Quick Hits - July 30, 2012

Catching up across a busy day and a busy weekend....

Remember this, when President Obama told a fundraising audience that 'we've tried their economic plan and it didnt' work, we tried our plan and it worked'...

This audacious statement led to this Romney campaign advertisement...

Which then sent the WaPoo 'Fact Checker' Glenn Kessler into a rapid defense of President Barack Obama, accusing the Romney campaign of taking the President's words 'out of context' in their advertisement while assigning that advert 'Four Pinocchio's' as a gross misstatement.

Apparently, when the President said his plan worked, he didn't really really honestly mean that his plan worked, according to Kessler.  Funny, Kessler used a similar vapid argument when he said the the President didn't really mean...

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen.”

...when he said that either.  At least he's consistent in his bias.  But this is getting really pathetic....the WaPoo has become the LA Slimes...

The Hill is also back to shilling for the Obama campaign with a 'do not worry Democrats, we are still leading this thing' article touting a NY Times shill who makes his case by averaging the polls of critical swing states and concludes that if these polls are accurate, Barack Obama will win 10 of the 12 swing states and 330 electoral votes.

If these polls are accurate?

What do you think?  The majority of the polls at the core of this 'analysis' reflect between a D+7 and a D+12 skew - basically measuring a turnout and enthusiasm level for the President's re-election that exceeds that of his 2008 election when 'Hope and Change' delivered a 52.8% popular vote 'decisive win'.

Do we really believe enthusiasm will exceed 2008 in 2012?

The Orange County Register, representing Orange County, California (one of the 'red' areas of CA) has an editorial that highlights that the President's 'gaffes' are really a true reflection of what he really believes...

'Fairness. You have made enough. Redistribution. Spread the wealth around. Private sector is doing fine. We tried our plan, and it worked. You didn't build that.'

Read it all...

Some claim that the statements of Barack Obama all have a 'statute of limitations' on their effectiveness.  Does this apply today or has the statute of limitations run out?

“The fact that we are here today to debate raisingAmerica 's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign thatthe US Government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we nowdepend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to financeour Government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America 's debtweakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that,"the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden ofbad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deservebetter.”


~ Senator Barack H. Obama, March 2006!

How does this statement reconcile with the President's 4 consecutive years averaging $1.3 trillion in budget deficits?  Adding $5 trillion, more than his predecessor did in 8 years, to the national debt in 38 months, and is on pace to add $6.4 trillion during his 4 year term in office? How about the last two budgets submitted by Barack Obama to Congress both included not only annual deficits >$1.2 trillion, but were on pace to add $10-$12 trillion more (with optimistic economic numbers as opposed to realistic economic projections) over the next decade?  Both of these were voted down unanimously by the U.S. Congress.

Charles Krauthammer highlight's 'This White House's arm's-length relationship with truth' as he win's game, set, and match in the kerfuffle of their own creation as the Obama WH furiously scrambled to claim that the President did not send back the bust of Sir Winston Churchill loaned to President George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 terror attack as a symbol of the special relationship with Britain and their alliance with us.

Rather than tell the truth about Barack Obama unceremoniously returning the bust to Britain in January 2009, the White House lied about the bust when it was being used as an example of the Administration's policies and actions which disrespected our ally -- weakening the partisan attacks against Mitt Romney over supposedly weakening the special relationship.  Charles Krauthammer called them on it - and it took but one phone call to the British Embassy in Washington DC to uncover the truth.

Staying on the subject of fundamental dishonesty, Pultizer Prize-winning author, David Maraniss, who wrote 'Barack Obama: The Story' and subsequently revealed that many of the events and people contained in Barack Obama's autobiographies are not true, is getting testy as his book tanks....

David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barack Obama: The Story, is getting testy. And it is not hard to understand why. The Washington Post diva spent the last four years on his career book, released it in the heart of a heated re-election season, got the kind of exposure a Kardashian would envy, and now finds the book heading for the remainder racks weeks after its release. Oy vey!


As of this writing, the book ranks 1,696 on Amazon's bestseller list. By contrast, Edward Klein's unfriendly Obama tome, The Amateur, has outsold just every book this summer not centered on female bondage, spent weeks on top of New York Times top-ten list, and now ranks 55 on Amazon despite being out a month longer than The Story.


Rather than assess why his book tanked -- it is too honest for the left and too dishonest for the right -- Maraniss has turned his wrath on the people he seems to hold responsible for the book's failure -- namely, "obsessed conspiratorialists" like me.

At noted in the link, at least we're not all racists...yet...

Is this relevant to the 2012 campaign season?  A new book by Richard Miniter is claiming that Barack Obama put off his 'gutsy call' to get Osama Bin Laden three times at the insistence of senior advisor Valerie Jarrett before finally giving the order to proceed.

Barack Obama called off the raid to kill Osama bin Laden three times at the insistence of a top political adviser, according to a new book that aims to downplay the president's greatest achievement in office.


In 'Leading from Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him,' journalist Richard Miniter argues that Obama waffled and wavered in the run-up to the May 2, 2011 Navy SEAL assault on the al-Qaeda leader's compound in Pakistan.


Mr Miniter says Obama missed opportunities in January, February and March to kill the mastermind the September 11 terrorist attacks -- and nearly called off the final raid as well -- because of the advice of adviser Valerie Jarrett, who has no national security background.

President Barack Obama's reelection campaign is apparently changing course and embarking on a new reelection campaign - to market his second term in office as Bill Clinton 2.0 - presumably without the cigar and the intern.  The key term here is the word - market - not run or operate as Bill Clinton 2.0.

Barack Obama is going to try to convince the American voter, with the increased assistance of former President Bill Clinton, that his economic plans for his second term are the same economic plans that Bill Clinton enacted in the 1990's that allegedly led to the economic growth of the mid-latter 1990's.

There are two problems with this approach.  One, Bill Clinton, in the wake of the sharp rebuke he took in the 1994 midterms, moved to the center and triangulated with the GOP from the center - or rather - took credit for the popular initiatives of the GOP Congress like Welfare reform and decreasing capital gains taxes in 1995-96 which played a major role in igniting the boom of the 1990's.  This welfare reform, by the way, is the same welfare reform that Barack Obama just gutted via Executive Order.  Those capital gains and dividend tax decreases - are the opposite of the capital gains and dividend tax increases that President Obama is endorsing / calling for in 2013.

Second, it's based on the revisionist history / fundamental misperception of the Clinton years which include the meme that the Clinton tax increases of 1993 helped fuel the economic boom.  The boom, however, did not start until after the GOP took control of Congress and forced the President to negotiate and compromise with them - leading to fiscal responsibility in the wake of the government shutdown, and the capital gains tax decreases which helped fuel the internet boom (which would go bust in 2001).

Will this work?  Perhaps for some, but the problem is, after the rebuke of 1994, Bill Clinton began to 'triangulate' in 1995 - well before his reelection effort in 1996.  After the voter's rebuke of President Obama in 2010, the President not only refused to 'triangulate', he trebled down on his hard left policies - to the point of acting without Congressional authorization in an unconstitutional manner.

As part of this new 'campaign', Bill Clinton is now going to be the headliner for the Democrat National Convention.  One problem - his headline speech is against the opening match of the 2012-13 NFL season, featuring the Super Bowl champs NY Giants facing off with the Dallas Cowboys.

Who will win prime time - and can the Democrats find a way to skew the Neilsens?

The progressive pinheads of NBC's Today program today 'gushed' all over the Olympic Opening Ceremony homage to Britain's National Health Service - their government run and managed healthcare system...

MEREDITH VIEIRA: It is called, "Second to the Right," a reference to J.M. Barrie's children's book Peter Pan. It honors what Danny Boyle considers two of Britain's greatest achievements, children's literature and the National Health Service's publicly-funded health care system.


LAUER: Back in the states you might be saying, wait a second, we're locked in this kind of partisan debate over the future of health care in our own country. Here, they feel so strongly about their health care system, they're actually celebrating it as part of the Olympic opening ceremony.

Any mention of the costs associated with NHS busting the national budget?  How about of the 9 month wait one has to see a medical specialist if one does not have private insurance?  Or how about the 130,000 elderly patients per year who are, in effect, euthanized to reduce costs?  Or the rationing of medicines and treatment to control costs?

‘It’s no fun and games’… Horror stories about the NHS abound. A 2007 survey of almost 1,000 physicians by Doctors’ Magazine found that two-thirds said they had been told by their local NHS trust not to prescribe certain drugs, and one in five doctors knew patients who had suffered as a result of treatment rationing. The study cited one physician who characterized the NHS as “a lottery.” A new study this year by GP magazine supports that conclusion. Through Freedom of Information Act records, it found that 90 percent of NHS trusts were rationing care.


Rick Dewsbury of the Daily Mail was aghast at the worship of the NHS during Friday’s Olympic ceremony.

It's not just Britain's NHS - the Canadian healthcare system is another preferred model to what they want the U.S. healthcare system to turn into....but what about the facts?

Canadian health care spending unsustainable… A 2011 report by the Fraser Institute concluded that Canada’s health care system is spending at an unsustainable rate. Six of ten Canadian provinces are on track to spend half of their revenues on health care, according to the institute.


“We conclude that Canada’s health system produces rates of growth in health spending that are not sustainable solely through redistributive public financing,” the report concluded.


In 2011, health care spending consumed 50 percent of revenues in Canada’s two largest provinces, Ontario and Quebec.


By 2017, four more provinces — Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia and New Brunswick — will spend half of their revenues on health care, according to the institute.


Total federal, provincial and territorial government health spending has grown by 8.1 percent annually, while the national GDP in Canada rose by only 6.7 percent during the same period.

More on entitlements and 'fiction - we have the progressive columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik (who was once suspended for sock puppetry and lying in his columns), who has a column today that touts Social Security does not contribute to the $1.3 trillion deficit (average over the last 4 years) - when in fact it accounted for about $137 billion of the deficit in 2011.

Will we get a correction?  Doubtful.

By the way, the Social Security Disability program is going broke too - and more have been added to the disability rolls in the last three months than jobs were created...

In Israel earlier today, Mitt Romney pointed out the obvious - and the Palestinian Islamists raged....

Mitt Romney told Jewish donors Monday that their culture is part of what has allowed them to be more economically successful than the Palestinians, outraging Palestinian leaders who called his comments racist and out of touch.


"As you come here and you see the GDP [gross domestic product] per capita, for instance, in Israel, which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality," the Republican presidential candidate told about 40 wealthy donors at a breakfast at the King David Hotel.


Palestinian leaders's reactions were swift and pointed.


"It is a racist statement, and this man doesn't realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation," said Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Israel embraces capitalism and has a western style democracy.  They also embrace western values and while the 'Jewish State' is a secular nation - Christians and Muslims in Israel who embrace those western values have the same rights as Jews in Israel.  On the other hand, the Palestinian Authority is a corrupt organization that eschews capitalism, a western style democracy, and western values.  They promote the victim hood of their own people for their own power and financial gain - using them as fodder to get hundreds of millions of aid from the gullible or feckless (UN) that they skim and call for the destruction of the only successful state in the region.

But it's not their fault - it's the fault of the Joooos.....

Sharing the anti-Israeli sentiment is the institution known as the International Olympic Committee.... which continues to refuse to hold a minute of silence in honor of the 11 Israeli Olympic athletes killed 40 years ago at the hands of Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics.  Some claim their hands were tied - when the only one's with hands tied were the victims of the terrorists...

The IOC doesn't limit their fecklessness to just anti-Semitism.  They also embrace political correctness - and want every country to win a medal because if they don't, someone may be disappointed....

Heavy fighting continues in the Syrian city of Aleppo - with the forces of Syrian despot Bashir al-Assad using artillery, tanks, attack helicopters, and bombers to hammer the city.  Nearly half of the nearly 20,000 Syrian dead, mainly civilians, in the 17 month uprising have occurred since a failed United Nations truce about 4 months ago.  The UN, moving from feckless to criminal in their incompetency...

Remember Greece?  It's been lost in the fiscal challenges facing the Eurozone from Spain and Italy.  According to one leading German politician, Greece cannot be saved from the hole it dug itself.

"Greece cannot be saved, that is simple mathematics," Michael Fuchs, deputy leader of the parliamentary group of Merkel's Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party told weekly business magazine Wirtschaftswoche." Indeed, truth hurts, especially when accompanied by math. Which sadly is the problem these days in a world where math and surreality can no longer coexist.

But with Greece already lost, will Germany pay the price to save the Euro (and Spain, and Italy, and perhaps  France)?

We close today's edition with a sampling from another great essay from Victor Davis Hanson - this one addressing what is taking place in California today - and how the Central Valley of California, once a major agricultural center for the country, is now emulating the experience of 'Road Warrior' - 

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.


Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.


Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.


Terrible governance was also a culprit, in the sense that the state worked like a lottery: those lucky enough by hook or by crook to get a state job thereby landed a bonanza of high wages, good benefits, no accountability, and rich pensions that eventually almost broke the larger and less well-compensated general society.

These are the effects of a progressive political leadership, viewpoint, and policies that have metastasized in California (and other places like Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Toledo which are dominated by progressives).  Can we not see the pattern?  The cause and effect?  Do we not have the will to change this direction before we find ourselves so deep in a hole that we cannot climb out?

Today in History

1729 - The City of Baltimore was founded in Maryland.

1945 - The USS Indianapolis, a heavy cruiser, is sunk by a Japanese submarine enroute from Tinian (where she just secretly delivered critical components for the atomic bomb) to the Philippines.  About 300 of her crew of nearly 1200 died when the ship was sunk, nearly 900 went into the sea.  The secrecy of the ship's mission meant that rescue efforts were significantly delayed.  By the time the survivors were located, only 300 remained alive - sharks accounting for most of the dead.

1965 - President Lyndon Johnson signs into law, Medicare, a health insurance program for elderly Americans.  Former  President Harry Truman was enrolled as Medicare's first beneficiary and received the first Medicare card.

1974 - The Watergate scandal approaches it's climax.  Under orders by the SCOTUS, President Richard Nixon releases WH recordings subpoenaed by Congress, suspected to prove his guilt in the Watergate cover-up efforts, to the special prosecutor.  The same day, the House Judiciary Committee voted a third article of impeachment against the President - contempt of Congress in hindering the investigative process into the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

1990 - In Spring Hill, Tennessee, the first Saturn automobile rolls off the assembly line.

2001 - Lance Armstrong becomes the first American to win three consecutive Tours de France.