What’s New Today
Story number 1 is
today's Signs of desperation. #2 looks at
why democrats and republicans can’t seem to work together. #3 asks the question is Obama beating
himself? #4 has an interesting chart on
the demographics of the Battleground poll released yesterday. #5 may give you the answer as to why Harry
Reid is speculating that Romney hasn’t paid taxes for 10 years. It appears Obama has won elections by getting
private information and then misrepresenting it. #6 looks at the acrimony between the left and
the right. #7 relates how Progressivism
is at war with the Constitution. Progressives
don’t like the Constitution. It limits
them. #8 has two different takes on
Chick-fil-A’s appreciation day.
Today’s
Thoughts
In a speech published on his website
Thursday, Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad said the ultimate goal of world forces must be the annihilation of
Israel.
Economists
expect that the economy added 95,000 jobs in July, which would be
a slight improvement from the 80,000 added in June. They see the unemployment rate stuck at 8.2%. We get the results on Friday so we can
compare expect with actual.
The Obama government
keeps growing devouring everything in its path, requiring us to borrow $41,222 per second (approximately $2.5 million per minute) just to keep
government running.
Michael Moore said: “I
wouldn’t say I support him. I would say I will vote for him,”
regarding President Obama. You can feel
the excitement.
1.Signs of Desperation
Each plea for money from President Obama and his allies has become more urgent and desperate than the last. His campaign’s chief operating officer said on Monday that “we’ve gotten our behinds handed to us.” Vice President Joe Biden warned on the same day that Mr. Obama would lose if “the other side spends us into oblivion.”
Michele Obama worried aloud about waking up on election day “wondering if I could have done more.” And Al Gore, the former vice president, said victories by the “extremist fringe” would “spell disaster” for the country.The answer, according to all of them? A donation of $3 (or more) by midnight on Tuesday. (The e-mails don’t say “Pretty please!” — yet.)
The urgent and repeated appeals, sent to millions of Mr. Obama’s supporters via e-mail and text messages, are a vivid reminder that the president’s campaign is likely to raise significantly less than Mitt Romney and Republicans for the third month in a row in July.
Neither campaign has released their fund-raising totals for the month yet. They are required to report those totals to the Federal Elections Commission by Aug. 15….
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/obama-supporters-barraged-with-pleas-for-cash/?partner=rss&emc=rss
The Obama campaign is starting to sound like NPR’s beg-athons.
2. Democrats won’t work with the Republicans
President Obama’s budget director told Congress Wednesday that automatic spending cuts will slash funding for 16,000 school employees, cut the U.S. Border Patrol and kick 100,000 children out of the Head Start program as the White House sought to up the political pain for lawmakers bickering over how to stave off the cuts.
House Republicans offered to cancel their August vacation and stay in town to work on a solution, but Jeffrey Zients, acting director of the OMB, said the administration can’t deal with the Republicans until they agree to raise taxes on the wealthy.
That stance officially ties together the two biggest issues dominating Capitol Hill right now, both of which threaten to bedevil lawmakers through the end of the year: What to do about the expiring George W. Bush-era tax cuts, and about the automatic spending cuts, known in legislative-speak as “sequesters,” both of which kick in at the beginning of January.
“There are five months remaining for Congress to act. What is holding us up right now is the Republican refusal to have the top 2 percent pay their fair share,” Mr. Zients told the Republicans in an acrimonious hearing before the House Armed Services Committee. Hours later, the House officially rejected that stance in a bipartisan 256-171 vote to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts for a year. Nineteen Democrats sided with the Republicans….
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/boehner-democrats-now-own-defense-cuts/
It appears the Democrats have doubled their demands. I thought it was the top 1%. But this is vintage politics. Democrats make a deal breaking demand of the Republicans. They don’t want them to raise the taxes on the
3. Is Obama beating himself?
For some reason President Obama has
us thinking of Marissa Mayer, Bill Ackman and Mark Zuckerberg.
"You didn't build that," Mr. Obama explained to the nation's entrepreneurs, and has
been explaining ever since. He only
meant to say we need government as well as private initiative, and who could
disagree? This argument is anodyne, dispositive of nothing that is in dispute.
Of course, it also comes as a defense of policies that all run in one direction:
bigger government, higher taxes. It comes against the background of a
re-election campaign whose calculated aim is to portray a respected business
leader as a criminal.
Ironically, it came in the same week his party in Congress was admitting paralysis
to do anything for economic growth and demanding adventurous new actions from
Ben Bernanke to reawaken the risk appetites of America's entrepreneurs and
consumers….
…
Of course, it's healthy
not to be overawed by the successes of others, and to remember the American
institutions and policies that let entrepreneurship thrive. But if Mr. Obama lost the point in the
soundbite that so bedevils his campaign, it's because his campaign doesn't have
a point.
Mr. Obama himself chose to lash his re-election bid to his
tax hike for the rich. His tax hike isn't valuable to him
because of the revenue it would raise (which isn't much). It isn't valuable to
him because it somehow fits into his green-eyeshade management of the budget
(neither he nor his party in Congress have shown much interest in managing the
fisc).
His tax hike is only valuable to him because it nominates a
villain for the campaign season—the greedy, undeserving, unpatriotic rich.
It's valuable because it affords a rhetorical escape route when the subject of
unsustainable spending comes up. He can talk about making the rich pay their
"fair share," not about the chasm that would persist between spending
and revenues, with or without his score-settling tax hike….
Obama is attempting to drive up Romney’s
negatives, but he is doing the same thing to himself: hence no movement in the polls for either
candidate. I believe the expression is
he’s being “hoisted on his own petard.”
4. Battleground Polls
The new CBS/NYT/Quinnipiac polls showing President
Obama with big leads (and above 50 percent) in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio are causing a
lot of groans among Republicans and elation among Democrats. In particular, Republicans object to the outsized number
of Democrats in the sample. This has been a consistent theme among
Republicans this cycle: looking at the party ID numbers and discounting polls
that show substantial Democratic advantages.
The numbers are way out of whack with
reality.
5. Obama’s signature move: Creating scandals out of sealed information
Mitt Romney presents one enormous problem for Barack Obama’s
campaign: No divorce records. That’s
why the media are so hot to get their hands on Romney’s tax records for the
past 25 years. They need something to
“pick through, distort and lie about” — as the Republican candidate says.
Obama’s usual campaign method, used in 100 percent of his
races, has been to pry into the private records of his opponents.
Democrats aren’t going to find any
personal dirt on the clean-cut Mormon, so they need complicated tax filings
going back decades in order to create the illusion of scandal out of boring
financial records.
Romney has already released his 2010
tax return and is about to release his 2011 return. After all the huffing and
puffing by the media demanding those returns, the follow-up story vanished
remarkably quickly when the only thing the return showed was that Romney pays
millions of dollars in taxes and gives a lot of money to charity.
Let’s take a romp down memory lane
and review the typical Obama campaign strategy. Obama became a U.S. senator only by virtue of David Axelrod’s former
employer, the Chicago Tribune, ripping open the sealed divorce records of
Obama’s two principal opponents….
… Obama’s
team delved into Sarah Palin’s marriage and spread rumors of John McCain’s
alleged affair in 2008
and they smeared Herman Cain in 2011 with hazy sexual harassment allegations
all emanating from David Axelrod’s pals in Chicago.
It’s almost like a serial killer’s signature. Unsealed personal records have been released to the press.
Obama must be running for office!
So you can see what a pickle the
Obama campaign is in having to run against a Dudley Do-Right, non-drinking,
non-smoking, God-fearing, happily married Mormon.
They’ve got to get their hands on
thousands of pages of Romney’s tax filings so that the media can — as Romney
says — lie about them. It will be interesting to see if Obama can pick the lock
of the famously guarded IRS.
This isn’t a fishing expedition. It’s more like a baby seal hunt where Obama
wants the chance to club the seals to death.
6. Understanding
where the Left is coming from
…As
Gary Kasselman and I argue in Waking the Sleeping Giant, the political struggle in this country is
really a contest between
two worldviews and two types of political character. The grassroots
conservative movement represents the Judeo-Christian worldview of mainstream
America, with values of independence, personal responsibility, and respect for
the rights of others. This movement has promoted a newfound appreciation
for the link between our Judeo-Christian heritage and our constitutional
liberties. If we are morally
accountable individuals, then liberty
-- within widely agreed-upon boundaries -- should be our natural state.
It is this worldview that underlies the conservative belief in limited and
defined government.
But
the Judeo-Christian worldview, with its old-fashioned focus on personal
responsibility, has gradually been
pushed aside by a liberal worldview in our educational, news, and
entertainment institutions. The
left's worldview offers self-esteem in place of self-discipline, entitlement in
place of earning. Just as showing up for the game merits a trophy,
students at expensive law schools are entitled to contraceptives paid for by
other people. Schools dominated by the left teach children to feel good
about their math skills even as math performance plummets.
Those
immersed in the narcissistic institutions of the left would be expected to have
difficulty appreciating points of view that differ from their own, or that challenge
their ingrained sense of superiority. And, if they become politically
active, they would have difficulty
recognizing any moral limits on their tactics because they are, in their own
minds, intellectually and morally superior to their opponents. The
battle cry of the pampered campus radicals of the 1960s -- "by any
means necessary" -- echoes through the left's institutions today.
If
our analysis is correct, then there is no need to look for deep psychological
processes such as paranoid projection in order to understand the left's
distorted view of grassroots conservatism; the
left's accusations would be rooted more in their culture of narcissism than in
paranoia. After all, paranoid individuals believe their delusions;
narcissists just lie in order to get their way.
Conservatives
are understandably concerned with winning the 2012 election, but the long-term
battle is for the cultural institutions that shape the character of our
children and our citizens.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/the_narcissistic_style_in_liberal_politics.html#ixzz22O0MNXdE
An interesting take on why there seems to be so
much acrimony between the left and the right.
7. Progressivism’s
war on the Constitution
Ted Cruz's victory in Tuesday's Texas Republican runoff for
the U.S. Senate nomination is the most impressive triumph yet for the
still-strengthening Tea Party impulse.
And Cruz's victory coincides with
something conservatives should celebrate, the centennial of the 20th century's
most important intra-party struggle. By preventing former President Theodore
Roosevelt from capturing the 1912 Republican presidential nomination from
President William Howard Taft, the GOP
deliberately doomed its chances for holding the presidency but kept its
commitment to the Constitution.
Before Cruz, now 41, earned a
Harvard law degree magna cum laude, he wrote his Princeton senior thesis on the
Constitution's Ninth and 10th Amendments, which if taken seriously would
revitalize two bulwarks of liberty — the
ideas that the federal government's powers are limited because they are
enumerated, and that the enumeration of certain rights does not "deny or
disparage others retained by the people."
Both ideas are repudiated by today's progressives, as they
were by TR, whose Bull Moose Party, the result
of his bolt from the GOP, convened in Chicago 100 years ago Sunday — Aug. 5,
1912.
After leaving the presidency in
1909, TR went haywire. He had always chafed under constitutional restraints,
but he had remained a Hamiltonian, construing the Constitution expansively but
respectfully. By 1912, however, he had
become what the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, was — an anti-Madisonian.
Both thought the Constitution — the enumeration and separation of powers —
intolerably crippled government.
Espousing unconstrained
majoritarianism, TR disdained Madison's
belief that the ultimate danger is wherever ultimate power resides, which in a
democracy is with the majority.
He endorsed the recall of state
judicial decisions and by September 1912, favored the power to recall all
public officials, including the president….
The threat of progressivism is real and dangerous. The idea of a living Constitution and the
series of what appear to be unconstitutional Executive Orders by the current
president show us where they want to take us. Progressivism equals fascism without the death
camps.
8. Chick-fil-A Buycott stories
The Chick-fil-A appreciation day gave rise to a
couple of stories. First this from Mark
Krzos published on his Facebook page.
"I have never felt so alien in my own country as I did today while covering the restaurant’s supporters. The level of hatred, unfounded fear and misinformed people was astoundingly sad. I can’t even print some of the things people said," he claimed. Then he bashed talk radio:
"It was like broken records of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and a recitation of half-truths and outright lies."
A friend asked: "And I bet they considered themselves christians. Don't know why these people don't take the advice of their spiritual teacher, Jesus whose name the religion contains....Could you ascertain what they're angry about, Mark?"
Krzos replied: "The President, Muslims, immigrants, poor people on welfare."
As for the unprintable comments, Krzos wrote:
You think "Fggt
this" and "N-word" President that would fly? Not to mention that
those who said those hateful things were -- excuse the pun -- TOO CHICKEN to
give me their names when I asked for it....too bad there wasn't another
reporter around to go with me and film it. I really wanted to do the interviews
on camera while eating out of a bucket of KFC.
But Krzos employer didn’t publish anything from
him on this story. Instead this was the
story that was published under Michael Braun’s byline.
They came for free speech, they came for traditional values
and they came for waffle fries.
Area Chick-fil-A stores were busy
Wednesday as Southwest Florida residents
came out in support, driven by remarks from company President Dan Cathy — “We
are very much supportive of the family, the biblical definition of the family
unit” — that sparked a controversy that has been simmering for the past few
weeks….
…At the Cape Coral store at Pondella
and Pine Island roads, owner Billy
Cossette said his business was double the usual lunch crowd, and store
manager Sandy Smith at the Colonial Boulevard store in Fort Myers said her
outlet was very busy as well…
.
…Those visiting Chick-fil-A fell mainly into two camps: those who
supported Cathy’s right to speak his mind and others who promoted Cathy’s view
of traditional marriage: between a man and a woman. There were no protesters
of appreciation day in evidence at any of the local stores.
The free-speech supporters included
Jerry Von Gruben, an attorney with Lusk, Drasites & Tolisano, who said he
learned of the appreciation day on Facebook.
“I’m here in support of Cathy,” he
said in Cape Coral. “He has a
constitutional right to free speech. It’s a private company and he can say what
he wants.”…
I also went to Chick-fil-A yesterday in support of free
speech and free enterprise. I saw
nothing like Krzos described, but I’ve attended numerous Tea Party gathering
and never have heard any racists or hate-filled statements. You can’t say something like what Krzos
described didn’t happen as he may have found the one place in the country where
it did. Or you may conclude Krzos is
stretching the truth beyond all recognition.
