Air Force One

Last year (2010) Obama flew in Air Force One 172 times, almost every other day.

And with only 673 days remaining in Obama's never ending presidential campaign, the incumbent's travel pace will not likely slacken. At an Air Force-estimated cost of $181,757 per flight HOUR (not to mention the additional travel costs of Marine One, Secret Service, logistics and local police overtime), that's a lot of frequent flier dollars going into Obama's carbon footprint.

We are privy to some of these numbers thanks to CBS' Mark Knoller, a bearded national treasure trove of presidential stats. According to Knoller's notes, during the last year, Obama made 65 domestic trips over 104 days, and six trips to eight countries over 22 days. Not counting six vacation trips over 32 days. He took 196 helicopter trips, signed 203 pieces of legislation and squeezed in 29 rounds of left-handed golf.

Obama last year gave 491 speeches, remarks or statements. That's more talking than goes on in some entire families. In fact, even including the 24 days of 2010 that we never saw Obama in public, his speaking works out to about one official utterance every 11 waking hours.

Maybe Chavez is OK Afterall?

Hugo Chávez blasted President Barack Obama as a “clown” and an “embarrassment” who has turned the United States into a “disaster”.

A skinny socialist community organizing clown.

My Dark Fantasy

There are some liberals that I could, with pleasure, torture. There is wilderness in Idaho that is replete with mosquitos. I would air drop them, naked, into the forest. It’s over 50 miles to nearest paved road, so I think once in, they would not escape. If they did escape, I could keep their eyelids open with toothpicks and show them pictures of Sarah Palin 16 hours a day.

That’s my dark fantasy. They are my enemies, they are stealing the future of my grandkids. But, I know we must treat our enemies with love and respect, dignity and grace. That’s hard for me.

Au Revoir Mr. Cain

We were Herman Cain supporters, but never really expected him to become the nominee.  He had some decent ideas and we thought that some of them would be might be adopted by the nominee whoever that might be.  We went to a rally for him which was the first and only political rally we have attended.  The crowd was a mixture of young, middle aged and old, white, black and oriental.  I kept thinking that 40 years ago there would have been no white support for him in a town where MLK and his father both preached.  We have come a long way.  I am so sorry it ended the way it did.

Which brings up another matter.  Where were these women when he had 5% of the vote?  They all came forward at once.  Was this planned?  What about the woman that was with Gloria Allred.  What does she get out of all of this?  I don't understand the woman that said she had a 13 year affair with him.  As a woman, I would think that you had to have some positive feeling for the man you are having an affair with.  If there was an affair, did he dump her and she is bitter?  If I were having an affair with someone and he decided to run for president, then those positive feelings I had for him would have kept me silent. 

I spent my career working with a large financial corporation and there were lawsuits.  Most of the time, the client was angry because he lost money.  The client always knew there was no guarantee that he would make money every time.  So the client sues the large corporation and the corporation settles the case just to make it go away because it would cost more money and time to prove our innocence.  Apparently that happened with Herman Cain - it does not prove guilt.  He is a smart man.  If he were having an affair, surely he knew that it would come out.

And the loser in this case is all of us.  His family is hurt.  The country has lost a positive spokesman.  What have these women won?  The liberals have won because it eliminates a conservative candidate.

Dorothy

Emendation to Archilochus

I post this for my own benefit. Perhaps you will find something in it for yourself?

You know how much I enjoy Victor Davis Hanson, VDH. I always learn something from reading his articles. Having reference materials at hand is most useful when reading his articles.

I had ordered an old William F. Buckley book, The Lexicon. Which is described as a cornucopia of wonderful words for the inquisitive work lover. Starting as a teen ager, I did the Reader’s Digest Word Power. So Buckley’s book is a natural for me.

Recently VDH wrote:

What is this strange attraction for these new reality shows about burly, raucous, and often obnoxious truckers, loggers, fishermen, miners, and bail bondsmen, if not their ability to pit physical strength and courage against the wild bunches? We don’t watch real TV about classicists finding a new emendation to Archilochus or a tort lawyer finding a new twist to a case.

Emendation? Archilochus? This could only be written by someone who can conjugate a Greek verb in all its 300-plus forms. I admire anyone who can read Greek and knows  Archilochus and can use the two words in a sentence.

I picked up the newly arrived The Lexicon, somehow knowing that Buckley could hold his own with VDH.

(noun) The word or the matter substituted for incorrect or unsuitable matter.

??? Thankfully, he uses it in a sentence. The new conservatives, many of whom go by the name of Modern Republicans, have not been very helpful. Their sin consists in permitting so many accretions, modifications, emendations, maculations and qualifications that the original things quite recedes from view.

This concludes today’s word games.

The Meathead Vote

I am going to figure this out for myself. I hope.

In 2008, 53% of the voters were meatheads. It said that about 23% of voters are liberals. That also means that they are idiots. For the liberal baby boomer, it's always 1972.

So the other 30% are what most call independents or moderates. I call them idiots too.

It was not difficult for a true independent to ascertain that Obablah would not be a good president. He had the most liberal voting record of any senator. That was enough to make anyone with common sense vote for whoever was on the other ticket considering that nothing, not one damn thing, advanced by liberals ever made our country one whit better.

petulant, abrasive and downright nasty

I would have preferred that the real tea bagger in Congress had been drawn and quartered, but we will have to settle for his quitting.

 

Congress Will Be a Better Place When Barney Frank Is Gone

By Karl Rove

Published November 29, 2011 | FoxNews.com

It was because he was going to retire anyway, lost a favorite port town in redistricting and had a tough race last time.

Was this really why Congressman Barney Frank announced today he’s retiring from the House of Representatives?

Perhaps another reason was he’s no longer chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and like a lot of bullies, Mr. Frank found it’s not easy to be stripped of the power to torment and humiliate others.

Brilliant, but acid tongued and generally unpleasant, Mr. Frank ruled with an iron gavel, ran over critics with delight and treated committee members and especially Republican colleagues as lesser forms of life.

Mr. Frank’s departure in January 2013 will remove from the House one of its more offensive members. Until then, this petulant, abrasive and downright nasty Congressman will keep making his presence known.

However, it is unlikely that Mr. Frank is leaving for the reason he should depart Congress: out of shame for all he did to stop reform of Fannie and Freddie while there was still time to avert the disaster that almost took down the American economy.

In 2003, he called Fannie and Freddie “fundamentally sound financially” and accused the Bush Administration of trying to “exaggerate a threat of safety… [to] conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see."

A year later, he said talk of financial problems at Fannie and Freddie were “an artificial issue created by the administration...I don't think we are in any remote danger here."

In 2007, as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and just as Fannie and Freddie – overleveraged and stuffed to the gills with risky mortgages they’d encouraged and facilitated – were about to go over the cliff, Mr. Frank attacked President George W. Bush’s call for reform as “inane.”

Yet when Fannie and Freddie went belly up in the fall of 2008, Mr. Frank voted for the same Bush Administration reforms that could have averted the bankruptcies of Fannie and Freddie.

Why did Mr. Frank oppose giving these two gigantic financial institutions the same scrutiny as a local bank, a neighborhood savings and loan or a community credit union?

Fannie and Freddie provided “grease” for the Democratic political machine through hundreds of millions in charitable contributions to left wing community and advocacy groups that are critical to Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts.

Fannie and Freddie hired vast armies of influence peddlers – admittedly from both parties, but mostly Democrats – to forestall any efforts at reasonable regulation.

Fannie and, to a lesser extent, Freddie, were led by Democratic political power brokers, masquerading as mortgage bankers while advising Democratic presidents, vetting Democratic running mates, and plumping the election hopes of Congressional Democrats.

Mr. Frank is incapable of feeling shame, regret or a sense of personal responsibility. These are emotions for lesser beings. He’s leaving because of redistricting or to avoid having to raise money or facing those nasty little voters every two years. The House will be a better place for his departure.

Karl Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush. He is a Fox News contributor and author of "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions, 2010).

Guns

The Skinny Socialist

This  was written by Gary Hubbell, a rancher, fishing guide and real estate agent, in Aspen, Colorado of all places. I hope he is right. I am not sure we can ever escape the debt load.

Barack Obama is the best thing that has happened to America in the last 100 years. Truly, he is the savior of America's future.

Despite the fact that he has some of the lowest approval ratings among recent presidents, history will see Barack Obama as the source of America 's resurrection. Barack Obama has plunged the country into levels of debt that we could not have previously imagined; his efforts to nationalize health care have been met with fierce resistance nationwide; TARP bailouts and stimulus spending have shown little positive effect on the national economy; unemployment is unacceptably high and looks to remain that way for most of a decade; legacy entitlement programs have ballooned to unsustainable levels, and there is a seething anger in the populace.

That's why Barack Obama is such a good thing for America . Here's why.

Obama is the symbol of a creeping liberalism that has infected our society like a cancer for the last 100 years. Just as Hitler is the face of fascism, Obama will go down in history as the face of unchecked liberalism. The cancer metastasized to the point where it could no longer be ignored.

Average Americans who have quietly gone about their lives, earning a paycheck, contributing to their favorite charities, going to high school football games on Friday night, spending their weekends at the beach or on hunting trips - they've gotten off the fence. They've woken up. There is a level of political activism in this country that we haven't seen since the American Revolution, and Barack Obama has been the catalyst that has sparked a restructuring of the American political and social consciousness.

Think of the crap we've slowly learned to tolerate over the past 50 years as liberalism sought to re-structure theAmerica that was the symbol of freedom and liberty to all the people of the world. Immigration laws were ignored on the basis of compassion. Welfare policies encouraged irresponsibility, the fracturing of families, and a cycle of generations of dependency. Debt was regarded as a tonic to lubricate the economy. Our children left school having been taught that they are exceptional and special, while great numbers of them cannot perform basic functions of mathematics and literacy. Legislators decided that people could not be trusted to defend their own homes, and stripped citizens of their rights to own firearms. Productive members of society have been penalized with a heavy burden of taxes in order to support legions of do-nothings who loll around, reveling in their addictions, obesity, indolence, ignorance and "disabilities." Criminals have been arrested and re-arrested, coddled and set free to pillage the citizenry yet again. Lawyers routinely extort fortunes from doctors, contractors and business people with dubious torts.

We slowly learned to tolerate these outrages, shaking our heads in disbelief, and we went on with our lives.

But Barack Obama has ripped the lid off a seething cauldron of dissatisfaction and unrest.

A former Communist is given a paid government position in the White House as an advisor to the president. Auto companies are taken over by the government, and the auto workers' union - whose contracts are completely insupportable in any economic sense - is rewarded with a stake in the company. Government bails out Wall Street investment bankers and insurance companies, who pay their executives outrageous bonuses as thanks for the public support. Terrorists are read their Miranda rights and given free lawyers. And, despite overwhelming public disapproval, Barack Obama has pushed forward with a health care plan that would re-structure one-sixth of the American economy.

Literally millions of Americans have had enough. They're organizing, they're studying the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, they're reading history and case law, they're showing up at rallies and meetings, and a slew of conservative candidates are throwing their hats into the ring. Is there a revolution brewing? Yes, in the sense that there is a keen awareness that our priorities and sensibilities must be radically re-structured. Will it be a violent revolution? No. It will be done through the interpretation of the original document that has guided us for 220 "FANTASTIC" years--- the Constitution. Just as the pendulum swung to embrace political correctness and liberalism, there will be a backlash, a complete repudiation of a hundred years of nonsense. A hundred years from now, history will perceive the year 2010 as the time when America got back on the right track. And for that, we can thank Barack Hussein Obama.

It’s All Free Now

 

Atta Way, Barry. Our skinny narrcistic socialist.

Come here, illegally, and demand free stuff.

 

In 1966, he was chosen by conservative editor William F. Buckley, Jr to be the first guest on Buckley's new television interview show Firing Line.

Barry and His Father

I recently talked with someone that had read Barry's book. I asked them what he had to say about his Mother or Grandmother. They could not recall anything.

This landed in my hands yesterday.
 
The character of any man is defined by how he treats his mother as the years pass. I bought and read Audacity of Hope. It was difficult to read considering his attitude toward us and everything American. Let me add a phrase he uses to describe his attitude toward whites. He harbors a "COIL OF RAGE". His words not mine.

From Dreams From My Father :

"I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."

"I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race."

"There was something about her that made me wary, a little too sure of herself, maybe and white."

"It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names."

"I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of   Africa , that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself: the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela."

 

and this

 

The abandonment by his father when he was an infant and by his stepfather at age 10 has left President Obama with a "father hunger" that influences everything from why he distances himself from pushy supporters, to his strong desire to compromise and bring people together, to his aggressive campaign to kill Osama bin Laden, says a psychoanalytic book out next week. In Obama on the Couch, George Washington University professor Justin Frank also reveals that Obama has spent much of his life seeking out father figures, but most, like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Vice President Biden, have disappointed him. "Obama searched for a father, for someone to relate to who could help him—a strong man who knew what to do,"

Still Not Feeling Very Free Here

BINGO!

Dennis Miller's Suggestion

Dennis Miller's Suggestion for Herman Cain's Next Bumper Sticker

Cain Versus Not Able

Black Conservatives Are Racist?

Something interesting is happening in politics.  Two men are getting a lot of publicity – Lt. Col. Allen West (ret) and Mr. Herman Cain.  Col. West ran for office as a U. S. Representative from Florida and won.  Mr. Cain has had a lot of success in the private sector, including former chairman and CEO of Godfather's Pizza. 

Neither sounds like much of a big deal, but that's where people are wrong.  Col. West has led men, he knows how to do that.  Mr. Cain took a company that was losing money and turned it profitable.  Both men know how to surround themselves with people that are capable of looking at a situation and telling their "bosses" how they can help turn the situation around with successful results.  Both men are not afraid of speaking out using common sense.

They see the Tea Party was a group of concerned citizens that want the country turned around.  The Tea Party is labeled by liberals as being stupid, ignorant, and uncaring.  When that doesn't work, the liberals come up with a worst label - racist.  Always remember that if all else fails, use the term racist.  The problem with this is that Col. West and Mr. Cain are African-Americans - how can this be!

Days of Rage

Here are some of the fine citizens participating in Occupy Wall Street.

Have you noticed that Tea Party signs are home made while union printed signs prevail where the lefties hang out?

The Fun Never Ends

During his historic address to a joint session of Congress last week, President Obama announced that his $447 billion Stimulus Jr. "jobs" bill "will be paid for." How? By asking Congress to pay for it!

 

The agreement we passed in July . . . charges this Congress to come up with an additional $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Tonight, I am asking you to increase that amount so that it covers the full cost of the American Jobs Act.

Obama's Jobs Speech: An Early Draft

'Notwithstanding the economic crisis, I have chosen to pursue my own agenda instead because I'm comfortable with it.'

• By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

An unreliable source provided this early draft of President Obama's speech to Congress last Thursday night:

Members of Congress, honored guests, my fellow Americans:

Jobs are the No. 1 priority of the American people. Jobs are the No. 1 priority of my administration's rhetoric. Jobs have not been the No. 1 priority of my administration's policies, however. Let me explain why.

A British statesman—I believe it was Harold Macmillan—was asked what he intended to do if elected prime minister. He answered, roughly, "Deal with matters that arise." That has not been my approach.

Elections have consequences. We mastered the use of slogans and imagery and won the presidency. Now the power is ours to choose our agenda, and we chose not to be distracted by matters that arise—say, the country's economic crisis. We chose instead to pursue the things that we know should be pursued.

These things are called shibboleths—badges of identity that signify us as "progressives" and entitle us to a sense of superiority. One is nationalization of health care, an emblem of our "caring."

One on which we've made less progress is the displacement of fossil fuels in favor of "green energy," at much higher cost. Accompanying this shibboleth are related shibboleths—about "energy independence," about "global warming"—that, like all shibboleths, are impervious to examination.

Another is union power—labor is good, management is bad. I could go on. These shibboleths are so important that, as you will have seen by now, we will not allow them to be impeded or delayed by matters that merely arise, such as the public's crying need for jobs. So we have blocked drilling for fossil fuels in as many places as possible, protecting Americans from the jobs that would be created.

So we have sacrificed jobs in order to punish Boeing for building a plant in South Carolina that would employ nonunion workers.

So we enacted a health-care plan whose unimaginable complexity and cost can only weigh negatively on every private-sector employer.

I have chosen to pursue this agenda, notwithstanding its untimeliness in the face of matters that have arisen (i.e., the economic crisis), in part because I'm comfortable with it.

Consider my background. I don't know much about business and, frankly, don't care to. You see, I have a self-reinforcing image of Barack Obama. I am high-minded. Business people are greedy and, somehow, lesser. I stay focused on that.

Some might say, "Had I known this I never would have voted for you." A) You weren't listening carefully; and B) that was my intention, my art. To conceal—for instance, by dropping one's Gs—is what it means to be an effective left-wing ideologue in America these days.

I am not anti-business. I get a supreme sense of satisfaction when business leaders approach me and, in a deferential manner, ask for subsidies and regulatory favors that will determine whether their companies succeed or fail. Like solar subsidies. This is the kind of job creation I'm interested in.

My administration has taken flak because of our "investment" of tax dollars in a solar company that last week filed for bankruptcy. Don't be misled. If such companies were profitable and could survive without subsidies, they would not be fit objects of government charity, nor would their leaders approach me with a deferential mien.

Their dependency is what makes them loyal constituents, generous with a campaign donation, willing to go on CNBC and praise our policies. You can always count on me for job creation when it means taking money from independent businesses, those that are answering the call of the marketplace, and giving it to dependent businesses, those that are answering the call of government.

In closing, let us recognize that an election is approaching. The time is upon us when my administration must ratchet up its rhetoric to make it sound like your agenda (jobs, growth) is my agenda.

Indeed, I will begin tonight by junking the more revealing passages of this draft speech and pretending that I place a higher value on job-creating pragmatism than on my progressive shibboleths.

This, I hope, will cause you to re-elect me. Thank you for listening.

More Drunks

The EEOC seems to prefer drunk truck drivers to discriminating against them. Read about it in Café Hayek.

What Happened to Obama?

What Happened to Obama? Absolutely Nothing.
He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president.

 

The whole article

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903918104576502093021646166.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion

This Is Me

I have never been to a Tea party rally. But I would. That makes me delusional and psychotic. That’s me. I think almost daily about putting Pelosi in a mosquito infested deep forest that she could not escape from. Slow torture. I really like the idea. She is putting it to me every day. Just payback.

 

Just when you thought the bias couldn’t get any more egregious over at MSNBC, Martin Bashir topped himself yet again when he encouraged one of his recent guests to psychologically analyze Tea Party members.  And Stanton Peele, the psychologist and addiction “expert” being interviewed, certainly didn’t disappoint Bashir, delivering his rather patronizing “professional” opinion in a segment affectionately titled the “Mind of the Tea Party.”

The diagnosis? It’s pretty grim. Tea Party members are apparently suffering “psychosis.” What’s more, according to the good psychologist, they are also the equivalent of drug addicts seeking a euphoric high, who will stop at nothing to achieve that high, and who will lash out like Anders Breivik did in Norway if they fail to attain that high.  Peele follows up his grave prognostication with the assertion that what the Tea Party wants is unattainable, hence, they will (you guessed it) lash out like the killer did in Norway.

“It reminds us of addiction because addicts are seeking something that they can’t have,” Peele said. “They [Tea Party members] want a state of happiness or nirvana that can’t be achievedexcept through an artificial substance and reminds us of the Norway situation, when people are thwarted at obtaining something they can’t, have they often strike out and Norway is one kind of example to one kind of reaction to that kind of a frustration.”

Relishing the moment, Bashir then asked, “so you’re saying that they are delusional about the past and adamant about the future?”

“They are adamant about achieving something that’s unachievable, which reminds us of a couple of things. It reminds us of delusion and psychosis,” Peele stated rather self-assuredly.

The Obama Downgrade, Alphabetically

By BRET STEPHENS

Snapshots from President Obama's efforts to improve America's standing in the world, 923 days into his administration:

A is for the Arab world, and our standing in it: This year, Zogby International found that 5% of Egyptians had a favorable view of the U.S. In 2008, when George W. Bush was president, it was 9%.

B is for the federal budget deficit, which is estimated to come in at around 11% of GDP in 2011, up from about 3% in 2008.

C is for China's military budget. For 2012, Beijing plans to increase spending on defense by 12.7%. The Obama administration, by contrast, proposed Pentagon cuts in April averaging out to $40 billion per year over the next decade, and Congress may soon cut a lot more.

D is for—what else—the federal debt, which grew to $14.3 trillion this month from $10.7 trillion at the end of 2008. D is also for the dollar, which has lost almost half its value against gold since Aug. 2008.

E is for energy. The average retail price of a gallon of gas hovered near the $1.80 mark when Mr. Obama was inaugurated. It has since more than doubled. E is also for ethanol, the non-wonder fuel the U.S. continues to subsidize to the tune of $5 billion a year.

F is for free trade. Bill Clinton signed Nafta in 1994, which facilitates $1.6 trillion in the trade of goods and services between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. George W. Bush midwifed more than a dozen FTAs, from Australia to Singapore to Morocco to Bahrain. Number of FTA's signed by the current president: zero.

G is for Guantanamo, which remains open, and for Gadhafi, who remains in power, and for Greece, which offers a vision of America's future if we don't reform our entitlement state.

H is for Hillary Clinton, who—I can't believe I'm writing this—would have made a better president than Mr. Obama.

I is for Israel, a Middle Eastern country the president claims to support even as he routinely disses its prime minister, seeks to shrink its borders and—why not?—divide its capital.

J is for jobs. In November 2008, president-elect Obama promised he would create 2.5 million jobs by 2011. By October 2010 the economy had shed 3.3 million jobs.

K is for Karzai, Hamid, Afghanistan's feckless leader. Still, the Obama administration probably did itself no favors by publicly dumping on the man, leading him to seek new best friends in Tehran.

L is for Laden, Osama bin. The president's greatest triumph, which will forever put him one notch—if only one notch—above Jimmy Carter.

M is for Mexico, a country that manages 5.4% unemployment and 4.2% annual growth even as it fights a war against the drug cartels.

N is for NATO, once a pillar of Western security, which Mr. Obama is in the process of destroying through his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and his refusal to give NATO the push it needs to win in Libya.

O is for ObamaCare, which goes far to explain B, D, J as well as the Greek part of G.

P is for Pyongyang, whose ruler the administration is once again attempting to engage in the six-party talks. This is after the Kim regime welcomed Mr. Obama's plea for a nuclear-free world by testing a nuclear bomb, torpedoing a South Korean ship, shelling a South Korean village, and unveiling a state-of-the-art uranium enrichment facility.

Q is for QE2, the most disastrous experiment in monetary policy since Fed Chairman William Miller's low-interest rate policy crashed the dollar in 1978.

R is for the reset with Russia, the principal result of which is an arms-control treaty that brings us to parity in strategic nuclear weapons, leaves us behind in the tactical category, and ill-equips us for the challenge of a proliferating world.

S is for shovel-ready. Enough said.

T is for taxes, which Mr. Obama would like to see raised for "millionaires and billionaires"—curiously defined as people making $200K and up.

U is for Iran's uranium enrichment. When Mr. Obama came to office promising to extend his hand to the mullahs, Iran had enriched 1,000 kilos of uranium. Today they have produced more than 4,000 kilos.

V is for Venezuela, a country whose extensive subterranean links to Iran the administration has consistently downplayed.

W is for the Dubya, whose presidency now looks like a model of spending restraint.

X is for Liu Xiaobo, an example of what a deserving winner of the Nobel Peace Prize looks like. X is also for Xanax, likely to be remembered as the drug of choice of the Obama years.

Y is for Yes, We Can! Unfortunately, it's also for Yemen.

Z is for zero, which is the likelihood that one of the current GOP hopefuls will defeat Mr. Obama in 2012.

Barack Obama the Pessimist

His lack of faith in American exceptionalism has dashed any hope of a 'transformational' presidency.

By FOUAD AJAMI

In one of the illuminating, unscripted moments of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama said—much to the dismay of his core constituency—that the Reagan presidency had been "transformational" in a way that Bill Clinton's hadn't. Needless to say, Mr. Obama aspired to a transformational presidency of his own.

He had risen against the background of a deep economic recession, amid unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; he could be forgiven the conviction that the country was ready for an economic and political overhaul. He gave it a mighty try. But the transformational dream was not to be. The country had limits. Mr. Obama couldn't convince enough Americans that the twin pillars of his political program—redistribution at home, retrenchment abroad—are worthy of this country's ambitions and vocation.

Associated Press

Temperament mattered. Ronald Reagan was the quintessential optimist, his faith in America boundless. He had been given his mandate amid economic distress—the great inflation of the 1970s, high unemployment and taxation—and a collapse of American authority abroad. Through two terms and a time of great challenges, he had pulled off one of the great deeds of political-economic restoration. He made tax cuts and economic growth the cornerstone of that recovery. Economic freedom at home had a corollary in foreign affairs—the pursuit of liberty, a course that secured a victorious end to the Cold War. The "captive nations" were never in doubt, American power was on the side of liberty.

By that Reagan standard, Mr. Obama has been a singular failure. The crippling truth of the Obama presidency is the pessimism of the man, the low expectations he has for this republic. He had not come forth to awaken this country to its stirring first principles, but to manage its decline at home and abroad. So odd an outcome, a man with an inspiring biography who provides no inspiration, a personal story of "The Audacity of Hope" yielding a leader who deep down believes that America's best days are behind it.

Amid the enthusiasm of his ascent to power, the choreography of a brilliant campaign, and a justifiable sense of pride that an African-American had risen to the summit of political power, it had been hard to tease out the pessimism at the core of Mr. Obama's vision. His economic program—the vaunted stimulus, the bailout of the automobile industry, the determination to overhaul the entire health-care system—gave away a bureaucratic vision: It was rule by emergency decree, as it were. No Reaganesque faith in the society for this leader.

In the nature of things, Mr. Obama could not take the American people into his confidence; he could not openly take up the thesis of America's decline. But there was an early signal, in April 2009 in Strasbourg, during a celebration of NATO's 60th anniversary, when he was confronted with the cherished principle of American "exceptionalism."

Asked whether he believed in the school of "American exceptionalism" that sees America as "uniquely qualified to lead the world," he gave a lawyerly answer: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." We were not always going to be right, he added, "all have to compromise and that includes us."

Events would supply evidence of Mr. Obama's break with the history of America's faith in liberty in distant lands. The herald of change was at heart a man who doubted the ability of political freedom to skip borders, and to bring about the emancipation of peoples subjected to brutal tyrannies. The great upheaval in Iran in the first summer of his presidency exposed the flaws and contradictions of the Obama diplomacy.

A people had risen against their tyrannical rulers, but Mr. Obama was out to conciliate these rulers. America's support wouldn't have altered that cruel balance of force on the ground. But henceforth it would become part of the narrative of liberty that when Iran rose in rebellion, the pre-eminent liberal power sat out a seminal moment in Middle Eastern history.

In his encounters with the foreign world, Mr. Obama gave voice to a steady and unsettling expression of penance. We had made our own poor bed in distant lands, Mr. Obama believed. We had been aggressive and imperial in the wars we waged, and in our steady insistence that our way held out the promise for other nations. In that narrative of American guilt, the Islamic world was of central importance. It was in that vast, tormented world that Mr. Obama sought to make his mark, it was there he believed we had been particularly egregious.

But the truth of it, a truth that would erupt with fury in the upheaval of that Arab Spring now upon us, is that the peoples of that region needed our assistance and example. This was the Arabs' 1989, their supreme moment of historical agency, a time when younger people broke with their culture's history of evasion and scapegoating. For once the "Arab Street" was not gripped by anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism, for once it wasn't looking beyond its geography for alien demons. But we could not really aid these rebellions, for our touch, Mr. Obama insisted, would sully them. These rebellions, his administration lamely asserted, had to be thoroughly indigenous.

We had created—and were spooked by—phantoms of our own making. A visit last month to Syria's embattled city of Hama by U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford ought to have shattered, once and for all, the thesis of a rampant anti-Americanism in Arab lands. The American envoy was given a moving reception, he was met with flowers and olive branches by those struggling to end the tyranny of the Assad family. News of America's decline had not reached the streets of Hama. The regime may have denied them air and light and knowledge, but they knew that in our order of nations America remains unrivalled in the hope it holds out for thwarted populations.

Americans' confident belief in the uniqueness, yes the exceptionalism, of their country, rested on an essential faith in liberty, and individualism and anti-statism at home, and in the power of our example, and muscle now and then, in foreign lands. Mr. Obama is ill-at-ease with that worldview. Our country has had pessimism on offer and has invariably rejected it. At crucial points in its history, it has remained unshaken in the belief that tomorrow can be better.

In 2008, shaken by a severe economic recession and disillusioned by a difficult war in Iraq, Americans voted for charisma and biography. The electorate could not be certain of the bet it made, for Mr. Obama had been agile, by his own admission he had been a blank slate onto which his varied supporters could project their hopes and preferences. Next time around, it should be easier. The man at the helm has now played his hand.

Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-chairman of Hoover's Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.

A Few Taxes

   Accounts Receivable Tax
   Building Permit Tax
   CDL license Tax
   Cigarette Tax
   Corporate Income Tax
   Dog License Tax
   Excise Taxes
   Federal Income Tax
   Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
   Fishing License Tax
   Food License Tax
   Fuel Permit Tax
   Gasoline Tax (currently 44.75 cents per gallon)
   Gross Receipts Tax
   Hunting License Tax
   Inheritance Tax
   Inventory Tax
   Liquor Tax
   Luxury Taxes
   Medicare Tax
   Personal Property Tax
   Property Tax
   Real Estate Tax
   Social Security Tax
   Sales Tax
   School Tax
   State Income Tax
   State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
   Telephone Federal Excise Tax
   Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
   Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes
   Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
   Telephone Recurring and Nonrecurring Charges Tax
   Telephone  State  and Local Tax
   Telephone Usage Charge Tax
   Utility Taxes
   Vehicle License Registration Tax
   Vehicle Sales Tax
   Watercraft Registration Tax
   Well Permit Tax
   Workers Compensation Tax 

Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, & our nation was the most prosperous in the world.
We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

Charles Krauthammer Speaks

on Friday Charles said, “This is Obama at his most sanctimonious, demagogic, self-righteous and arrogant,” Krauthammer said. “And given the baseline, it wasn’t a pretty sight.

 

I would like to have Krauthammer as my mouth piece.

Lamb Chopra

From the Left Coast

The New Age media personality Deepak Chopra is worried that President Obama may not win re-election. But he has a bright idea, which he sets forth in a San Francisco Chronicle column. His analysis has four parts:    

1. Liberals are freethinkers who wisely question their own assumptions. "One of the virtues of being on the liberal side of politics is that total obedience isn't required. There are no hidden agendas. Ideology doesn't lead to unreason. . . . Liberal politics is based on a non-regimented, all-inclusive approach to democracy. Freedom of thought is paramount."

2. Conservatives, by contrast, are sheep who blindly adhere to crazy dogmas. "It feels as if the inmates are running the asylum--as in the current Republican threat to default on America's debt. . . . If you suppose that the average citizen remembers that the right wing are the very ones who got us into this forlorn tangle of wars abroad, financial collapse, out-of-control spending, and massive bonuses for the rich, you have not felt the power that fear exerts."

3. It is crucial to keep Obama in office lest the crazy, stupid conservatives take over. "The prevailing sanity of President Obama is something that others and I have taken for granted. . . . It was such a relief to return to humane, non-ideological governance when President Obama won in 2008." Chopra's dream electorate  

4. Therefore, liberals should stop questioning him and give him their blind support. "All of us who have taken advantage of our liberal heritage to question and criticize President Obama need to step back and consider the radical nature of the opposition. . . . If ever there was a time to stand behind the captain, this is it."

Rant of the Day

Every day, Obama appointees are chipping away at my freedom.

In the small favors department, President Obama did not nominate banking scourge Elizabeth Warren to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Instead he nominated one of her protégés, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, whose career sounds like Mrs. Warren without the charm.

 

 

If you voted for Barack Obama in 2008 to prove you're not a racist,  you'll have to vote for someone else in 2012
to prove you're not an idiot."

Money Matters

I learned 40 years before George Bush pulled the trigger on stimulus spending, (fiscal policy), that it would not have the desired effect. It fails each time.

I was an Economics undergraduate studying monetary policy in the early 60’s This is when Friedman and Schwartz debunked all the previous explanations of what had caused the Great Depression and showed that it was the product of a failure of monetary policy in their book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 .

Obama wanted more stimulus spending and nothing is more pleasurable to liberals than pissing money down a rat hole. So here we are three years after recession ended and the only thing that has changed is that the country in serious financial straights.

I said then that our fiscal course of printing money would led to our bonds being rated like Mexico’s. Do you think I might be right now?

Government spending can never improve things; it can only pile up more debt.

Hanging In At 42%

President Present approval rating has been floating in the mid-40’s for over a year. Right now, he is at 42.

The way I read this is we have 22% that are fully committed to the folly of statism, 16% from  blacks who somehow imagine that he is doing something for them. That leave 4% who are just fools.

America Tunes Out

I recall pre-2008 when the MSM touted Barry as eloquent speaker. I didn’t see it then. I do hear a lot of Ah’s when he opens his mouth. Now we all know he can only speaker with a tele-prompter.

 

In some countries, the leader is pictured everywhere. North Korea is plastered with pictures of the Great Leader. Barry is not so much for having his picture in the plaza’s, but he sure likes being on TV. Do you recall when you might go for a week without seeing a single picture of the President?

We tuned out after he insulted the Supreme Court in his first State of the Union.

 

Why is Obama such a bore?

By JAMES TARANTO

Michael Goodwin of the New York Post "listened intently" to President Obama's Monday press conference, but only "for 15 minutes or so." That's 15 minutes or so longer than the duration of our own intentness, but we did listen falteringly to the whole thing. By contrast, as the president "droned on," Goodwin reveals that he "did something I never did before during an Obama appearance: I turned off the TV."

"Enough," writes Goodwin. "He is the Man Who Won't Listen to Anybody, so why should anybody listen to him? . . . I will leave that unhappy duty to others. I am tired of Barack Obama. There's nothing new there. His speeches are like 'Groundhog Day.' "

Goodwin is dead wrong about that last point, and he owes Bill Murray an apology. "Groundhog Day" was a terrific movie. Apart from that quibble, though, we feel Goodwin's pain, and we suspect most Americans do. The World's Greatest Orator is almost always uninspiring, condescending, self-aggrandizing, peevish and grim.

He is also, as Goodwin notes, ideologically inflexible: "There is not a single example on domestic issues where he voluntarily staked out a spot in the American middle. . . . Obama's default statist position remains unmolested by facts or last year's landslide that was a rebuke to his first two years. He continues to push bigger and bigger government, higher and higher taxes and more and more welfare programs."

And we are stuck with him for another year and a half. Goodwin and this columnist are professionally obliged to pay a certain amount of attention, but the rest of America can tune him out.

Oblahblah

No Reason At All To Be Paranoid

If you’re still living under the delusion that the TSA is just restricted to airports then think again. A joint VIPR “security exercise” involving military personnel has Transportation Security Administration workers covering 5,000 miles and three states, illustrating once again how the TSA is turning into a literal occupying army for domestic repression in America.

The TSA, in alliance with a whole host of federal, state, local agencies as well as military personnel, is currently conducting a massive “security exercise” throughout Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia.

“The participating teams are composed of a variety of TSA assets including federal air marshals, canine teams, inspectors and bomb appraisal officers. They will be joined by state and local law enforcement officials to supplement existing resources, provide detection and response capabilities. The exercise will utilize multiple airborne assets, including Blackhawk helicopters and fixed wing aircraft as well as waterborne and surface teams,” reports the Marietta Times.

Although the exercise is couched in serious rhetoric about preparedness, it relates to “no specific threat” and the details are nebulous to say the least and seems to revolve around little else than testing out high-tech surveillance equipment and reminding Americans who their bosses are.

“In addition to using three helicopters for aerial inspection, the exercise made use of the Ohio Highway Patrol’s camera-equipped Cessna Caravan, which is capable of transmitting close-up, detailed real-time images of objects on the ground taken from more than five miles away,” reports the Charleston Gazette.

The exercise seems to be about little more than a show of force by the TSA in light of a massive resistance against their agenda, particularly in Texas where a recent bill that would have banned invasive TSA grope downs almost passed and is set to be up for debate again.

Michael Cleveland, federal security director for TSA operations in West Virginia admitted as much when he said the event was about letting, “people know we’re out here.”

As we have documented, TSA grope downs and body scans are now being rolled out on highways, street corners, train stations, bus depots, public buildings, at sports events, and even at local prom nights as part of the VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) takeover of the country.

The TSA has also announced its intention to expand the VIPR program to include roadside inspections of commercial vehicles, setting up a network of internal checkpoints and rolling out security procedures already active in airports, bus terminals and subway stations to roads and highways across the United States.

Homeland Security is also developing technology to be used at “security events” which purports to monitor “malintent” on behalf of an individual who passes through a checkpoint.

President Obama’s election campaign promise to create a domestic “security force,” that is “just as powerful, just as strong” as the US military is now coming to fruition as the TSA expands to turn American into a checkpoint-festooned hellhole where constant fearmongering about terror threats is the justification for the construction of a Sovietized police state.

More Calls for a Drug War Cease-Fire

June 6, 2011, The Wall Street Journal

An increasing number of world leaders are concluding that laws against drug consumption do more harm than good.

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Tomorrow marks the 79th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the U.S. prohibition on alcohol. On that day in 1932 John D. Rockefeller Jr., a vociferous advocate of temperance, called for the repeal of the 18th amendment in a letter published in the New York Times.

Rockefeller had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying for the constitutional prohibition on alcohol. But his letter did more than admit the error of his investment. Because of his moral authority on the matter, it effectively ended the conservative taboo against admitting that the whole experiment had failed.

Rockefeller had not changed his views on the destructiveness of drink, and he asked for ongoing "support of practical measures for the promotion of genuine temperance." But he insisted that lifting prohibition was essential if America was to "restore public respect for the law."

Rockefeller's reversal came to mind last week when former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana, three former Latin American presidents from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, and the current prime minister of Greece (among others) issued a joint report—as the Global Commission on Drug Policy—"describ[ing] the drug war as a failure and call[ing] for a paradigm shift in global drug policy."

Like Rockefeller, the commission members do not embrace a laissez-faire policy toward drug use. But they recognize, as he did, that the attempt to use force to halt consumption has been disastrous. They recommend alternative approaches to controlling substances and more emphasis on treatment for addicts.

The parallels between the situation Rockefeller faced and today's scandalous war on drugs are dramatic. The wealthy philanthropist had begun his campaign against alcohol with great expectations. "When the Eighteenth Amendment was passed I earnestly hoped—with a host of advocates of temperance—that it would be generally supported by public opinion" and, he wrote, that teetotaling would eventually take hold.

"That this has not been the result but rather that drinking generally has increased; that the speakeasy has replaced the saloon, not only unit for unit, but probably two-fold if not three-fold; that a vast army of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale; that many of our best citizens, piqued at what they regarded as an infringement of their private rights, have openly and unbashed[ly] disregarded the Eighteenth Amendment; that as an inevitable result respect for all law has greatly lessened; that crime has increased to an unprecedented degree—I have slowly reluctantly come to believe."

He noted that any "benefits" from the 18th amendment were "more than outweighed by the evils that ha[d] developed and flourished since its adoption, evils which, unless promptly checked," were "likely to lead to conditions unspeakably worse than those which prevailed before."

Sound familiar? Almost 100 years after drug prohibition was ushered in, school children report that they can easily access narcotics and surveys indicate they are used across social classes. A May 23 story in the Economist reported that Canada now trumps Mexico as an entryway into the U.S. for the drug "ecstasy." American jails are taking in record numbers of young minorities and converting them into hardened criminals; gang violence is on the rise; organized crime is undermining U.S. geopolitical interests in places like Mexico, Central America and Afghanistan. Thousands of innocents, including children, have been killed in the mayhem.

Having produced nothing but hardship for the most vulnerable, disrespect for the rule of law, terror in formerly peaceful cities and profit opportunities for gangsters, drug warriors now want to militarize the southern U.S. border.

If history is any guide, says Angelo Codevilla, in a recent Claremont Review of Books essay titled "Our Borders, Ourselves," this isn't going to end well. Look at what happened, he warns, in the Peloponnesian War when hostility broke out on the Athenian doorstep: "Having lost a friendly border, Athens turned itself inside out trying to secure an unfriendly one."

The border is unfriendly not because of too few fences, drones or soldiers, but because American drug habits finance the traffickers. "These dollars, and nothing else," writes Mr. Codevilla, "are responsible for the near collapse of law and order south of the border and for the insufficiently publicized corruption on the northern side."

We have met the enemy and it is us, the Claremont Institute scholar posits: "Even if our southern border were completely closed off . . . it would do nothing to change the fact that mind-altering drugs have become morally and politically acceptable to mainstream American society."

Americans can cut their demand, perhaps with education and by stigmatizing use, as was done with cigarettes. But until then, victory is unlikely. As Mr. Codevilla notes: "America's assumption that restricting supply can somehow make it safe for us to tolerate widespread drug use has itself proved to be a habit-forming narcotic that has reduced our sensitivity to moral rot." Rockefeller could not have said it better.

UBL

"They should have captured Bin Laden alive and made him continually go through airport security for the rest of his life."

We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers

 

More Americans work for the government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined.

By STEPHEN MOORE

If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida's ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York's.

Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.

Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners. New York is the financial capital of the world—at least for now. That sector employs roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That's less than half of the state's 1.48 million government employees.

Don't expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren't willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.

Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn't pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.

The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we've gotten.

Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.

President Obama says we have to retool our economy to "win the future." The only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector that takes things.

Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Happy Tax Day!

All these numbers flying around. How to make sense of it all? This did it for me.

Taken from a WSJ editorial of April 18, 2011.

Where the Tax Money Is

A dominant theme of President Obama's is that our fiscal problems would vanish if only the wealthiest Americans were asked "to pay a little more." Since he's asking, imagine that instead of proposing to raise the top income tax rate well north of 40%, the President decided to go all the way to 100%.

Got that? a 100% tax rate. No take home.

First a 100% tax on the really rich. The top 1% of taxpayers—those with salaries, dividends and capital gains roughly above about $380,000, yields about $938 billion, which is sand on the beach amid the $4 trillion White House budget. Not enough millionaires.

Say we take it up to the top 10%, everyone with income over $114,000. That would get $3.4 trillion. We are getting there, but we need more.

So who else is there to tax? Well, in 2008, there was about $5.65 trillion in total taxable income from ALL individual taxpayers. There that does it. Take every penny earned by everyone and you will be able to afford Obamacare and all the other entitlements.

Show this to people who will get it.

 

Today’s Quips

DNC FACEBOOK event calls for dumping trash at Boehner's house...

Pelosi calls GOP plan 'war on women'...

Dem: Shutdown 'equivalent of bombing innocent civilians'...

Jesse Jackson compares to Civil War...

REID: GOP wants shutdown to keep 'women from getting cancer screenings'...

 

One of my dreams is to choke the life out of these folks.

In The Bubble

"The biggest problem for me is being in the bubble," President Obama told Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly on Super Bowl Sunday. "Over time, you know, what happens is you feel like--that you're not able to just have a spontaneous conversation with folks."

The greater peril of the presidential bubble may be what happens when you do have a spontaneous conversation with folks. If you're not careful, you end up saying things that show how out of touch you are with folks.

At a town-hall meeting yesterday in Fairless Hills, Pa., a man in the audience asked Obama about gasoline prices, which are currently in the range of $4 a gallon. According to the Associated Press, Obama responded "laughingly" and "needled" the questioner. The president's sarcasm comes through in the White House transcript:

***** QUOTE *****
I know some of these big guys, they're all still driving their big SUVs. You know, they got their big monster trucks and everything. You're one of them? Well, now, here's my point. If you're complaining about the price of gas and you're only getting eight miles a gallon--(laughter)--you may have a big family, but it's probably not that big. How many you have? Ten kids, you say? Ten kids? (Laughter.) Well, you definitely need a hybrid van then. (Laughter.) . . .

So, like I said, if you're getting eight miles a gallon you may want to think about a trade-in. You can get a great deal. I promise you, GM or Ford or Chrysler, they're going to be happy to give you a deal on something that gets you better gas mileage.
***** END QUOTE *****

The transcript shows that Obama got lots of laughs. But presumably he was speaking to a friendly audience--to people who regard the burning of gasoline as sinful and who, at least in theory, are attracted to the idea of $8-a-gallon gasoline.

Cartoon Humor

My Dream Team

Every week Barry takes away some liberty from me. I try not to think about him and day dream instead.
Many people have dream sports teams. Here is my incomplete political dream team.

President – Charles Krauthammer, but I will settle for Michelle Bachmann
VP – Bobby Jindal
Chief of Staff - Stewart Varney

Cabinet officers
State – John Bolton
Treasury – Mitt Romney
Defense – Victor Davis Hanson
Justice – Tom Coborn
Interior - Sarah Palin
Agriculture -
Commerce – Donald Trump
Labor – Lindsay Graham
H & HS – Any GP Doctor
HUD - Gary Johnson
Transportation -
Energy – Steve Forbes
VA – Allen West
Homeland Security – Richard Lugar
Education – Michelle Rhee

To be named to key posts. John Stosell, Thomas Sowell, Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush.

Of Course Bush Was Right

The German magazine Der Spiegel on reassessing George W. Bush's view of Muslim democratization.

Suddenly it seems everyone knew all along that President Mubarak was a villain and the U.S., who supported him until recently, was even worse. However it was actually former President George W. Bush who always believed in the democratization of the Muslim world and was broadly ridiculed by the Left for his convictions. . . .

Painful as it may be to admit, it was the despised George W. Bush who believed in the democratization of the Muslim world and incurred the scorn and mockery of the Left for his conviction. Everyone was sure—without knowing any Muslims—that the Western model of democracy could not be applied in a backward society like Iraq. Everyone knew that the neo-conservative belief in the universal desire for freedom and progress was naïve nonsense. It is possible that the critics were right, albeit for the wrong reasons. The prospect of stability and order seems to be at least as important to many people.

How facts backfire

by Joe Keohane

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite.

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right