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"If you like your health plan, you can keep it" was last year's Lie of the Year. When millions of cancellations stacked up, the game of make-believe was over. So the Democrats, hoping to survive another election cycle, shifted to a new mantra: they claim they want to fix the law. The facts show this is just another Obamacare lie.

But it should be clear by now that neither of those outcomes will be possible as long as Democrats control the Senate.

Democrats convened their real presidential convention for 2016 a bit early.

In NYC.

At the U.N.

In what is becoming a proxy for what the public believes is the Democrat National Committee, the media, world government organizations and activists who think that some small, few men should decide what every other man gets to have—or not have—met in public and private in New York City this week.

They harangued and proselytized, raised money and “awareness” in a purely show-business attempt to re-set the agenda off their failed policies.If only by sheer volume of their arguments, they have tried to convince America that the laws of mathematics, physics and insider trading just don’t apply to these select few.

Nor do any other laws.

Bill Clinton, for example, a guy well known for his equal treatment of women under a law defining the word “is”, promised that in the future, companies could ignore their very real legal obligations to the shareholders who provide them capital.

“In the future,” reports CNBC, “corporations will care less about maximizing profits and more about employees and society, President Bill Clinton told listeners on Tuesday.”

That sounds more like a warning to me than it does a speech.

"I think the government can have incentives that will encourage it, but I think by and large it will happen, if it does, because of proof that markets work better that way," Clinton told those who will likely write planks in their party platforms around the world.

Clinton here is giving the slow wink to socialism; a socialism that will be encouraged by government, because, you know, accidents can happen to companies who don’t go with the way things are.

"We're going to share inequality, misery and conflict, or we're going to share prosperity, responsibilities and a sense of community," Clinton said.

When you’re done laughing Coca Cola through your nose you may resume reading.

It’s bad enough that Democrats enact their silly social theories, but must they always insist that the torchbearer for the light of enlightened Democratism be a parody of the values they claim to espouse?

Robert Kennedy Jr., for example, was also in New York, and attending the Doppelganger of the DNC.

He supported Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama in 2008.

Like all the Kennedys-- a family that I used to admire—he is reluctant to give up his own privileged position in society, just like all hypocrites are, even while he lectures the rest of us about our responsibility to the “planet.”

Most of us don’t have trust funds worth $50 million, most of us don’t have a family compound on Hyannis Port, most of us don’t have the luxury of preaching about renewable energy standards while lobbying our powerful and rich friends against applying those standards to ourselves.

Capital markets can do many things if made to. But the only things they do really well are wealth creation... if they are allowed to. That’s why we have a large body of corporation law. It is there to protect wealth—that is shareholders. Shareholders, like Clinton and RKF Jr. are the inevitable fruits of labor. Even if in RFK Jr.’s case someone labored first to allow him the luxury of his own idleness.

How to split up the labor’s contribution to the creation of wealth has been the primary focus of the twin failed science of socialism and Marxism for the last 160 years.

Most countries that have tried either variety of social economics have rejected them and instead embraced free market principles.

Leave it to the Democrats, in this great hour of national despair, to propose a system that will fail to everyone but their leaders.

Turkey was able to close down THEIR border crossings after 70,000 refugees from Syria fled ISIS into Turkey. They used tear gas and water cannon, along with a sign that says “This Border Closed” to stop the flight into Turkey's Islamic state.

“Turkish security forces have fired water cannon and tear gas at crowds which had gathered in support of Syrian Kurdish refugees on the border,” reports the BBC.

“It comes after some 66,000 refugees poured into Turkey in 24 hours. Turkey opened its border on Friday to Syrians fleeing the town of Kobane in fear of an Islamic State attack.”

While I like the Kurds in general, I think Turkey is giving us part of the solution to our own border problems: We need to send some of our politicians to Turkey to be tear gassed too. A little water cannon wouldn’t hurt either.

While there would no doubt be civil rights implications—bad for the politicians and good for us-- don't discount the fun factor here. Tear-gassing Eric Holder and Nancy Pelosi would not only help them understand that he have the right to defend ourselves, it would also just be fun.

And you don't even have to be Turkish to enjoy that.

The highlight of navy boot camp for the NCOs at Great Lakes when I went through was when they lined up recruits and had them remove their gasmasks in a chamber filled with tear gas while reciting the Sailor’s Creed:

I am a United States Sailor.

I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America and I will obey the orders of those appointed over me.

I represent the fighting spirit of the Navy and those who have gone before me to defend freedom and democracy around the world.

I proudly serve my country's Navy combat team with Honor, Courage and Commitment.

I am committed to excellence and the fair treatment of all.

Snot ran, we cried, we did not laugh and a good time was had by men, mostly in their 20s, who had been in the Navy long enough defending freedom and democracy around the world for the event to pass as entertainment.

But think how much more fun it would be to tear-gas someone who actually deserved it like Elizabeth Warren or Hank Johnson.

So maybe we can have a similar creed made up for the cretins who decided that the proper response to Russia’s occupation of Ukraine and ISIS occupation of Iraq and Syria was to mobilize feminists in NYC via 550 union-provided buses to STOP GLOBAL WARMING NOW!

You wanna combat global warming? Stop Obama from leasing union buses.

The larger issue could be addressed as well through tear-gassing.

And that larger issue is this: Many countries abandoned by Obama's so-called foreign policy—including our own--are having border problems as a direct result of the president’s Democrat-induced delusions of pander.

Let’s face it: If it weren’t for pandering Obama would have no foreign policy objectives at all.

ISIS?

Created by pandering to the Arab Street’s desire for reform, no matter what form reform takes.

The U.S. Apology tour?

Pandering to Europe and the Arab States.

The Russian Reset?

Pandering to Russia.

Our border policy with Mexico?

Pandering to Democrat pollsters who need to keep Hispanics in line for the next next election, which of course is always only one more election away.

Because while throngs gather at the United Nations this week to hear Obama try to change the topic from his own pandering and shortcomings to even more pandering followed by more Obama shortcomings, keep one thing in mind: If Obama were at the UN to get tear-gassed while reciting the Sailor’s Creed, even more people would show up to see it.

And for the right reasons too.

We wouldn’t even need buses

Liberal publications around the globe celebrated climate change on Sunday by gushing over a reconvening of the same drum circle that took over Wall Street in the misshaped Occupy movement in 2011—and failed to do anything but offend ordinary Americans.

“More than 400,000 people turned out for the People's Climate March in New York City on Sunday,” says the HuffPo, “just days before many of the world's leaders are expected to debate environmental action at the United Nations climate summit.”

Coincidence? No.

Claiming that the Sunday marchers were part of big tent that represents all of America, the New York Times immediately contradicted itself with this gem of inclusion:

“At Columbus Circle,” said the Times, “there were bare-breasted women and people with dreadlocks and homespun clothing. There were Muslim women wearing hijabs and groups of older women with signs proclaiming they were ‘Grandmas Against Global Warming.’ and that ‘Gray Is Green.’”

Oh, how American!

Yes, and anarchists LOVE apple pie, hot dogs and Chevrolet.

Okay, admittedly anarchists might indeed love the NEW Chevrolet, an anachronistic labor organization that is devolving into anarchy.

Oh, how Occupy!

But getting past that irony, whom can we thank for this weekend’s progressive spectacle that represents “AmEriKa” as THEY would have it?

Obama, that’s who.

After suffering total rejection by Main Street, the same commie organizers who put together Occupy Wall Street to try to win back the legislative initiative for Obama are at it again. After he was spanked at the polls in 2010, a seemingly motley group of people was bused into New York by labor unions, leftist community organizations and special interests to provide the “spontaneous” uprising in support of Obama’s redistribution ideas.

Yeah it failed then. But that’s just more proof that Obama’s White House is at the root of Sunday’s march. When did they ever recognize a losing idea?

They double down on it, and order more buses.

“[M]ore than 550 buses carried in people from around the country!!!" bragged the HuffPo about Sunday’s event.

At $2,000 a day, buses bring you the kind of spontaneity that can only be bought with cold, hard cash. Over a million dollars worth of cash for the buses alone.

You can always tell it’s an Obama event by the buses. They have forced busing down to a science: Occupy, Ferguson, Climate Change, wherever common sense needs to be defeated, in come the buses.

Too bad they couldn’t get troops to Benghazi as efficiently…or to Iraq or Ukraine.

So today, yes, as the world burns and the Democrats look increasingly desperate, out touch and Democraticky, the Organizers are ginning up support for Obama to take action on climate change in conjunction with the United Nations at the next world whatever meant to settle something they call science.

A million dollars in bus fare is just chump change meant to dazzle you with this completely grassroots movement.

But here’s what they really mean:

You need to pay more for energy right now, and you need to surrender your liberties, no questions asked.

It’s our only hope for a new AmEriKa!

And that debate was settled a long time ago

 

Fresh terror busts in Australia expose a common Achilles' heel of the West: Indiscriminate refugee policies turn free countries into breeding grounds for jihad. It's the same game in America. Soldiers of Islam have weaponized our blind generosity against us.

In Sydney this week, authorities detained a half-dozen Muslim plotters and arrested a top collaborator in an alleged conspiracy to kidnap and behead a random Australian citizen. The accused mastermind? Afghan refugee turned Aussie Islamic State recruiter Mohammad Ali Baryalei. He and his aristocratic family were welcomed Down Under decades ago. Baryalei returned the favor by taking to the streets of Sydney to recruit and radicalize dozens of fellow Muslim immigrants or their children.

Baryalei's minions include Australian jihadist Khaled Sharrouf, the homicidal son of Lebanese immigrants. Sharrouf is now based in Syria, where he infamously tweeted a photo of his elementary school-age son brandishing a severed human head.

The Sydney Beheading Bust comes on the heels of a separate outbreak of violence by Afghan refugees aligned with the terror group Hezbollah. In late August, Aussie police broke up a bloody riot involving members of the "420 gang" -- Muslim teenage boys and young men who post sword-wielding, AK-47-toting selfies on social media. The self-described "Shia soldiers" quote Hezbollah militant imam Hassan Nasrallah online, while wreaking havoc in Sydney slums offline.

International "human rights" wags have attacked Australian officials for trying to crack down on unfettered immigration from terror-sponsoring states. Now, many of those ungrateful imports are crying "Islamophobia" as law enforcement authorities try to stop the head-choppers from spilling blood on their soil.

Australia, we feel your pain. America's unselective and desultory asylum and refugee policies have also enabled jihadists of all stripes and blades to recruit, convert, plot, pillage, rape and kill.

In our heartland, Minneapolis has become "Little Mogadishu" -- a haven for Somali refugees targeted by Islamic supremacists. It's a deadly two-way street. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy noted in "The Grand Jihad," "We not only import Somali aliens, including their 'traditional leaders.' We also send back aspiring Islamist militants, including suicide bombers. Since 2006, the FBI has detected that many Somalis are returning to fight on behalf of al-Shabaab, and more are launched from Minneapolis than from any other U.S. haven."

But instead of slowing down refugee admissions from terror-sponsoring and terror-supporting states, the Obama administration has jacked them up. Instead of increasing our scrutiny of asylum and refugee seekers who admit to providing "limited material support" to terrorists, the Obama administration has created more loopholes for them.

Last fall, FBI agents admitted that several dozen suspected terrorist bomb-builders may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the United States as war refugees from Iraq. These include two al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) jihadists who were resettled as refugees in Bowling Green, Ky. -- and then later admitted in court that they had attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to ABC News.

In Colorado Springs, a gang of Iraqi Muslim refugees monstrously raped and brutalized a woman -- after being welcomed here with open arms and, in at least one case, receiving praise and help from U.S. soldiers.

These thugs join a growing litany of asylees and refugees gone wild in America, including:

--The vengeful Tsarnaev family of Boston Marathon brothers and their jobless, mooching sisters.

--Ramzi Yousef, who faked an asylum claim to plot the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

--Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a Palestinian bomb-builder who entered the U.S. illegally through Canada and claimed political asylum based on phony persecution by Israelis.

--Palestinian jihadist Mir Aimal Kansi, convicted in 1997 of capital murder for the January 1993 shooting spree outside CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., claimed bogus political asylum based on his ethnic minority status in Pakistan.

--Somali national Nuradin Abdi, the al-Qaida shopping mall bomb plotter convicted in 2007, first entered the U.S. in 1995 using a false passport, entered again illegally from Canada in 1997, and then secured asylum on false grounds. He fraudulently obtained a refugee travel document, which he then used to fly to Ethiopia and, yes, Chechnya for jihad training.

--Convicted Fort Dix (N.J.) jihad plotters and ethnic Albanian illegal alien brothers Dritan, Shain and Eljvir Duka, who snuck into the country through Mexico with their parents, who applied for asylum in 1984.

Meanwhile, countless Christians, Jews and other victims of Islamic persecution remain outcast and abandoned around the world. Ain't diversity and assimilation grand?

For folks who are trying to ignite inflation, this sure isn’t working out very well. It’s been hoped by the country’s central bankers that the massive quantitative easing program along with near-zero interest rates will touch off a wave of inflation that if not exactly the same thing as boom times, will at least give the appearance of a strengthening economy. However, month after month inflation in the goods that the Fed cares about seems muted. Now this month we had the horrid news that official inflation numbers are falling not rising.

“The consumer-price index declined 0.2 percent,” reports Bloomberg, “the first decrease since April 2013, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington. The median forecast of 83 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for unchanged. Excluding volatile food and fuel, the so-called core measure was unchanged, the first time it failed to increase in almost four years.”

Oh, the horror of falling gas prices!

It should be noted that falling fuel costs, not coincidentally, also contributed to the robust retail sales figures that boosted the economy in August

“Lower gasoline prices and better job growth encouraged consumers to open their wallets this summer, pushing up sales at U.S. retailers last month,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Retail and food sales rose a seasonally adjusted 0.6% in August from July” according to statistics released by the Commerce Department.

Therein lies the failure of the Fed policy.

Creating the type of artificial inflation the Fed is after is idiotic. And even in their idiotic goal they’ve failed to live up to their own expectations.

Inflation in core items that the Fed cares about remains stubbornly low. Inflation in food and energy, which the Fed pretends doesn’t matter, remains much more volatile. And energy inflation is cramping consumer style.

Today it’s not a question of “if” we have adequate inflation for a sound economy, but rather if the type of inflation that we do have is helping the economy or hurting the economy. Because we do have inflation, it's just not the "good" kind the Federal Reserve is banking on. Ha, ha! Banking on. 

Ignoring for a moment that inflation is a symptom of a hot economy not an end goal, stable or lowering gas prices would help the economy by increasing the amount that consumers have to spend on other things. Those other things—like electronics, clothes, cars (you know? the discretionary items in flyover country?)—are the missing fuel for an economy that has stalled out while facing up hill.

It’s as if the policy makers have decided to fill the gas tank up, while ignoring the big, gapping hole out of which the fuel is sloshing and gurgling underneath the economy while trying to chug up that steep slope known as Obama.

Let’s hope now that no one lights a match.

As I have demonstrated time and again in this space, there used to be a time in this country when the link between a sound economy and low and stable energy prices was understood.

There was a time when that was bipartisan issue.

Today we have so decoupled energy from the people that energy is supposed to serve that the stock market falls on lower energy prices, rather than recognizing the legitimate stimulus value lower energy prices have on the rest of the economy.

The flip side is that higher energy prices have a dampening effect on the total economy. If Obama cared so much for the workers who make minimum wage he’d have an energy policy that saves them money at the fuel pump since that’s a cost that costs them dear.

“A penny sav'd, is a penny got,” says the English proverb.

Of course Obama knows nothing about pennies or saving.

“Since World War II,” writes St. Louis Fed economist, Kevin Kliesen, “nearly every U.S. recession has been preceded or accompanied by a sharp rise in energy prices.”

Kliesen was writing in the winter of 2000, a time when he was hoping that better policy tools by the Fed would make oil shocks and an accompanying general recession a thing of the past.

As 2008 proved, oil shocks, if anything, have a greater impact then they did previously.

Inflation in oil is not just a bad thing; it’s the worst of all possible things.

Don’t ask the Fed about inflation in oil. They think things are great.

Ask the consumer.

Because we are decidedly less sanguine about high energy prices.

And so is the economy.

WASHINGTON - The nightly news shows made it very clear this week that they've gotten behind Hillary Clinton's expected 2016 campaign for president.

The network news programs gave Clinton's trip to Iowa the gushing, royal treatment on Sunday, repeating it again on Monday, as she appeared before a throng of cheering Democrats where her party's first presidential nominating caucuses will be held. The coverage of her speech, which was loaded with empty platitudes and little else that was newsworthy, bordered on the worshipful.

She is manifestly ill-equipped to be president and has shown no talents to be a chief executive of anything, let alone the most powerful nation on the face of the earth.

No one can name a major achievement in her career as First Lady, senator from New York, or Secretary of State. Indeed, her role in all three jobs has been marked by failure, incompetence and grandstanding.

When President Clinton put her in charge of health care reform, she glued together a hopelessly incomprehensible Rube Goldberg contraption that no one could understand, or that could pass muster within her own party on Capitol Hill.

Republicans hit the road, making its defeat their No. 1 issue, and it wasn't a hard sell.

I remember a newsmaker health care panel I chaired at the time to discuss her plan, and the chief lobbyist of the politically powerful AARP told me it was so complicated and murky even he couldn't fully understand how it would work.

Her plan was so bad, House Democratic leaders never even brought it up for a vote in committee, let alone bring it to the House floor. It was a humiliating experience for the Clinton administration and a devastating defeat for a First Lady who was clearly in over her head on health policy.

But the little-known fact about Hillary's years in the White House was that she was often at odds with her husband over key issues and policies.

During that time, President Clinton worked closely with the centrist-leaning Democratic Leadership Council which he had chaired during his time as governor. Their agenda was focused on expanding trade, reforming welfare, and championing non-union, charter school, education reforms -- positions that were fiercely opposed by the party's liberal base.

DLC leaders at the time told me that Hillary, who was far more liberal than her husband, opposed their centrist agenda within the White House. 

Obviously, Clinton dismissed her complaints when he expanded the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed Republican legislation cutting the capital gains tax, and enacted the GOP's welfare-to-work reforms.

Then came Hillary's Senate years, choosing to run in the overwhelmingly Democratic state of New York, not in Arkansas where she and her husband established their political careers.

Can anyone name one major legislative initiative that she made during her time as a senator? One legislative reform that she authored, fought for and managed through Congress?

Yet by 2008, she believed she was ready to run the country and lead the Free World. Democrats didn't think so.

In the first major nominating contest that year, Hillary finished a humiliating third in the Iowa caucuses -- behind Obama and then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina. Her candidacy was seen as presumptuous and her aloof, humorless personality on the stump didn't help, either.

But President Obama made her his secretary of State, despite the fact that she had no foreign policy experience whatsoever. But, then, neither did Obama, who had been an untested freshman senator of no accomplishment for a mere three years before he ran for president.

She quickly demonstrated that she had little or no skills in foreign policy statecraft, focusing instead on making lots of speeches, and building her travel record -- leaving the details of running the State Department and its embassies and consulates to others. 

That led to the deadly catastrophe in Benghazi, Libya, where our ambassador and three other Americans were killed in a terrorist attack that State Department officials initially tried to coverup as a tame Muslim protest that just got out of hand.

Numerous investigations and congressional hearings were held, revealing the heart-breaking pleas from U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens for beefed up security at the besieged consulate -- which never came. 

Since she stepped down from her post at the end of Obama's first term, and after writing a book about her four years at State, Hillary's had many opportunities to address the enormous problems that afflict our country under this administration.

Start with the weak, jobless, underperforming Obama economy, about which Hillary, incredibly, has had little or nothing to say. A Pew Poll late last month found 58 percent of Americans surveyed said "jobs are difficult to find."

Median family income has fallen from $53,100 in 2007 to $46,700 in 2013. About one-third of young adults, the so-called millennials, still live with their parents. The U.S. economy is stuck in a slow growth quagmire of less than 2 percent annually.

Hillary's government-centered solution at the steak fry in Indianola, Iowa Sunday sounded almost word for word like Obama's failed agenda: "…we are for raising the minimum wage, for equal pay for equal work, for making college and technical training affordable, for growing the economy to benefit everyone."

But raising the minimum wage would kill 500,000 to one million jobs, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says. How would she produce stronger economic growth, create more jobs and raise incomes? She doesn't say.

We’re living a failing economy. Job hunters are so discouraged, tens of millions have dropped out. The world is erupting in flames. The terror threat to America is higher than any time since September 10, 2001. Democrats have no successes to point to, nothing positive to defend going into election season. Presidential approval is tanking. Obviously, America is ready for something different. Big government progressives are about to get spanked! Right? Not even close.

Look out, conservatives! With the help of ignorant or malicious national Big Pens and Big Hairs who wouldn’t know the benefits of Constitutional freedom if it bit them in the amicus, you’re about to get painted as the biggest racists, sexists, class-snob robber barons the world has ever known. We’re talking America before civil rights; matrimony before female inheritance and voting rights; class castes before Social Security and food stamps. You horrible non-liberals won’t rest until everyone who isn’t a rich, white, heterosexual, property owning male is hungry, uninsured, unemployed, and socially oppressed.

It’s an old but successful playbook. When Paul Ryan burst on the scene as the VP nominee, with creative ideas on the budget, fighting poverty, and sparking the economy that was dying under Obama, the president displayed his customary grace by accusing Republicans of peddling "trickle-down fairy dust." The media obligingly piled on with stories about Romney’s wealth and Ryan’s tiny nicks in the massive entitlement empire as if they were the end of economic progress.

They protected Progressive dogma and liberal economic fraud in the same way they protected Obama’s foreign policy frauds. The latter have burst into such a disastrous fireball, there’s barely public or media attention left for the former. Nevertheless, there’s domestic economic suffering aplenty.

To preview the coming election/policy debates, let’s consider one class warfare staple: “Trickle down economics.” Strictly speaking, that taunt has always been an incoherent mess.

People get wealthy by persuading consumers to buy their products and services. It’s actually trickle up economics. Goods and services flow to consumers; payment flows to suppliers. And, entrepreneurs usually hire and benefit a lot of workers along the way.

“Trickle down economics”--what does it mean? That if we don't tax the snot out of the rich, maybe they'll pour some spare pennies down on the heads of the poor? Nonsense. Beyond achieving a miserly-sounding sneer, the pairing is exactly wrong in at least three different ways.

First, the wealthy don’t actually trickle anything down on anyone. They pay for things they need and want, with whatever effects that produces in the economy. What progressives seem to prefer is a system to wring the rich like a wet towel and politically drizzle the money on the needy—what’s left, anyway, after government waters its favored causes and cronies.

That's the approach of the shake-down state economies of the Euro-moribund zone and of the great Peron-Castro-Chavez banana republic tradition. You know, where strongmen gain power, neutralize competing power centers--like checks and balances—assert economic control, and chocan the fortunes and freedom of rising Latin nations. (“Chocar” doesn’t mean “to choke” but close enough).

That turns out to be the real “trickle down”: extract lots of money from the rich, feed it through the digestive tract of government and its many corrupt parasites, then dribble what’s left on the heads of the grateful, dependent poor, thus securing their suicidal votes.

It’s ruined a number of nations and threatens to ruin America.

Come to think, “trickle down economics” also reasonably describes the redistributive obsession and promises President Obama has powerfully and empirically debunked in an exhaustive six year field study. Jobs down. Dependency way up. Inequality up. Bravo, Mr. President! Thank you for historically vindicating the historically consequential Reaganism you hoped to erase from the textbooks.

Second, what liberals call “trickle down” is just good ole’ “supply side" or “free market” economics. It means human freedom in commercial activity. Get out of the way of people’s pursuit of happiness and gainful labor, so free exchange and economic growth can build prosperity. Investors, entrepreneurs, managers, and workers build enterprises that hire employees to market goods and services to willing buyers. Prosperity and opportunity spread out from there.

Third, interestingly, if any vertical metaphor makes sense here, it’s not “down,” but “up.” “Trickle up economics” describes free enterprise far better than “trickle down.” The way to build wealth in a free economy is to satisfy the market, as in consumers. That is, to get rich you have to offer goods or services for which A) people are willing to pay you; B) a price higher than your cost of providing; and C) in sufficient quantity that profits proliferate. And your offer has to be more attractive than your other competitors’.

If people get wealthy in a free economy, it's because the wealth trickles up as a result of others’ free choices pursuing their own benefit. All the related suppliers, employees, contractors and others also gain from the same flowing currents of wealth generation. Apart from charitable giving--a different subject--the rich don’t pour or trickle anything down on less fortunate heads; rather the middle and working classes earn income in the streams that trickle up toward success.

Ever since this silly insult first trickled harmlessly off Ronald Reagan’s Teflon, its logic has been amiss. But it is all the liberal establishment has left.

If Americans want some cheap fuel for the economy, it would be best to vote GOP this time around because only the GOP has a plan for inexpensive, reliable domestic energy production. Combined with a lifting of restrictions on exportation of unrefined oil, fuel prices could be significantly lower than they are now.

And where they are now—lower—has helped the economy greatly in the last month.

For years I’ve puzzled over how so many Americans have lost the connection between inexpensive, reliable energy sources and a robust economy. But this month’s retail sales numbers make the connection clear. Retail sales were up in line with expectations. The rise in sales largely reflected lower gas prices, which meant that more money was available to consumers to spend on something besides fuel.

“U.S. retail sales rose in August as Americans bought automobiles and a range of other goods,” reports Reuters, “which should ease some concerns about consumer spending and support expectations for sturdy growth in the third quarter…. While sales at service stations fell 0.8 percent, that reflected declining gasoline prices, which should free up income and support discretionary spending in the months ahead.”

While the economy has adjusted to the reality of higher gas prices and higher taxes under Obama, an economy that has lower gas prices and lower taxes does better than one that does not. Money moves from fuel costs and tax receipts when those costs go down into, say, electronics purchases like the iPhone 6.

That’s simple math and common sense.

That of course is why the GOP skunks the Democrats when it comes to energy policy: math and common sense are never liberal strong suits.

If you want an overarching bureaucracy dedicated to slowing down the economy, sapping its vitality and drive, and denying consumers choice in the marketplace, then the Democrats are definitely for you.

That’s been fairly obvious since 2006.

But if you want the best post-Obama recovery the world will ever see, then vote GOP.

Since Obama was elected in 2008, a revolution in energy has transformed the world. The United States has never, ever had more proven reserves of cheap so-called fossil fuels. Even with the government doing all it can to stop energy production, there is a massive glut of some types of oil because refineries are running at capacity to process that fuel. To some extent however this increase in production here at home has yet to be felt in worldwide oil markets. The oil produced here at home won’t go into the open market, but will stay here due to the oil exportation ban.

We can buy oil from foreigners; we just can’t sell them oil.

Yeah, the ban is stupid; the ban is shortsighted; the ban is non-economical. And that of course is why the Democrats like it.

If there were a single policy area that our next president could concentrate on to right our economy it would be in supporting domestic energy production. And lower taxes. And repealing Obamacare. And reforming welfare. Oh, and don’t forget education: fixing education would be huge. We could also use labor union reform to be honest with you. And a better funded military.

So please, vote GOP.

"If you see something, say something." That's what our homeland security apparatchiks incessantly preach. But 13 years after the 9/11 attacks, the freedom to warn is in danger and vigilant whistleblowers are under fire.

Listen to Robert MacLean. He's a former Air Force nuclear weapons specialist and Border Patrol agent recruited by the government to serve as one of the first federal air marshals after 9/11.

In 2003, MacLean underwent emergency training to prepare for a new round of al-Qaida hijacking threats. Jihadists exploiting visa and screening loopholes had planned to target East Coast airliners, according to intelligence analysts. For unknown reasons, however, the Transportation Security Administration abruptly called off air marshals from duty on nonstop, long-distance flights -- just two days before the anticipated hijacking.

How did they notify the air marshals? Cue the Keystone Cops. "TSA chose to send the unlabeled text message to our unsecured Nokia 3310 cellular phones instead of our $22 million encrypted smart phone system. There were no markings or secrecy restrictions on the message," MacLean recounted to Congress this week. "We all thought it was a joke given the special training we had just received and the post-9/11 law that nonstop long-distance flights were a priority."

A supervisor told MacLean the agency was broke and there was nothing he could do. Appalled at both the dangerous pullback and the reckless way in which the feds notified the air marshals, MacLean then contacted his department's inspector general hotline and was warned he would be "cutting (his) career short if (he) pursued the issue further." Instead, he went to the press and made his homeland security concerns public. In 2006, MacLean was fired.

More than a decade later, the dedicated security expert has battled the feds who retaliated against him. He was forced into bankruptcy and shut out of law enforcement jobs. His legal case heads to the Supreme Court this fall. God bless him. Despite the consequences, MacLean would do it all again in a heartbeat.

"I blew the whistle because I had to," he testified this week. "I could not live with the tragedy risked if I had been the cynical silent observer."

MacLean is not alone. Do you remember 10 years ago when then-Federal Air Marshal Service Director Thomas Quinn refused to allow his employees to dress undercover? Quinn, a former Secret Service agent, insisted that air marshals abide by military-style grooming standards and a rigid business dress policy regardless of weather, time of year or seating arrangement. Yes, really. Marshals were ordered to dress like characters straight out of "Men in Black" -- leaving them vulnerable to terrorist identification.

Critics of the code dubbed Quinn the Captain Queeg of homeland security. He even assigned fashion police to enforce the rules his own spokesman denied existed. Homeland security bureaucrats in Washington back then downplayed the marshals' complaints about the dress policy and other directives and leaks that undermined the marshals' anonymity.

Officials at headquarters smeared the messengers inside and outside the agency and denied any wrongdoing. One top special agent in charge of the marshals' Atlanta office, Don Strange, was fired after criticizing the dress code and boarding procedures that made the marshals' identities obvious. Another agent, Frank Terreri, faced retaliation for whistleblowing and was forced to sue to protect his job.

Today, the Federal Air Marshal program remains riddled with mismanagement, corruption and neglect. In April, FAM Director Robert Bray resigned amid an embarrassing gun scheme probe. And earlier this year, six of 24 air marshal offices closed, and hiring was frozen in Las Vegas, Seattle and Denver. Yet, according to one of my sources, "the last class of air marshals graduated from the academy in 2012. The service has not hired any mission-flying FAMs since. In that same time frame, they have promoted or hired over 300 people, and continue to do so, for supervisory and administrative duties. Almost every supervisory position includes a paid move and a yearly salary of $100,000."

Every 9/11, pundits talk about how "everything changed" after the attacks. But the homeland security bureaucracy is as petty, vindictive, wasteful and stupid as ever.

Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is [email protected].

First the strategy -- which is to get each crisis off the front pages and off television news programs as quickly as he can, in whatever way he can, at the lowest political cost. Calling ISIS a junior varsity months ago accomplished that goal.

Saying before the 2012 elections that "bin Laden is dead" and that terrorism was defeated accomplished the goal of getting reelected.

Ineffective sanctions against Iran and Russia likewise serve a clear purpose. They serve to give the illusion that Obama is doing something that will stop Iran from getting nuclear bombs and stop Russia from invading Ukraine.

This forestalls the massive and enraged outcries there would be if the public were fully aware that he was doing nothing serious enough to prevent either of these things from happening. Generations of Americans yet unborn may curse us all for leaving them hostage to a nuclear terrorist Iran. But generations yet unborn do not vote, so they carry no weight with Barack Obama.

No one has a perfect batting average in any field, so Obama has been caught in some dicey situations, such as the sudden eruption of ISIS on the world stage, with their videotaped beheadings that make it hard to get them off the front pages and off the TV newscasts.

Caught off guard, the president has played for time -- time for Iraq to get its internal politics fixed, time for our allies to come together, time for the military to create a strategy. Ideally, from his standpoint, time for the whole ISIS crisis to blow over.

There is always someone else to blame for whatever goes wrong in the Obama administration. Supposedly the intelligence services had not kept him informed about how imminent the ISIS threat was. But others who received top-secret briefings by the intelligence services say otherwise.

Some people are wondering how someone of obvious intelligence like Barack Obama could be so mistaken about so many things, especially in deadly foreign policy issues. But there is no way of knowing whether anyone is succeeding or failing without first knowing what they are trying to do.

If you assume that Barack Obama is trying to protect the safety and interests of the United States and its allies, then clearly he has been a monumental failure. It is hard to think of any part of the world where things have gotten better for us since the Obama administration began.

Certainly not in Iraq. Or Iran. Or Libya. Or China. Things went from bad to worse after Obama intervened in Egypt and helped put the murderous Muslim Brotherhood in power. Fortunately for Egypt -- and for the whole Middle East -- the Egyptian military took the Muslim Brotherhood out of power, in defiance of Obama.

If you start from the assumption that Barack Obama wanted to advance America's interests, this is truly an unbelievable record of failure. But what is there in Obama's background that would justify the assumption that America's best interests are his goal?

He has, from childhood on, been mentored by, or allied with, people hostile to the United States and to American values. His mentors and allies have all been very much like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, even if they were not as flamboyant.

Barack Obama has succeeded in reducing America's military strength while our adversaries are increasing theirs, and reducing our credibility and influence with our allies. That is completely consistent with his vision of how the world ought to be, with the West taken down a peg and humbled.

We are currently at a point where we can either kill as many of the ISIS terrorists as possible over there -- where they are bunched together and visible against a desert background -- or else leave the job half done and have them come over here, where they will be hard to find, and can start beheading Americans in America.

Everything in Barack Obama's history suggests that he is going to leave the job half done, so long as that gets the issue off the front pages and off the TV newscasts.

"Do you have a strategy now, Mr. President?" asked the cover of the Daily News next to a photo of the second American journalist to be beheaded by the terrorist group ISIS.

The impulse to "do something" to counter such evil is strong.

But why do we assume that government doing something is always an improvement over government doing nothing?

In domestic policy, encouraging government to act leads to nonsense like the "stimulus spending" that created boondoggles such as Cash for Clunkers.

Our foreign policy record isn't much better, despite big successes such as stopping Hitler. Consider the unintended consequences of involving ourselves in other conflicts, such as Vietnam.

President Carter, now derided as a weakling, wasn't about to sit around and "do nothing" when Russians invaded Afghanistan. Carter armed Islamic fighters, the mujahidin. Bold move.

But later those fighters formed the Taliban.

President Clinton lobbed missiles at al-Qaida without doing much damage. Osama bin Laden mocked the U.S. as a "paper tiger" for such ineffectual tactics.

When President George W. Bush chose to go to war with Saddam Hussein, Vice President Cheney assured the world we'd be hailed as "liberators." After we weren't, hawks said the invasion still made the world safer, because Saddam harbored terrorists.

Well, Iraq is definitely a harbor for terrorists now.

Despite our frequent military interventions from Southeast Asia to Latin America, in the Wall Street Journal, Brookings Institution foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan warns about "America's dangerous aversion to conflict."

Aversion to conflict?

I too get frustrated watching evildoers abuse Americans overseas. Maybe the plan to "train and equip" certain tribes and eventually "destroy ISIS" that President Obama will speak about tonight will be a good thing.

But I'm skeptical.

After the toppling of Saddam, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice thought it was smart to support Sunni militants who wanted to fight al-Qaida. But now it's Sunni militants who lead ISIS.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton thought it was smart to aid Islamist militias in Syria and Libya. In Libya, "A monstrous little dictator was removed," writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, but that "left an opening for people who were more monstrous still, who murdered our ambassador, burned our consulate in Benghazi and have now run us out of Tripoli."

We may soon do an about-face and help Bashir Assad against militias we had hoped would overthrow him (a few months ago, when he was the latest in a long line of foreign leaders who hawks likened to Hitler).

We don't know what our interventions will bring. If we remove ISIS, we remove the biggest threat to terrorist cells like Hamas. Fighting these groups is like fighting Hydra, the monster from Greek mythology. Cut off one head, two more grow back.

The policy twists and turns come so fast that Americans may give up on following them all. I don't blame them: In Syria alone, there's conflict between Assad's government, the Free Syrian army, al-Qaida, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamic Front, Hezbollah, ISIS and so on.

Remember hawkish Sen. John McCain appearing in a photo with some Syrian fighters who turned out to be terrorists? It's hard to keep track.

One of the terrorists' goals is to get us to overreact. They understand how much it costs us. In a piece titled "The Beheadings Are Bait," Matthew Hoh from the Center for International Policy reminds readers that Osama bin Laden said, "All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there and cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."

Maybe it's time for America to stop taking the bait. Islamic militants do monstrous things all over the world. We cannot stop it all.

There may be actions we can take. Thousands of people in Iraq were rescued by airdrops of food and water. Air strikes stopped the ISIS advance.

But there is a big difference between that type of action and prolonged engagement.

The urge to "do something" is understandable. But Government can't get domestic policy right. Don't assume it gets foreign policy right.

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Oops. Attorney General Eric Holder’s office accidently tried to concoct a PR strategy to undermine Republican Congressman Darrell Issa with… Darrell Issa’s office. According to a letter released by Issa, a Senior Communication aide to Holder (who used to work for Chuck Schummer) called the congressman’s office asking to release documents that would “undermine” the Republican investigation into the IRS scandal.

So, I repeat: Oops.

Brian Fallon, who previously spent his time in DC as an aid to Democrat Senator Chuck Schummer, apparently needs to update his rolodex. (Wait… Does anyone still use a rolodex, or should we be talking about Google “circles” and i-phone contacts?) Staff members in Issa’s office received a strange call on Friday afternoon of last week when Brian called, asking to release “specific documents” before the “majority” (those are Republicans, by the way) had a chance to comment on them.

Frank Underwood, I’m sure, is shaking his head in disappointment at such a rookie mistake, Brian.

In short, Holder’s aide called up Issa’s office asking to undermine Republicans in their investigation into the IRS targeting scandal… It’s a pretty safe assumption that poor little Brian tried to call Elijah Cummings, who is the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee. After all, reports have been mysteriously appearing in the Press before the Committee makes them public, and it’s highly unlikely that the leading Republican would be damaging his own case. I guess up until now it has been a complete and total mystery as to how such information was leaked… But we could probably take some guesses.

After requesting that a few select documents be leaked to the press, and some PR spin be liberally applied, Brian apparently realized his mistake. It’s still unclear when Brian might have realized he misdialed… Maybe it was when Issa’s staff asked for such odd (and questionably moral) requests to be put in writing, or maybe it just took the brilliant DOJ aide several minutes to process the words “Darrel Issa’s office, how can I help you?”

Either way, the hapless Holder-helper abruptly put Issa’s staffers on hold… For three minutes.

After a short commercial break, the loveable lug from the DOJ got back on the line with a very witty (albeit unnerved) explanation that he was trying to “work together” with the committee… It’s only laughable because Eric Holder was recently found to be in contempt of Congress for ignoring the will of the House.

So, let’s recap:

A DOJ aide accidently called the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee; then he asked that a handful of documents be released to “select” reporters in an effort to get “in front of” Republicans on the issue; then he put staffers on hold; then he came back (audibly shaken) and blabbered about “working together”.

Yeah. This sounds legit.

Good thing Brian wasn’t around when Holder was running guns to Mexico… Who knows what kind of calls Issa’s office would be getting on Friday afternoons

It seems the Export-Import Bank of the United States is once again putting up walls to keep the duly-elected representatives of the American people from getting a look at their inner workings. Ex-Im Chairman Fred Hochberg recently dashed off a letter to U.S. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Patrick McHenry in which he dismissed the committee’s request to interview Ex-Im officials, shying away from what he called “the inherently adversarial nature of transcribed interviews.”

The Ex-Im Chairman also defended the Bank’s practice of making heavy redactions to the documents they have deigned to turn over to the committee. He did, however, offer to provide “additional information if you have questions about particular redactions.” This, apparently, is a man who thinks having committee staff pick out every single blacked-out word or phrase is a good use of their taxpayer-funded time. Or maybe, because he knows how prevalent these redactions are – as Chairman Hensarling put it, “more redactions than answers” – this is simply another attempt to slow-walk any investigation into the Ex-Im Bank’s affairs.

In Chairman Hochberg’s position, it’s hard to blame him. The stakes are high for the Ex-Im Bank at the moment. Their charter expires at the end of this month, and without reauthorization by Congress, the bank will fold. Several Members of Congress, including senior lawmakers like Hensarling and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have already expressed their support for just that. It’s no wonder that Chairman Hochberg might be a little concerned about his job security. But by redacting documents and withholding access to government workers for interviews, what exactly is he trying to hide about the Ex-Im Bank?

Could it be yet more evidence of corruption? It was widely reported earlier this summer that four officials had left the Bank under a cloud of fraud allegations, ranging from questionable contracting practices to taking kickbacks from companies hoping to do business with Ex-Im. Hochberg made a particularly uncomfortable and evasive appearance before a Financial Services subcommittee in July to discuss these matters. Also called to testify was Johnny Gutierrez, one of the dismissed Ex-Im staffers, who elected to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Approximately 40 charges of fraud were noted to be under investigation by the Bank’s Inspector General at that time. Perhaps even more cases have been discovered in the intervening weeks and Hochberg hopes to keep them under wraps.

Or, it could be that the bank’s chairman wants to conceal more of Ex-Im’s embarrassing foreign entanglements. They finally stopped making deals with Russia in July, only after the Treasury Department sanctioned two Russian state banks who had previously received $519.6 million in combined financing from Ex-Im. Now, with Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolling around eastern Ukraine, Ex-Im would be especially keen to suppress any additional, unwelcome details of their relations with Russian government-backed financial institutions.

Maybe Hochberg simply wants to keep Congress and the public from discovering any new details that more firmly establish the Ex-Im Bank as a crony-capitalist institution that regularly picks winners and losers – though that’s fairly self-evident as it is. We already know that about 60 percent of the Bank’s financing flows to ten massive corporations like Boeing, Caterpillar and GE. Fine American companies all, but none in need of additional government subsidies – especially not when those subsidies happen to kill American jobs.

When Ex-Im provides taxpayer-backed financing so a foreign airline can buy a Boeing jet, they put our own American airlines – who must pay the sticker price – at a competitive disadvantage. One study estimated that these sweetheart deals for foreign airlines have already cost more than 7,500 jobs in the U.S. airline industry.

That’s exactly the sort of inconvenient connection that Chairman Hochberg doesn’t want the Financial Services Committee to make. He may well be concerned that the more Congress learns about the Ex-Im Bank, the more likely they’ll be to vote against its reauthorization, leaving him out of a job.

It’s time to face the music, Chairman Hochberg. Congress has a right to conduct effective oversight over the executive branch, and even more fundamentally, the people have a right to the truth.

President Barack Obama had another very bad week. It was only because former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell was convicted on eleven of fourteen counts of corruption that Mr. Obama didn't walk away with the Worst Week honors.

President announced during his pre-taped interview with Chuck Todd (to help mark the beginning of the Todd era on Meet the Press) that he would be addressing the nation on Wednesday night on his strategy for dealing with ISIS/ISIL/IS.

Remember, a couple of weeks ago he told a presser that he had no strategy to do that which was about as dumb a statement as we have heard from a President of the United States since Gerald Ford insisted that "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" in 1976.

On his trip to Europe last week to attend the NATO summit, the White House staff thought it would be a big deal for the President to make a stop in Estonia which was one of the Eastern European nations that President Ford didn't realize were under Soviet domination.

If, as most now believe, Republicans will organize the Senate next year, it is not at all clear how much political power will be available to him during the expected Lame Duck Session between the

November 4, 2014 election and the opening of the new Congress on or about January 3, 2015.

Barack Obama's job approval according to the RealClearPolitics.com average of major polls shows the President stuck at 41.5 percent. The Gallup Daily Tracking Poll shows him at 38 percent approval overall through

Friday's polling - his all time low in the Gallup sequence.Looking at the latest crosstabs available which are through the end of August, Blacks supported the President with an 89 percent approval rating, but only 30 percent of Whites approved.

That may not surprise many, but here's where political types' eyes will widen. Among the category of respondents who identified themselves as a "Pure Independent" President Obama's approval was also at only 30%. These numbers, remember, largely portray the President's approval before the damaging "no strategy" blunder. The President's political power is dissipating like the sand under your feet at the beach when the tide is going out.

I was the spokesman for then-Governor Bob McDonnell's legal team through the summer and early fall last year. I know a lot about what went on, much of which is still covered by my tenuous link to attorney-client privilege. Here's my feeling - notwithstanding the trial that ended in all those guilty verdicts last week: If stupidity exhibited by elected officials becomes actionable under Federal law, the U.S. House and Senate will have a tough time gathering a quorum.

My other take-away from my brief time in Richmond is that the only difference between the way business is done in Virginia and, say, Louisiana is the public nature of the "gifts" to officials. In Virginia, they just smile and nod. In Louisiana they say things, like: "Hell, yes he gave me a boat, but I earned it!" The silence from both Republicans and Democrats in the Statehouse as McDonnell twisted slowly in the wind for most of his final year in office was deafening. But, if you listened very closely, I believe you could hear the murmured prayers of many other officials who similarly made liberal use of the almost-non-existent gift laws in Virginia.  Bob McDonnell's term of Governor will, of course, be measured by his conviction, but he was a good Governor who, his dreadful judgment in his private life notwithstanding, left the Commonwealth better than he found it.

The only difference between Obama’s ISIS strategy in defeating the Islamic terror group and Obamacare is that under Obama’s strategy, ISIS will likely be able to keep their doctors and their current coverage, while under Obamacare you will not. Oh, and it won’t cost ISIS even a penny more to beat Obama than it would have previously.

Make no mistake though: Neither will work the way they are being sold.

That’s because Obama’s strategy relies upon the extreme Islamic states --states that made ISIS possible-- forming into a coalition to defend us from the ISIS extremists that they have funded for years. Falling short of the all out war that Henry Kissinger urged upon Obama against ISIS, the president-- of sorts—says that the guys who failed to be able to stand up to Osama bin Laden when he was a stateless refugee, the folks who couldn’t defeat Saddam Hussein, the states that couldn’t stand up to the Muslim Brotherhood or Iran should suddenly become resolute.

And moderate.

Obama’s strategy will fail because those people don’t actually exist.

“We're going to have to develop a moderate Sunni opposition,” wished the guy who couldn’t even get a budget passed as president, “that can control territory and that we can work with.”

Develop a moderate Sunni opposition? That we can work with?

Because THAT strategy was NEVER tried before.

Why doesn’t Obama just stick to things he knows more about, like stopping the seas from rising, Grammy-winning audiobooks, and peace prizes?

What Obama lacks in executive ability he matches in a lack of originality.

I’m not saying that Obama steals ideas that he claims to be his own, I’m just saying that the title of his next book ought to be “Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Stole from Someone Else, Mostly Communists and Marxists. But It’s All Bush’s Fault.”

Obama was handed a moderate Sunni opposition in Iraq protected by U.S. troops—created by George W. Bush-- and he forsook them. It’s hard to be moderate when the extremists want to kill you with U.S permission.

And if Obama thinks that countries like Saudi Arabia are going to help us, then he’s crazier than I already know him to be. The Saudis are funding the extremists in the same way the Kaiser funded Russian socialists during the Great War. At this rate, expect the Kaiser to eventually abdicate, again.

“Obama doesn’t seem to get it,” Ramzy Mardini, an analyst with the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group told Bloomberg News by e-mail. “No Arab leader wants to publicly join hands with the ‘Great Satan’ and ‘Crusaders’ in fighting a war in the Middle East.”

That’s because guys like Obama have consistently told the American people and the rest of the world that America actually doesn’t care about Iraq. And some people—some people in the Middle East and in America, even believed him.

I’m not one of them.

Here’s the deal, my fellow Americans: You either make a commitment to Iraq or you don’t. You do it because the stakes are high enough for your own country that the expenditure of blood makes it in your national best interest.

We can have differences in how we got here, but there is no doubt that we are at a Rubicon of sorts.

If, as Obama has said, this is not our fight, then why are we fighting it?

But if, as Obama’s actions and words suggest, we do have something at stake, why didn’t we take it seriously and stick to it when the situation was manageable in Iraq in 2009?

It will take that kind of commitment to win-- again.

Obama has said that in just meeting with world leaders at a NATO summit he knows his fellow heads of state understand the gravity of the threat that ISIS poses to everyone. I hope that’s true.

Because clearly Obama understands nothing about the threat ISIS poses to the United States of America.

The economy created only 142,000 jobs in August, down from 212,000 in July, indicating the economy significantly slowed this summer.

Jobs creation is well below the pace needed to reemploy all the workers displaced during the financial crisis—the economy is in crisis!

 Although official GDP estimates indicate the economy expanded in the second quarter at a torrid pace—4.2. percent—much of that was inventory build, as consumer spending continued to drag along at a nonplus pace and capital investment, especially in manufacturing, remains subpar.

Third quarter growth is likely in the range of 2 percent, and the Obama Administration spin doctors will have a tough time selling these jobs data as anything but bad news.

Simply, the administration’s big spending stimulus policies and the Fed’s obsession with pumping money into a moribund New York financial industry have failed.

Also, now Americans are seeing the real cost of ObamaCare health care subsidies. Employer mandates are not much good to working families if no one in the family is working.

The official jobless rate is down to 6.1 percent but real unemployment is closer to 18 percent, because so many prime aged adults are sitting out the party. For example, one in six adult males between the ages of 25 and 54 has no job, and may have simply quit looking thanks to “compassionate” government policies that reward able bodied men and women to sit at home and watch ESPN NFL reruns or The View.

Since 2000, Congress has beefed up the earned income tax credit, and expanded programs providing direct benefits to low and middle income workers, including ObamaCare and Medicaid, food stamps, and rent and mortgage assistance.

Those buy votes but do little to encourage work.

Benefits phase down as family incomes rise, and often tax additional income as much as 50 percent. Consequently, government benefits penalize work and encourage one partner in two adult households to be idle.

 Also, those programs offer incentives for single people to work only part-time and contribute to skills shortage.

With millions of young college graduates unable to land a professional job and start a career, the president has implemented irresponsible federal student loan policies. And unscrupulous university presidents exploit young people by peddling graduate programs that promise rewarding careers but only deliver a lifetime of debt.

 Student loans take disgruntled college graduates off the streets, lower the official unemployment rate and deliver electoral majorities for Democrats but undermine future growth. Simply, too many folks in their late 20s are stuck in dead end jobs, burdened with crippling debt and unable to buy a home or comfortably start families.

The root cause of the jobs crisis is chronically anemic growth, whose sources candidate Obama promised to address in 2008 but has forgotten.

 These include the purposefully undervalued Chinese and Japanese currencies, which cheapen imports, siphon off demand for American-made products and destroy factory jobs; federal restrictions on offshore oil and gas development, which unnecessarily perpetuate U.S. oil imports and finance terrorism; business regulations more burdensome than necessary to accomplish worthy objectives, which create prestigious jobs for political supporters and create monopolies for campaign contributors; and a tax structure ranked one of the worst in the world for encouraging sound business decisions and supporting international competitiveness.

A second term president should be a statesman looking to the long-term security and prosperity of the American people.

Instead, Obama continues to campaign, blames his predecessor and congress for his disappointments, and will leave Americans poorer and less safe in the bargain

Despite brave proclamations that the economy is a rolling juggernaut of wealth and job creation, once again the jobs report underwhelmed even the anemic estimates analysts have been counting on to brightly prop up this gray economy.

“U.S. job growth slowed to its lowest level of the year in August,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “a stumble for labor markets that had delivered a string of steady gains over the prior six months despite uneven economic growth.”

Payrolls came out at 142,000 versus a consensus estimate of 225,000, a miss of 83,000 to the negative or a 37 percent mulligan over the estimate.

It’s time for economists to admit what everyone knows: The experiment in a government controlled economy that sets interest rates, sells insurance, cars, student loans, home mortgages, while rationing out energy, housing, healthcare and money has failed. And the economists should be the first to admit it.

When you predict that global temperatures will get hotter and they don’t, something is wrong with your assumptions. Likewise when you predict year after year, month after month that the economy is finally on the mend, and it remains cool, not hot, something is wrong with your plan.

Some folks at the Federal Reserve Bank seem to understand that.

“In this regard,” write economists at the Saint Louis Federal Reserve Bank, “the unconventional monetary policy [of quantitative easing and zero interest rates] has reinforced the recession by stimulating the private sector’s money demand through pursuing an excessively low interest rate policy (i.e., the zero-interest rate policy).”

And. Well. Duh.

As I pointed out on the radio on Thursday, Japan has been trying some version of “unconventional” monetary policy for over a decade and they have little to show for it. Yes, the once mighty Japanese—now replaced in our mythology by the mightier still Chinese—have screwed up their economy year after year for over a decade by doing the same dumb things that we are perfecting now, keeping interest rates artificially low.

There is a temptation in all this to blame the bankers, who after all, benefit greatly from these policies in that the demand for their product—money—goes up when interest rates are low. But the truth is that it is the government that sets rates artificially low and is the biggest beneficiary of the policy. The bankers go along because in the absence of a sound fiscal policy that generates GDP at least everyone can borrow money to offset our non-growth.

The government, especially THIS government under Obama, benefits because the only campaign they know how to run is the one based on everyone being upset about something that they can blame on someone else. They have lived on the fact that demographically they can create more complainers who will vote for their side than the other side can.

Scapegoating is their typical leadership style. That’s true of politicians in general, but blame-someone-else has been elevated to a kind of mixed-media performance art under Obama.

It’s time to blame the person responsible for all of this.

I nominate Elizabeth Warren.

Looking more and more like a presidential hopeful, Warren sounded off on GOP Majority Whip Eric Cantor’s defection to Wall Street for a big payday after his recent defeat in Virginia by Austrian economist David Brat.

"How wrong can this be that basically what's happening here is that people work in Washington, and man, they hit that revolving door [to Wall Street] with a speed that would blind you," Warren said in an interview with Yahoo News.

But Warren and her colleagues in academia have that similar problem. Where do you think all the money comes from for report after report, study after study generated by academics like Warren who praise government spending, government control and unconventional monetary policy?

The money involved may be smaller, but it smacks of no less of venality, no less of corruption and no less of conflict of interest. It just proves academics typically think smaller than those on Wall Street and Main Street.

That affects us all adversely.

Because it’s those same small academic minds from which economists are born.

So now you know why economists and our economy are so, so, very wrong.

And small. And poor. 

Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history. Never a politician in this land had such quasi "religious" impact on so many people. The fact that Obama is a total incognito with Zero accomplishment, makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming.

Obama is not an ordinary man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite
ignorant on most important subjects. Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the "Malignant Self Love," believes Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist. Vaknin is a world authority on narcissism. He understands narcissism and describes the inner mind of a narcissist like no other person.  When he talks about narcissism everyone listens. Vaknin says that Obama's language, posture and demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest friends suggest that the man is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of People's Temple, the man who led over 900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder their own children was also a narcissist. David Koresh, Charles Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao, Kim Jong Ill and Adolph Hitler area few examples of narcissists of our time.

All these men had a tremendous influence over their fanciers. They created a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches elevated their admirers, filled their hearts with enthusiasm and instilled in their minds a new zest for life.

They gave them hope!

They promised them the moon, but alas, invariably they brought them to their doom. When you are a victim of a cult of personality, you don't know it until it is too late. One determining factor in the development of NPD is childhood abuse "Obama's early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations, "says Vaknin. "Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant two years old. Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then his mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia , a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father.

At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. "She died of cancer in 1995."

One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it overwhelms those around them. Charmed by the charisma of the narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do his bidding and delight to be at his service..The narcissist shapes the world around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image. He creates a cult of personality. His admirers become his codependents. Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help them to reach their personal objective. They are focused on one thing alone and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and they do not want to waste their precious time on trivialities. Anything that does not help them is beneath them and does not deserve their attention. If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or another, he as no interest in it. The "present" vote is a safe vote. No one can criticize him if things go wrong. Those issues are unworthy by their very nature because they are not aout him.

Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations. The University of Chicago Law School provided him a lot longer than expected and at the end it evolved into, guess what? His own autobiography! Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for which he had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book Dreams from My Father. Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote his own autobiography when he was still a nobody. So did Stalin. For a narcissist no subject is as important as his own self. Why would he waste his precious time and genius writing about insignificant things when he can write about such an august being as himself?

Narcissists are often callous and even ruthless. As the norm, they lack conscience. This is evident from Obama's lack of interest in his own brother who lives on only one dollar per month. A man who lives in luxury, who takes a private jet to vacation in Hawaii, and who raised nearly half a billion dollars for his campaign (something unprecedented in history) has no interest in the plight of his own brother. Why? Because, his brother cannot be used for his ascent to power. A narcissist cares for no one but himself.

This election was like no other in the history of America . The issues were insignificant compared to what is at stake. What can be more dangerous than having a man bereft of conscience, a serial liar, and one who cannot distinguish his fantasies from reality as the leader of the free world? I hate to sound alarmist, but one is a fool if one is not alarmed.

Many politicians are narcissists. They pose no threat to others. They are simply self-serving and selfish. Obama evidences symptoms of pathological narcissism, which is different from the run-of-the-mill narcissism of a Richard Nixon or a Bill Clinton for example. To him reality and fantasy are intertwined.

This is a mental health issue, not just a character flaw. Pathological narcissists are dangerous because they look normal and even intelligent. It is this disguise that makes them treacherous. Today the Democrats have placed all their hopes in Obama. But this man could put an end to their party. The great majority of blacks voted for Obama. Only a fool does not know that their support for him is racially driven. This is racism, pure and simple. The downside of this is that if Obama turns out to be the disaster I predict, he will cause widespread resentment among the whites. The blacks are unlikely to give up their support of their man. Cultic mentality is pernicious and unrelenting. They will dig
their heads deeper in the sand and blame Obama's detractors of racism. This will cause a backlash among the whites. The white supremacists will take advantage of the discontent and they will receive widespread support.

I predict that in less than four years, racial tensions will increase to
levels never seen since the turbulent 1960's. Obama will set the clock back decades.  America is the bastion of freedom. The peace of the world depends on the strength of America , and its weakness translates into the triumph of terrorism and victory of rogue nations. It is no wonder that Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, the Castrists, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, the lawyers of the Guantanamo terrorists, and virtually all sworn enemies of America are so thrilled by the prospect of their man in the White House. America is on the verge of destruction.

There is no insanity greater than electing a pathological narcissist as president.

Michael A. Haberman, M.D.

Many people suggest President Obama has checked out. He treats the ever-growing threat of ISIS as an abstraction. Sources from within the administration are now more openly admitting that, for almost a year, intelligence and Pentagon officials have advised the president of the threat. He has chosen to do very little. Last Wednesday, he said we would "shrink" ISIS and make it "a manageable problem" as opposed to eliminate it.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with a sitting governor and a dear friend of mine. The friend leaned over to the governor and me and said Barack Obama is to America as Clarence the Angel was to George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life." Barack Obama is showing the world what it would look like had America never been born. As this friend later wrote, "Unsurprisingly, Bedford Falls is now Pottersville, and it's a terrible place. Unfortunately, we do not get to revert to the tolerable if modest status quo at the end of the lesson: George Bailey will eventually have to shell the town and retake it street by street from Old Man Potter's Spetsnaz."

Consider how far the world has collapsed in the past year. Again, my friend noted, since Labor Day weekend last year the Chinese expanded their air defense identification zone to incorporate the territory of other nations; the Russians annexed Crimea; ISIS rose; the Russians invaded Ukraine; Mosul fell; the Hungarian liberal democracy collapsed into Russian-aligned authoritarianism; a Central American refugee crisis spawned a border and humanitarian crisis in the United States; the Egyptians and Emiratis attacked Libya without telling the United States; Iraqi Christians and the Yazidi are suffering genocide at the hands of ISIS; NATO is scrambling to shore up its eastern-frontier defenses; mainstream anti-Semitism is re-emerging; the Americans are on the verge of yet another war in Iraq; middle America is seeing race riots, etc., etc.

Seventy-five years ago this past Monday, German tanks rolled across the Polish border setting off World War II. Sixty-nine years ago this past Tuesday, World War II ended as the Japanese formally surrendered. In the nearly seven decades since, the West has established a world-wide peace. Though not flawless, we have lived a relatively stable and secure existence. In just the past year, Barack Obama has largely undone seven decades of gains toward peace.

Our peace was balanced on top of two pillars. The first of the two pillars is the idea of peace through strength. Ensuring the American military could go anywhere at any time to strike back against any foe, no matter its size, has caused many to give us pause. In the last 25 years, after the collapse of the Cold War, America has consciously decided to scale back our military. We have handed military actions to FBI agents serving indictments, signaling our growing complacency.

The other pillar is the moral certainty of the West's goodness. We have, since the fall of Nazi Germany and the rise of its kissing cousin the communists, maintained Western values are superior and right and true. Barack Obama does not believe in the goodness and superiority of Western values. He sees former old colonialists trying to preserve their dubious claims on power. What so many for so long took for granted, Barack Obama sees as oppressive and regressive.

Barack Obama is the first American president who, through his upbringing, writings and actions, conveys a deep sense of grievance toward the American experiment. The idea that we are the last best hope for mankind is anathema to him. Barack Obama thinks the world, if the American imperial aggressor would just sit on the sidelines, could work out its problems and would be better off.

In short, the world has descended into chaos these past 365 days because the American president thinks America is to blame for much of the world's ills and has chosen not to check himself out, but to check the United States out of international affairs. The only question now is how many around the world will die because of it.

It's one thing to watch race hustlers like the Rev. Al Sharpton bellowing, "No justice, no peace." But when the attorney general of the United States makes false but racially incendiary claims about today's alleged "pernicious racism," we are in uncharted territory.

Holder complains about different prison rates, different school expulsion rates and longer prison sentences for black boys and men compared to white boys and men. He equates "equal rights" with "equal results."

In Ferguson, Missouri, after announcing federal investigation into the cop-shooting death of an unarmed black teen, Holder said: "I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man. I can remember being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike on two occasions and accused of speeding. ... I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me."

The New Jersey Turnpike? The long-believed claim of "racism" on that highway has been investigated -- and debunked. Twice.

Numerous complaints of DWB -- Driving While Black -- were filed by blacks driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. So the state entered into a consent decree, agreed to federal monitoring, and put their officers through, among other things, "sensitivity training." New Jersey commissioned a study, checking motorists' speed with laser guns and photographing drivers of vehicles going 15 mph or more over the speed limit.

The result? It turned out that more speeders were black than white, which explained why cops pulled over black motorists so often. The U.S. Justice Department, which requested the study, did not want the results released to the public. Instead, they accused the researchers of using a "flawed methodology." Why shelve a report that disproves racism? Isn't it good news that Jersey troopers do not pull blacks over willy-nilly? Would this not improve race relations in New Jersey? No -- the facts did not fit the script.

The next year, state police "stop data" showed that, on the southern part of the turnpike, 30 percent of the drivers pulled over were minority -- almost twice the 16 percent rate of minority stops elsewhere on the turnpike. So, amid new allegations that cops were targeting minorities, and to correct the "flawed methodology" of the previous researchers, New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey commissioned yet another study. The result? Again, it turned out a disproportionately higher percentage of drivers on that stretch of highway were black, and that blacks were more likely than non-blacks to drive 80 miles per hour or faster. Again, critics called the study's methodology "flawed."

Over 20 years ago, black liberal Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson said: "The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations ... is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa." Holder, however, sees an America -- as to "race-relations" -- still mired in the 1950s.

On a plane about 20 years ago, I met a black man who told me he was nearing 100 years old. What is the secret, I asked, to a long and happy life? Tall and ramrod straight, he said: "I tell my granddaughters to greet everyone with a big smile and an outstretched hand for a handshake. But those young girls don't wanna hear nothing about no smile and no handshake. That generation ain't got no appreciation for how easy they got it."

Perhaps Holder feels guilty because he didn't do something more noble, like marching with MLK while braving attack dogs and water hoses. Perhaps Holder feels guilty because of his own personal success and fears the "people he left behind" will resent him if he doesn't sound empathetic.

Holder's victicrat mentality might also explain why rich blacks -- including, for time, Oprah Winfrey -- belonged to Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ whose pastor denounces the very drive for upward mobility that made Oprah Winfrey Oprah Winfrey.

Why else would successful blacks pull up in their Lexus and BMW's to attend a church that denounces the work ethic that enabled them to drive nice cars, live in nice houses in nice, clean and safe neighborhoods? What sense does it make for a rich black man to listen to his pastor tell him how racism has held him back from becoming rich?

Those "left behind" need a message of hard work and accountability and of seizing the opportunities uniquely offered by the United States of America. In a 1997 Time/CNN poll, a majority of black teens called racism a "big problem." But 89 percent of black teens called racism a "small problem" or "not a problem at all" in their own lives. In fact, nearly twice as many black teens than white teens called "failure to take advantage of available opportunities" a bigger problem than racism.

Tell that to Mr. Holder.

As Americans celebrated Labor Day and the freedom to provide for their families, let’s hope they didn't spoil the holiday yesterday by pausing to consider whether government today is making their lives easier or more difficult.

To wit, the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, published by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation, which ranks countries based on four main factors – rule of law, limited government, regulatory efficiency, open markets – has the US is headed in the wrong direction. “The U.S. is the only country,” the survey states, “to have recorded a loss of economic freedom each of the past seven years.”

As ordinary Americans toil to put food on the table and provide for their families, most “cling” to the idea that the highest aim of our leaders is to leave a legacy of greater freedom our children, not less. Americans don’t believe in a monarchy, and they actually believe everyone should live by the same set of rules, not one set of rules for them and another set for the political class when circumstances or political arguments fail.

Needless to say, many Americans are outraged to see laws being re-written midstream, whether in health care, taxes, immigration or in government grants to political cronies. They are discouraged to learn of the secret 2012 decision by the Treasury Department to confiscate the profits of the mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. With that decision, the federal government thumbed its nose at transparency, flaunted the basic rule of law and property rights, and put the government deeper into the mortgage market. It moves our country in the opposite direction of where it should be headed.

Ordinary Americans understand that our system of freedom, bolstered by a strong foundation of contract enforcement, property rights and the rule of law works better than any other system in the world, but they also know those liberties cannot be taken for granted.

Working families, through their personal accounts, pension funds including those managed on behalf of public employees, and retirement plans hold sizable investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These large funds also often employ private professional money managers to make choices and take risks on their behalf, and through those managers ordinary Americans are invested in a broad swath of the economy, including Fannie and Freddie.

During the financial crisis, the US government, after years of policies that promoted their excesses, chose to move the mortgage packaging giants into conservatorship to manage the entities on behalf of its investors. In doing so, they agreed to a 10% dividend, a figure reminiscent of White House confidant Warren Buffett’s deal with Goldman Sachs when it was running into trouble in 2008.

That was the deal, and it sent signals to the market at that time, including to foreign investors. Some investors held on as they had for years, some sold, some came in with new capital. Treasury then secretly changed the rules and started taking 100%, leaving those who stuck with their investment, or committed new capital to the market , with nothing.

The Wall Street Journal/Heritage study confirms the slow erosion of freedoms, however imperceptible to the modern liberal eye. That erosion occurs bit-by-bit, with each instance of a grab for greater government power, crony capitalism, lack of transparency, and evidence of disdain for private property rights and rule of law.

Having celebrated Labor Day, Americans must go to the polls this November, and vote for political leaders who will advance liberty, limited government, the rule of law and job opportunities.

More Swiss banks are dropping out of the U.S. banking program that the IRS supposedly uses to prevent American citizens from stashing cash overseas to avoid taxes. Known for 100 years as the original tax haven, free from the prying eyes of governments around the world, Swiss banks have provided banking services that guaranteed anonymity to arms dealers, Nazis, and law-abiding Americans alike.

Offshore banks, especially Swiss banks, are not generally used to evade taxes however. The government already has enforcement mechanisms in place to prevent tax evasion by the use of offshore banks by American citizens. No smart rich person, with competent advice, would attempt such a thing. Instead rich people—like the few doctors left who have money-- use offshore banks to protect assets from lawyers and lawsuit seekers who would try to take those assets away. If assets are stashed overseas, they are generally immune from attachment by lawyers. In the asset protection world, this is known as a lawsuit avoidance strategy.

But using as an excuse their hunt for tax cheats-- and the war on terror-- the United States has been pushing overseas banks for access to private banking information from banks with no legal obligation to cooperate with a government that has no jurisdiction over them.

Like banks in Switzerland.

Now, however, some Swiss banks are having second thoughts.

From Reuters:

At least 10 Swiss banks have withdrawn from a U.S. programme aimed at settling a tax dispute between them and the United States, Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag said on Sunday, quoting unnamed sources.

Around 100 Swiss banks came forward at the end of last year to work with U.S. authorities in a programme brokered by the Swiss government to help the banks make amends for aiding tax evasion.

The key here is the phrase “make amends”. There is no mention of illegality here because Swiss banks fall under Swiss laws. But instead we are presented with a “Golly, gee, we sure are sorry that we broke no laws that we are bound to enforce, so have some cash anyway”-type pledge from Swiss banks that make it seem like the U.S. government and Swiss banks are really swell friends who need to make up.

And since U.S. banks are playing the same game with Obama and Eric Holder, I think the Swiss banks ought to be applauded for stopping that type of nonsense. No one should evade taxes, but the heavy hand of the government is prying into areas into which they have no legal right to go.

Like Switzerland. And home mortgages.

Why? Money, that’s why.

Because the program cited in the Swiss banking example is a variation on a scheme that the government is using here at home

There’s a growing need for banking reform in the United States. But it’s not the type of reform that Obama and his pals favor. Instead, using all the coercive powers of the federal government, the administration from “Chicago” has engaged in a greenmail campaign, long ago perfect by liberal special interests.

Growing up in Chicago I was witness to how Jesse Jackson Sr. and Operation PUSH would shake down companies for money in return for not being “hit” by special interests with the tag of being racist by the King of Black people.

It worked, keeping the Reverend Jackson and his various community organized confidence schemes in funds that he still lives off of.

So it’s hardly surprising that the Emperor of Black America, Barack Obama—who is at least Chicago-plated-- would bring this tactic to D.C.

Under Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, the administration has tagged banks as the bad guys—banks that are mostly the creation of the Obama administration genetic experimentation in banking. The government mixed Countrywide with Bank of America, JP Morgan with Bear Stearns, selling off parts of one bank to government-funded banks that were guaranteed by the Obama administration to make profits.

The ruse works like this: The Obama administration in conjunction with various “community organizations” have been chatting up the terrible wrong-doing that banks did in the 2008 financial crisis. These evil banks loaned the banks' capital to people for whom default was more likely, leaving the bank with large losses. The banks did this because if they didn’t they’d be hit with charges of racism by government types, community organizations and the various enforcement arms of various governmental units.

And for a while everything was lovely. The banks made more profits-- with an implied guarantee from the federal government that they wouldn’t lose money-- the government got their hooks deeper into banks, the real power in capitalist America. But when the economy slowed down and home prices stopped making ridiculous gains year after year, the scheme fell apart. That in part is why we had the 2008 financial crisis in the first place.

So after taking control of the banking system by bailing it out, Holder and Obama have now been going around engaging in “settlement” talks with U.S. banks over supposed abuses in regards to risky mortgage loans that banks took loses on. In return for the quid pro quo of not pursuing criminal charges against JP Morgan employees, for example, Holder and Obama have agreed to take a $13 billion settlement from JP Morgan for loans in made in 2005-2007 by a company that Obama made JP Morgan-- Bears Sterns-- buy with government money during the financial crisis.

$9 billion of that settlement goes to the federal government.

But it’s the criminal charges part that is so worrisome.

It’s why the Swiss should be applauded.

There are too many here in this country that would trade their liberty for a $13 billion settlement that means they—or their employees—won’t have to tangle with a greedy government that has the coercive power to put them in jail. And while the Swiss banks don't have anything like that at stake, they do have the one thing that Swiss banks are supposed to care about: Money.

By giving Eric Holder the finger it means they won’t be parting with any.

For me it’s just refreshing for one party, like Swiss banks, to be doing exactly what they should be doing under the law that applies to them.

I remember when that was the rule, not the exception.

Hopefully it spreads here at home.