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Written By : David Limbaugh
August 31, 2012

The Democrats and their mainstream media cheering section can huff and puff at Paul Ryan’s convention speech, but they can’t blow his house down. It was built on a solid foundation.

So powerful was the speech that the liberal establishment is reduced to wailing about alleged lies the speech contained — dishonest and easily refuted allegations. Ryan delivered a substantive indictment of the Obama administration’s failed record and a content-rich, realistic plan for putting this nation back on track to economic growth and fiscal recovery, a plan that includes “protecting and strengthening” Medicare, not “raiding” it.

Don’t listen to the naysayers. Ryan began with a humble acceptance of his “calling” and “duty” to help restore America. His message was positive. “I know we can do this,” he said, not dwelling on the malaise in which Obama’s disastrous policies have placed us but offering a specific blueprint to deliver us from this quicksand.

He carried forward this same theme throughout the speech: He said that when he accepted the nomination, he told Mitt Romney, “Let’s get this done”; and in closing the speech, he converted the slogan into a formal offer to the American people, promising that if elected, he and Romney would put America back on a path to fiscal redemption.

Ryan offered a succinct but irrefutable critique of Obama’s economic record: 23 million unemployed or underemployed, 1 in 6 Americans living in poverty and one-half of college graduates unable to find work they’ve studied for or any work at all.

More importantly, he emphasized that Obama has no new ideas to deliver us from this quagmire. Under a second Obama term, nothing would change — Obamanomics being but a ship trying to sail on yesterday’s wind.

Obama’s grandiose stimulus plan, involving “the largest one-time expenditure of the federal government,” not only didn’t work to create jobs but also took us into deeper debt. The money wasn’t “just spent and wasted; it was borrowed, spent and wasted.” Instead of giving us the jobs we needed, he forced Obamacare on us against our will, and he gave us Solyndra and its ilk — replete with corporate welfare, political patronage, cronyism and “make-believe markets.” Indeed.

Obama’s stimulus debacle was a microcosm — albeit a gargantuan one — of the ideas that Obama has advanced and that Romney and Ryan would reject in favor of America’s founding ideals. Ryan was eloquent in articulating the contrast. Under Obama, he said, the government has tried to divide up wealth. Under Romney and Ryan, Americans — not government — would (SET ITAL) create (END ITAL) wealth. Ryan expanded on the contrast, saying that Obama sees America as a place where everyone is stuck in some class or station in life, victims of circumstances beyond their control, with government there to help them cope with their fate.

The new administration, he assured us, would give us the exact opposite — a land where government is limited (to 20 percent of gross domestic product) and liberty is championed. He weaved in the story of his own family experiences and his mother — his “role model” — to personalize the point. He urged us not to buy Obama’s message and record of despair and to reject the stifling notion that we can’t do any better — ideas wholly inconsistent with Ryan’s personal experiences and the lessons his parents taught him.

Ryan said, in essence, “How dare you tell me and other Americans we have to accept whatever circumstances we find ourselves in and not try to improve our lots in life?” He said, “I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself and define happiness for myself.” In other words, in the America in which Ryan grew up and that he and Romney will try to restore, no government and no politician will predefine limits on economic growth and individual liberties — above all, the pursuit of happiness.

Ryan said that the American dream is grounded in freedom, not a planned economy in which equal outcomes are sought in lieu of equal opportunity. He underscored not simply that central planning doesn’t work but that it’s morally inferior, contrary to the claims and “sanctimony” of its leftist proponents.

Ryan promised that they would lead on the tough issues and be men of action — rather than of endless empty rhetoric — and would spend the next four years not blaming others but taking responsibility. They would immediately end the current administration’s practice of replacing our founding principles and begin to reapply those principles.

Obama tells us that Republicans want a smaller America, but as Ryan conclusively demonstrated in his speech, it is Obama who envisions a limited, anemic America with a finite pie, incapable of a robust economic future.

In Romney and Ryan’s America — as in Ronald Reagan’s, Jack Kemp’s and Condoleezza Rice’s — “it doesn’t matter where you came from; it matters where you’re going.”

Written By : John Hawkins
August 30, 2012

The first hour and a half of the GOP convention was punishingly bad. It featured politician after politician giving dull, stilted, cliched speeches that would have been more appropriate for a small town Toastmasters meeting than a national convention. It was boring to watch, the crowd was dead, and it did little to help the GOP. It is hard to understand why the GOP would run so many terrible speakers in a row when they had solid speakers like Rand Paul on before prime time started. Happily, the GOP did bring its A-Game for the last hour and a half when the big names who were likely to draw the most eyeballs delivered great performances.

5) Rob Portman: He sounded competent, had good energy, and put on a respectable, but not outstanding performance.

4) Tim Pawlenty: He told jokes, machine-gun-style to open up his speech. On the one hand, many of them weren’t that funny. On the other hand, TPaw got in a few good lines, made a few points worth making, and was at least entertaining.

3) Condoleeza Rice: Condi had the crowd in the palm of her hand and she delivered a very strong speech. It didn’t have a lot of red meat or one-liners in it, but she came across as a grown-up offering the sort of mature, responsible leadership you want in charge. It was an absolutely outstanding speech.

2) Mike Huckabee: Huck has great delivery, a good sense of comedic timing, and he managed to artfully talk about social issues without coming across as preachy. He was probably the best pure speaker on the podium.

1) Paul Ryan: The crowd went NUTS for Ryan and he was everything they hoped he would be. He came across as warm, likable, extremely knowledgable, concerned about the country, and he had so much gravitas that you wondered how the stage could hold him up without splitting asunder. He also did a great job of building up Mitt and hammering the Obama Administration. After watching that speech, I came to the conclusion that I had underrated Ryan’s talent as a speaker.

Now, here are the five best quotes of the night.

Written By : Ann Coulter
August 30, 2012

Poor Mickey Kaus. He’s the liberal intellectual (not an oxymoron — he’s the last known living “liberal intellectual”) lefties on TV are usually stealing from, but now that this welfare reform maven has concluded that Romney’s welfare ad is basically correct, liberals refuse to acknowledge his existence.

The non-Fox media have formed a solid front in denouncing Romney’s welfare ad for daring to point out that Obama has gutted the work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform bill.

The New York Times claims that Romney’s ad “falsely” charges Obama with eliminating work requirements. CNN rates the ad “false.” Underemployed hack Howard Fineman says Romney’s ad “is just flat out wrong on the facts” and “that every fair analyst, every fact checker” has said it’s “just factually wrong.”

When a campaign ad induces this much hysteria, you know Romney has struck gold. On closer examination, it turns out that by “every fair analyst,” Fineman means a bunch of liberals quoting one another.

This is how the media’s “fact checkers” operate when it comes to a Republican campaign ad. One not very well-informed person (or a heavily biased person) announces that Romney’s welfare ad is false, and the rest of the herd quote him, without anyone ever bothering to examine the facts, much less citing anyone who knows what he’s talking about.

It is striking that everyone who actually knows something about the 1996 welfare reform law says that Romney’s ad is accurate.

One of the principal authors of the 1996 welfare reform, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, and Douglas Besharov, who advised Hillary Clinton on the 1996 welfare reform law, say Romney’s ad is accurate.

Andrew Grossman, also of Heritage, produced something the MSM “fact checkers” avoid: a specific and detailed explanation of how the new waivers will allow states to evade the work requirements.

Even Ron Haskins, one of the reform bill’s authors now at the liberal Brookings Institution — cited far and wide for “blasting” Romney’s ad — doesn’t deny the Obama administration plans to waive the work requirements. He just says he supports waivers for “job training.” That’s not disputing the accuracy of Romney’s ads.

A lot of Americans don’t support waiving the work requirements, even for “job training.” Mitt Romney thinks they should know that that’s what Obama is doing.

And liberal Kaus — whom liberal hacks are usually plagiarizing from — has written a series of blog posts explaining in detail why the Times is wrong and Romney’s ad is not incorrect. True, he says the ad is “oversimplified,” but I think most people grasp that a 30-second ad will not provide the lush analytical detail of a Kausfiles blog posting.

We know liberals are reading Kausfiles; why aren’t they stealing from him this time?

As Kaus explains, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius has interpreted the welfare law to allow her to waive work requirements “subject only to her opinion” as to what will serve the purposes of the law.

By viewing the work requirements as optional, subject to her waiver, Kaus says, the law has been “altered dramatically”: “Old system: Congress writes the requirements, which are … requirements. New system: Sebelius does what she wants — but, hey, you can trust her!”

Sebelius is not a laid-back, third-way neoliberal who can be expected to interpret her waiver authority honestly. She’s the doctrinaire feminist loon who “interpreted” Obamacare to require every insurance policy in the country to provide full coverage for birth control.

Kaus points out that the HHS memo announcing that Sebelius could allow waivers from work for “job training,” “job search” or “pursuing a credential” unquestionably constitutes “a weakening of the work requirement.” He adds that it’s also “unfair to the poor suckers who just go to work without ever going on welfare — they don’t get subsidized while they’re ‘pursuing a credential.’”

In a follow-up post, Kaus pointed out that the Times’ own editorial denouncing the Romney ad inadvertently revealed that Sebelius was proposing a lot more than “job search” exemptions from the work requirement.

Both the Times and an HHS memo cheerfully propose allowing hard-to-employ “families” — which are never actual families, by the way — to be “exempted from the work requirements for six months.” Or more than six months. It’s up to Sebelius: “Exempted.”

The work requirements were one of two central features of the 1996 welfare reform law, along with time limits. They were heatedly opposed by the Democrats’ left-wing base at the time, and have been met with massive resistance in some of our more Greece-like states ever since.

A 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office found that some states were accepting such non-work substitutes from welfare recipients as “bed rest,” “personal journaling,” “motivational reading,” “exercise at home,” “smoking cessation,” “weight loss,” and “helping a friend or relative with household tasks and errands.”

(Under Sebelius, the work requirement will also be satisfied with “playing Xbox and eating Doritos.”)

Many liberals, such as those who write for The New York Times, agree that “bed rest” and “personal journaling” should count as a work substitute for welfare recipients. But that’s not what the law says. And it’s certainly not what liberals tell us when they proclaim Romney’s ad “false.”

What “every fair analyst” and “every fact checker” means when they call Romney’s ad “false” is: We, the media, don’t consider exempting welfare recipients from the requirement of having to work “gutting” the work requirements.

“Thoroughly debunked” is the new liberal code for “blindingly accurate.”

The Quest For A Reason To Re-Elect The President

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Have you heard the latest from the Obama re-election team?

Mitt Romney doesn’t have enough of his money taken from him in taxes. Paul Ryan wants to give rich people a tax “break.” Mitt Romney cut jobs when he was an executive at a private equity firm. Paul Ryan wants to cut school lunches for needy children.

You’ve probably seen and heard it all before. Romney and Ryan are scary, “extreme,” and out of touch, according to Team Obama. The President, Vice President, and all their operatives and surrogates are committed to getting the word out.

But while the President and his friends are adept at making rhetorical attacks on Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, it’s an infrequent occurrence when they offer any reasons why the President should be re-elected. So what, really, is the case foran Obama re-election victory? We know why the President dislikes the Romney-Ryan ticket (and Republicans, generally). But why do we need another four years of Barack Obama as our President? “Because Mitt Romney is terrible,” seems to be the implied answer.

Try searching for remarks from the President about what he intends to do in a second term, and you won’t find much. This is because he hasn’t said much on the topic. Most of the President’s comments these days are disparaging remarks about Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and not about his agenda - although he did note in an Associated Press interview on August 25^th that if he is elected to a second term, he believes there are Republicans in the House and Senate who will compromise and work with him to “get things done” for the country.

I did, however, receive a recent email update from the Obama campaign, a portion of which read like this: “President Obama believes the only way to create an economy built to last is to build it from the middle out and not from the top down. His economic plan is to restore middle-class security by paying down our debt in a balanced way that ensures everyone pays their fair share. Yet the President also wants to still invest in things we need to create jobs and grow our economy over the long term, things like education, energy, innovation, and infrastructure.”

This little blurb should raise some big questions. First, we should all ask “who is seeking a ‘top-down’ approach to the economy?” The answer, of course, is the President himself.

Within less than two years of taking office, President Obama successfully put in to place a system of tremendous governmental control over the otherwise private economy. By the middle of 2010, the President had become a de-facto C.E.O. over huge chunks of the economy, with the power to hire and fire executives, establish compensation limits for executive management, and to determine what products and services are produced. Insurance companies, car manufacturers, lending institutions and energy producers – President Obama has successfully forced his will upon them all.

So has all this governmental control created an economy that is “built to last?” We should also ask the Obama campaign emailers “how does the extra $6 trillion in U.S. government debt (roughly the amount of federal debt increase since the President’s first day in office) help pay down the debt?” And what about the $813 billion stimulus bill of 2009 – that was supposed to be an “investment” in innovation, infrastructure and education – where did that money go? Wasn’t that supposed to be “invested” in important things? And what happened to “shovel ready jobs” – were there any “created?”

A quick check of Democrats.org, the national party’s website, also reveals a list of other specific policy ideas that the President allegedly supports, yet he isn’t talking about them these days. One such policy has to do with energy independence, as the Democrats claim that “President Obama knows we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” and that President Obama is focused on “developing all of America’s natural resources...”

Of course, the President himself said late last year and earlier this year that he is committed to an “all of the above” approach to energy policy, implying that he’s okay with petroleum-based energy, along with the alternative energy development that he’s promoted.

This sounded great- but the President isn’t saying this anymore. This is probably because an “all of the above” approach to energy, we now know, means “anything except Big Oil” within the Obama worldview – hence the President’s veto on the Keystone XL Pipeline project that could have reduced America’s reliance on oil from other continents and could have created jobs from the Canadian border all the way down to Texas. The President and his friends would prefer to ignore this here within the last ten weeks of the election cycle, so they simply don’t talk about it – better to remind everyone about the scary and terrible Romney and Ryan.

Barack Hussein Obama:

• Voted three times to allow a child who survived an abortion to die on a gurney.
• Allowed the trafficking of guns into the hands of Mexican drug lords via Operation Fast and Furious, knowing they would be utilized in the commission of crimes and murders, sending hundreds of people to their deaths, including U.S. Border Agent Brian Terry.
• Forced Catholic and other Christian institutions to violate their consciencesby attempting to force them to fund birth control and abortifacients.
• Imprisoned a Marine for speaking his mind on Facebook
• Shut down hundreds (1000s?) of GM dealerships and put thousands out of work.
• Prevented tens of thousands of United States workers from finding gainful employment during the worst recession since the Great Depression- by blocking the Keystone Pipeline Project.
• Is the consummate narcissist, assigning credit to no one but himself, assigning blame to EVERYONE but himself.

 Written By : Doug Giles

If Obama were wise he would really ramp up his misinformation machine. He should start giving away free weed, beer, hookers, tanks of gas, kazoos, Vaseline, stretch pants, whirly hats, Flowbees and ShamWows to anyone who promises to vote for him because he just ticked off stacks of Catholics even further by dissing Cardinal Dolan for the DNC.

Say “buh-bye” to a big ol’ voting block, Mr. Anti-Catholic-In-Chief.

Just like I can’t imagine any evangelical who can read and who remotely takes their faith seriously ever voting for BHO, I can’t imagine a sober Catholic giving this anti-biblical, anti-Constitution president the time of day.

Obama’s admin rages against pretty much everything Christians hold sacred. Stevie Wonder can see that.

But some of you will say, “But Obama loves the poor!” Oh, that’s why he’s created so many more of them in the last three and a half years. Garsh, I wondered what he was doing.

Look, I’m not a Catholic, but I sure dig Dolan’s chutzpah. It’s about time you guys got a U.S.-based prophetic butt-kicker who’s not beholden to big government but rather to a bigger God.

I wish to God more prissy evangelical leaders would call Obama out like Dolan has done. What a bunch of nutless wonders evangelicalism is littered with. Can we recall petrified pastors like the car industry recalls crappy vehicles, such as the Chevy Volt?

I will give one protestant wild man mad props, however: I’m talking about Bishop E. W. Jackson who said, from a biblical standpoint, that the Democratic Party is virulently anti-Christian, and if you take God and His Word seriously you need to flee from said party like a bootlegger out of Alabama on a Saturday night (my paraphrase).

Yes, the former candidate for U.S. Senate in Virginia points to what he calls the Democratic Party’s “cult-like devotion” to abortion; the rejection of the traditional biblical model of family; the hostility hurled at those who express a Christian viewpoint, such as Chick-fil-A president and Chief Operating Officer Dan Cathy; the actions of organizations such as the ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation in suing cities and towns for displaying crosses at memorials or mentioning the name of Jesus in prayer at official events. How does a serious Christian square that stuff with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Oh, I forgot … you can’t. You can, however, merge the aforementioned with John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Back to Dolan.

In all honesty, after Dolan’s bold outspokenness against Obama over a health care law requiring employers to provide abortion coverage and the subsequent lawsuit Dolan and others filed against the rule—claiming it forces church-related groups to act against their conscience—I get why BHO said “heck no” to Mr. D speaking at the DNC.

Peasants and monks scream, “Give up the funk!”

 Written By : William Teach

…and for a good reason. Though, somehow, it’s probably raaaaacist

(Washington Times) Mitt Romney, routinely dismissed as a bit stiff and humorless on the stump, is suddenly cracking up his campaign trail crowds.

On Saturday, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate delighted supporters at a rally in Powell, Ohio, with a Greek-themed jibe at President Obama.

After hearing some pro-Obama hecklers in the audience, the former Massachusetts governor fired back:

“This is kinda like the Greek chorus in the background,” he said, referring to the protesters.

“It reminds me of Obama’s address four years ago in Denver. Remember, he was speaking in front of those Greek columns? … Everything they do reminds us of Greece and we’re not going back Greece, we’re going to get America back to being America,” he said as the crowd roared its approval.

Oh, come on, Mitt, we’re not that bad. 8.3% unemployment nationally, only 3 states with a real unemployment rate under 10%, $5+ trillion in new debt, $220 trillion in liabilities, housing still in the toilet, wages and savings way down…..hmm, maybe we are pretty close. Fortunately, Obama has a plan for this. He won’t really lay it out, but we’ve watched it for well over 3 years. It’s called “Spend Other People’s Money To Reward Campaign Donors And Liberal Support Groups.”

He wants to add “tax the hell out of people” to the mix, so he can spend even more to achieve….8.3% unemployment, people abandoning the jobs market in despair, more trillion dollar + deficits, and, really, you should just bask in Obama’s greatness instead of whining about all your own misery, you darned raaaaacists.

"And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there." --Francis Scott Key, "The Star-Spangled Banner"

“Thank God we had the federal government last week to bail out the private sector!”  That is what a rather statist friend of mine declared a year ago as the economy tanked, almost gleeful that the financial crisis seemed to be proving how much we all need a massive federal establishment to both regulate and rescue us.

Never mind the federal government’s own indispensable role as an enabler in the crisis, from its reckless monetary policy to its jawboning banks into making dubious mortgage loans. Never mind the long-term danger of its assumption of colossal new obligations and the moral hazard in the message its intervention sends. My response to my friend was of a more narrow focus. “Thank God we have the private sector to bail out the federal government not just last week, but every week!” I exclaimed.

Think about it. Taxes on the private sector pay a majority of the federal government’s bills. For most of the rest, the government borrows by selling its debt obligations, mostly to private-sector entities–including banks, insurance companies, and individuals.

The federal government is the world’s biggest taxer and the world’s biggest debtor. If those of us in the private sector didn’t pay our taxes or didn’t buy Washington’s paper, the feds would have gone belly-up decades ago. We’ve rescued Washington to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars over the years. A big difference between Washington’s bailing out the private sector and the private sector’s bailing out Washington is that the private sector has to work, invest, employ people, and produce goods to come up with the cash. It can’t create it out of thin air like Ben Bernanke can.

Our friends in Washington have blessed us with future burdens almost too astronomical to comprehend.  In the name of taking care of us in our old age, we are saddled with no less than $6 trillion in Social Security payouts over the next 75 years–for which there are no presently earmarked funding streams. According to Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, the unfunded obligations for the new federal prescription drug program, enacted under President Bush, total another $8 trillion.

On and on it goes. The private sector has an awful lot of bailing out to do in the coming decades. I shudder to think how deeply we taxpayers will have to dig in the not-too-distant future to pay the bills of our benevolent, compassionate, and forward-thinking government.

Since Barack Obama took office in January 2009, the federal government has spent a full billion dollars every single hour. Before his term is half over, federal spending will have doubled in just a decade. The deficit in one year’s budget is now as large as the entire budget in George W. Bush’s first year as president, 2001–and I thought not very long ago that the spending spree he and the Republicans gave us would be tough to beat! The flood of red ink is now adding to the national debt to the tune of about $4 billion every day. At well over $11 trillion, that debt amounts to $37,000 for every living American.

Too Big to Succeed?

We’re told by the wise planners in Washington that certain private firms are “too big to fail.” So we’re handing big chunks of them over to the government.

The question we all should be asking ourselves is this: Are we trusting our economy and our lives to a government that is too big to succeed?

Once upon a time in America, most citizens expected government to keep the peace and otherwise leave them alone. We built a vibrant, self-reliant, entrepreneurial culture with strong families and solid values. We respected property and largely kept the spirit of the Eighth and Tenth Commandments against coveting and stealing. We understood that government didn’t have anything to give anybody except what it first took from somebody and that a government big enough to give us everything we want would be big enough to take away everything we’ve got. We practiced fiscal discipline in our personal lives and expected nothing less from the people in the government we elected, or we threw them out.

But somewhere along the way we lost our moral compass. And just like the Roman Republic that rose on integrity and collapsed in turpitude, we thought the “bread and circuses” the government could provide us would buy us comfort and security.

We gave the government the responsibility to educate our children, though government can never be counted on to teach well the main ingredients of a free society–liberty and character–or just about anything else, for that matter. We asked the government to give us health care, welfare, pensions, college education, and farm subsidies, and now our politicians are bankrupting the country to pay the bills. This welfare state of ours has become one big circle of 305 million people, each with his hand in the next fellow’s pocket.

This is a government whose reach even before the financial crisis scarcely left an aspect of American life untouched, from the cradle to the grave and the volume of our toilet-bowl water in between. As a portion of our personal income, its tax and regulatory burden consumes at least five times what it did just a century ago. But to the majority on the Potomac, government is nowhere yet big enough. This is madness writ large.

Stick to the Knitting

Remember In Search of Excellence, the 1982 best-selling management book by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman? One of its salient points is that an organization gets off track when it no longer “sticks to the knitting.” When it allows its mission to blur and stretch far beyond its founding design, when it becomes distracted by endless and dubious new responsibilities, its core competency evaporates. It will fail to do what it is supposed to do, because it’s doing too much of what it’s not supposed to do.

It may come as a surprise to those who see aspirin made in Washington as the cure for every ailment, but the federal government is not God. It can’t even be a good Santa Claus. It’s no Mother Teresa either, because on those occasions when it does some good it usually costs an arm and a leg and sends a big part of the bill to generations yet unborn. The fact is, the bigger government gets, the more it starts to look like Moe, Larry, and Curly.

Accentuating the madness of the present day, the cover of Newsweek declared last March, “We are all socialists now.” Pardon me, but I’m not about to sign on to a proven flop.

  Written By : Michael Fell

The American labor market showed few signs of new life in the latest jobs report.   First time filings for unemployment benefits rose again last week to a one-month high.  Claims rose for a second week, by 4,000 for the period ended Aug. 18.  After economists had predicted 365,000 new claims, the number climbed to 372,000.

The administration continues to cite the European debt crisis and economic slowdowns in Asia as deterrents to investment.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-23/jobless-claims-in-u-s-climb-for-second-week-to-one-month-high.html

It is far easier to blame the global economy than to admit that this administration’s energy policies are killing jobs in America.  That  this administration poked their thumbs into the eyes of millions of unemployed Americans when they laughed about “shovel-ready” projects not being as “shovel-ready” as advertised.  It is not the least bit funny to Americans when they discover that this administration does not know what they are doing, especially after they spent trillions of taxpayer dollars on plans that did not work and redistributed hundreds of billions of the taxpayer’s wealth to rich “progressive” bundlers for the administration’s campaign machine.

Across the country, Americans have had enough of this administration’s policies, starting with those that kill jobs; like the healthcare reform law that levies huge tax hikes on all Americans and imposes additional burdens on businesses.  Americans are done with the policies that are killing America’s energy industry, like stifling EPA regulations that make it impossible to build new petroleum refineries or use coal powered energy.  Americans can no longer tolerate a lack of policy; a lack that precludes any hope for recovery in the housing market.  Many small businesses will find it difficult if not impossible to exist, much less expand and hire while banking regulations imposed during this administration make it virtually impossible for banks to loan them money.

Why does America continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on foreign energy rather than developing the abundant energy in its own country? Why not keep those hundreds of billions of dollars at home in its own sluggish, cash strapped economy?

At a time when tens of millions of Americans are struggling to find work and its economy is starving for liquid capital, why does this administration refuse to take advantage of America’s wealth of natural resources? Why does this administration continue to prevent drilling for oil and natural gas or mining for coal? Why not put Americans back to work building refineries and power plants? Why not have Americans delivering gas, coal and natural gas to American consumers?

How many peripheral jobs will be created by that process?

For every new oil well, power plant, refinery or mine there will be new roads built, followed by restaurants, stores, housing, schools and places of worship. All generated by the only force capable of powering America’s economic recovery: the private sector.

The key to economic recovery in America is a shift in policy.  The only way for that shift to happen is to alter the governing philosophy.  For that alteration to take place, America must elect a new sheriff and new deputies.

 Written By : William Teach

Gee, Team Obama being rude and doing things differently? Who’d have guessed? Last go around, Obama broke precedent, and his promise, and refused to take the public funding for the general election. This go around

(The Hill) Bucking protocol, President Obama and the Democrats are planning a full-scale assault on Republicans next week during their convention.

Presidential candidates have traditionally kept a low profile during their opponent’s nominating celebration, but Democrats are throwing those rules out the window in an attempt to spoil Mitt Romney’s coronation as the GOP nominee.

President Obama, Vice President Biden and leading congressional Democrats have all scheduled high-profile events next week to counter-program the Republican gathering in Tampa.

Even first lady Michelle Obama is in on the act, scheduling an appearance on the “David Letterman Show” smack in the middle of Romney’s nominating bash.

I think we can officially declare “Hope and Change” dead, now we’re moving “Forward” into the era of being a jerk. Yes, I did just call Obama a jerk. The term fits. At least in keeping the post at a PG level.

Political historians say the high stakes of this year’s elections — combined with the rise of today’s 24/7 media culture — has forced leaders on both sides of the aisle to get more aggressive.

Both sides? Both sides? Nowhere within the article does it mention the Romney campaign and/or Republicans having any plans to disrupt the DNC in Charlotte. I doubt they will, but, if they do, you can bet that Romney will be called rude and provide teeth gnashing for the liberal media, who will conveniently forget about what the Dems did at the RNC.

On the bright side, it’ll give Joe Biden the chance to say something monumentally rude and stupid. Again.

 Written By : Ben Shapiro

The American system of democracy is under threat. It’s under threat from an Obama campaign that seeks to polarize Americans along race and class lines. It’s under threat from a Democratic Party that seeks to pit those who pay taxes against those who don’t.

But most of all, it’s under attack from America’s public sector unions.

Mallory Factor explains in his new book, “Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind,” just how the unions pervert the political system. They demonstrate how our government has become subject to the demands of an ever-more-powerful minority — and how that level of control breeds national bankruptcy.

In essence, government worker unions run the Democratic Party. Franklin D. Roosevelt long opposed the notion that government workers should be allowed to unionize; he recognized that the ultimate power of unions is the ability to strike, and that government workers striking would be acting against the interests of the dispersed taxpayers. That was unacceptable.

But over time, FDR’s clarity of vision fell away. In 1962, JFK, recognizing the increasing power of private unions, realized that government employees who unionized could build the path to permanent Democratic governance. Here’s how the scheme would work. The government would insist on bargaining with unions; employees would have to join unions in order to work and receive representation. Unions would be able to exact dues from their members, and they would use those dues to elect their favored politicians. Those politicians would then strike cushy deals for the unions. The winners: politicians, unions and working union members. The losers: taxpayers, who would subsidize both union salaries and Democratic campaigns.

Democrats across the country quickly adopted this strategy. The system of forced dues now rules larges swaths of the United States, destroying the fundamental freedom of labor that should be an American birthright. In certain states, private individuals have been forced into unions — and more importantly, into paying union dues — simply for caring for their disabled children.

But the unions have now become the masters of the Democrats rather than vice versa. As Factor writes, “Democrats live in fear of the people that really impact their reelection campaigns — the union Shadowbosses. … Open Secrets reported that of the top ten Congressional candidates whom labor spent money to defeat in 2008, all lost their races.”

The cost of union domination has been economic stagnation and widespread bankruptcy. As Factor writes, “Over the last ten years, the federal government has subsidized more and more state government spending, covering 34.1 percent of all state spending in 2011, up from 25.7 percent ten years before.” Overall, as Factor points out, “Lightly unionized states do much better than highly unionized states.” The average real personal income growth from 2000 to 2010 in the seven most unionized states averaged 7.8 percent; in the seven least unionized states, that average was a whopping 24.9 percent. Government workers’ unions impoverish Americans.

There’s only one solution to taking back our country. It starts by taking control of our tax dollars by booting out of office those who are in bed with the public employee unions. Only when the corrupt cycle between the Democratic Party and their public-employee union shadowbosses is broken can American democracy be restored in full.

 Written By : Michael Barone

Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan was supposed to be a problem for the Republicans. So said a chorus of chortling Democrats. So said a gaggle of anonymous seasoned Republican operatives. All of which was echoed gleefully by mainstream media.

The problem, these purveyors of the conventional wisdom all said, was Medicare — to be more specific, the future changes in Medicare set out in the budget resolutions Ryan fashioned as House Budget Committee chairman and persuaded almost all House and Senate Republicans to vote for.

But while Democrats licked their chops at the prospect of scaring old ladies that they’d be sent downhill in wheelchairs, the Medicare issue seems to be working in the other direction.

Romney and Ryan have gone on the offense, noting that while their plan calls for no changes for current Medicare recipients and those over 55, Obamacare, saved from demolition by Chief Justice John Roberts, cuts $716 billion from the politically popular Medicare to pay for Obama’s politically unpopular health care law.

The Romney campaign is putting TV advertising money behind this message, and it will have plenty more to spend — quite possibly more than the Obama forces — once the Romney-Ryan ticket is officially nominated in Tampa, Fla., in 10 days. Team Obama is visibly squirming.

It turns out that Ryan and Romney, who in late 2011 and early 2012 moved quietly but deliberately toward embracing the Ryan agenda, may have outthought their adversaries.

Those last-minute Mediscare-type mailings to seniors, which enabled Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles to narrowly defeat Jeb Bush in the 1994 Florida governor race, don’t work so well anymore when the issue is brought out fully in the light of day.

But Medicare/Mediscare is not the only thing on which the Democrats have underestimated Ryan and the putative presidential nominee who selected him from the high-quality field of potential VP nominees from which he made his pick.

Ryan brings two other things to the Republican ticket that could prove important in the two-month sprint from the Tampa and Charlotte, N.C, conventions to Election Day.

One is foreign policy chops. Romney has less in the way of exposure to serious involvement in foreign and defense policy than any major party nominee since Bill Clinton in 1992 and Romney’s fellow Bay Stater Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Ryan, as a member of the House, theoretically brings a little more. But actually a good bit more, to judge from a little noticed speech he delivered three blocks from the White House to the Alexander Hamilton Society in June 2011.

In that speech, as Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens noted last week, Ryan showed that “he knows how to think.”

“Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course,” said Ryan, whose number-crunching knack clearly appealed to fellow numbers-cruncher Romney.

Defense spending accounted for 39 percent of the federal budget in 1970, said Ryan (who was born that year), but accounts for only 16 percent today. Under current budget pressures, it is at risk of going far lower.

Ryan referenced Princeton scholar Aaron Friedberg’s book “The Weary Titan,” on how Britain ceded world leadership a century ago in the face of economic pressures. He pointed out that while Britain could assume that the United States, with similar values and goals, might take up the burden, we have no similar fallback today.

Ryan acknowledged that our long-term dedication to freedom and democracy must sometimes yield to short-term interests. But that dedication, not occasional accommodations, must be our lodestar.

As Stephens argues, this puts Ryan much more than Barack Obama in line with the examples set by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan and — dangerous to say it — George W. Bush.

Romney takes the same approach on this, and on the other valuable quality Ryan brings to the Republican ticket.

And that is his solid mooring in the lessons of America’s Founding Fathers. “America is an idea,” Ryan said, that “our rights come to us from God and nature,” rights that “belong to every person everywhere.”

This election can be seen as a contest between the Founders’ ideas and those of the Progressives, who saw the Founders as outmoded in an industrial era.

Ryan strengthens Romney in his invocation of the Founders. Obama is stuck with the tinny and outdated debunking of the Progressives. Which rings truer today?

 Written By : Warner Todd Huston

Many on the GOP side of the aisle have been complaining that Mitt Romney seems to be incapable of hitting back against the constant stream of lies, innuendo, and calumny that Obama and his minions have unleashed thus far in this campaign. Romney’s campaign has been a veritable campaign of milquetoastiness by comparison. Yet the Old Media has the gall to claim that there is too much mud slinging going on by both sides.

This inability of the press to discern the tenor of the two campaigns proves two things clearly. First that the media are ignorant of the concept of morality, certainly, but it also pretty much proves that they are sold out to Obama’s reelection campaign.

Take Politico’s recent piece where they complain that “even the media’s had enough” of the “disgrace” that this race has become.

The race for the White House has grown so toxic that it’s become a top topic among reporters and analysts covering the contest — and some are even calling on President Barack Obama and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney to call a truce.

Politico goes on to repeat carping from such Old Media mavens as Brian Williams of NBC News, former Democrat operative and current NBC/MSNBC correspondent Chuck Todd, CNN’s lefty shill Soledad O’Brien, and others, all of whom claim to be tired of the “ugly” campaign.

This is at least the third time that Politico has carped about the death of the high-minded campaign and every article takes the same track: both sides are at fault.

Well, we are all tired of the “ugliness” in this campaign, for sure. But the problem with these reports is that this ugliness is not coming from both sides. In fact, it has been predominantly from Obama, his super PACS, and his surrogates.

This act of moral equivalence making it out as if Romney was being just as nasty as Obama is proof that the Old Media is attempting to inoculate Obama for the exact sort of nasty, negative campaigning they are pretending to decry.

The fact is, Mitt Romney has run a pretty much, straight down the line, issues-based campaign. Agree or disagree with his political points, he has avoided attacks on Obama’s character and his surrogates have not engaged in a back channel, grudge match the way Obama’s have.

Just think about what Obama has done, as Ben Shapiro notes:

• From Vice President Joe Biden: “They gonna put ya’ll back in chains.”
• From Mitt Romney: “Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.”
• From Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt: Romney is “unhinged.”
• From Obama: Romney put a dog on the roof of his car.
• From Romney: Biden’s comments on coal, in which he said that coal caused more deaths than terrorism, showed his lack of vision for the country.
• The Obama campaign has called Romney a felon and a murderer.

And this is just a small sampling of the lies and personal attacks that Obama has perpetrated against Romney and now Paul Ryan.

In return, Romney has decried Obama’s tactics, he’s criticized Obama’s campaign attacks, and expressed his desire to keep this race about the issues, but Obama has responded by a continuation of personal attacks, lies, and mud slinging.

Yet, Politico says both sides are doing the same thing.

This, I think, is an ages old left-wing concept, though. It goes right along with the idiotic, left-wing policy of “zero tolerance” we see in schools, that sort of policy where both participants in a fight are punished for the fight — as if fights just spontaneously begin and no one is the instigator. It’s as if the one who isdefending himself is just as guilty as the one that picked the fight in the first place.

And that is what we see here. We see Obama cynically distracting voters with his campaign of mud slinging and lies and when Romney defends himself the Old Media tsk tsks Romney as somehow being just as bad as Obama. And what does this act of moral equivalence do? It lessens Obama’s culpability, makes of him a mere participant with everyone else instead of the instigator. In this way the Old Media makes Obama nearly blameless when in reality he is the most guilty of all.

It’s an act of moral equivalency that is, in the end, no morality at all

 Written By : William Teach

Hopefully, one of those things will end up being the Obama administration

(Daily Caller) Ryan said that if elected, Mitt Romney would treat Americans like adults.

“We have a very serious choice to make,” Ryan told the crowd. “And what Mitt Romney is offering is to make a decision together.”

Ryan has earned praise as a serious policy wonk willing to tackle the tough issues, and in his speech to the overflowing crowd at a northern Virginia high school, he spoke of issues — like entitlement reform — that tend to be flashpoints used to rile up voters.

Ryan said politicians ought to confront those issues head on, like adults, instead of avoiding them.

“The problem is, too many politicians in Washington, like President Obama, have been more worried and concerned about their next election than they have about the next generation,” Ryan said. “We will not do that.”

He’s exactly right: what happens is politicians tend to pass legislation with thoughts of their next elections in mind. Even on the occasions where the legislation has long term goals and impacts, those are suborned to short term cares. Take the Stimulus: what was the long term goal? Get the economy going. How did it work? It shoveled money to short term projects. It propped up public sector unions and the States for a short time. And, once that money dried up, things went right back to being crummy. It gave people around $40 extra a month. But, it changed withholding rules, meaning that a lot of money was lost from the Social Security trust fund in the long term.

The “green” energy projects were designed for the long term, but with short term thinking. Hence, money was dumped into companies that had little to no chance of succeeding. This kind of spending isn’t just an Obama problem (though he seems to have perfected it), but a government problem. “How can I spend some money to help my re-election?” Doesn’t matter what this does in the long term to the pols.

“When we get elected, we will not duck the tough issues, we will lead. We will not blame other people; we will take responsibility,” Ryan said.

“Remember how President Obama used to say we aren’t the blue states or the red states, we’re the United States of America?” Ryan asked. “Remember when he said to put aside childish things and have an adult conversation? We’re still waiting for that adult conversation.”

This nation, like so many others, has serious fiscal issues that need to be addressed. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security (there are multiple programs, and they aren’t just for seasoned citizens). Long term infrastructure. Energy. Debt. Deficits. Unemployment. It will be interesting to see if a Romney/Ryan administration looks towards dealing with the long term issues, rather than simply pushing legislation that is designed to say “hey, look at what we did, don’t forget to vote!”

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Jobless Rates Rise in Pivotal States

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 Written By : Michael Fell

All those hateful hard core right wing extremists really should quit trashing poor President Obama.  There can be no doubt that his presidency has been nothing if not historical.

Here is an impressive list of some of his accomplishments:

• First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student then denies he is a foreigner.
• First President to have a Social Security number from a state where he has never lived.
• First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States.
• First President to violate the War Powers Act.
• First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
• First President to require that all Americans purchase a product from a third party as a condition of citizenship.
• First President to spend a trillion dollars on ‘shovel-ready’ jobs when there was no such thing as ‘shovel-ready’ jobs.
• First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.
• First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.
• First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.
• First President to demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.
• First President to tell a CEO of a major corporation (Chrysler) to resign.
• First President to terminate America’s ability to put a man in space.
• First President to cancel the National Day of Prayer and to say that America is no longer a Christian nation.
• First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.
• First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
• First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke-out on the reasons for their rate increases.
• First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.
• First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).
• First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.
• First President to actively try to bankrupt an American industry (coal).
• First President to fire an inspector general of Ameri-Corps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.
• First President to appoint 45 czars to his office.
• First President to surround himself with extremist fringe devotees to the institutionalized “progressive” left’s radical agenda.
• First President to golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office, 102 to date.
• First President to hide his medical, educational and travel records.
• First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing to earn it.
• First President to go on multiple global “apology tours” and concurrent “insult our friends” tours.
• First President to go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayer.
• First President to have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.
• First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.
• First President to repeat the Holy Quran & tell us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.
• First President to tell the military men and women that they should pay for their own private insurance because they “volunteered to go to war and knew the consequences”.
• Then he was the First President to tell the members of the military that THEY were UNPATRIOTIC for balking at the last suggestion.
• First President to side with a foreign nation over one of America’s 50 states (Mexico vs. Arizona).

How is that hopey-changey thing working out for you?

Thanks to Obama’s insistence on remaining a stubborn, inflexible partisan ideologue, this list keeps growing.

THERE IS AN ELECTION COMING IN NOVEMBER…REMEMBER THIS LIST WHEN YOU VOTE!

The government wants to control what TV you watch, what light bulbs you have in your house, how big a soda you can buy, and apparently, you can’t even feed poor kids in this country without having some useless government official sticking his nose into it.

Angela Prattis has spent part of the summer distributing meals to hungry children in Pennsylvania, but now, the township has informed her that if she does not obtain a costly “ordinance,” she will be fined $600 each day she distributes food.

(Related: MI Teen Starts Hot Dog Stand to Help Disabled Parents, Shut Down by City Almost Immediately)

 

The Daily Times has more:

“I’m not stopping,” said Angela Prattis, who has been distributing meals she receives from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to about 60 children from a gazebo on her property this summer. “These kids are hungry. I’m not tearing down the community. I’m keeping the children out of harm’s way.”

Prattis, who has lived in the township for about three years, started distributing meals and drinks to underprivileged children at her church, the Church of the Overcomer in Trainer, several years ago. This year, after giving birth to her second child, she began distributing the meals from the gazebo in her yard.

Township Council Chairman Stanley Kester said the township was notified of the distribution via a telephone call from another resident a few weeks ago. He asked the township solicitor, Stephen Polaha, to investigate the matter, and in a response to council two weeks ago, Polaha returned an opinion stating that, in terms of the township’s zoning laws, the distribution “was not permitted without a variance.”

That variance costs about $1,000, according to NBC10.

This works about the same way as a mob shakedown.

“You sure do seem to be doing some good work for those kids. It sure would be a shame if you couldn’t do that anymore. Pay us $1000 in protection money and we’ll make sure you don’t have any problems.”

Too harsh? Well, here’s a question: What does she get for her $1000? Nothing. What do those kids get for the $1000? Nothing. What is the government doing in exchange for the $1000? Nothing. What’s wrong with asking the most basic of questions that every consumer considers before he buys something: What am I getting for my money? Why doesn’t anyone in the government ever seem to feel compelled to answer that question?

 Written By : Michael Fell

The White House re-election campaign wants to make a deal.  In exchange for GOP presidential challenger Mitt Romney releasing five years of tax returns, they will stop criticizing him for not releasing more.  While hiding behind the skirt of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the White House campaign alleges there may be as many as ten years when Romney evaded paying income taxes.

Romney says that over the past decade he has paid at least 13 percent in federal income taxes.  According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, a non-partisan group, middle income families average paying 12.8 percent in federal income tax.

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-campaign-offers-romney-5-tax-disclosure-114057169.html

Critics complain that Romney pays too few taxes.  At his income level, Romney pays plenty of taxes.  Romney made every penny he has.  Hence every dime he uses to make investments has already been taxed at wage income rates.  Romney pays a lower tax rate than wage earners because a majority of his income comes from investments, which are taxed at a lower rate than wages.  Investment income is taxed at a lower rate because, unlike wages, investments are at risk.

If Romney was guilty of income tax evasion, the IRS would already be after him and his campaign for the White House would long be over.  The IRS falls within the Department of Treasury.  At the behest of the White House, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the IRS would be all over Romney like a ravenous pack of hyenas.

Romney has released his 2010 tax records and vowed to release his 2011 returns.  That matches the number of returns released in 2008 by Senator John McCain when he was the GOP candidate.  The number of tax returns released by McCain was never an issue.

This is not Let’s Make A Deal, and David Axelrod is not Monty Hall.  For Mitt Romney only a booby prize or worse waits behind curtain number three.

This bait and switch by the White House and their “progressive” co-conspirators is more than simply a distraction from the issues.

Throughout a shadowy, veiled, mystery shrouded political career where his own past has been intentionally concealed, obtaining confidential information about political opponents and distorting that information to smear them has been the signature move of this candidate.

Remember, the current Oval Office occupier is the same clandestine, shadowy figure caught in an open-mic moment with then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev saying that after his re-election he would have “more flexibility”.

Flexibility for…?

Three members of a Russian punk band were found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail for protesting against Russian president Vladamir Putin.   The band members were arrested on March 3^rd and charged with “hooliganism”.  Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30 have been in jail ever since.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/russian-punk-band-verdict-found-guilty-hooliganism-115937812.html

What kind of flexibility is this secretive, anti-business, hostile to constitutionally protected individual Liberty White House promising to a Russian president who imprisons people for free speech?

Is this flexibility related to the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Internal Revenue Service each purchasing multi-thousands of rounds of hollow point bullets?

Could this flexibility include plans to tighten the iron grip of power by imposing Martial Law and suspending elections to ensure he can finish the “fundamental transformation” of America through the imposition of a form of government completely foreign to every principle espoused by its Founding Fathers?

By agreeing to release any additional tax returns, Mitt Romney would be making a crucial mistake.  Let the White House re-election campaign go into grand mal seizure.  Let them scream like banshees and howl at the moon.  Let them cry like babies.  Let them wet themselves.  Let them posture, threaten, intimidate and bully.  You can bet your underwater sub-prime mortgage they will do anything, be it lie, cheat and steal to win this election.

To borrow a phrase from another popular television game show: No deal.

Written By : Michelle Malkin

Hey, remember when Nancy Pelosi and a gaggle of Democratic women vowed to eradicate Washington’s culture of corruption? Tee-hee. Instead of breaking up the Good Ol’ Boys Club, Capitol Hill’s leading liberal ladies have established their very own taxpayer-funded Sisterhood of the Plundering Hacks.

This week, the names of two of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s gal pals surfaced in a mortifying, Animal House-style scandal. If the allegations of whistleblowers pan out, DHS may soon be known as DSH: The Department of Sexual Harassment.

According to FoxNews.com’s Judson Berger, DHS chief of staff for Immigration and Customs Enforcement Suzanne Barr put herself on voluntary leave after details of her lewd behavior were disclosed as part of an ongoing discrimination and retaliation lawsuit. In “newly emerging affidavits,” Berger reported, “one of the employees claimed that in October 2009, while in a discussion about Halloween plans, the individual witnessed Barr turn to a senior ICE employee and say: ‘You a sexy (expletive deleted).’”

Striking a blow for equal opportunity pervs everywhere, Barr “then looked at his crotch and asked, ‘How long is it anyway?’ according to the affidavit.”

Barr is accused of numerous other acts intended to “humiliate and intimidate male employees.” Yet another account from the lawsuit detailed Barr’s vulgar text messages to a colleague while on a boozy trip to Colombia. On the same junket, Barr allegedly offered to perform oral sex on another DHS employee. Barr, a lawyer who previously served as Napolitano’s director of legislative affairs when the DHS secretary was governor of Arizona, had no law enforcement experience before ascending the federal ranks.

A few months after Barr followed Napolitano to DHS in 2009, another crony tagged along. Dora Schriro, who served as director of Arizona’s Department of Corrections under then-Gov. Napolitano, was appointed by her BFF to head the Detention and Removal Operations office despite zero experience in that critical homeland security policy area. The suit claims that Schriro had a “longstanding relationship with (Napolitano)” that resulted in preferential treatment.

A few plum posts here, a few plum posts there. Pretty soon, the sleaze piles up.

But DHS has nothing on the public relations slush fund created by Obamacare — and forked over to Obama on-air surrogate Kiki McLean. The longtime Democratic operative and self-described “true D.C. insider” heads up the global public affairs division at Porter Novelli, which secured a $20 million contract to peddle Obamacare to the public. The firm claims it struck gold after a “competitive bidding process.” But members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have called for probes into that and other shady business-as-usual PR contracts. And HHS, headed by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, is dragging its feet on meeting information requests.

Such obstructionism is nothing new to Sebelius, whose tenure as Kansas governor is still the subject of an ongoing criminal court case against Planned Parenthood and the Sunflower State’s health officials. Last year, the plaintiffs discovered that health bureaucrats presided over the “routine” shredding of “documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces.” Sebelius doggedly fought transparency motions in the proceedings for years.

Are Obama’s female inspectors general watching out for taxpayers any better than their male counterparts? As the boys in my family like to say: negatory.

Interior Department acting IG Mary Kendall is knee-stocking-deep in a conflict-of-interest scandal, which alleges that she potentially helped White House officials cover up their doctoring of scientific documents that led to the fraudulent, job-killing drilling moratorium of 2010.

Acting Department of Justice IG Cynthia Schnedar, a longtime employee and colleague of now-Attorney General Eric Holder, has an ethics imbroglio all her own. As I reported in June, she worked under Holder in the 1990s and co-filed several legal briefs with him. Schnedar recklessly released secret Fast and Furious audiotapes to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix before reviewing them. The tapes somehow found their way into the hands of the local ATF office. Both remain targets of congressional probes.

Over on Capitol Hill, Democratic women are too preoccupied with their own nest-feathering and backside-covering to police the Obama administration:

California Democratic Rep. Laura Richardson, a tax dodger and loan defaulter, received a House ethics wrist slap two weeks ago after investigators concluded she had “improperly pressured her congressional staffers to work on her campaign, verbally abused and intimidated them, used taxpayer-funded resources for personal and political activities, and obstructed the investigation,” as the Los Angeles Times summed it up.

Fellow California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters still hasn’t faced an ethics trial over her meddling in minority-owned OneUnited Bank. The financial institution, in which her husband had invested, received $12 million in federal TARP bailout money after Waters’ office personally intervened and lobbied the Treasury Department in 2008.

Nevada Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley faces a formal House ethics investigation into charges that she abused her position to benefit her husband’s business interests.

And investigative author Peter Schweizer exposed House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and her husband’s smelly Obamacare insider deals involving the initial public offering of credit-card company Visa.

Out: Drain the swamp. In: Last one in is a rotten egg. Kick off your pumps and 3, 2, 1 … cannonball!

 Written By : Ann Coulter

My smash best-seller “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America” has just come out in paperback — and not a moment too soon! Democrats always become especially mob-like during presidential election campaigns.

The “root cause” of the Democrats’ wild allegations against Republicans, their fear of change, their slogans and insane metaphors, are all explained by mass psychology, diagnosed more than a century ago by the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon, on whose work much of my own book is based.

Le Bon’s 1896 book, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,” was carefully read by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in order to learn how to incite mobs. Our liberals could have been Le Bon’s study subjects.

With the country drowning in debt and Medicare and Social Security on high-speed bullet trains to bankruptcy, the entire Democratic Party refuses to acknowledge mathematical facts. Instead, they incite the Democratic mob to hate Republicans by accusing them of wanting to kill old people.

According to a 2009 report — before Obama added another $5 trillion to the national debt — Obama’s own treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, stated that in less than 10 years, spending on major entitlement programs, plus interest payments on the national debt, would consume 92 cents of every dollar in federal revenue.

That means no money for an army, a navy, rockets, national parks, food inspectors, air traffic controllers, highways, and so on. Basically, the entire federal budget will be required just to pay for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — and the cost of borrowing money to pay for these programs.

When Social Security was enacted in 1935, the average lifespan was 61.7 years. Today, it’s almost 79 and rising. But liberals believe the age at which people can begin collecting Social Security must never, ever be changed, even to save Social Security itself.

Mobs, according to Le Bon, have a “fetish-like respect” for tradition, except moral traditions because crowds are too impulsive to be moral. That’s why liberals say our Constitution is a “living, breathing” document that sprouts rights to gay marriage and abortion, but the age at which Social Security and Medicare benefits kick in is written in stone.

Le Bon says that it is lucky “for the progress of civilization that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.” If “democracies possessed the power they wield today at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam-power and of railways, the realization of these inventions would have been impossible.”

Liberals exhibit this exact group-think fear of science not only toward light bulbs and nuclear power, but also toward medical inventions. Thus, when a majority of the country objected to Obamacare on the grounds that — among many other reasons — a government takeover of health care would destroy medical innovation, liberals stared in blank incomprehension.

They believe every drug, every diagnosis, every therapy, every cure that will ever be invented, has already been invented. Their job is to spread all the existing cures, while demonizing and stymieing pharmaceutical companies that make money by inventing new drugs.

Democrats haven’t the slightest concern about who will formulate new remedies because they are enraged at profit-making and suspicious of scientific advancement.

Apart from cures that will never be invented, liberal elites will be mostly untouched by the rotten medical care to which they are consigning the rest of us. Note how Democrats’ friends, such as government unions, immediately received waivers from Obamacare. Rich or connected liberals, such as George Soros, Warren Buffett, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, will always have access to the best doctors, just as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez do.

It is similar to the way that Democrats, who refuse to pass school choice, always seem to bypass the disastrous public schools for their own children, who end up at Sidwell Friends or St. Albans.

Democrats don’t worry about how bankrupting Social Security and destroying the job market hurts black people, bitter divorcees and young people, because they can always demagogue these one-party Democratic voters simply by repeating that Republicans are racist, hate women and aren’t cool like Obama.

The truth is irrelevant; only slogans and fear-mongering delight mobs.

The rest of us are forced to live in a lawless universe of no new pharmaceuticals, foreign doctors, gay marriage, girl soldiers, a health care system run by the post office, and bankrupt Social Security and Medicare systems, because liberals can’t enjoy their wealth unless other people are living in squalor.

The country will have the economy of Uganda, but Democrats will be in total control.

 Written By : Rachel Marsden

A recent intelligence leak confirms something that regular readers of this column already know: that the Obama administration has officially authorized covert support of local “rebel” groups, through government agencies like the CIA, with the goal of destabilizing and subverting the Bashar al-Assad regime. The interesting consequence is that al-Qaeda is among the groups President Obama’s directive now supports.

Just think about this for a minute. The president of the United States, according to an intelligence leak initially reported by Reuters, has secretly authorized support of an undisclosed nature for armed fighters in a region, including members of the group now synonymous with terrorism against American and Western interests in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Presumably, Obama is leaving it up to those responsible for distributing said “support” to ensure that no arms fall into the hands of any al-Qaeda members. But the reality is that, given the fog of war permeating Syria right now, Obama would have better luck determining which trick-or-treating children arriving at his door on any given Halloween are little hellions undeserving of candy.

Obama reportedly signed the order earlier this year, closer to when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested to the Senate Armed Services Committee that al-Qaeda had taken a discreet approach in Syria, choosing not to draw attention to itself. The Washington Post quoted Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess as saying that there was no “clarion call to outsiders coming in.”

Well, Burgess must not have gotten the memo, because just a few days earlier, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had issued that call, declaring in an eight-minute video: “Wounded Syria is still bleeding day after day, and the butcher (Assad) isn’t deterred and doesn’t stop. However, the resistance of our people in Syria is escalating and growing despite all the pains, sacrifices and blood.”

Obama has now engaged America in a covert war AGAINST a regime trying to wipe out al-Qaeda. If this was at all about fighting global terrorism, Obama would just sit back and do precisely nothing while al-Qaeda spilled into Syria and Assad’s forces wiped them out. Assad is a horrible guy, but is it really worth getting in bed with al-Qaeda to have a hand in his ouster?

If Obama’s order had anything to do with humanitarian intervention to assist the Syrian civilian population, he would be following Canada’s lead in differentiating between genuinely innocent civilians and the undifferentiated mass of rebel fighters — providing strictly humanitarian aid and protection to the former while letting the latter fight it out with Assad.

Russian officials once rebuffed the Islamic extremists of the region when they actively sought Russian cooperation against America in Afghanistan post-9/11. Why couldn’t Obama find the sense to do the same?

It’s because this is about economics and position, nothing else. And for some harebrained reason, Obama sees fit to take a chance on dealing with al-Qaeda in order to make inroads rather than being upfront, honest and authentic with China and Russia over what America really wants out of Assad’s ouster in Syria: economic benefits and favorable geopolitical positioning. Could there possibly be a bigger slap in the face to the leaders of Russia and China than to suggest, via covert yet concrete action, that taking a chance on the group responsible for the most heinous act of terrorism on American soil is preferable to dealing with the leaders of those nations forthrightly and honestly?

Now it’s all too late, and a hangover likely awaits. Russia and China have every right to be offended by Obama trying to play them for fools all while attempting to bring them to the table under false pretenses. Does Obama think Vladimir Putin, a former director of Russian intelligence, doesn’t understand subversive tactics, or that the Chinese don’t understand Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” principle of leveraging chaos? It’s like a friend who’s constantly trying to rope you into some kind of pyramid scheme under the guise of a great business opportunity. At what point do you just get fed up with it all?

Obama could have done things much differently and laid out an economic impetus for action in Syria, bringing the two major opposing geopolitical players in this particular game to the table on an honest footing rather than insulting them in seemingly every way possible. Is there no one in this administration capable of constructing an honest, forthright, respectful diplomatic pitch? Subterfuge and deception should be reserved for those lacking the intelligence, creativity and character to do anything else.

 Written By : Ben Shapiro

Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate has utterly unhinged the Obama campaign. Last week they were happily jabbering about Romney’s record at Bain Capital, implying that he had killed a man’s wife, stating that he was a tax cheat and blaming him for outsourcing jobs. This week they’re stuck defending Barack Obama’s $700 billion cuts to Medicare and spending addiction.

That leaves the Democrats with one solution: get ugly.

Joe Biden led off the festivities in Virginia this week, where he informed the population of 49-percent-black Danville that “he said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules — unchain Wall Street. They gonna put y’all back in chains.” That last line is a direct transcription — Biden lapsed into a heavy southern accent, clearly making a slavery reference. According to the Obama campaign, then, Romney’s Wall Street plans are the same as placing Americans in chains. If that isn’t insulting to black Americans, nothing will be.

But the Obama campaign wasn’t done. The same day Biden unleashed his inner race-baiter, the Obama campaign’s Julianna Smoot send out a mass email accusing Ryan of “making a pilgrimage” to Las Vegas to “kiss the ring” of Jewish mega donor Sheldon Adelson. This was an obvious attempt to drive a wedge between Ryan and blue-collar Catholics by invoking anti-Semitic imagery; the implication is that Ryan, instead of making a pilgrimage to Rome to kiss the ring of the Pope, was heading to Vegas to kiss the ring of a wealthy Jew. Ryan, the email implied, was a Judas willing to sacrifice religion for money in the Sodom and Gomorrah of Vegas.

This isn’t just nasty campaigning. It’s vile campaigning.

It wasn’t surprising, of course — not after the Obama campaign seemingly worked hand-in-glove with a super PAC to release an ad accusing Romney of murdering Joe Soptic’s wife of cancer after Bain Capital fired Soptic and Soptic lost his health insurance. It wasn’t surprising after the vulgarities that seem to spout daily from the Obama headquarters; their emails suggest that they must win the “<snip>” election and their staffers call Obamacare opponents “mother—ers.” No hope and change to be found here — just vulgarity and racism.

Just because the Obama campaign is running a disgusting campaign doesn’t mean it will hurt them. Negative campaigns remain extraordinarily effective. But it won’t work against the revitalized Romney-Ryan ticket. Ryan is simply too likeable — 50 percent of Americans like him, as opposed to 32 percent who don’t — and he is highly intelligent and scrupulously honest. That means he’ll be tough to categorize with the left’s three favorite anti-conservative insults: stupid (Palin), corrupt (Nixon) and mean (Bush). Ryan isn’t extreme; he’s praised by people like … Barack Obama and Erskine Bowles.

The question that remains for the American public is whether they can be polarized by the divide-and-conquer rhetoric of the Obama campaign. If Obama can’t convince Americans that Romney-Ryan will destroy America, he’ll have to destroy America himself to ensure re-election by separating Americans by race, sexuality and religion. That’s precisely what he’s doing.

Ben Shapiro, 28, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, a radio host on KRLA 870 Los Angeles, and Editor-At-Large for Breitbart News. He is the four-time bestselling author of “Primetime Propaganda.”

Watching some of the Sunday shows yesterday and reading the usual suspects online, I was struck by how even knowledgeable liberals still do not understand what Obamacare has done to them. They have a sense that health care is no longer a good issue for them, that it might have cost them the 2010 elections and will hurt in 2012, but they haven’t grasped that Medicare — which for decades has been a trusty battering ram against Republicans in the contest for the votes of seniors and others — is also no longer their issue.

This becomes evident in part when you consider that the arguments the Democrats naturally fall back upon regarding Medicare are just false now. So for instance David Axelrod on CNN’s State of the Union referred to “Congressman Ryan’s idea that we should turn Medicare into a voucher program, shifting thousands of dollars ultimately onto the backs of seniors.” But that’s simply a lie — Ryan’s actual Medicare proposal(which Romney has backed) simply doesn’t shift costs to seniors.

But it’s even more evident when liberals try to confront what they themselves — the supporters of Obamacare — propose to do to Medicare. Thus we find Rachel Maddow like a deer in headlights when Rich Lowry asked her a simple question on Meet the Press  yesterday: “Do you support $700 billion in cuts in Medicare over the next ten years?” Obamacare takes that amount out of the program and spends it on other things, especially its new exchange subsidies. Maddow literally refused to answer the question. At one point she even said she shouldn’t have to answer it because “I’m not running for anything,” even though her occupation, as I understand it, is to express her opinion. And in the end, her defense of the cuts (though she still never said she supported them) was that Paul Ryan’s budget actually keeps them in place, eliminating Obamacare’s spending but not its Medicare cuts.

It’s at least a bit odd for Democrats who say Ryan is the devil to defend President Obama’s raid on Medicare by saying Paul Ryan does the same thing — and what’s more, it’s not true. The Ryan budget puts those $700 billion into the Medicare trust fund, to shore up the program’s future and reduce the deficit, rather than spending the money on yet another new entitlement. And Mitt Romney proposes not to make those Obamacare cuts in the first place — keeping the money in Medicare’s operating budget and so leaving the program simply as it is for today’s seniors and starting his premium-support reform for younger Americans when they retire, beginning a decade from now. Both undo Obama’s raid on Medicare, and both support a plan to save Medicare from bankruptcy in the years ahead.

I don’t think Axelrod and Maddow were just setting out to lie exactly — it’s worse than that. Listening to them, it seemed as if they really hadn’t realized until now the situation they were in. They’re used to a certain order of things on Medicare and have not stopped to grasp what Obamacare has done to them. They assume it must be true that Republicans want to cut benefits and Democrats want to preserve them. But it’s not true, not anymore. You could see that panicked realization slowly rising in Maddow’s eyes as she was pressed.

What she was probably recognizing was this: Obamacare changed everything. In the wake of that law, it is now clearer than it ever could have been before that the market solution is also the best one for seniors — that the conservative approach that would dramatically reduce the deficit is also the one that would avoid any disruptions for current beneficiaries and the one that would save Medicare in the longer run without shifting costs to future beneficiaries. And the Left can’t claim any  of those benefits for its own approach to Medicare.

Even some conservatives haven’t quite realized this, and have been uneasy about criticizing Obama’s Medicare cuts — after all, aren’t we supposed to be for Medicare cuts? But this attitude fails to consider the nature of Obama’s cuts (an arbitrary raid of the system to fund a new unsustainable entitlement) and the nature of the Romney-Ryan alternative (a market solution that would turn recipients into consumers and make Medicare a model of how competition can create efficiency and reduce costs without undermining value or access). There’s a broad consensus in America that the elderly should have access to highly subsidized health coverage. Cutting the cost of the program does not need to mean cutting the level of that coverage — unless, that is, you think central planning is the only way to run the program. The Left apparently does believe that, and now they’ll have to face the consequences.

President Obama has put Democrats in the position of being the party that seeks to cut current seniors’ benefits (especially those in Medicare Advantage) and access to care (thanks to the IPAB) while still allowing the program to collapse in the coming years and so watching the deficit explode and bringing on fiscal disaster. And Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have put the Republicans in the position of being the party that wants to protect current seniors’ benefits and make them available to future seniors while still saving the program from collapse in the coming years and so dramatically reducing the deficit and averting fiscal disaster.

Whether you’re now a senior and concerned about your health coverage, are younger and worry if you’ll have affordable coverage when you retire, or are most concerned about the nation’s fiscal health and economic future, the Democrats offer you a very bad deal on Medicare and the Republicans offer you a good one.

The Democrats still don’t see that, and think that turning to Medicare in the wake of Ryan’s selection will yield great political rewards. Perhaps Romney and Ryan should inform them of how the two parties actually stand on the issue. And they might think about informing some voters as well.

President Obama Has A Bridge to Sell You

By YOGI LOVE on 8.13.12 @ 11:53AM

I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure that Romney would make the right choice. I was fearful that his pick for Vice President would revolve around the consideration of a prospect’s cultural identity than their ideas and what they bring to the table for Romney’s Campaign that, sad to say, is less than exciting at times.

I’ll admit, I’m a Paul Ryan supporter. Everybody’s got a niche, an area of expertise that they bring to the marketplace of ideas, and having a focus on reducing debt and forcing fiscal accountability upon government is tremendously appropriate at this low point in our nation’s history. While Ryan may ruffle a few feathers on the moderate side, and may be perceived as being a bit “radical”,  I’ll confess that somebody saying something meaningful with regards to getting us out of the hole we’re in is not radical, it’s sensible and welcomed. He isn’t radical, he’s focused, and he brings an element of excitement to a campaign that may have been dogged by a stink of quasi-moderate leanings.

Apparently, I am not the only one enthusiastic about Romney’s pick. In the three hours after Ryan was named as the Vice Presidential candidate, the Romney Campaign saw a fundraising windfall as the campaign received $1.2 million in donations. If money in politics is speech, then the $1.2 million dollars raised tells me the people are jazzed about this fiscal conservative being on the ticket.

Andrea Saul, the Romney Campaign Press Secretary, tweeted the good news, saying, “HERE FIRST: @MittRomney has raised over $1.2 million since pick of @PaulRyanVP #LessThan4Hours.”

But the fun didn’t stop there, however. Saul tweeted soon after, “Just passed $2 million raised since @MittRomney announced @PaulRyanVP #RomneyRyan2012.”

Let’s hope the fun continues and we see some real momentum for this campaign. While Romney may not have been my first choice for the Republican nod, I’ll admit that the campaign gained some points by including Ryan on the ticket.

 Written By : Josh Bernstein

Today is the first day in the rebirth of America. With the exception of maybe Senator Marco Rubio, no other candidate for vice president has the ability to satisfy the base, energize the Tea Party, and appeal to Independents quite like Congressman Paul Ryan.

If the Democrats and the left underestimate Paul Ryan, they do so at their own peril.

Before I get into the meat and potatoes of this article, I will heed a warning to Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. If we allow the left to define Paul Ryan through vicious and unscrupulous attacks, then WE do so at our own peril.

If I was running the Romney Campaign the first thing I would do is immediately create multiple ads in which Paul Ryan is speaking to the camera and explaining the upcoming Medicare attacks. I would get out in front of this right now and not wait to respond to the coming attacks. Handicap the left by getting to the voters first. If anyone in the Romney Campaign happens to read this or has contacts within the campaign please get this to them as soon as possible.

Now that Mitt Romney has shown he can be bold; I would take it to the next level. The Romney Campaign should run an introductory ad in all 57 states. Excuse me, 50 states. Sorry, I couldn’t resist that one. The comeback team should introduce themselves to America in a big way. No voiceovers, no fancy music in the background, just the two of them looking at the camera and laying out in specific and clear details the vision they possess for the country. Most pundits or talking heads would ridicule an idea like this. They would say why would the Romney/Ryan ticket be trying to woo voters in the liberal states of Hawaii, Vermont, Oregon, etc?

The reason is because this time it is different. All Americans are suffering regardless of party. When a Democrat, Independent, or Republican loses his job it hurts just the same. More Americans are stuck in poverty than at any other time.

The Obama administration is a cancer. It is eating away at the very fabric of our nation. It is dissolving our rights, our freedoms, and our sovereignty. Unlike a nuclear bomb that would kill us quickly, the Obama Administration is killing us slowly and deliberately. It is a slow and painful death. A death by a thousand little cuts.

When a sitting president in a horrible economic environment is too busy to meet with his jobs council you know that this economic catastrophe was purposely caused. When a sitting president hasn’t even signed a budget in over 3 years you know this is intentional. When a sitting president guts welfare and removes the work requirement you know he is following the Cloward and Piven strategy. His goal is to overload the financial system by getting as many people as possible under the government dole. The more people Obama has eating out of his hand, the more control he has over Americans lives.

History has shown that when the iron fists of government comes down on its people there are typically only two outcomes. The people fight back, remove it, and cut it off at the wrist; or they embrace it, accept it, and hold and kiss it.

We need to cut it off at the wrist.

Today Mitt Romney just told the American people that he is serious about fixing the economy. Not with his words, but with his actions. Paul Ryan is a smart, articulate policy guy. He comes from middle class roots and understands the severity of the problems we face as a nation. He will be able to articulate complex financial issues to the electorate in a very simplistic way. He has a knack for talking to you, not over you. He will be able to out debate not only Joe Biden, but any left leaning pundit that dare tries to outsmart him.

The heartbeat of the nation has always been what the elitist’s on the left and right disdainfully refer to as fly over country. This is exactly where this election will be won or loss. The left and right coasts are mostly comprised of liberal ideology, Hollywood radicals, and politically correct demagoguery.

We have been programmed by this administration to accept mediocrity in the name of global fairness. We have settled for average when we know we are exceptional. We have been told that our businesses were not built by ourselves but rather by our government. We were told the private sector is doing fine even though unemployment is over 8% for a record 43 straight months.

This horrible experiment with hope and change has been an utter failure. We need to return America back to its greatness. As Reagan used to say we are the shining city on the hill. We are the last beacon for freedom. And we never lead from behind. Obama has emboldened our enemies, abandoned our allies, and bowed down to our adversaries. This President makes Jimmy Carter look competent. That is no easy task.

The Romney/Ryan ticket is a winning combination. They will show the American people what real leadership is. They combine the talent, ability, and desire to make America great once again.

When an Insufferable Blowhard Runs Out of Money This is What it Looks Like

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Let me set the scene for you: Rising oil and gas prices, rising equity prices and falling housing prices. Storm signals start winking on the global economic front after a month of a braggadocious presidential tour telling us all that finally the economy has got it right; that it’s on its way to recovery.

Where have I seen this film before? Oh yeah: February 2010, 2011, 2012.

In his State of the Union address of January 2011 and 2012, Obama was bragging about his economic accomplishments.

“We are poised for progress,” he told Congress in 2011. “Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.”

At the start of 2011, the president was an insufferable blowhard, anxious to let us know that he saved the economy. He was even more of a blowhard in December going into 2012.

But after successfully destabilizing the Islamic world by intervening in Libya, Obama, along with loose money policies of the Federal Reserve, created successively higher oil prices as more and more regimes felt pressure from the Islamic Spring and Obama stifled production at home.  And it wasn’t just oil prices, either, that went up. Food prices, gold and silver and other basic material prices were heading up just at a time when the global economy was showing signs of slowing.

Inflation then acted as a brake on economies that were struggling to gain traction.

Then Mr. President Obama- who has always looked disinterested in real policy work- took several long vacations, inspired a sovereign debt crisis in the US and started the class warfare rhetoric that he now clings to bitterly as a substitute for religion and guns and real tax reform.   

Several sovereign debt crises later, the largest economic union in the world, the Eurozone, is on life support, while China deteriorates economically and Japan is listless.

And how did America do in this after all of Obama’s bragging?

Corporate profits are mixed, unemployment is ticking back up, while GDP grows at about 1.5 percent annually. The S&P 500 returned a measly 1.02 percent for 2011, however much Obama was roaring about the stock market in January.

Apparently the president doesn’t get to decide in January what the market will do for the year.

Now Obama knows that. 

Investors, who make economic decisions, not political speeches, didn’t buy the all-is-well mantra and bought very little equity in the stock market in 2011, despite “record profits.”   

This time around, in 2012, as Obama’s economy rises from the dead once again, he’s claiming only to have saved the auto industry on the backs of the taxpayers’ gift of ten and twenty dollars bills that stretches out a billion times.

General Motors, which made “record profits” last year, after getting the largest forgivable loan in the history of mankind- seriously- from the federal government, has announced profits have plunged.

Investors haven’t been buying those “record profits” either, chasing shares down to $20 from an offering of $33 in late 2010. $54 is break even for taxpayers- I guess investors were waiting for higher “record profits” before they are convinced that GM is as valuable as Obama says.

Now Obama has a big problem.

He wants you to believe that the economy is so bad that he needed trillions more to fix it. If that’s true, then all the bragging in the world by him isn’t going to remove the responsibility he has for the mess that he’s created over three years. 

But he also wants you to think that things are improving as well. If that’s true, if unemployment is heading downward, as Obama would want you to believe, then the question becomes: Why does he need trillions more to fix an economy already in recovery?

It’s clear the both-ways president, as usual, wants it both ways. He wants to declaim any responsibility for anything, while taking credit for everything.

He got Bin Laden, he saved GM and he blamed Bush.   

Subtle clues can be seen in places other than the bottom line of the employment report that the economy is fragile and at risk of fracturing.

Let’s for a moment ignore the contortions that socialist economists execute in order to make it appear the best-of-times and the worst-of-times alternately for the benefit of Obama.

Millions of people have left the workforce in the last year, driving labor participation rates to a 30 year low and costing the economy literally hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Consumer sentiment is down markedly, but that’s a lagging indicator of the economy. Confidence will be meaningful only on election-day. Even still, consumer confidence is well below what is considered healthy- for an economy or a president.

Getting the picture?

While GDP was not-so great in the first half, that was a one-off event. It will be a disaster in the second half of the year. And the first quarter of 2013 will be decidedly worse, maybe even 2008-9 type worse.

Already we have seen durable goods orders drop. And quarterly dividend futures point to companies eager to retain cash despite “record profits.”

Now add into that potent mix of economic miasma: 1) an Obama energy policy that has resulted in higher, less stable prices; 2) an Obama foreign policy that has resulted in more hostile and less stable global relationships, and; 3) world wide central bank policies that admits of one conclusion: We are out of money.

We. Are. Out. Of. Money.

So this is what it looks like when an insufferable blow hard runs out of money?

Yes, sir. 

• 
• WAYNE ALLYN ROOT
• 
• 

I am President Obama’s classmate at Columbia University, Class of ’83. I am also one of the most accurate Las Vegas oddsmakers and prognosticators. Accurate enough that I was awarded my own star on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars. And I smell something rotten in Denmark. Obama has a big skeleton in his closet. It’s his college records. Call it “gut instinct” but my gut is almost always right. Obama has a secret hidden at Columbia- and it’s a bad one that threatens to bring down his presidency. Gut instinct is how I’ve made my living for 29 years since graduating Columbia.

Obama and his infamous strategist David Axelrod understand how to play political hardball, the best it’s ever been played. Team Obama has decided to distract America’s voters by condemning Mitt Romney for not releasing enough years of his tax returns. It’s the perfect cover. Obama knows the best defense is a bold offense. Just keep attacking Mitt and blaming him for secrecy and evasion, while accusing him of having a scandal that doesn’t exist. Then ask followers like Senator Harry Reid to chase the lead. The U.S. Senate Majority Leader appears to now be making up stories out of thin air, about tax returns he knows nothing about. It’s a cynical, brilliant, and vicious strategy. Make Romney defend, so he can’t attack the real Obama scandal.

This is classic Axelrod. Obama has won several elections in his career by slandering his opponents and leaking sealed documents. Not only do these insinuations and leaks ruin the credibility and reputation of Obama’s opponents, they keep them on the defensive and off Obama’s trail of sealed documents.

By attacking Romney’s tax records, Obama’s socialist cabal creates a problem that doesn’t exist. Is the U.S. Senate Majority Leader making up stories out of thin air? You decide. But the reason for this baseless attack is clear- make Romney defend, so not only is he “off message” but it helps the media ignore the real Obama scandal.

My answer for Romney? Call Obama’s bluff.

Romney should call a press conference and issue a challenge in front of the nation. He should agree to release more of his tax returns, only if Obama unseals his college records. Simple and straight-forward. Mitt should ask “What could possibly be so embarrassing in your college records from 29 years ago that you are afraid to let America’s voters see? If it’s THAT bad, maybe it’s something the voters ought to see.” Suddenly the tables are turned. Now Obama is on the defensive.

My bet is that Obama will never unseal his records because they contain information that could destroy his chances for re-election. Once this challenge is made public, my prediction is you’ll never hear about Mitt’s tax returns ever again.

Why are the college records, of a 51-year-old President of the United States, so important to keep secret? I think I know the answer.

If anyone should have questions about Obama’s record at Columbia University, it’s me. We both graduated (according to Obama) Columbia University, Class of ’83. We were both (according to Obama) Pre-Law and Political Science majors. And I thought I knew most everyone at Columbia. I certainly thought I’d heard of all of my fellow Political Science majors. But not Obama (or as he was known then- Barry Soetoro). I never met him. Never saw him. Never even heard of him. And none of the classmates that I knew at Columbia have ever met him, saw him, or heard of him.

But don’t take my word for it. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008  that Fox News randomly called 400 of our Columbia classmates and never found one who had ever met Obama.

Now all of this mystery could be easily and instantly dismissed if Obama released his Columbia transcripts to the media. But even after serving as President for 3 1/2 years he refuses to unseal his college records. Shouldn’t the media be as relentless in pursuit of Obama’s records as Romney’s? Shouldn’t they be digging into Obama’s past–beyond what he has written about himself–with the same boundless enthusiasm as Mitt’s?

The first question I’d ask is, if you had great grades, why would you seal your records? So let’s assume Obama got poor grades. Why not release the records? He’s president of the free world, for gosh sakes. He’s commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. Who’d care about some poor grades from three decades ago, right? So then what’s the problem? Doesn’t that make the media suspicious? Something doesn’t add up.

Secondly, if he had poor grades at Occidental, how did he get admitted to an Ivy League university in the first place? And if his grades at Columbia were awful, how’d he ever get into Harvard Law School? So again those grades must have been great, right? So why spend millions to keep them sealed?

Third, how did Obama pay for all these fancy schools without coming from a wealthy background? If he had student loans or scholarships, would he not have to maintain good grades?

I can only think of one answer that would explain this mystery.

Here’s my gut belief: Obama got a leg up by being admitted to both Occidental and Columbia as a foreign exchange student. He was raised as a young boy in Indonesia. But did his mother ever change him back to a U.S. citizen? When he returned to live with his grandparents in Hawaii or as he neared college-age preparing to apply to schools, did he ever change his citizenship back? I’m betting not.

If you could unseal Obama’s Columbia University records I believe you’d find that:

A)   He rarely ever attended class.

B)   His grades were not those typical of what we understand it takes to get into Harvard Law School.

C)   He attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student.

D)   He paid little for either undergraduate college or Harvard Law School because of foreign aid and scholarships given to a poor foreign students like this kid Barry Soetoro from Indonesia.

If you think I’m “fishing” then prove me wrong. Open up your records Mr. President. What are you afraid of?

If it’s okay for U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to go on a fishing expedition about Romney’s taxes (even though he knows absolutely nothing about them nor will release his own), then I think I can do the same thing. But as Obama’s Columbia Class of ’83 classmate, at least I have more standing to make educated guesses.

It’s time for Mitt to go on the attack and call Obama’s bluff.

 Written By : Ben Shapiro

President Obama is my president. He’s not illegitimate. He’s not a usurper. He was duly elected by my fellow citizens — and as much as I think he’s a horrible commander-in-chief with anti-American ideals, that’s the choice Americans made in 2008.

But by the same token, President Obama isn’t my president. He isn’t doing anything for me, the typical, faceless American citizen. I’m not a member of a minority group — at least a minority group that counts (being Jewish obviously doesn’t count when it comes to Obama’s giveaway grab bag). I’m not a welfare case, and I’m employed. I’m not a member of a public sector union.

And so I don’t count when it comes to President Obama.

President Obama’s entire re-election campaign — and, thus far, his entire presidency — has been predicated on appealing to various splinter groups within the American population. He isn’t interested in presenting broad policy initiatives that appeal to the vast swath of Americans; in fact, his one major policy initiative, Obamacare, bombed with the American public so badly that the Democrats were unceremoniously thrown from Congress in 2010.

That’s why Obama finds himself on the defensive with regard to his polarizing campaign tactics. In an interview with Black Enterprise magazine, Obama said, “I want all Americans to have opportunity. I’m not the president of black America. I’m the president of the United States of America.” But that’s not what he says on his campaign website, where he breaks down Americans by color, including a subgroup of African-Americans for Obama, where he pushes posters urging blacks to “get his back” — just $35 to show your support!

Obama’s website also offers groups for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Jewish Americans (well, liberal Jewish Americans), Latinos, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgenders, people with disabilities, small business owners (all two of them who support Obama), seniors, women, and young Americans, among others.

Obama sees America as a country of differences papered over with the flag; Americans, by contrast, have historically seen America as a country of different folks united by dreams, goals and principles. To Obama, unity is aesthetic, an idea to be photoshopped to the front of a campaign brochure. To Americans, unity is engraved on our coinage.

But that fundamental difference in perspective has yet to manifest itself in this campaign. Americans seem to want to take Obama at his word. They don’t understand that his campaign philosophy of 2008 is worlds apart from his campaign philosophy of 2012. He has failed as a universal president — a president whose rising tide has lifted all boats. His only success must spring from his particularism. He must deconstruct his “all things to all people” persona in order to appeal to any one particular group.

But Obama’s enigmatic persona means that there’s no there there. He hasn’t offered enough to any one group to qualify as a representative member. His answer to Black Enterprise came in response to a question about whether he’s done enough for the black community. And he hasn’t. But he can only campaign as a black candidate or a gay candidate or a Latino candidate or a whatever-he-is-this-week candidate.

And that just won’t fly. Because, to paraphrase a famously unifying politician of the recent past, we’re not black states and white states, gay states and straight states — we’re the United States. Even if our president seems to like us better scattered and disunited.

Ben Shapiro, 28, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, a radio host on KRLA 870 Los Angeles, and Editor-At-Large for Breitbart News. He is the four-time bestselling author of “Primetime Propaganda.”

 Written By : Walter Williams

In Europe, especially in Germany, hoisting a swastika-emblazoned Nazi flag is a crime. For decades after World War II, people have hunted down and sought punishment for Nazi murderers, who were responsible for the deaths of more than 20 million people.

Here’s my question: Why are the horrors of Nazism so well-known and widely condemned but not those of socialism and communism? What goes untaught — and possibly is covered up — is that socialist and communist ideas have produced the greatest evil in mankind’s history. You say, “Williams, what in the world are you talking about? Socialists, communists and their fellow travelers, such as the Wall Street occupiers supported by our president, care about the little guy in his struggle for a fair shake! They’re trying to promote social justice.” Let’s look at some of the history of socialism and communism.

What’s not appreciated is that Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, the term Nazi stands for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis pale in comparison with the horrors committed by the communists in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China. Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China’s communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is documented on University of Hawaii Professor Rudolph J. Rummel’s website, at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills, and in his book “Death by Government.”

How much hunting down and punishment have there been for these communist murderers? To the contrary, it’s acceptable both in Europe and in the U.S. to hoist and march under the former USSR’s red flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle. Mao Zedong has been long admired by academics and leftists across our country, as they often marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving his little red book, “Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung.” President Barack Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.

Whether it’s the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children’s Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined.

Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

The unspeakable horrors of Nazism didn’t happen overnight. They were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.” It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans — who would have cringed at the thought of genocide — who created the Trojan horse for Hitler’s ascendancy. Today’s Americans are similarly accepting the massive consolidation of power in Washington in the name of social justice.

If you don’t believe it, just ask yourself: Which way are we headed tiny steps at a time — toward greater liberty or toward more government control over our lives?

Perhaps we think that we are better human beings than the German people who created the conditions that brought Hitler to power. I say, don’t count on it.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

 Written By : Michelle Malkin

Chutzpah overload in full effect: President Obama’s sleazy super-PAC, run by his former White House spokesman Bill Burton, just released an ad accusing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of causing the cancer death of a steelworker’s wife.

It’s not just a slanderous and false attack. It’s a foolish attempt to camouflage the administration’s massive jobs death toll, politicized pension plundering and Big Labor bailout cronyism. And it will backfire big time because the thousands and thousands of true victims of Obama’s economic wreckage are speaking up and fighting back.

Let’s dispense with the “Romney = murderer” meme first. The warped Priorities USA ad features the claims of one Joe Soptic, a former employee at the Kansas City-based GST Steel plant. The plant went bankrupt years after Bain Capital acquired it. Soptic blames Romney for the loss of his job and health insurance — and for the subsequent death of his wife a “short time after” the plant’s closure.

But Romney stopped working for Bain in 1999. The plant closed in 2001. And Soptic’s wife died in 2006. Oh, and Soptic admitted to CNN on Tuesday afternoon that the family in fact had health insurance at the time of Soptic’s wife’s death. But it’s still all-powerful, time-traveling, omnipresent Darth Romney’s fault.

Obama flack turned super-PAC slime-master Burton shrugged off the facts and doubled down on the campaign’s class-warfare bloviation. “Families and individuals had to find new jobs, new sources of health insurance and a way to make up for the pensions they lost,” he told Politico. “Mitt Romney has had an enduring impact on the lives of thousands of men and women, and for many of them, that impact has been devastating.”

Yet, the Soptic story is the best they could scrape together? Stamp this one “EPIC FAIL.”

While Team Obama promotes fables to indict Romney, the incontrovertible stories of the current administration’s economic malpractice are finally getting out. In 2010, I first reported on how Obama’s UAW bailout threw tens of thousands of nonunion autoworkers under the bus. It’s the ongoing horror story of some 20,000 white-collar workers at Delphi, a leading auto parts company spun off from GM a decade ago.

As Washington rushed to nationalize the U.S. auto industry with $80 billion in taxpayer “rescue” funds and avoid contested court termination proceedings, the White House auto team and the Treasury Department schemed with Big Labor bosses to preserve UAW members’ costly pension funds by shafting their nonunion counterparts.

In addition, the nonunion pensioners lost all of their health and life insurance benefits. The abused workers — most from hard-hit northeast Ohio, Michigan and neighboring states — had devoted decades of their lives as secretaries, technicians, engineers and sales employees at Delphi/GM. Some workers have watched up to 70 percent of their pensions vanish.

“I worked for 34 years at GM/Delphi Corp. When Delphi went bankrupt, we lost everything,” Dana Strickland of Michigan wrote me. “Because I was salaried (middle management), we lost our pension and health insurance. I did not belong to the union, so GM/Delphi could have cared less. I have never felt so betrayed. We never hear this brought to the public’s attention. People need to know how we were screwed, while the Obama administration kissed up to the union.”

“I’m one of the Delphi Salaried Retirees that lost the health care, life insurance and 67 percent of the pension I was promised in retirement after working hard for 40 years,” Charles Stone of Michigan e-mailed. “Words cannot describe the frustration and let down these events have thrust on my family’s lives, and to have GM’s rescue all sugar-coated in the current political environment is like putting lipstick on a pig. … We will continue to fight to right this grievous wrong.”

Tom Rose of Ohio added: “I am one of the 20,000 salaried retirees that lost all of my health care and — in my case — a 40 percent pension cut. So I am now paying increased health care costs with fewer pension dollars and contributing what is left to our lawsuit to correct this injustice. Meanwhile, the politically connected union has their full pension and 90-plus percent of their health care. You have hit upon the key question: How can our own federal government pick winners and losers amongst its own citizens?”

Through two costly years of litigation and investigation, the Delphi workers have exposed how the stacked White House Auto Task Force schemed with union bosses to “cherry pick” (one Obama official’s own words) which financial obligations the new Government Motors company would assume and which they would abandon based on their political expedience. Obama’s own former auto czar Steve Rattner admitted in his recent memoir that “attacking the union’s sacred cow” could “jeopardize” the auto bailout deal.

In June, 20 months after a federal judge first ordered the government to cooperate, the Delphi Salaried Retirees Association broke through the administration’s information stonewall and dislodged 62,000 pages of documents in their lawsuit to right the administration’s wrongs. As The Daily Caller reported on Tuesday, the documents included “internal government emails (that contradicted) sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts … and that administration figures violated federal law.”

Meanwhile, the Delphi workers who got shafted are getting in the faces of the administration and the public with a new web ad produced by conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring. They are asking, “Why, Mr. President? Why?” They — and America — deserve answers and justice, not more Bizarro World smears and fantastical bedtime stories.

Mitt and Ann Romney in a 1973 yearbook at Harvard; he earned a joint law and business degree.

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President Obama has a Harvard law degree. Former President George W. Bush has a Harvard M.B.A. Will the next president have both?

One of the most exclusive clubs in academe is a Harvard University dual-degree program allowing graduate students to attend its law and business schools simultaneously, cramming five years of education into four. On average, about 12 people per year have completed the program — the overachievers of the overachievers — including a striking number of big names in finance, industry, law and government.

The program is so small that it has drawn little attention outside rarefied circles, but that may change as its most famous graduate, Mitt Romney, campaigns for the White House, subjecting every phase of his life to scrutiny.

When Harvard started its so-called J.D.-M.B.A. program in 1969, there were just a handful like it. Others have cropped up since, but Harvard’s has what may be the most successful alumni roster, particularly in finance.

In addition to Mr. Romney, founder of Bain Capital, the roughly 500 graduates include Bruce Wasserstein, who led the investment bank Lazard until he died in 2009; leaders of multibillion-dollar hedge fund and private equity firms like Canyon Capital Advisors, Silver Lake Partners and Crestview Partners; high-ranking executives at banks like Citigroup and Credit Suisse; C. James Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company; and Theodore V. Wells Jr., one of the nation’s top trial lawyers.

The young Mr. Romney wanted to go to business school, while his father, George W. Romney, a cabinet secretary and former Michigan governor, urged him to go to law school. So the younger Mr. Romney did both, studying at Harvard from 1971 to 1975.

“What was special about these people was that they had bandwidth,” said Malcolm S. Salter, an emeritus business professor who helped create the program. “They had to be driven, hard-working and organized to a degree that was unusual even for Harvard business or law grad students.”

Guhan Subramanian, who graduated from the program in 1998 and now is its faculty chairman, said the students could be viewed as “résumé builders who haven’t figured out what to do with their lives and are just checking off all the boxes.” But he said they are genuinely interested in mastering both fields.

Students must be admitted separately to the business and law schools before applying for the program. That is a feat in itself, because the two student bodies are quite different.

The law school takes younger students, often straight out of college, putting more emphasis on academic credentials, while the business school usually wants work and leadership experience. Business students are often described as being more gregarious and at ease with numbers, law students as more intellectual and facile with words.

And then there are politics.

“I was among the most conservative people at the law school and one of the most liberal people at the business school,” said Peter Halasz, a partner at the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel, who completed the program in the early 1980s. “Studying at both exposes you to many different kinds of people and various sides of an argument.”

The political gap was wider in Mr. Romney’s era, scarred by Vietnam and Watergate, when law students wore T-shirts and business students wore ties to class. “The law school was very swept up in the politics of the time, but the business school pretty much ignored them,” said Detlev Vagts, a law professor who ran the program for more than 30 years.

Charles E. Haldeman Jr., former head of Putnam Investments and Freddie Mac, was a year ahead of Mr. Romney in the program. “Back then, people were trying to save the world,” Mr. Haldeman said. “Because I was interested in business, and doing well economically mattered to me, and I didn’t think the country was controlled by evil people, the law school students did think of me as a little different.”

Both schools were overwhelmingly male in those days. And far more graduates have gone into business than law; many, like Mr. Wasserstein, switch to business.

Lawrence Golub, chief executive of the Golub Capital investment firm, said that the vast majority of graduates end up in business rather than law because of the earnings potential and the quality of life. “One learns that the life of associate at a big corporate law firm is demanding, unpleasant and not as lucrative as what you can do on the business side,” said Mr. Golub, who graduated from the program in 1984 and founded its alumni society.

For many graduates, Mr. Golub said, the toughest lesson after a lifetime of uninterrupted success is “that failing won’t kill you.”

In the 1970s, many graduates went into management consulting, as Mr. Romney did, but for most of the program’s history, finance has dominated, which some people connected to the program find mildly disappointing. Professor Salter said he had hoped the program would produce more public servants.

But former students and professors say it makes sense that a group of overachievers would be drawn to financial markets, a hypercompetitive field with the promise of immense riches.

Adebayo O. Ogunlesi, a program graduate, said, “I wanted to be a business or commercial lawyer and thought I could meet prospective clients at H.B.S.”

But Mr. Ogunlesi, whose law classmates included Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., practiced law only briefly. He became head of investment banking at Credit Suisse, then chairman of Global Infrastructure Partners.

“When you’re negotiating as a banker, it helps to throw in a few choice legal terms to suggest that you could help them think through how the deal can get done from a legal point of view,” he said.

Students start by taking the first year of one program, and then the first year of the other. In their third and fourth years, they take courses from both.

Those who start with the first year of law school — often regarded as the hardest — as Mr. Romney did are more likely to complete both degrees.

But in another sense, Mr. Romney is atypical. He is one of only two alumni to have a high-profile career in politics, along with Christopher Cox, a former congressman and Securities and Exchange Commission chairman. 

As long as politics remains a relatively low-paying, fickle career, graduates do not expect to see many students taking the political path. All the more reason that other dual-degree graduates, whether or not they support Mr. Romney, admit to being intrigued by the prospect that one of theirs might become president.

“Who knows,” Mr. Golub said, “maybe we’ll be holding our next reunion at the White House.”

Some 800,000 additional Texans than expected went to the polls today to cast ballots in what might normally have been a sleepy cakewalk for the ho-hum Establishment Flabby Middle.

Yep. Another Kay Baily Hutchison, another Bob Krueger, that’s all folks in Texas reallywanted, right, Mr. Dewhurst? Someone with french-cuff shirts and collar stays, someone that enjoys the Silent Auction at the Country Club to benefit the United Fund, who speaks in smooth and dulcet tones, and never, ever threatens to actually read the Constitution –let alone abide by it.

Well, gee whiz, guess what happened on the way to the Lowell Wiecker Memorial Big Tent?

The American People happened, that’s what.

And Ted Cruz absolutely crushed David Dewhurst, by nearly 12 percentage points. Ted didn’t merely eke out a victory, or fall over the finish line by a whisper. No. He filleted the Lieutenant Governor, basted him with a spicy sauce of righteous American anger at our current political class, and served him up with a bow to all the establishment types –who, by the way, will now poo-poo the notion they weren’t with Cruz from the get-go.

Does anyone these days queue up hours in advance to listen to a speech by Charlie Crist? Anybody? Bob Bennet?

The truly remarkable thing about Mr. Cruz’s victory is the massive, massive fortune that his opponent sank into the race, and how slathering all the money around by Dewhurst had the exact opposite effect of it’s intent: People are sick of the relentless personal, bizarre, irrelevant attacks in concert with the complete absence of philosophical and political substance. Personal attacks are fine, as far as they go: But, they must be paired with solid, substantive, strongly articulated debate. Ted Cruz offered this in spades.

And in this election, Mr. Obama can see the future, if he cares to look into the glass:

It is a grim and brutish future for the man who is President for the next 159 days, electorally speaking. Just as in Texas, the otherwise somnolent folks that tend to eschew politics in this nation will have been stirred to wrath –fury!– by a President and a political class that is utterly, utterly disconnected from, and uninterested in, them.

How in the name of a loving God could a President so obnoxiously rule against the known, (-and knowable) will of the American People for four years expect anything other than a good, old-fashioned drubbing? All Barack has done for four years is attack his opponents with the most adolescent blather, accuse them of being lazy, racist, good-for-nothings that don’t appreciate his genius– and then sign into law bill upon bill that the American People manifestly despise and reject? How? Has Mr. Obama ever actually acted Presidential for more than a couple of speechifying afternoons? Has he ever been the President of the entire nation –rather than the chief antagonist for the Democrat Party?

The American People are fed up. They are tired of being ignored, tormented, and ripped off. We are a kind and loving people. We are tolerant to a fault.

But, Mr. Obama, pace Admiral Yamamoto: You have awakened a sleeping giant.

Just ask David Dewhurst.

Only in a world of lowered, New Normal expectations was the July jobs report anything less than another disaster for U.S. workers. Nonfarm payrolls rose 163,000 last month as the unemployment rate rose to 8.3%. In addition, employment for May and June was revised by 6,000 jobs.

– Not only is the 8.3% unemployment rate way above the 5.6% unemployment rate that Team Obama predicted for July 2012 if Congress passed the $800 billion stimulus plan. It’s way above the 6.0% unemployment rate they predicted if no stimulus was passed.

– Job growth, as measured by nonfarm payrolls, has average about 75,000 jobs a month during the Obama recovery for a total of 2.7 million jobs. Context: During the first three years of the Reagan Recovery, job growth averaged 273,000 a month for a total of 9.8 million. If you adjust for the larger U.S. population today, the Reagan Recovery averaged 360,000 jobs a month for a three-year total of 13 million jobs.

– This continues to be the longest stretch of 8% or higher unemployment since the Great Depression, 42 straight months.

– If the labor force participation rate was the same as when Obama took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate would be 11.0%.

– Even if you take into account that the LFP should be declining as America ages, the unemployment rate would be 10.6%.

– If labor force participation rate hadn’t declined since just last month, unemployment rate would have risen to 8.4%.

– The broader U-6 unemployment rate, which includes “all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons,” ticked up to 15.0%.

– Two years ago, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner wrote his now-infamous “Welcome to the Recovery” op-ed for the New York Times. During those two years, the economy has added an average of just 137,000 jobs a month.

– Not only is the 8.3% unemployment rate way above the 5.6% unemployment rate that Team Obama predicted for July 2012 if Congress passed the $800 billion stimulus plan. It’s way above the 6.0% unemployment rate they predicted if no stimulus was passed.

– Good point on the report from IHS Global Insight:

In the household survey, which produces the unemployment rate, both the employment-to-population ratio and the labor force participation rate dropped, not signs of a healthy labor market. The report will alleviate fears that the US might be tipping back into recession. But uncertainties over the strength of global growth, the Eurozone crisis, the fiscal cliff and the November elections are giving plenty of reasons for caution. We expect subdued monthly job creation in the 100,000-150,000 region in the second half of the year

– And Citgroup’s take:

To keep us all guessing, today’s data included a particularly weak reading on employment from the household survey, which showed a 195,000 drop in employment and 150,000 drop in the labor force. The unemployment rate rose to 8.3% from 8.2%. While trend employment gains are not progressing at a particularly robust rate, we would not view a 0.1 percentage point move in a singlemonth reading as particularly significant. Also showing that the underlying trend is not very robust, the work week was unchanged and average hourly earnings rose just 0.1%, suggesting a much smaller gain in real income than reported in June (which also argues for smoothing). Aggregate hours worked rose a modest 0.1%.

Written By : Ann Coulter

Mitt Romney presents one enormous problem for Barack Obama’s campaign: No divorce records. That’s why the media are so hot to get their hands on Romney’s tax records for the past 25 years. They need something to “pick through, distort and lie about” — as the Republican candidate says.

Obama’s usual campaign method, used in 100 percent of his races, has been to pry into the private records of his opponents.

Democrats aren’t going to find any personal dirt on the clean-cut Mormon, so they need complicated tax filings going back decades in order to create the illusion of scandal out of boring financial records.

Romney has already released his 2010 tax return and is about to release his 2011 return. After all the huffing and puffing by the media demanding those returns, the follow-up story vanished remarkably quickly when the only thing the return showed was that Romney pays millions of dollars in taxes and gives a lot of money to charity.

Let’s take a romp down memory lane and review the typical Obama campaign strategy. Obama became a U.S. senator only by virtue of David Axelrod’s former employer, the Chicago Tribune, ripping open the sealed divorce records of Obama’s two principal opponents.

One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader. But then the Chicago Tribune leaked the claim that Hull’s second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.

Those records were under seal, but as The New York Times noted: “The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had ‘worked aggressively behind the scenes’ to push the story.” Many people said Axelrod had “an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story.”

Both Hull and his ex-wife opposed releasing their sealed divorce records, but they finally relented in response to the media’s hysteria — 18 days before the primary. Hull was forced to spend four minutes of a debate detailing the abuse allegation in his divorce papers, explaining that his ex-wife “kicked me in the leg and I hit her shin to try to get her to not continue to kick me.”

After having held a substantial lead just a month before the primary, Hull’s campaign collapsed with the chatter about his divorce. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.

As luck would have it, Obama’s opponent in the general election had also been divorced! Jack Ryan was tall, handsome, Catholic — and shared a name with one of Harrison Ford’s most popular onscreen characters! He went to Dartmouth, Harvard Law and Harvard Business School, made hundreds of millions of dollars as a partner at Goldman Sachs, and then, in his early 40s, left investment banking to teach at an inner city school on the South Side of Chicago.

Ryan would have walloped Obama in the Senate race. But at the request of — again — the Chicago Tribune, California Judge Robert Schnider unsealed the custody papers in Ryan’s divorce five years earlier from Hollywood starlet Jeri Lynn Ryan, the bombshell Borg on “Star Trek: Voyager.”

Jack Ryan had released his tax records. He had released his divorce records. But both he and his ex-wife sought to keep the custody records under seal to protect their son.

Amid the 400 pages of filings from the custody case, Jack Ryan claimed that his wife had had an affair, and she counterclaimed with the allegation that he had taken her to “sex clubs” in Paris, New York and New Orleans, which drove her to fall in love with another man.

(Republicans: If you plan a career in public office, please avoid marrying a wacko.)

Ryan had vehemently denied her allegations at the time, but it didn’t matter. The sex club allegations aired on “Entertainment Tonight,” “NBC Nightly News,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” and NBC’s “Today” show. CNN covered the story like it was the first moon landing.

(Interestingly, international papers also were ablaze with the story — the same newspapers that were supposed to be so bored with American sexual mores during Bill Clinton’s sex scandal.)

Four days after Judge Schnider unsealed the custody records, Ryan dropped out of the race for the horror of (allegedly) propositioning his own wife and then taking “no” for an answer.

Alan Keyes stepped in as a last-minute Republican candidate.

And that’s how Obama became a U.S. senator. He destroyed both his Democratic primary opponent and his Republican general election opponent with salacious allegations about their personal lives taken from “sealed” court records.

Obama’s team delved into Sarah Palin’s marriage and spread rumors of John McCain’s alleged affair in 2008 and they smeared Herman Cain in 2011 with hazy sexual harassment allegations all emanating from David Axelrod’s pals in Chicago.

It’s almost like a serial killer’s signature. Unsealed personal records have been released to the press. Obama must be running for office!

So you can see what a pickle the Obama campaign is in having to run against a Dudley Do-Right, non-drinking, non-smoking, God-fearing, happily married Mormon.

They’ve got to get their hands on thousands of pages of Romney’s tax filings so that the media can — as Romney says — lie about them. It will be interesting to see if Obama can pick the lock of the famously guarded IRS. 

In January 2011, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) declared that Social Security is in fine shape. A few days past 18 months later, and with disturbing new information about the truly bleak future of Social Security, Reid has not publicly adjusted his statement, nor do I expect he plans to. This is not the only area where Reid has been complicit in an abdication of duty, however – on Tuesday National Journal  reported that the nation’s top Senator is going to kick the can down the road again when it comes to his duty to pass a budget.

Reid’s stated reason for not passing a budget is that the House Republicans want to spend $19 billion less than the Budget Control Act dictated could happen in Fiscal Year 2013. However, since Reid has not passed a budget through the Senate in nearly 1,200 days – including one year when Democrats had a nearly filibuster-proof margin of votes in the Senate and a complicit Pelosi-led House – this reason is suspect at best.

There at least three other reasons Reid’s statement should be taken with a grain of salt. First, disagreements between the chambers are normal. Typically, the Senate passes legislation that is different than House legislation. Then a conference committee is put together, and differences are hashed out. A compromise bill then comes back to both chambers for an up-or-down vote. This just happened with the transportation/student loan/flood insurance law, for example.

Second, Reid could easily pass legislation through the Senate and put political pressure on House Republicans to raise their spending cap. It only takes 51 votes in the Senate to pass a budget, after all, and we all know much of the media would use the Senate’s bill as an opportunity to hammer Republicans as intransigent. Clearly, Reid has decided inaction will lose Democrats fewer seats in the fall than pro-active action – in other words, doing his job would entail more political risk, so he is going to abdicate his responsibilities. (This strategy worked so well for Reid in 2010, didn’t it?)

Third, $19 billion just isn’t very much money in the grand scheme of things. It’s one-half of one-percent of the 2012 budget, for example. It’s less than 1.5% of this year’s expected deficit. Essentially, it’s a rounding error, a drop in the bucket, whatever you want to call it, as compared to our massive national debt – about one-eighth of one percent. And yet Reid is willing to force another embarrassing debate over whether we want this year’s deficit to be gigantic and unsustainable or merely gigantic and unsustainable.

Last year, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) said Congress should be in jail for not passing a budget within the time constraints of the law. While that is unlikely to take place, the fact is Senator Reid is purposely flouting public law, laws that he is supposed to uphold, especially since they specifically apply to his chamber. It is disappointing to see he is really going to go through with this irresponsible method of funding the federal government of the United States.

GOP Angry Over Reid Claim That Romney ‘Paid No Taxes for 10 Years’

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