Benghazi: Obama’s Shameful Dereliction of Duty

Benghazi: Obama’s Shameful Dereliction of Duty
By Peter Ferrara
11/1/2012

Enough facts are in the public record about the Benghazi murders of Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and 3 others, including two Marines, that a final judgment can be rendered on President Obama's handling of the affair. Obama's actions, or inactions, amounted to dereliction of duty, and worse.

The Obama Administration received requests for additional security from the Embassy and the Ambassador himself as early as February. An embassy cable on June 25 expressed fear of rising Islamic extremism in eastern Libya around Benghazi, and noted that the black flag of Al-Qaeda "has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and training facilities." On August 2, Ambassador Stevens sent a cable requesting 11 additional body guards, noting "Host nation security support is lacking and cannot be depended on to provide a safe and secure environment for the diplomatic mission of outreach,"

But these requests for additional security were repeatedly denied, as security officials testified before Chairman Darrell Issa's House Oversight Committee earlier this month. Obama and his allies did not want a show of American force in the country that would offend Muslim sensibilities. They wanted to rely instead on the host country's security that the embassy was telling them was inadequate and could not be depended upon.

As the anniversary of 9/11 approached, the Obama Administration should have known that more security was necessary to protect diplomatic missions in the increasingly hostile country, especially on that sensitive date. But they did just the opposite, reducing security. The Wall Street Journal reported on October 10 that the Administration removed a well armed, 16 member, security detail from Libya in August, to be replaced by the Libyan security personnel that Ambassador Stevens had just told them could not be relied upon.

Based on documents released by the House Oversight Committee, the day of the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, September 11, the White House situation room starts receiving emails at about 1 pm that the mission is under hostile surveillance. The only response was that the Pentagon sends a drone armed with a video camera so that everyone in Washington can see what transpires in real time, as it happens, at the White House, at the State Department, at the Pentagon, at the CIA.

The drone documents no crowds protesting any video. But at 4 pm Washington receives an email from the Benghazi mission that it is under military style attack. Subject: "U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack." The email states,

"The Regional Security Officer reports the diplomatic mission is under attack. Embassy Tripoli reports approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well. Ambassador Stevens, who is currently in Benghazi, and four COM personnel are in the compound safe haven. The 17th of February militia is providing security support."

The attack was then fed to all of them, the White House, the Pentagon, the State Dept., the CIA, through live video feed. A later email that day reported, "Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack." The feed showed no protest of any supposedly offensive You Tube video.

Just one hour flight time away were U.S. Air Force bases that could have been rousted in minutes to send fighter planes and attack helicopters that could have routed the attackers in minutes of fighting. As Investors Business Daily editorialized on October 24, "Within an hour's flight time from Libya, at the large naval air station in Sigonella, Italy, and at bases in nearby Aviano and Souda Bay, were fighters and AC 130 gunships that can be extremely effective in dispersing crowds or responding to a terrorist assault." But the order for the rescue never came. Maybe because Barack Obama did not want to offend Muslim sensibilities by such a show of force.

The IBD editorial summarized the situation by the next morning as follows:

"When President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton stepped into the Rose Garden the morning of September 12, they likely knew [correction: they surely knew] the attack on our Benghazi consulate the day before was organized by terrorists. They knew because they were privy to a flurry of emails among administration officials discussing the attack in real time. Yet they said nothing about what they knew and, worse, had done nothing to mount a rescue despite American forces being less than an hour away during the seven hour blitz. According to Fox News, 300 to 400 national security figures received these emails in real time almost as the raid was playing out and concluding. These people work directly under the nation's top national security, military and diplomatic officials."

By then everyone knew how the battle of Benghazi had turned out. The United States Ambassador to Libya, the personal representative of President Barack Obama, had been tortured, sodomized, dragged bloody through the streets of Benghazi, and murdered. Chris Stevens, along with the two Marines and another who were murdered along with him, had volunteered to serve his country. But under the leadership of Barack Obama, that is how his service ended.

By the evening of that next day, Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama was jetting off to a campaign fundraiser in Las Vegas, followed by parties with Jay-Z and Beyonce. Chris Stevens was already out of sight, out of mind. Except that Commander Obama could not wash off the stench of dereliction of duty, duty to far more worthy American warriors and servicemen, dereliction in failing to authorize worthy security for those who were sent in harm's way under his leadership, and to order a timely rescue when he could. For such failure, any commander serving under the commander-in-chief should be court martialed. But the President expects you to give him four more years of such "leadership."

The Truth-Challenged President

But the saga did not end there for the American people. The rest of us had to endure the President, Secretary of State Clinton, and UN Ambassador "explaining" to us that what really happened was that those irascible Muslims were all incited out of their minds by a previously unseen, unheard of YouTube video trailer by an unknown American immigrant, a movie that was never made outside the trailer advertising it, in Fool on the Hill style. Their protest had just got out of hand, you see.

Except they all knew when they were saying these very words that they were untrue. They were precisely calculated to deceive and to mislead. Yet there was our President Obama telling this mendacious fairy tale to the entire world at the U.N. And there was U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice telling the American people the same concocted fairy tale. Typical Progressives, they were so certain that they could easily buffalo a majority of their countrymen, no smarter than the representative Homer Simpson.

An incredulous IBD editorialized, "How could emails be sent to the White House Situation Room in real time describing a terrorist attack on sovereign U.S. territory in which four Americans were killed as it happened, and as a drone flew overhead recording the truth of the carnage, and the President and Secretary of State insist that it was all about a video and there was no evidence to the contrary."

Or as Glenn Beck (yes Glenn Beck, and you can go read some New York Times lying propaganda if you don't like it), summarized at his website The Blaze,

"The president of the United States of America, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State have all lied to you. They have lied to you and said this might be a video; we don't have all the information; the information is still sketchy; it's confusing. No. We now have the documents. We now have the documents that came into the situation room saying there's an attack; they're watching. Then we have the documents that we have a live video feed in the situation room, so they could see that there was no protest."

How Clueless Does He Think We Are?

But the lies did not end even there. The President then went into a nationally televised debate with GOP nominee Mitt Romney, and before the whole country, expected to pull off another lie denying that he had lied, indeed, denying that what the entire country had just seen and heard, from him, from his Secretary of State, from his U.N. Ambassador, had even just happened. Obama explained at the debate, "The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we're going to hunt down those who committed this crime."

An exasperated Mitt Romney, shocked at the brazenness of this Soviet style propaganda, exclaimed, "I think interesting the President just said something which - which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said this was an act of terror." "That's what I said," Obama lied in response. Romney leaped at the brazen discrepancy with reality, saying "I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the President 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror." Obama replied, "Get the transcript."

It was a transparently pre-arranged, Soviet propaganda style, ambush that the supposed moderator Candy Crowley then jumped in to say, "He did in fact sir." Obama then brazenly demonstrated his mastery over the Democrat Party controlled media, outright ordering right there before the American people, "Can you say that a little louder, Candy?" Crowley stood at attention, saluted, and "reported": "He did call it an act of terror."

This was so transparently pre-arranged because the transcript of the next day's Rose Garden ceremony, in fact, does not report what Obama fantasized and Crowley "reported." The transcript in plain black and white shows that Obama was not even talking about Benghazi when he mentioned terror, but about terrorism more generally, as displayed on 9/11. Do you see precisely the further "calculated deception?"

Romney alone among the three, ever sharp as a tack, and fully on top of the facts, persisted in recalling the truth: "The Administration indicated this was a reaction to a video and was a spontaneous reaction....It took them a long time to say this was a terrorist act by a terrorist group."

Obama again interrupted and appealed to his plant for a further bailout, calling out, "Candy?" But Romney maintained his control and his ever classy demeanor, and unruffled by the blatant, Soviet style propaganda he was enduring, cut off this interruption, "Excuse me. The ambassador of the United Nations went on the Sunday television shows and spoke about how this was a spontaneous..." But Obama interrupted again, appealing further for help, "Candy, I'm happy to have a longer conversation about foreign policy." Crowley took the cue again from the Boss, "I know you, absolutely, but I want to move you on...." A relieved Obama responded with obvious joy, "OK. I'm happy to do that too."

This spectacle of the President lying about his own lies to a national debate audience is unprecedented in American politics. It shows an absurdly haughty attitude, and an arrogant disrespect for the intelligence and awareness of the American people. But an Obama supporter calling into the Glenn Beck radio program indicated that Obama may be on to something after all. When Beck asked her, "Where is Benghazi?" she responded, "He is at Walmart."
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To read another article about the Benghazi attacks, click here.
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To read another article by Peter Ferrara, click here.

What Do I Tell My Black Child If Obama Loses?

What Do I Tell My Black Child If Obama Loses?
By Larry Elder
11/1/2012

What do I tell my black child if Barack Obama, America's first black president, loses his bid for re-election? This is a question many parents are asking themselves -- especially those who would blame the loss on racism.

Jubilant black parents on the front pages of newspapers, the day after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, said things like, "for the first time" they could "sincerely" say to their children that a black person could realistically aspire to become president of the United States.

The New York Times wrote: "That a new day had dawned was immediately apparent at breakfast on Wednesday at Eagle Academy, a young public school in the spot where the often hard-edged Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brownsville and Ocean Hill intersect: The sixth-grade boys sat in silence over their eggs, biscuits and apple juice.

"They were too busy poring over the transcripts of President-elect Barack Obama's speech that teachers had handed them as they walked in. Too tired, perhaps, from having been awoken at midnight to hear the news from their tearful mothers. ...

"The 30-year-old principal, Rashad Meade, pushed his proteges, asking why they thought ... this moment was so important ... why their parents had woken them the night before.

"Isaiah Purcell, who is 11, started to say something about the issues, then trailed off. He picked up again, asserting that Mr. Obama's ascendancy to the White House 'makes us think that we could accomplish anything when you put your mind to it (emphasis added).'"

Goodness! Pre-Obama, what were these parents and teachers telling these kids about their future? What would the teary-eyed parents have said had Obama lost? Would they have told their children that racism remains a major force in America and Obama's defeat proves the point? And assuming he loses his bid for re-election, what will this defeat say about "race" in America?

My father, a former Marine, World War II vet, was born to an illiterate single mother in Athens, Ga. An only child, he never met his biological father. He was a 14-year-old teenager in that Jim Crow South when the Great Depression began. Hard, hard knocks.

But as I write in my new book, "Dear Father, Dear Son," my father taught my brothers and me that the only barrier to success is lack of effort. My Huntsville, Alabama-born mother also taught us that, through education and steady application, goals could be achieved -- no matter how lofty.

Yes, even the presidency of the United States.

I write: "Mom made me feel like I could spit lightening and make bullets bounce off my chest. She sat me down on the front porch when I was about 6 years old. She had an illustrated book of all the presidents from George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower. We talked about their achievements and disappointments.

"'Larry,' she said, tapping the book, 'if you work hard enough and want it bad enough, someday you can be in this book.'"

My parents told us that no one can make you feel inferior without your permission. In high school, we read a sad, bitter poem about racism in a black literature course:

"While riding through old Baltimore, so small and full of glee,

"I saw a young Baltimorean keep a-lookin' straight at me.

"Now, he was young and very small, and I was not much bigger

"And so I smiled, but he put out his tongue and called me 'nigger.'

"I saw the whole of Baltimore from May until September,

"Of all the things that happened there, that's all that I remember."

The teacher angrily talked about the permanent damage done to this little boy's psyche. The permanent stain of racism. The assault on the little boy's dignity. The boy, said the teacher, will never be the same. By the time the bell sounded, everyone was angry.

When I got home, I read the poem to my mother. She was in the kitchen, cooking a pot of greens. When I finished the last line, she turned, big spoon in hand, and looked me in the eye.

"Too bad," she said, "that boy let something so trivial spoil his vacation."

If Obama loses, how many parents will tell their children that his race did him in? Already, The Associated Press published a poll supposedly showing that the negative "racial attitudes" people hold against blacks could likely cost Obama 2 points in the election.

Really?

Not only does Obama benefit from a near-unanimous black vote, but also from the many whites who voted for Obama because of his race. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, explained in 2008: "This is (their) chance to demonstrate that we have been able to get this boogeyman called race behind us. And so they are going to vote for him, whether he has credentials or not, whether he has any experience."

Hall of Famer Frank Robinson became the first black manager in the modern major leagues. There have been many since. Robinson's hiring made a statement about the irrelevance of race. Years later, when his team underperformed, Robinson was fired.

Obama can be fired, as well.
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To read another article by Larry Elder, click here.

Au Revoir, Mr. President

Au Revoir, Mr. President
By Emmett Tyrrell
11/1/2012

Reviewing the last few months of this tumultuous presidential campaign, I see the debates as having a wondrous salience. The first was the most momentous since Nixon vs. Kennedy, though that 1960 confrontation was mostly a matter of cosmetics. Listening to it on radio, many in the audience came away thinking that the participant with the five-o'clock shadow had won. That would have been Richard Nixon.

In debate this time around, Mitt Romney hammered Barack Obama mercilessly. Under the ongoing assault Obama's knees buckled and he repeatedly looked glassy-eyed. If the contest were a prizefight, the referee would have stepped in. Actually, I felt sorry for Obama. My tax-bracket notwithstanding, I did not want to see Mitt hit him again, but he did: the economy! the national debt! joblessness! However, the debate was not a prizefight. It was the first of three presidential debates and, though restrained in the next two contests, Romney accomplished just what he wanted. The debates left him looking reasonable, informed, competent and presidential.

During these final two debates all Romney had to do was continue to look presidential. He glided suavely through them, as his opponent snarled, looking spiteful, petty, mean-spirited and second-rate. In sum, Obama looked like the challenger and not a very gifted challenger at that. In the end, most Americans went away feeling that Romney has the right stuff to be president, and some wondered why a majority ever elected Obama president in 2008. Obama's presidency proves that not just anyone can serve in the country's highest office. In 2012, the charisma of a showman has about exhausted itself as a qualification to lead America. Only the Washington press corps still hankers for a "thrill going up the leg" or "a perfectly creased pant leg" or whatever other literary device was meant to convey a pundit's enthrallment to the community organizer from Chicago. How about a fast-beating heart or tummy flutters?

Obama has come across as an amazingly close approximation of Jimmy Carter, complete with a slow-growth economy and a foreign policy disaster, though one of Obama's empty boasts was he understood the Arab world especially well. His backup team of David Axelrod and David Plouffe serve as second-rate Jody Powells and Ham Jordans. Frankly, I preferred Jody and Ham.

I must, in all humility, admit that it took me all of two weeks into his presidency to recognize that Obama was over his head. On February 5, 2009, I said in this space that Obama's presidency was doomed. I pronounced him a dud, unlikely to be reelected president. Said I, " ... with the economy in crisis and American national security in the hands of a starry-eyed novice, one can argue that we are in for a reprise of the Carter years complete with the self-righteous pout." Well, I argued this for almost four years and today I rest my case. Next week President Obama goes into retirement. I hope he will consider Hawaii.

Given my perspective, it was an easy case to call. A few months back I published my findings in "The Death of Liberalism." In that book I noted that in the conservative deluge of 2010, independents combined with conservatives to turn the Liberals out. The independents do not always share the conservatives' social values, but they are very ardent for prudent economic policies. The growing debt and unbalanced budgets (both state and federal) had roused the independent vote. I said they would vote with the conservatives for years to come, because Obama and his cohorts in Congress were going to pile up trillion dollar deficits for years to come. Along with the conservatives and independents, next week will come the "uncommitted" voter. The uncommitted always goes with the challenger.

There are two numbers that have been relatively underemphasized in this election, 18 percent and 24 percent. Eighteen percent is the standard cut the federal government takes of GDP. Twenty-four percent is the cut that Obama's government is taking. He says that to pay for this engorgement of the federal government all we need to do is raise taxes on the rich. The conservatives and independents recognize that there is not enough money earned by the top percentage of taxpayers to pay for it and probably not enough down below. Pithily put, we cannot afford Liberalism. That is why we shall be getting a new government next week.
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To read another article by Emmett Tyrrell, click here.

Obama Needs Secretary of Business as Clinton Needed an Intern- and for Same Reason

Obama Needs Secretary of Business as Clinton Needed an Intern- and for Same Reason
By John Ransom
11/1/2012

As the clock heads toward midnight on the Barack Obama experiment, it’s nice to see that he continues to be the guy we said he was all along. I’m beginning to doubt he was even any good at being a community organizer.

After churning over all the options available to him- using the full-faith and credit of the United States; a one billion dollar campaign war-chest; $37 million in staffing costs at the executive office per year; a trillion dollars in pork barrel spending; QE4EVER!; recommendations from Nobel-prize winning economists (ha!), the top business experts that political contributions can buy (ouch!) and (deep breath) presumably THE 1-800 HELPLINE at the Small Business Administration… and here’s the plan to jumpstart our economy in the second term: Obama wants to create a U.S. Department of Business, with a cabinet-level secretary.

Yep. That’s it.

Secretary Van Jones anyone?

Someone has to coordinate the upward revisions of the already ridiculous jobs, GDP and voter registration numbers. Someone has to wear the presidential knee pads when the economy won't cooperate.

“Isn’t this rich? Saturday Night Live couldn’t have thought of anything better,” writes the Washington Post’s Ed Roger. “When I read this headline [about appointing a Secretary of Business], I had to make sure it wasn’t coming from The Onion.”

No, didn’t come from the Onion but it sure does stink, doesn’t it?

“Speaking to the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe Monday, Obama said a Secretary of Business would serve to consolidate several commerce-related government agencies, a plan he originally proposed in January,” reports the Huffington Post.

Can’t tell if the tears are Onion-related from the cutting humor or just shell shock for the sheer futility of our president’s brain.

Because yeah, the plan DC came up with to create an intelligence Czar at a new Department of Homeland Security to coordinate the safety of transportation workers’ rights to see what a women looks like naked at the airport- that plan has worked out so well.

Or how about the creation of the Department of Education, even as the United States falls farther and farther behind other countries in education, while spending more money than anyone else?

Or how about the time we created the Department of Energy to address our growing dependence on foreign sources of oil?

That‘s worked out sooooo well.

We really needed a whole department to make us MORE dependent on foreign energy. To be fair, as hard as Obama works at making us less energy independent, a whole bureaucracy actually could help Obama achieve more dependency on foreign oil, which seems to be his goal.

Raise your hand if you are a liberal who wants to point out, as our president has, that we currently import less foreign oil than ever before.

That answer just proves how stoopid you both are.

We’re using less oil because our economy is a giant, festering, open wound.

The fact that we import less oil is an indictment of the whole Barack Obama Experience. In a healthy economy we would be using more oil, more coal, more nuclear, more fracking, more of the things that made our country great, not less.

Some former Obama aides get it.

Bill Daley was appointed chief of staff to Obama when Rahm Emanuel left the post. The Daley appointment was considered a kind of olive branch to the business community who somehow got the idea that the record number of regulations aimed at killing jobs and profits was a bad idea.

Daley, in a way, was the first Secretary of Business. And he got right to business by inviting business leaders to share their pain.

“One by one, exasperated executives stood to air their grievances on environmental regulations and stalled free-trade deals,” reported the Washington Post. “And Daley, the former banker tasked with building ties with industry, found himself looking for the right balance between empathy and defending his boss.”

But (ha, ha, ha) he couldn’t find his balance.

“Daley said he did not have many good answers, appearing to throw up his hands in frustration at what he called ‘bureaucratic stuff that’s hard to defend.’”

“’Sometimes you can’t defend the indefensible,’ he said.”

No, you can’t. But apparently Obama thinks the very least we can do is build a really big government agency to coordinate the indefensible. Or the unbelievable. Or both if you make it a really big bureaucracy.

I bet he could do it with four more years.
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.

Communists, Socialists, and Other Plagues

Communists, Socialists, and Other Plagues
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky

Recently, when Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit to Greece, she was greeted with violent protests. Because Greece’s socialist government had long retained power by caving in to every last demand of its left-wing labor unions, much as we have done in America, when economic circumstances inevitably changed for the worse, the worker bees inevitably turned into greedy, self-righteous, sons of bees.

It was only natural that the Greek strikers would revile the head of the nation that has done the most to keep their economy afloat, thus setting a new low when it comes to ingratitude. The world now sees that the major difference between Greeks and the mangiest of curs is that only the former is so contemptible that it bites the hand that feeds them.

Ever since the Trojan Horse, people have been advised not to trust Greeks bearing gifts. In recent years, the world has discovered that you also shouldn’t trust Greeks accepting gifts.

Starting in 1901, using the money generated by royalties accruing to the estate of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, the Swedes have awarded Nobel Prizes dealing with literature, physics, medicine, chemistry and since 1969, economics. However, when it came to the Peace Prize, the Swedes jobbed it out to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in Oslo.

I have no clue as to why they did so, unless it was in order to make their Scandinavian cousins the endless target of ridicule and derision. Perhaps the Swedes harbored a sneaky hunch that the Norwegians would eventually hand out these million dollar prizes to such nincompoops and ne’er-do-wells as Woodrow Wilson, Le Duc Tho, the U.N. Peacekeeping Forces, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Barack Obama, while ignoring the contributions to and sacrifices for world peace made by the likes of Winston Churchill, the R.A.F., Dwight D. Eisenhower, George Patton and the entire U.S. military.

In keeping with its proud tradition, Oslo gave its most recent Peace Prize to the European Union. It is just possible that the Norwegians, who are even more left-wing than their wacky relatives in Minnesota, figured that any group that referred to itself as a union was prize-worthy.

When people, including some conservatives, insist that Mitt Romney is stiff or, worse yet, a stiff, I suspect they’re merely repeating guff they’ve heard from the likes of Jon Stewart, Bill Maher and David Letterman, much the way that liberals who dismiss Fox as a right-wing megaphone must overlook the constant presence of Juan Williams, Geraldo Rivera, Leslie Marshall, Marc Lamont Hill, Bob Beckel and Alan Colmes.

After seeing Mitt Romney and Barack Obama delivering jokes at the recent Al Smith charity dinner in NYC, you would have to revise your opinion as to which of them is the dullard. Whereas Obama came across like the sort of no-talent amateur who used to show up regularly on The Gong Show, Romney proved he definitely didn’t require my writing services in order to channel his inner Bob Hope.

Speaking of Obama, like most politicians, he is fond of pretending that he subscribes to Harry Truman’s line about the buck stopping with him, so long as he can bob and weave, eluding the pesky buck the way that Walter Payton used to elude tacklers. Among those things that Obama has blamed for his own failings are George Bush, Japan’s tsunami, Europe’s economy, the oil and coal industries, congressional Republicans, the Tea Party, Hillary Clinton, droughts, earthquakes and Kim Kardashian’s divorce. He has laid the blame on everything, in fact, but Michelle’s hot flashes and his own incompetence.

The only bucks that stop with Obama are those donated to his re-election campaign. And in the end, like those billions of dollars he has used to subsidize green energy companies owned by his major bundlers -- all of which have gone bankrupt -- this money, too, will be foolishly wasted. But at least the billion dollars squandered in an effort to keep this schmuck in the White House came out of the pockets of boobs like Bill Maher, Jeffrey Immelt, Eva Longoria and the two Georges, Clooney and Soros, and not, for once, out of yours and mine.

Finally, it’s a shame that Obama inherited his disdain of white people, Englishmen in particular, from his loony Commie father. Otherwise, instead of banishing the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, he might have harkened to Churchill’s sage advice that “A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year and, of course, have the ability to explain why it didn’t happen.”
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.

Three Strikes and You're Out

Three Strikes and You're Out
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky

I realize that some people have been raving about Obama’s final two debate appearances. But, for the most part, those are people named David Axelrod, Jay Leno, Joy Behar, David Letterman and Chris Matthews. But the truth is that no rational person would ever say he mopped the floor with Mitt Romney; the most you can say for Obama is that he did better after awakening from his self-induced coma, even if in doing so, he spouted more fibs than Joe Isuzu.

I have no doubt that Team Obama now wish they had gotten out of the first debate by claiming that their guy had come down with the flu. Up until then, their negative ads had convinced a lot of voters that Romney was a heartless plutocrat, the sort of ogre who would chuckle while helping Paul Ryan push old people off a cliff. Once they saw and heard Romney for themselves, saw a devout Mormon who regularly donates well over 10% of his income to charity -- and not just during election years -- a guy who knows how business works because he has spent most of his life running businesses, as opposed to someone who has spent most of his own life badmouthing capitalism while promoting Marxism, it was, as they say in tennis, game, set, match.

One of the things Obama likes to say is that one of the worst things that we can expect of President Romney is that he’ll start shipping jobs overseas. Is he unaware that his own unemployment numbers would be even worse than they are if such foreign car companies as Toyota, Honda, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and VW, didn’t have factories in America that employed hundreds of thousands of workers? And, what’s more, none of them had to be bailed out of bankruptcy with billions of tax dollars and handed over, lock, stock and carburetor, to the UAW.

Four years ago, the late Geraldine Ferraro, who was helping Hillary Clinton in her primary campaign, was tossed under the bus because she had the audacity to state that Barack Obama was lucky he was black because no white guy with so little political experience would have dared run for the presidency.

What she didn’t say was that no white guy who had attended a racist church for 20 years, and counted among his nearest and dearest a rabid black minister; a native-born terrorist who had tried to blow up the Pentagon; a Chicago fixer who was serving a prison sentence; and America’s foremost anti-Semite, Louis Farrakhan; would have ever dreamed of being the standard bearer for a third, fourth or fifth political party, let alone one of the two majors.

I guarantee that if Obama had been a white man, people would have questioned what it meant that he had been a community organizer. The fact that the community in question is the murder capital of America makes you wonder what it was exactly that he was organizing.

When you look over his record, which he’s done so much to suppress, you hear that people at his college remember him, if at all, as a student who was lazy, left-wing and egotistical. By his own admission, he enjoyed smoking pot and hanging out with radicals. He also made a point of denying that he was half-white because he so closely identified with his natural father, an avowed Communist who despised Caucasians and the free market in equal measure.

Years ago, Laurence Peter came up with a notion, which he expanded into a book called The Peter Principle. It was his theory that people tend to rise to the level of their incompetence, that being the nature of organizations. So it is that an excellent teacher will more often than not be removed from the classroom and promoted to an administrative position as a principal or member of the Board of Education, where they can comfortably settle into a permanent state of mediocrity.

These days, if they brought out a new edition of the book, they could do worse than have Obama’s picture on the cover.

When you realize that during his six years in the Illinois State Senate, his most memorable accomplishment was voting in favor of laws that allowed doctors to kill babies born during botched abortions; and that during his four years in the U.S. Senate, his voting record was even more left-wing than that achieved by such liberal pinheads as John Kerry, Patty Murray, Dick Durbin and Ted Kennedy, it’s even more bizarre that he was elected in 2008.

Furthermore, when you consider what has happened to America over the past four years, both in our relations with allies and enemies, and with an economy on life support, you have to wonder why the polls continue to suggest it will be a close election.

Obama, after all, is the anti-Midas. Unlike the mythological king whose touch turned everything into gold, everything this guy touches turns into dreck.

Still, even now, this near to the election, there are people who claim they’re still undecided if they’re voting for Obama or Romney. How is that possible?

I mean, by now even dead people have made up their minds.

Unfortunately, as is usually the case, they’re all Democrats and they’ll be voting for Obama.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.

Romney is what the country needs now

Romney is what the country needs now
By: Ann Coulter
10/31/2012 06:37 PM

The single most important issue in this election is ending the national nightmare of Obamacare.

If Obamacare if not stopped, it will permanently change the political culture of this country. There will be no going back. America will become a less productive, less wealthy nation. What wealth remains will have to be plowed into Obamacare — to the delight only of the tens of thousands of government bureaucrats administering it.

There won’t be one moment marking the end of America. Everything will just gradually get worse, like trains and the tax code, until a bustling, prosperous nation is as distant a memory as pleasurable train travel and one-page tax returns.

As with all liberal schemes requiring lots of government workers – which is the Democrats’ true constituency – liberals claimed there was a crisis of millions of uninsured — an enormity of human suffering that nothing would stop except a massive federal solution.

There was no crisis. Poor people have Medicaid. Liberals got around this implacable fact by defining as “uninsured” any poor person who hadn’t been to the doctor yet. But if they’re poor, then they’re eligible for Medicaid. It’s like saying people who haven’t applied for driver’s licenses are being “denied the right to drive.”

What were their specific beefs with health insurance? Democrats could never come up with anything good.

Instead they threw around phony statistics and outright lies:

– “40 million uninsured!”

Only if we’re including illegal aliens.

– “If you like your health insurance, you can keep it!”

A 2011 McKinsey study found that a majority of employers who understand ObamaCare say they’ll have to drop their employees’ health coverage.

The reason we have Obamacare is not because the public was clamoring for the federal government to take over health care. It’s because the Democrats had 60 senators. In the frozen ideology of the left, it doesn’t matter if anyone wants government health care.

Democrats had been waiting around for 50 years to win huge majorities in the House and Senate and the presidency, sothey could check off this box on “FDR’s Unfinished Business.”

Unlike all other major legislation in the nation’s history, Obamacare was passed exclusively by one party that had just won an aberrationally large majority in Congress. Not a single Republican in either the House or Senate voted for it.

Republicans have passed legislation on such partisan votes, too, but never something that would fundamentally change the lives of every living American. Nationalizing one-sixth of the economy is not thekind of thing that should be passed by one party sneering, “Ha, ha — we have 60 votes!”

If that weren’t bad enough, Justice John Roberts then re-wrote the law into something the Democrats themselves would never have passed.

There’s a reason Democrats spent six months swearing up and down that ObamaCare didn’t impose a tax. Had they claimed to be enacting the largest tax hike in U.S. history, even the Democrats would have had to vote against ObamaCare.

Only Congress has the right to make laws and Congress has to make laws the way it makes them, i.e.: constrained by the fact that the members have to stand for re-election.

But in an outrageous abrogation of power, Justice Roberts rescued ObamaCare in the eleventh hour by saying: “Don’t worry, elected branch! We, the unelected branch, are going to save your bacon by making an argument you couldn’t possibly have made.”

So now hundreds of billions of tax dollars are going to have to be collected for a nonexistent “crisis” to pay for a solution unrelated to the problem.

As soon as all Americans have been thrown off their employer-provided insurance plans and are forced to start depending on the government for health care, Republicans will never be able to repeal it.

The private insurance market will be gone. Most Americans won’t be able to conceive of getting health care that doesn’t come from the government — just as people in the Soviet Union couldn’t imagine how they’d get bread if the government didn’t provide it.

(Also similar to Communist systems, you’ll have to know someone in power to get decent medical care.)

A powerful health care Leviathan will arise, composed of self-paced, well-pensioned, unionized government workers who will manage our health care from 10 a.m.-3 p.m., except federal holidays, sick days, mental health days and in bad weather. (The day after Hurricane Sandy, everything was open on the mostly unaffected Upper East Side of New York — but not the post office.)

This new phalanx of government workers will spend the bulk of their time campaigning to ensure the election of more Democrats who promise to lessen their workload and increase their benefits. Even Republicans will have to run for office promising only to enlarge Obamacare. Newt Gingrich will be calling plans to alter Obamacare “right-wing social engineering.”

Whenever a service is provided by the government, a whole new set of agendas come into play. The No. 1 purpose of any government agency is to be a jobs program.

That’s why we can’t shut down unnecessary post offices.

That’s why Mayor Giuliani spent his entire second term in court battling “Campaign to Save Our Hospitals” as he tried to sell off rotting, empty public hospitals that were nothing but Democratic patronage dumps.

That’s why the Department of Education still has a program to fund schools at military bases long after those bases have closed and the children have gone.

The Democrats’ idea for funding their endless government programs is always the same: Tax the rich, and just keep taxing them, no matter how high taxes have to be raised. One thing all such peoplehave in common is that they’ve never had a real job, meaning a job from which you can be fired. Not Bernie Sanders, not Barack Obama, not Joe Biden, not Chuck Schumer and on and on.

Such people simply cannot grasp that doubling tax rates will not double government revenues because people won’t work as hard for half the money. Their ideas about tax policy will put America on a high-speed train to government deficits rivaling Greece. We’ll be a countrywith no military, no wealth and no hope.

Even before the train wreck of Obamacare, health care was half-a-disaster because that’s the percentage of medical care in this country that was already provided by the government — via Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans hospitals and other public hospitals.

In 2008, a single county in Florida — Miami-Dade — received more money in Medicare home health care payments than the entire rest of the country combined. This continued throughout the entire year and was finally noticed by our Department of Health and Human Services in December 2009.

Do you think it would take a private insurer two years to catch onto the fact that health care claims coming from a single county in Florida were larger than the rest of the country combined?

Lifelong politicians haven’t the first idea what an efficient, operating system would even look like. If only we had a presidential candidate who had spent his life working in the private sector …

The way to fix health care is to take as much as possible away from the government and give it to the private sector. It is a universal law of nature that everything run by the government gets worse and more expensive over time — the postal service, airport security and Amtrak. Everything run by the private sector gets better and cheaper over time — cellphones, computers, hair products, dishwashers, etc.

You know who specializes in rescuing failing enterprises and making things work? Mitt Romney.

As governor, Romney didn’t have the ability to reform Medicare or change federal laws requiring hospital emergency rooms to treat every illegal alien, drug dealer and vagrant who rolled in the door. But within the restrictions imposed by federal law, Romney came up with the most free market solution available to improve healthcare in Massachusetts.

Both conservatives and libertarians – even an article in Reason magazine! – hailed Romney’s state healthcare reforms as a free market solution that should be tried by other states.

Contrary to ignorant slanders about Romney’s private sector work, his specialty was not buying thriving companies and stripping them for parts. Rather, the Bain Capital model was to take companies that were on the verge of collapse — about to cut all jobs, pensions and health care for their workers — and save the business.

Romney is the Red Adair of his profession. He’s like a doctor who specializes in multiple gunshot wounds or an oncologist who takes only Stage 4 cancer patients. Yes, there were layoffs, but also lots and lots of jobs, profit, success, efficiency, saved businesses and saved lives.

Romney will be the most accomplished incoming president since Dwight Eisenhower.

Not only has Romney promised to issue a 50-state waiver from Obamacare on his first day in office and then seek a formal repeal and replacement, but he’ll know how to do it. The savior of dying companies will fix health care in this country so that no Democrat will be able to wreck it again.

The only way to rid ourselves of this national poison pill, set to destroy both health care and the nation at large, is to elect Mitt Romney our next president.
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To read another article by Ann Coulter, click here.

The OFA Exception to Political Speech

The OFA Exception to Political Speech
By Mike Adams
10/31/2012

Two Fridays ago, I was busy preparing for a campus debate and finishing the final edits on my next book. It was a busy day and I simply did not have time to deal with a totalitarian college administrator posing as a genuine liberal. But these people never rest. So when the phone rang I should not have been surprised. And I knew I had a responsibility to help the distressed student, despite my busier than usual schedule.

The controversy in this case was pretty simple. The UNCW College Republicans (CRs) were hosting a political event. They put up posters on campus and all around Wilmington trying to draw people to the event. Then, one of the CR officers went to Cape Fear Community College (CFCC) to place political fliers on bulletin boards inside some of their publicly funded educational buildings.

Members of the taxpaying public should not have to ask for permission to put up political fliers on public campus bulletin boards. But the CR officer asked anyway. When she did, the CFCC administrator denied the request with this sweeping statement: CFCC does not allow political posters or fliers anywhere on campus.

I was proud of the CR officer for demanding that the administrator show her a copy of the policy that allows administrators to ban all printed political speech on a publicly funded college campus. I was unsurprised to hear that the administrator failed to produce evidence of the nonexistent policy. Nor was I surprised when she redirected the CR officer to two different administrators who were not present in their offices during the middle of the morning.

After being redirected to the two empty offices, the CR officer called me to explain the situation and seek my advice. I sent her back to the CFCC campus with her iPhone to complete a very simple research project: I asked her to take a walk across campus and take pictures of every single political poster she saw.

The results of our little study will not surprise you. Obama For America (OFA) posters were hanging in plain sight all across campus. So I called the administrator who had banned the Republican posters from the CFCC campus. When she picked up the phone, I said "Hi. My name is Mike Adams. I've called to ask some questions about one of your policies that restricts political speech on campus." Her reaction suggested that she may have heard of me before.

I did not get very far into my First Amendment lecture before that administrator transferred me to another office. The reception I got there was markedly more professional. I explained the illegality of a policy banning all printed political speech. I explained that it was irrelevant because the policy actually does not exist because the administrator simply made it up. Then, I arranged a time for the student to come back to seek approval with two things in her hand: 1. A stack of political posters advertising a Republican event. 2. An iPhone loaded with pictures of OFA posters hanging all over the CFCC campus.

By the end of the day, the posters were hanging on the campus. I went back to preparing for my debate and working on my book edits. When I finished those tasks I sat down to catch up on my column chronicles of the campus free speech wars. I wrote this specific column in order to illustrate the followings points:

1. Campus censorship, which began in the elite private schools and spread to the state universities has now reached our community college campuses.
<>2. All of these institutions are populated with armies of administrators who are, at best, indifferent to First Amendment principles.

3. Increasingly, many campus administrators, including those at small community colleges, are openly hostile toward the First Amendment.

4. Hostile administrators often invent campus policies in an effort to shut down the marketplace of ideas.

5. The goal of hostile administrators is to completely remove any semblance of conservative thought from the marketplace of ideas. Their goal is total domination of the ideological marketplace.

6. Administrators rely upon a combination of student apathy and student ignorance in their efforts to reduce intellectual diversity on campus.

7. When questioned by others in positions of authority, these administrators generally refuse to answer questions and try to pass responsibility on to other administrators.

8. When initially confronted, those other administrators claim ignorance of the facts concerning alleged constitutional violations.

9. When confronted again with explicit evidence and implicit threats of litigation, campus administrators often capitulate.

10. Even small free speech victories require substantial effort due to the size of the college administration and the ambiguity of its organizational structure.

There really is little wonder why some administrators at CFCC sought to keep OFA posters as the sole examples of political speech on campus. It really isn't political speech. It's just the way things ought to be. The OFA movement protects the administrative bureaucracy. The administrative bureaucracy protects the OFA movement. That is how these things move. Forward.

These days, the purpose of speech at government schools is to grow the government. It isn't about the students. It hasn't been that way since the 1960s.
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To read another article by Mike Adams, click here.

Black and White Standards

Black and White Standards
By Walter E. Williams
10/31/2012

The Washington Post (10/25/2012), in giving President Barack Obama an endorsement for another four years, wrote, "Much of the 2012 presidential campaign has dwelt on the past, but the key questions are who could better lead the country during the next four years -- and, most urgently, who is likelier to put the government on a more sound financial footing." The suggestion appears to be that a president is not to be held accountable to his promises and past record and that his past record is no indication of his future behavior. Possibly, the Washington Post people believe that a black president shouldn't be held accountable to his record and campaign promises. Let's look at it.

What about Obama's pledge to cut the deficit in half during his first term in office? Instead, we saw the first trillion-dollar deficit ever, under any president of the United States. Plus, it has been followed by trillion-dollar deficits in every year of his administration. What about Obama's pledge of transparency, in which his legislative proposals would be placed on the Internet days before Congress voted on them so that Americans could inspect them? Obama's major legislative proposal, Obamacare, was enacted in such secrecy and with such speed that even members of Congress did not have time to read it. Remember that it was Rep. Nancy Pelosi who told us, "But we have to pass the (health care) bill so that you can find out what is in it." What about Obama's stimulus packages and promises to get unemployment under control? The Current Employment Statistics program shows that in 2008, the total number of U.S. jobs was more than 138 million, compared with 133.5 million today. As Stanford University economics professor Edward Lazear summed it up, "there hasn't been one day during the entire Obama presidency when as many Americans were working as on the day President Bush left office."

While Obama's national job approval rating is a little less than 50 percent, among blacks his job approval is a whopping 88 percent. I'd like to ask people who approve of Obama's performance, "What has President Obama done during the past four years that you'd like to see more of in the next four years?"

Black support of politicians who have done little or nothing for their ordinary constituents is by no means unusual. Blacks are chief executives of major cities, such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, Memphis, Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans, Oakland, Newark, Cleveland and Cincinnati. In most of these cities, the chief of police, the superintendent of schools and other high executives are black. But in these cities, black people, like no other sector of our population, suffer from the highest rates of homicides, assaults, robberies and shootings. Black high-school dropout rates in these cities are the highest in the nation. Even if a black youngster manages to graduate from high school, his reading, writing and computational proficiency is likely to be equivalent to that of a white seventh- or eighth-grader. That's even with school budgets per student being among the highest in the nation.

Last year, in reference to President Obama's failed employment policies and high unemployment among blacks, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who is chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said, "If Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House." That's a vision that seems to explain black tolerance for failed politicians -- namely, if it's a black politician whose policies are ineffectual and possibly harmful to the masses of the black community, it's tolerable, but it's entirely unacceptable if the politician is white.

Black people would not accept excuses upon excuses and vote to re-elect decade after decade any white politician, especially a Republican politician, to office who had the failed records of our big-city mayors. What that suggests about black people is not very flattering.
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To read another article by Walter Williams, click here.
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To read another article by black racism, click here.

A Tale of Two Countries

A Tale of Two Countries
By Ben Shapiro
10/31/2012

It has become an accepted truism in American politics that both Democrats and Republicans want the same things: a prosperous America, a strong America, an America true to principles of freedom and liberty.

Perhaps 50 years ago that was true.

Today, it no longer is.

The fact is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are no longer arguing over means; we are arguing over ends. Democrats know that economic prosperity for the broad swath of the United States cannot be bought with higher taxes; even Bill Clinton recognized as much in the 1990s, which is why he lowered capital gains taxes dramatically after raising personal income taxes just as dramatically. Instead, Democrats argue, as President Obama did in 2008, that taxes must be raised "for purposes of fairness."

Democrats also know that American influence in the world can't be attained purely with negotiations, timetables and unilateral pullouts. Kind words don't win hearts, and they don't defend our friends from aggression. Democrats simply hope to be left alone. After all, as President Obama has said, America has demonstrated "arrogance" and sought to "dictate our terms" to other countries. And that just isn't fair.

Fairness lies at the root of the Democratic agenda. It's a leveling agenda, not a growth agenda. What's more, it's a philosophy of constant revolution since ultimate fairness can never be achieved in a world where we are all blessed with different gifts. The philosophy that prizes fairness above all else -- at least in material and cultural terms -- can never achieve human happiness, since such fairness can never be attained. And even if it could be attained, it would require unbelievable levels of suppression. The human spirit is not built to serve the god of fairness.

Prosperity and strength lie at the root of the Republican agenda. Conservatives don't support lower taxes because we hate the poor.

Conservatives support lower taxes because lower taxes create prosperity for everyone. Individuals always know more about their lives than any bureaucrat does. They know more about their needs and wants. They know which products they require, and they know how to find the best deal. No government can better distribute resources than individuals making individual decisions can. Competitive markets have done more to create wonderful products and raise the quality of living across the globe than any other institution. Central planning does not create wealth. It merely redistributes poverty.

When it comes to America's role in the world, conservatism does not rely on America to be one among many. We must be proud of our role as a global leader. Our values are superior to those of other countries. Our system, prizing limited government and preserving individual liberties, is the greatest system of government ever devised. Why would we run from the honor of leading? Why would we shirk that responsibility? Most importantly, if we wish to see the world a happier place, why would we deny to others the opportunity to share in our lot, especially if it preserves our interests to do so?

Mitt Romney knows all this. Barack Obama does not. That's why Obama suggests on Jay Leno that banks have to be regulated because they're "in it to make money." And that's why Mitt Romney knows that businesses must be encouraged to profit-seek, rather than punished for doing so. That's why Obama leaves American ambassadors to die overseas rather than giving an intervention order. That's why Romney knows that backing down in the face of foreign fire is a recipe for disaster, not peace.

The Democratic road leads to an end: Europe.

The Republican road leads to an end: a resurgent, dominant America on the world scene.

We can choose to fade into oblivion, suffering from high taxes and broken promises, telling ourselves that the government will take care of us even as we go broke. Or we can choose to rise again, believing in the values that made us great. In less than a week, that choice is in our hands.
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To read another article by Ben Shapiro, click here.

Are You -- and Donald Trump -- Obama's Brother's Keeper?

Are You -- and Donald Trump -- Obama's Brother's Keeper?
By Paul Kengor on 10.31.12 @ 6:08AM

Charitable giving is not exactly the President's strong suit -- better to rely on Dinesh D'Souza.

Donald Trump has offered President Barack Obama $5 million to the charity of his choice if Obama opens his college records. Obama has until 5:00 Wednesday afternoon to respond. Trump should expect nothing. Not only does Obama not want us to see those records, but he could care less about the $5 million in charity. Obama, after all, gives very little to charity. For Obama, like many liberals, "charity" is forced government redistribution; they coerce money from the likes of Trump (and those of far lesser incomes) to be redirected to others with less money -- from the makers to the takers.

A telling illustration of Obama's personal lack of charity is the situation with his half brother, George Obama. George is interviewed in Dinesh D'Souza's film "2016: Obama's America." As D'Souza shows graphically, George lives in a shanty house in Nairobi, Kenya, surviving on a few dollars a month.

George apparently took a liking to D'Souza. Remarkably, he recently phoned D'Souza from Kenya. It was an emergency. Obama's brother needed healthcare. He explained to D'Souza that his child was in the hospital, ailing from a "chest condition." He needed a quick $1,000 for the medical bills.

"Since George was at the hospital I asked him to let me speak to a nurse," says D'Souza, "and she confirmed that George's son was indeed ill." D'Souza immediately sent the money via Western Union.

And here's the kicker: As D'Souza relates, "Before I hung up, I asked George, 'Why are you coming to me?' He said, 'I have no one else to ask.' Then he said something that astounded me, 'Dinesh, you are like a brother to me.'"

That's touching. In fact, however, Dinesh D'Souza is not a brother to George Obama. Barack Obama is. And Obama is a millionaire. Why didn't George go to his real brother for support? Better, why doesn't Obama go to him?

But, alas, there's more. This whole sorry thing is actually even worse. Consider:

As president, Barack Obama has not been shy about invoking his faith -- and with no protest from liberals who went wild every time George W. Bush even mentioned God. Obama has invoked his faith in support of everything from "Obamacare" to gay marriage. Most of all, Obama constantly uses the phrase "my brother's keeper." It has become the signature line for his public expression of faith. My colleague, Dr. Gary Smith, author of the authoritative Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush, reports that Obama has used the phrase 57 times. The Presidential Papers reveal 17 instances of Obama using the phrase over the last 12 months, 11 of them at fundraisers.

"I am my brother's keeper," said President Obama in Atlanta recently. "Each of us is only here because somebody somewhere was looking out for us. It started in the family, but it wasn't just the immediate family…. Our story has never been about what we can do alone. It's what we do together."

For Obama, this is an exhortation to help one another, from our literal brothers to our brothers in the wider community and world.

To be sure, the "brother's keeper" passage is an odd choice. It comes from the Old Testament remark of Cain after he murdered his brother Abel. God asks Cain where his brother is. Cain replies, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

It is a bad moment. Given the roots of the phrase -- the first murder, of a sibling no less -- it's a strange formulation for making the case of helping our brother, or our neighbor, or the needy. A phrase like "love thy neighbor," a favorite of George W. Bush, is far more preferable, and certainly derived from an infinitely better source.

But here's the kicker:

Who is Obama's brother's keeper? That is, who is George Obama's keeper? Well, it certainly isn't Barack Obama. Lately, it's Dinesh D'Souza. Or, more specifically, it's all of us, you and me -- everyone but Barack Obama.

For those who find this hypocritical of Obama, they should understand it's actually not all that inconsistent. Barack Obama is from the "social justice" Religious Left (see here, here, and here). Many religious liberals link "compassion" and even "charity" not to individual action but government action. Obviously, that's totally misguided.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is an excellent illustration. Consider: What did the Good Samaritan do when he encountered the wounded traveler? He picked him up, treated him, transported him, paid the innkeeper, and pledged to follow up. He gave his own time and resources. Note that he didn't shout for governing authorities to come help the wounded traveler. Certainly, Jesus didn't employ the parable as a call for a single federal collective to handle all poverty.

Really, Barack Obama's ignoring of his brother's plight is no surprise. Obama's view of social justice is based not on personal charity but big government and wealth distribution. He favors what the late economist Hans Sennholz called "the Transfer Society." And so, he's pushing the problem of his brother to the rest of us. Obama sees us as his brother's keeper. We are the ones expected to help Obama's brother. You are Obama's brother's keeper.

And so, Donald Trump can expect his Wednesday afternoon deadline to pass in dead silence. His offer provides no incentive to Barack Obama. I suggest that Trump instead donate the money to the families of the victims of the Benghazi attack -- or to a healthcare fund for Obama's brother, George. After all, Mr. Trump, you, too, are Obama's brother's keeper.
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To read another article by Paul Kengor, click here.

The Gospel According to Joe

The Gospel According to Joe
By George Neumayr on 10.31.12 @ 6:11AM

Clownish final pitches from the Obama campaign.

Joe Biden said at October's vice-presidential debate that he would never "impose" his Catholic faith on fellow Americans, describing it as "personally" important to him but publicly irrelevant. This stance hasn't stopped him in the finals days of the campaign from imposing his self-serving version of the Catholic faith on voters. In a recent campaign ad, complete with images of the crucifix, a solemn Joe Biden presents himself as a "practicing Catholic" who serves an administration that advances the "values" of "Catholic social doctrine."

"Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me," says Biden in the ad, quoting Jesus Christ in a summary of those values. This would seem an ill-advised adage for an administration that subsidizes the killing of the unborn. A politician who stretches the category of the "least of these" to include Sandra Fluke but not unborn babies might want to avoid scriptural quotations.

According to Biden, religion doesn't belong in politics, but it is okay to insert politics into religion. Equating the platform of the Democratic Party with "Catholic social doctrine" and then imposing that phony equation on Americans is fine by him. This arrogant attitude comports perfectly with the Obama administration's view of the subordinate relationship between religion and the state: the religious exist to serve the interests of the state, but the moment they stop serving those interests the state can eliminate them from public life.

Under the HHS mandate, a priest who objects to free contraceptives can't descend from his pulpit to participate in public life; but a pro-abortion pol can ascend that same pulpit to preach liberalism and pander for votes. In a speech delivered from a pulpit at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Nashville, Tennessee last June, Michelle Obama said that liberal political issues belong at church: "To anyone who says that church is no place to talk about these issues, you tell them there is no place better, no place better." Translation: liberals reserve the right to harness the power of religion for their own purposes.

The German sociologist Max Weber used the term "caesaropapism" to describe the "complete subordination of priests to secular power." Liberalism advances a kind of Obamaopapism, a system in which religious organizations can only enter public life if they first agree to serve as conduits for state fiats. Under Obamaopapism, Biden can simultaneously reject Church teaching on abortion and gay marriage while identifying Obamacare, food stamps, and amnesty as the perfect expression of "Catholic social doctrine."

In the final stretch of the campaign, the Obama administration is scrambling for the pious and impious vote. It is at once the champion of supposed Catholic social doctrine and a loud proponent of a comically entitled hook-up culture. One day it rolls out a Joe Biden ad collaring Catholics; the next it airs an ad from Lena Dunham crassly appealing to college students. Dunham is the star of the HBO show "Girls," which is Obama's chief constituency it would seem. Dunham likens her first-time voting for Obama to a pre-marital deflowering, an analogy that she considers very flattering: "Your first time shouldn't be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy. It should be with a guy with beautiful — someone who really cares about and understands women." This is as judgmental and discriminating as the hook-up culture gets: a suitable hook-up partner is not "just anybody" but a man who stands ready to pay for the used woman's contraceptives and abortions. Obama is that "great guy."

From the suffragettes to Lena Dunham is an inglorious ascent, culminating in a party that boasts Bill Clinton as its most popular figure and abortion as its most defining issue. The Life of Julia and the Life of Lena leave feminism in very sad shape. Yet Obama is counting on these degraded and reductive visions of women's issues to propel him to victory and to propel America "forward."

He still wouldn't want his daughters "punished with a baby" and apparently considers Sandra Fluke and Lena Dunham fitting role models for them. The Democrats don't even talk about "soccer moms" anymore. Only the "reproductive issues" of "girls" matter now. While Biden invokes the Golden Rule, Obama hails all the "progress" that has come from violating it.
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To red another article about Joe Biden, click here.
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To read another article by George Neumayr, click here.

Obama cuts FEMA

Obama cuts FEMA
By: John Hayward
10/31/2012 09:24 AM

The frantic efforts of liberal apologists to claim Hurricane Sandy as evidence that only a big-spending, high-taxing, massively bloated centralized government can protect the populace from natural disasters have already been the subject of ridicule, but the more this idea is considered with reason instead of panic, the more completely it collapses.

One particular bit of liberal political opportunism concerns Mitt Romney’s supposedly heartless desire to kill innocent people by wiping out FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Romney doesn’t actually want to abolish FEMA; he thinks more of the authority and funding for disaster relief should be moved to the state level.

But one candidate in this race absolutely has cut FEMA funding, and wants to cut it even more: Barack Hussein Obama.

As the Wall Street Journal points out, “Mr. Obama’s own fiscal 2013 budget sought $10.008 billion. That was a cut of $641.5 million, or 6.02%, from fiscal 2012. We couldn’t find an apples-to-apples comparison in the Ryan budget resolution, because FEMA spending was part of a larger category and the Senate never did pass its budget. But if budget cuts to FEMA are the liberal standard, their beef is with Mr. Obama.”

In contrast, as Fox News points out, Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget “doesn’t specifically mention disaster relief but includes considerable cuts to domestic discretionary spending.”

The Wall Street Journal also relays an observation from the Heritage Foundation that FEMA has been drawn into relatively minor “disasters” due to political machinations with increasing frequency. ”Annual FEMA disaster declarations have multiplied since the Clinton years and have reached a yearly average of 153 under Mr. Obama,” reports Matt Mayer of the Heritage Foundation. ”That compares to 129.6 under George W. Bush, 89.5 under Mr. Clinton, and only 28 a year under Reagan.”

Obviously, we’re not having six times as many massive disasters under Obama as we were in the 1980s. I sat in on a FEMA briefing yesterday in which the agency described itself as primarily distributing economic assistance, while state authorities and local personnel handled most of the field work, which is perfectly sensible. Economic assistance is important, but there’s only so much money to go around; if FEMA expends its resources on 152 other disasters, there’s less money to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

And the sequestration spending cuts, a product of Democrat intransigence, are scheduled to knock $878 million from the FEMA budget. Liberal efforts to spin this as Republicans’ fault are ludicrous. We only have sequestration because the deficit-cutting Super Committee failed; it failed because Democrats insist on job-killing tax increases that wouldn’t come anywhere near resolving our budget crisis. The same Democrats constantly insist that job creation is their top priority, but they’d rather lose jobs through tax increases than cut any of their precious government spending.

We only had a fiscal crisis because Barack Obama and the Democrat Congress, all the way back to their capture of both houses in 2006, have given us permanent trillion-dollar budget deficits. We wouldn’t have a fiscal crisis if Big Government lived within its means. Too many Republicans were accessories to this process, but as a matter of current political positions, it’s the Democrats who want to stick other people with their bills while they keep running up the national credit cards. Remember, long before there was a Super Committee or sequestration, Obama’s initial demand was for a “clean” debt increase with no conditions or spending cuts at all.

So Obama has cut FEMA, and he wanted to cut it even more. Maybe it needs to be cut, or restructured – it should be no more immune to reform than any other federal agency, but the notion that Mitt Romney is uniquely determined to wipe it out, because killing the wives of steelworkers with cancer is too slow to satisfy his bloodlust and he’d rather watch them drown, is pure malarkey.

An article in the New York Times today notes the persistent charges that FEMA tends to throw money around indiscriminately, with $643 million incorrectly distributed after Hurricane Katrina. A FEMA employee quoted in a Homeland Security report said the agency “begs people to call and apply, even if they are not sure they are eligible.” Like every other government agency, they generally want to spend every nickel and tell Congress they need even more, so their budget is increased – every year, forever and ever, amen. When the agency in question is federal, they have a lot more money to spend, and a vast national jurisdiction full of opportunities to spend it. Who has a better chance of correcting that attitude: the guy from Bain Capital, or President Solyndra?

If you want the government to handle its important duties well, get rid of the Party that keeps frittering away trillions of dollars on non-essential garbage. One of Obama’s recurring lines in the presidential debates was that budgets are how we determine the priorities of our government. It was absurd coming from the head of a Party that hasn’t passed a budget in over four years, and whose own budget proposals drew not a single vote from members of his own Party, but Obama’s basic point is quite correct. The funding available to government is limited, and within the next couple of years, we will receive firm and disastrous reminders that the amount of money it can borrow is limited, too. So do you want a trillion-dollar welfare state, complete with a food stamp program that has doubled in size over the past four years, or do you want a well-funded Federal Emergency Management Agency? Budgeting is about choosing between guns and butter… or between safety nets and sandbags.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.

Can America afford to be isolationist?

Can America afford to be isolationist?
By: Robert Maginnis
10/31/2012 05:05 AM

There is a major gap between the isolationist trending, war-weary American public and the presidential candidates who advocate expanding America’s global leadership. Bridging that gap is a tall order for the next president.

The current national mood compares to periods after other wars when Americans called for military spending cuts and economic rebuilding at home. The difference this time is that America can ill afford to cocoon at home because of intertwined interests abroad.

A new Pew Research Center survey found an isolationist mood among Americans who question the benefits of our global leadership which President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Gov. Mitt Romney espoused during their recent foreign policy debate. They spoke of a dangerous world marked by military and economic challenges and the need to spread American values.

During the debate Obama spoke of America as the “indispensable nation” in dealing with world conflicts and the point that “America has to stand with democracy.” Romney said America must “make the world more peaceful” and “America must lead.” Both men indicated they would limit the use of military force in recognition of the public’s mood shift, however.

The candidates promised to limit or avoid American military involvement in places like Syria and remove the last U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Romney quipped, “We can’t kill our way out of this [Mideast] mess,” and Obama said “it is absolutely true that we cannot just meet these challenges militarily.” But they agreed military force might be needed as a last resort if Iran does not curb its nuclear weapons ambitions.

A recent Pew survey, however, confirmed the American isolationist mood. Two out of three Americans believe the U.S. should be less involved with leadership changes in the Mideast “Arab Spring” revolutions. Rather, 54 percent said it was more important to have stable authoritarian-led governments like that of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak than try to spread democracy that fails to produce lasting improvements for the people.

In fact American support for promoting democracy abroad sharply shrunk over the past decade, according to Pew. In 2001, 29 percent believed promoting democracy should be a high priority; now 13 percent endorse the same view, probably because of the cost in blood and treasure to nation-build in Iraq and Afghanistan. Further, 64 percent of Americans believe countries that receive American aid “end up resenting us” which fuels our skepticism.

The survey demonstrates strong consensus (60 percent) for ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan as soon as possible but on another front the public supports tougher policies. Most (56 percent) say it is more important to take a firm stand against Iran’s nuclear program, while 35 percent say it is more important to avoid a military conflict.

So why do both presidential candidates call for more American global leadership given the growing isolationist public mood?

At the heart of isolationism is avoidance of alliances, foreign economic commitments, and foreign wars in order to devote the country’s efforts to its own advancement and to remain at peace. But the presidential candidates evidently realize America’s global interdependence makes isolationism a historic relic.

For the first half of America’s history she managed to avoid most foreign entanglements and when she did fight it was as a non-aligned power like in World War I. Then came the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 which drew American troops into a global bloodbath. America emerged from that conflict a global power and never returned to the comfort of isolationism in part because of the demands of emergent globalization.

America’s modern structure depends on the globalized interdependency of information, work, security, economy and culture. Economically we can’t survive as an isolationist country because we no longer have a manufacturing base to meet our needs and commodities like food and oil make the U.S. globally interdependent. Our national security depends on a global presence and instant global communications. Our financial services and education attract and depend on people from across the world. And the pace of global integration is speeding up due to dramatic advances in technology, communications, science, transport and industry.

While the average American may yearn for the good old isolationist days, the presidential candidates apparently understand our global interdependence and America’s inherited responsibility to lead, like it or not.

So how does the next president balance public desires for more isolationism, the reality of globalization, and America’s global leadership responsibilities? The answer comes from the presidential candidates.

First, America needs a “strong defense” and “strong allies” to deter would-be aggressors said Mr. Romney. Our global security challenges will increase with more interdependency which means we must be more prescriptive in the use of military force. Further, as Mr. Obama said, we must focus “on alliances and relationships” to build-up our foreign partners’ ability to defend themselves through security cooperation programs; training and equipping them to defend themselves and fight regional conflicts.

Second, there must be more accountability for our aid and more defense cost sharing. Mr. Romney illustrated the accountability challenge.

America poured more than $25 billion of aid into Pakistan since 2001 but that country is questionably an ally in the war against the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda, said Romney. Yet “Pakistan is important to the region, to the world and to us, because Pakistan has 100 nuclear warheads and they’re rushing to build a lot more.” If Pakistan falls apart, Romney said, and “becomes a failed state,” it would pose an “extraordinary danger” to us.

Also, as President Obama said in the debate, America spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined. Our allies must invest more in their defense and share more of the responsibility defending the global commons – space, sea and cyberspace.

Third, our foreign policy must invest in stable partners. Both candidates espouse democracy, but like the current crises across the Mideast, our national interests are not served nor that of the affected populations when stability is replaced by instability, even if it is “democratic.” Besides, as President Obama said four times in the debate, “after a decade of war it’s time to do some nation building here at home” but we can’t ignore global challenges and stable partners help.

Finally, America must embrace sound economic policies and a balanced budget. Governor Romney said “promoting the principles of peace has fallen to America. We didn’t ask for it. But it’s an honor that we have it.” Then he cited former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, who said that our debt is the biggest national security threat we face…. We need a strong economy.” An economically strong America is evidence of sound global leadership and comforting to our war-weary public.

The majority of Americans may express isolationist tendencies, but it is clearly not in our national interest. The next president must be a true leader who can present the case to the nation that America must remain a global leader through global involvement. Not doing so will render America isolated, impotent and irrelevant.
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To read another article by Robert Maginnis, click here.