on fossil fuels and how the Republicans will help bring back the economy by supporting these fuels that actually work.  #5 is an interesting interview with Jonah Goldberg.  #6 looks at fairness, the left and the results of making fairness a national goal.  #7 relates how Elizabeth Warren appears not only to not be an Indian descendant, but….

Today’s thoughts

It seems Iran has released a propaganda picture of a missile launch but forgot to edit out of the picture, Jar Jar Binks.  I guess they are looking for the Force to be with them.

The Wisconsin Democratic Party has canceled Tuesday’s unity rally after the primary to face off against Scott Walker in the recall election.  It appears there wasn’t enough unity. 

It’s now been more than three years since the Democratic majority in the Senate last passed a budget, (last time was April 29, 2009). During that time, the federal government has spent $10.4 trillion and added another $4.5 trillion to our total debt.

As part of their civility campaign, David Axelrod has declared they will respond to the GOP’s ‘contract killers’ (Super PAC ads).  Civility?  Really? 

California has gained the dubious distinction as the worst place to do business according to Chief Executive Magazine.  I remember when it was the best, but that was before it became a progressive stronghold. 

1.  The Romance between Obama and Wall Street is over

…One day in late October, Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, slipped into the Regency Hotel in New York and walked up to a second-floor meeting room reserved by his aides. More than 20 of Obama’s top donors and fund-raisers, many of them from the financial industry, sat in leather chairs around a granite conference table.

Messina told them he had a problem: New York City and its suburbs, Obama’s top source of money in 2008, were behind quota. He needed their help bringing the financial community back on board.

For the next hour, the donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being wealthy. They felt scapegoated for the recession. It was a few weeks into the Occupy Wall Street movement, with mass protests against the 1 percent springing up all around the country, and they blamed the president and his party for the public’s nasty mood. The administration, some suggested, had created a hostile environment for job creators.

Messina politely pushed back. It’s not the president’s fault that Americans are still upset with Wall Street, he told them, and given the public’s mood, the administration’s rhetoric had been notably restrained.

One of the guests raised his hand; he knew how to solve the problem. The president had won plaudits for his speech on race during the last campaign, the guest noted. It was a soaring address that acknowledged white resentment and urged national unity. What if Obama gave a similarly healing speech about class and inequality? What if he urged an end to attacks on the rich? Around the table, some people shook their heads in disbelief….

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/obamas-not-so-hot-date-with-wall-street.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

Obama has made a lot of enemies and a lot of people disillusioned.  He’s going down in November. 

2.  Battleground Poll:  A Dead Heat

This is a pleasant surprise, but not entirely unexpected. Obama was hurt by politicizing the Osama raid and his "war on women" by the GOP has blown up in his face.

This is reflected in the fact that Obama's 5 point lead over Romney in February is now a one point deficit - 48-47. And the GOP in general is making a comeback as well.

Politico:

The former Massachusetts governor has opened up a 10-point lead, 48 percent to 38 percent, among independents in a poll conducted Sunday, April 29 through Thursday, May 3 and a 6-point lead among those who describe themselves as "extremely likely" to vote in November. Obama led Romney by 9 points overall in POLITICO's February's poll.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/05/battleground_poll_dead_heat.html#ixzz1uGzVmJTA

What is interesting is that if you go to the demographics you will find the Democrats have a 4 point lead over Republicans in the numbers sampled.  Correcting for this you have 52-43 Romney. 

3.   Rasmussen’s agrees with my comments

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows Mitt Romney earning 49% of the vote and President Obama attracting 44% support. Three percent (3%) would vote for a third party candidate, while another three percent (3%) are undecided.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll

Rasmussen is using likely voters.   As Dick Morris likes to point out almost all the undecided break for the challenger (Mitt Romney).  Add that 3% to these numbers and you get Romney 52% Obama 44%.  It’s not even going to be close in November.

4.  Obama’s War on Fossil Fuels

Natural gas is a feedstock for the production of fertilizer, plastics, and many chemical products. Fortunately, America possesses vast reserves of recoverable natural gas. The low price of this gas is one factor spurring companies like Dow Chemical to expand production in the United States rather than send jobs overseas.

How many jobs? According to one reliable estimate, low gas prices resulting from hydraulic fracturing will result in the creation of one million new jobs in the U.S. in the next decade and a half. That is in addition to another half million jobs created by the fracking process itself and the countless other spin-off jobs necessary to support those expanding chemical, fertilizer, plastics, and energy industries. (Canadian oil sands development alone would create 343,000 new jobs in the U.S. That is the same development that Obama is trying to shut down with his veto of the Keystone XL pipeline.)

It all adds up to a renaissance for American industry, with all the benefits of job creation, economic growth, and wealth creation that go with it. As a result of the new natural gas boom and the industrial recovery, American industries will be expanding their workforces. The stagnant industrial wages of the last 30 years should begin to see meaningful expansion. Once again, American industrial workers can look forward to job security and higher wages.

It all sounds like an economic miracle, and it is. So why is Obama trying to kill it?...

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/obama_wants.html#ixzz1uH3GeIke

The answer to the last question is that part of the Democratic coalition is the hard left environmental movement that sees fossils fuels (even natural gas which is the cleanest) as the equivalent of the serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden.  But this is one of the advantages Romney and the Republicans have.  When they come into office expect to see a huge surge in prosperity that should lock the Democrats out of power for some time. 

5.  An Interview with Jonah Goldberg on “The Tyranny of Clichés”

…Liberals—and this is a point that, you know, people like E.J. Dionne and Martin Peretz and a lot of liberal intellectuals will concede—liberals don’t have the same relationship with their intellectual history, with their ideology.  They deny that they have one….

…Liberals claim that they’re pragmatists, that they’re empiricists, or that they’re fact finders, that they only care about what works, and they just wish we crazies on the Right would drop all of these labels and these ideological, you know, squabbles, so that we could get busy doing the work the American people sent us to Washington to do and all that sort of nonsense.  And that is a monumental lie.

And it’s first and foremost a lie liberals tell to themselves.  The idea that liberals aren’t ideological is just nonsense on stilts.  And I don’t mind that liberals are ideological.  What I mind is that they won’t admit it.  It’s sort of like liberal media bias.  I don’t mind that—I don’t really care that much that the mainstream media is biased at this point, you know.  I mean, that’s something we’ve learned to live with.  What bothers me is—what really drives me to distraction is the way mainstream journalists deny that liberal media bias even exists.

And so the tyranny of the clichés is that a lot of clichés that I go through in the book, they’re not just liberal talking-point clichés; they are more fundamental formulations that sort of steal ground for progressive assumptions about the way the world works, man’s place in the universe, and all of the rest.  It’s not just sort of Obama v. Romney kind of talking points.  It’s a more fundamental thing.

You know, John Ralston Saul has this expression “the unconscious civilization.”  And it’s sort of the civilization that maybe a visitor from Mars would see that we don’t really recognize, because it’s—you know, our dogma makes a lot of assumptions invisible to us.

Liberals have an enormous amount of dogma.  They’re far more dogmatic than conservatives are.  And it expresses themes—and they express their dogmatism and their ideology, not in open and honest exp—you know, declarations of ideological preference, but in these sort of clichéd buzz phrases and terms and truisms that they claim aren’t ideological at all.

I mean, there’s no—there’s nothing a conservative regularly says that is more wildly radically extremist in its ideological assumptions than, say, violence never solved anything.  I mean, that is the most idiotic, wildly, radically ideological reality-distorting conviction, if you actually believe it.  And yet they say they believe it, and at the same time they claim that it’s not ideological at all….

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/05/07/jonah-goldberg-discusses-the-tyranny-of-cliches-part-i/?singlepage=true

I’m a great fan of Jonah’s.  His keen intellect is able to parse out Progressive lies.  The cliché of the left that has always bothered me is “War, what is it good for?  Absolutely nothing.”  It was a song sung by leftists who have no idea about history at all.  Most of our technological and medical breakthroughs owe their existence to war.   

6.   Fairness and the Left

As the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Peter Wehner recalled April 12 in a superb essay on Commentary’s website, in 2008 then-Senator Obama advocated a higher capital-gains tax rate. He did so even though lowering that tax rate from 28 percent to 20 percent in 1997 actually expanded net revenues by 124 percent — from $54 billion in Fiscal Year 1996 to $121 billion in FY 2000, according to a Congressional Budget Office report. That tax-rate cut was enacted under tea-party pinup William Jefferson Clinton.

“Well, Charlie,” Obama told ABC’s Charles Gibson during the 2008 campaign, “what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital-gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

For too many liberals like Obama, “fairness” is not about enriching the modest; it’s about impoverishing the moneyed.

Multibillionaire Warren Buffett has energized liberals with his still-unverified claim that his tax rate lags his secretary’s. If that is true, “fairness” could mean slashing the secretary’s taxes to match Buffett’s 11 percent effective tax rate.  (Like many 1 percenters, Buffett chooses to derive most of his income from lower-taxed investments rather than higher-taxed wages.) Somehow, reducing the secretary’s taxes never came up. Instead liberals demand the so-called Buffet Rule, an instrument for bludgeoning the successful rather than boosting the downtrodden.

In her final appearance in the British House of Commons, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher skewered this liberal mindset. Feisty as ever, she answered her colleagues’ questions on the gap between the needy and the affluent: “The honourable gentleman is saying that he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich,” Thatcher explained on November 22, 1990. “So long as the gap is smaller, they would rather have the poor poorer. One does not create wealth and opportunity that way.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/298932/ignore-income-gap-deroy-murdock

As Winston Churchill said, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” That is the problem with the left’s argument about the wealthy getting wealthier.  Prior to Obama’s presidency the rich had gotten vastly richer, but the poor also were better off.  Under Obama everyone has gotten poorer. 

7.  Elizabeth Warrens Real Ancestry

For over a quarter of a century, Elizabeth Warren has described herself as a Native American. When recently asked to provide evidence of her ancestry, she pointed to an unsubstantiated claim on an 1894 Oklahoma Territory marriage license application by her great-great grand uncle William J. Crawford that his mother, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, Ms. Warren's great-great-great grandmother, was a Cherokee.

After researching her story, it is obvious that her "family lore" is just fiction.

As I pointed out in my article here on Sunday, no evidence supports this claim. O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford had no Cherokee heritage, was listed as "white" in the Census of 1860, and was most likely half Swedish and half English, Scottish, or German, or some combination thereof. (Note, the actual 1894 marriage license makes no claim of Cherokee ancestry.)

But the most stunning discovery about the life of O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is that her husband, Ms. Warren's great-great-great grandfather, was apparently a member of the Tennessee Militia who rounded up Cherokees from their family homes in the Southeastern United States and herded them into government-built stockades in what was then called Ross’s Landing (now Chattanooga), Tennessee—the point of origin for the horrific Trail of Tears, which began in January, 1837.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/08/Elizabeth-Warren-Ancestor-Trail-of-Tears

So why is this important?  It appears Ms. Warren was not only living a lie, but benefiting from it as well. 

Is Obama overplaying his hand?

What’s new Today 

Story #1 tells that the solutions Obama brought with him into office doesn’t seem to be working. #2 Obama has held more fundraisers at this point in his first term than the previous five presidents did all together.  It appears he’s having to work a lot harder for money.  #3 Dana Perino thinks the Obama team is overplaying their hand. They had a perfectly good positive ad about taking down bin Laden and couldn’t help but make it a negative ad.  Not smart.  #4 is another look at Obama’s problem with the Youth vote compared to 2008.  #5 tells us why we have progressives rather than liberals.  #6 wonders about Elizabeth Warren’s status as a minority.  And finally #7 tells about a great new book out from Jonah Goldberg. 

Today’s thoughts

According to Jonah Goldberg, if the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, the greatest trick liberals ever pulled was convincing themselves that they’re not ideological.

Mitt Romney is running against a different man than the Pied Piper of "transformational change" who won the 2008 presidential election. Romney's opponent is that man's clone -- scaled down to one-eighth the size. He's a much smaller and distinctly meaner version of the Barack Obama of four years ago.

It appears one of the points that brought George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton together was a shared distain for Jimmy Carter according to the new book “The President’s Club.”   

If you look at what’s going on it appears the Obama campaign is sputtering.  First Hilary Rosen attack Ann Romney and the backlash effectively makes her off limits.  Now the Obama ad on killing Bin Laden and questioning if Romney would have ordered it seems to be taking his very real accomplishment off the table for future ads. 

1.   Obama’s Economy

…Barack Obama’s original economic team — Austan Goolsbee, Christina Romer, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag — have long fled the administration, and have proved mostly wrong in all their therapies and prognostications of 2009. Despite the stimulus of borrowing over $5 trillion in less than four years, near-zero interest rates, and chronic deficits, the U.S. economy is in the weakest recovery since the Great Depression and mired in the longest streak of continuous unemployment of 8 percent or higher — 38 months — since the 1930s. The Mexican economy is growing more rapidly than is ours. Why did not massive annual $1 trillion–plus deficits spark a recovery, as government claimed an ever larger percentage of GDP, and new public-works projects were heralded by the administration?

Much of the answer is found in the collective psyche of those Americans who traditionally hire, purchase, or invest capital. An economy is simply the aggregate of millions of private agendas, of people sensing and reacting to a commonly perceived landscape. Yet since January 2009, that landscape has been bleak and foreboding.

Take the debt. The problem is not just that Obama has borrowed $5 trillion in less than four years, but also that he has offered few plans to reduce the ongoing borrowing and none at all to pay down the debt. Instead, he has demonized as heartless anyone who opposes his serial $1 trillion annual deficits….

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/297223/sitting-out-obama-victor-davis-hanson

Obama is going after the oil companies for $4 billion per year when the deficit he’s running is $1.3 trillion per year.  Other than more taxes what have you heard him talk about? 

2.   Obama Has More Fundraisers Than The Previous Five Presidents—Combined.

Barack Obama has already held more fundraising events to build cash for his re-election bid than all five Presidents since Richard Nixon combined, according to figures to be published in a new book.

Obama is also the only president in the past 35 years to visit every electoral battleground state in his first year of office.

The figures, contained a in a new book called The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign by Brendan J. Doherty, due to be published by University Press of Kansas in July, give statistical backing to the notion that Obama is more preoccupied with being re-elected than any other commander-in-chief of modern times.

Doherty, who has compiled statistics about presidential travel and fundraising going back to President Jimmy Carter in 1977, found that Obama had held 104 fundraisers by March 6th this year, compared to 94 held by Presidents Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Snr, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush combined.

Since then, Obama has held another 20 fundraisers, bringing his total to 124. Carter held four re-election fundraisers in 1980, Reagan zero in 1984, Bush Snr 19 in 1992, Clinton 14 in 1996 and Bush Jnr 57 in 2004.

http://www.jammiewf.com/2012/the-permanent-campaign-failed-president-has-held-more-fundraisers-than-previous-five-presidents-combined/

Well, this is a historic presidency. Stand by for the election ad blitz, because the money is flowing on both sides.    

3.  Dana Perino: Obama may be overplaying hand

Former Bush White House Press Secretary Dana Perino appeared on Fox & Friends on Monday where she was asked to weigh in on the Obama administration’s latest campaign push to put Osama bin Laden’s death in the forefront of the President’s reelection effort. Perino said that Obama may be overplaying their advantage with the  Osama bin Laden ad that claims Mitt Romney may not have made the decision to go after OBL. Perino wondered why Obama’s team would “question what anybody else would have done because how do they know?” …

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/dana-perino-on-bin-laden-ad-never-underestimate-this-white-houses-ability-to-overplay-their-hand/

Expect Obama’s campaign to do this over and over again.  This was the one place they didn’t need to go negative, yet they did.  Six months of this is going to diminish Obama in the eyes of the country and will help lead to a big loss in November for the President. 

4.   Obama’s Problem with the Youth Vote

They lapped up President Obama’s 2008 promise of “hope” and “change,” but his inability to deliver has turned younger voters cynical and disillusioned, according to a new analysis of 18-29-year-olds who backed the president but are now skeptical of him.

“It will take a decade before they believe in hope and change,” said GOP pollster Ed Goeas. Worse, he said, younger voters are “disillusioned” with Obama and have turned “cynical” of his rhetoric.

He recently traveled to Raleigh, N.C., and Columbus, Ohio, to conduct focus groups with voters aged 18-29 who backed Obama in 2008. He found them gravely concerned about unemployment, the economy and gas prices. “They are very decidedly unhappy,” he said.

Mostly, they are upset that the president didn’t make good on his promises.
“There is no belief that the economy is getting better,” he found….

http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/washington-secrets/2012/04/young-obama-voters-turn-president/553751

You are seeing polls all over the place showing Obama way up or barely up with the under 30 crowd.  The one thing that does seem to be constant is that far fewer young people plan to vote than do the other age groups. 

5.   The New Regressives

About fifteen years ago, many liberals began to self-identify as progressives—partly because of the implosion of the Great Society and the Reagan reaction that had tarnished the liberal brand and left it as something akin to “permissive” or “naïve,” partly because “progressive” was supposedly an ideological rather than a political identification, and had included some early twentieth-century Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.


But twenty-first century progressivism is not aimed at political reform. There is no new effort at
racial unity. There is not much realization that we are in a globalized, rapidly changing, high-tech economy or that race and gender are not as they were fifty years ago. Instead, progressivism has become a reactionary return to the 1960s—or even well before….

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-new-reactionaries/

In the 1880s, liberalism quit looking at liberty as the answer and moved onto Progressivism.  In the 1980s they shed their focus on progress and looked to simple control. They are now looking to go backwards with their ties to environmentalism. 

6.   Elizabeth Warren Minority?

Despite claiming she never used her Native American heritage when applying for a job, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign admitted last night the Democrat listed her minority status in professional directories for years when she taught at the University of Texas and the University of
Pennsylvania.

From 1986 to 1995, Warren’s name is included in the Association of American Law Schools’
annual directory of minority law teachers, according to records obtained by the Herald.

The campaign for GOP U.S. Sen. Scott Brown last night called for Warren to “come clean.”

“This story raises serious questions about Elizabeth Warren’s credibility. The record now shows Prof. Warren did claim to be a‘minority,’ and that she attempted to mislead the public about these facts whenshe was first asked about the issue last week,” said Brown spokesman Jim Barnett.
“Prof. Warren needs to come clean about her motivations for making these claims and explain the contradictions between her rhetoric and the record.”…

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view/20220430liz_listed_self_as_minority_inprofessional_directories_brown_calls_on_warren_camp_to_come_clean/srvc=home&position=1

Kind of like Democrats who cheat on their taxes when they call for raising them on everyone else, Elizabeth Warren used special status designed to help actual minorities, not just pretend ones. 

     7.  "The Tyranny of Clichés”

…But with "The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas", not only has Goldberg (editor-at-large for National Review Online) avoided the sophomore slump -- in
many ways he has an even bigger triumph on his hands.

Everything conservatives will be looking for is on every page of "Tyranny."
Just as he did with "Liberal Fascism," Goldberg uses scholarly history, damning logic, pop culture, and laugh-out-loud humor to connect the dots that expose the Left as thevacuous, dishonest, State-addicted mercenaries they really are. But what sets "Tyranny" apart from its predecessor and, in my opinion, improves on it, is two things:

First, simply by its title alone, "Liberal Fascism" was red meat for the Right; a delicious, timely, page-turning balm in The Year Of Obama. As we were getting our electoral butts kicked in every corner of America -- as our worst political nightmares were impossibly coming true -- we could at least get under the covers and flick a flashlight onto Jonah's reassurance that we were right, dammit!

"Liberal Fascism" is ours and all ours, but to its credit, "Tyranny" is less so.

"Tyranny" isn't red meat as much as it's an argument. Yes, so was "Liberal Fascism," but that was a more pointed argument made from a somewhat belligerent posture (which I loved). "Tyranny," though, is something I would (and have) send to my Obama-loving, swing state-dwelling,
left-wing mother. For years now, the two of us have fired books at one another in the hopes of persuading the other to see the light, and because Goldberg's theme is less about partisan politics than it is about intellectual honesty, I'm convinced it's going to be one of my more persuasive missives.

"Tyranny" isn't about ideology. Don't get me wrong, Goldberg still takes
it to the Left, but liberalism (for very good reason) is merely the vehicle the
author drives to explore the much bigger theme of how and why the left and their allies in media and academia haveallowed political debate to devolve into cliché. The over-arching theme,
however, is even bigger and speaks to conservative and liberal alike:

Think…

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/28/Tyranny-of-cliches-review#disqus_thread

Just in time.