Category: Current Posts

Watching Fox News’ “Huckabee” Sunday night, I had two occasions to shout obnoxiously “I’ve said that!” The first was after the Governor’s monologue (previous post) and the second was during his interview of Ed Klein, whose book “The Amateur” has been number one on the New York Times bestseller list for two weeks.

I haven’t read the book yet, but Klein said at one point that President Obama “doesn’t know what he doesn’t know”.

And I’ve said that too.

Actually, I’ve said “No one is more dangerous than someone with great power who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know”.

The reason Obama doesn’t know what he doesn’t know is that he has has never worked in the real world and has surrounded himself with people who have never worked in the real world. Barely eight percent of the people in the Administration have EVER had a private sector job. They’ve all worked in academia, government and nonprofit organizations, but 92% of the administration has NEVER had a real job in a productive for-profit company.

I’m not saying that being a college professor, a bureaucrat or an officer in a charitable organization isn’t real work. I’m just saying that one’s perception of what is required to generate wealth is skewed, because you don’t have to generate wealth in those jobs; in academia and nonprofits, you receive wealth from the government, other nonprofits like foundations, or people who work in the private sector. In government you simply confiscate wealth from those who create it.

People who work in the private sector generate the money, not just for their businesses, but for academia, government and nonprofits as well. But almost nobody in the Obama Administration understands that, least of all Obama himself, which was Ed Klein’s point.

A hilarious episode that illustrates this point occurred when none other than George McGovern left the Senate and decided to start a for-profit business. After a short period of time he actually admitted that he had no idea how government regulation makes things more difficult for business.

DUH!

McGovern was a war hero but after the war he was a college professor until he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1956. He graduated to the Senate in 1962. He ran unsuccessfully for president, then lost his seat in 1980 during the Reagan revolution. From the Senate he went back to teaching and eventually went to work for the United Nations(!). But in the midst of that time he operated a hotel for a while. It was a revelation.

“It was an eye-opening introduction to something most business operators are all-too familiar with,” McGovern said recently, “the difficulty of controlling costs and setting prices in a weak economy. Despite my trust in government, I would have been alarmed by an outsider taking control of basic management decisions that determine success or failure in a business where I had invested my life savings.” (more)

Again, DUH! He worked in academia and government for 60 years, but had no idea about the impact of the unnecessary and unjust hardships government places on business. Yet he had tremendous power to compel private business to do his bidding.

Perhaps if President Obama bought a restaurant…

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Last night on Fox News’ “Huckabee” show, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee reported in his monologue that 129,000 millionaires had lost so much net worth during the past year that they are now not millionaires at all. And the super rich have lost net worth as well. Their wealth declined by 2.4%, the largest drop for any single group.

This he attributed to President Obama’s policies, since the president has made it clear that he doesn’t think it’s “fair” that some people have so much more than others.

At the end of the monologue I shouted, “I’ve said that!” And I would say it again before the one-hour show was over.

What he said that I’ve also said in two blogs in this space (“At Least It Will Be Fair” and “Time For The Zero-Sum Game To Dir“) was that when the rich get poorer, the middle class and poor get poorer too.

The governor said it very well, and I’ll outline it again, as I did briefly on Tom Garcia’s “The American Hour“.

It’s pretty simple really. If a person has a lot of money, they will do one of two things with it: they will save it or they will spend it. If they save it (greedy blackguards!), they will at minimum put it in a savings account, where the bank will then loan that money to middle class people like you and me so we can buy home, cars, and fill our credit cards with creature comforts.

However, most of their money, wealthy people will invest where they can get a better return than with a passbook savings account. In that case they are buying stock, which will enable the companies whose stock they buy to hire additional poor and middle-class people, improving their financial status, and to make capital improvements such as building facilities, buying equipment and expanding their markets, which enhances the finances of construction people, retail sales people, etc.

Governor Huckabee’s point was that when a rich person has to cut back because they have lost income and/or net worth, it is the middle and lower classes that suffer, through lost revenue from the rich, which brings us to the second of the two things a rich person can do with their money: If they don’t save/invest it, they SPEND it.

This makes those jealous of the evil, greedy rich maddest because it is the most visible. But, Huckabee said, if a rich person decides NOT to buy a third home, who gets hurt? Certainly not the rich person. They already have two houses. It’s the real estate agent who would have sold the home and the contractor who can’t sell the spec home he’s put his money into. It may be the carpenters and plumbers who don’t get work building the home in the first place, etc.

And if rich people are forced to eat out at fancy restaurants less often, that doesn’t hurt them, but it does hurt the waitresses, cooks and bus boys who may be laid off because the restaurant’s traffic is down.

And if the very rich can’t buy their third luxury car that petty, envious people drool over, that doesn’t hurt the rich people, but there are factory workers, truck drivers, car salesmen and many more who will lose income.

There was another “I’ve said that” in the show last night, but that will have to wait.

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I was fascinated by the prospect of an election between Barack Obama and Georgia favorite son Herman Cain (see “Crisis Averted“). A conservative African American heading the Republican ticket would have given the lie to the tired old Democrat fiction that conservatives are racists and it would have shattered the world view of a lot of Liberals.

Alas, it was not to be. That does not mean the election season is not proving to be entertaining, however.

Today, in Kentucky, President Obama came amazingly close to losing the Democrat primary to “Uncommitted” (I knew Uncommitted. Uncommitted was a friend of mine and you’re no…). The vote was 58% to 42% in favor of the sitting president. It was a squeaker but he pulled it out. If 9% had voted the other way, Obama would have lost the primary to, well, anybody else.

And neighboring West Virginia’s primary two weeks ago was interesting too, with an out-of-state, incarcerated convict getting 41% of the vote. I’m not sure which is worst: to almost lose to a candidate to be named later, or to an obvious late “April Fool’s” candidacy.

But he did no better in Oklahoma, garnering only 57% of the vote in the Democrat primary there. Next door, Arkansas had its primary today with John Wolf offering a direct and more credible challenge to Barack Obama. Wolf can’t win but is scoring strong as a protest candidate and this could be very embarrassing to the president.

Meanwhile, Arizona, whose governor has locked horns with the president on immigration policy and whose polarizing Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s official investigation into Obama’s birthplace has led the Attorney General to demand that Hawaii produce a credible birth certificate for the president or the state will not put Obama on the ballot AT ALL!

Well, you could say, these are “fly-over” states; not exactly the president’s cup of tea. They’re too red. However, the predictions of how the electoral votes will be distributed on election day keep moving the red states closer to the coasts. Recently a Gallup electoral map showed Oregon as a red state (Oregon!) as well as traditional swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. North Carolina, which went for Obama in 2008, appears out of reach this time.

Even Obama’s home state of Illinois looked lonely in blue against a sea of red, making it easy to assume that if you excluded Chicago, the rest of the state would be as red as Indiana and Missouri on its flanks.

Virginia is red again, according to Gallup; in fact the Southernmost blue state East of the Mississippi is Maryland. Which brings us to Florida. It’s usually a battleground state, but I tend to think the battle may be over before it starts there. Yes, I know the retirees care about Social Security and Medicare and usually vote for big government Democrats, but Obamacare raids Medicare and some of the seniors most likely believe the Death Panels will be a practical reality if not an official policy.

So in states where the president can barely muster a majority in an unopposed primary, he stands no chance when the energized “Anybody But Obama” Independents and Republicans are voting too. How many middle- and lower-population states can he afford to write off?

Meanwhile we’ve seen an amusing parade of trial balloons and flags run up the pole by the Obama Campaign. Embarrassments like Sandra Fluke, who objected to being called a bad name by Rush Limbaugh after she told Congress she needed $3,000 worth of free contraceptives. The ridiculous “War On Women” has now fallen flat, with recent a poll showing Obama has lost significant ground among married women.

And doesn’t the country just LOVE Occupy Wall Street?

Similarly, Obama’s tried and true Class Warfare, directed at Mitt Romney’s stint at Bain Capital, is ringing hollow, with more than one Democrat going off the reservation and objecting to the demonization of venture capital.

But the biggest problem that Obama has this go ’round that he didn’t have in 2008: He has a record and we’ve all seen it.

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Official Obligatory Disclaimer: I am not a Birther, a Flat-Earther, nor a Gold-Standard Worther (the latter is a shout out to Ron Paul supporters).

With that out of the way, If you’ve seen the literary agency brochure revealed by Brietbart.Com this week, you have exactly two choices: President Obama was lying then or he’s lying now.

The brochure was to try to sell a book (never published) by Barack Obama, who was “born in Kenya”, says the brochure unambiguously.

Since some doubt Obama was born in the US, and therefore his legitimacy as a natural-born citizen to run for president according to the Constitution, this can’t just be brushed off. The literary agency, Dystel & Goderich, published the “inaccurate” bio of Obama about 20 years ago but kept the information about Kenya as the place of his birth until 2007, conveniently just before he began his presidential campaign. At that time the literary agency’s web site was changed to say Obama was born in Hawaii.

To state the obvious, if Obama wasn’t born in the United States, he is ineligible to be president.

The position of Brietbart.Com is that the brochure is wrong and that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii. But the brochure would not have been wrong in the first place if Obama hadn’t told his agent he was born in Kenya.

So either he was lying then, as Breitbart.Com says, or he’s lying now and he never was qualified to run for president. Those are the choices.

In a fascinating coincidence, it came to light in a painfully slow dance that Elizabeth Warren (D), candidate for Senate from Massachusetts, had falsely claimed to be part Cherokee in order to take advantage of minority benefits in her college teaching career. Some have insisted that she had a great-great-great grandfather with high cheek bones, so of course he had to be Native American, but even that is in doubt.

So in the same week we find two Democrat politicians who lied about their heritage to benefit their careers.

Truth Schmuth.

And somewhere the anti-war demonstrators are still chanting “Bush lied…”

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In the video below, a former Soviet Russian citizen very gently educates an Occupy Wall Street demonstrator about Capitalism, Socialism, Israel and more. Outstanding!

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Let me make one thing perfectly clear: President Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim.

Except that he quotes the “Holy Quran” more easily and accurately than he quotes the New Testament, he speaks nostalgically of hearing the early morning Call to Prayer, and, unlike most Christians, seems to wish Israel would just go away.

President Obama went to a Muslim school in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation, during his formative years, and so is very conversant with Muslim teaching and practice. On the other hand, he has only experienced Christianity at the feet of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a pastor in one of the most politically liberal denominations in Christendom and a disciple of radical Liberation Theology.

That’s a little like your only exposure to Western Civilization being the Three Stooges.

Let me be just as clear about something else: In my opinion, Islam is a false religion.

I don’t say this lightly. I’m a conservative Christian, but Christianity at its best promotes freedom of religion, speech and thought, so I also believe Muslims should be able to practice their religion as their consciences dictate. Unless their religion causes them to kill people who disagree with them. Then we need to talk.

But never mind the radical Islamists, who fly passenger jets into buildings, maim and kill our soldiers and Marines and strap bombs to women and children in order to kill other women and children in Israeli pizza parlors. Look instead at the way Islam is practiced. Whereas in nations where Christianity has permeated the culture, all religions are allowed to flourish, in Islamic nations, persecution, incarceration and execution are the fate of anyone wishing to convert to Christianity or Buddhism, the two most likely routes for people in the 10-40 window seeking to leave Islam. (see”Arab Spring is Winter for Christians”)

And, to our Western minds, the biggest affront is Islam’s abominable treatment of women. A few years ago, the Saudi Arabian moral police (it’s a real police force) forced young girls to remain in a burning dormitory because they were not properly covered, resulting in their horrific, fiery deaths. The event is emblematic of the dysfunction of Islam regarding sexual matters. In Africa, female genital mutilation to prevent intercourse is common and in Afghanistan under the Taliban, at least one soccer stadium was converted into a public execution arena, where women were given brutal capital punishment for crimes such as driving or appearing on a public street unaccompanied by a man.

To be “fair” (one of the president’s favorite words), Christians are not always tolerant, and if you go back 300-600 years or so, you can find brutal persecution and intolerance in, not just the Catholic Inquisition, but by official state Protestant denominations in America.

But that was then. On the other hand, Islam seems to be stuck in the eighth-century gear in regards to barbaric intolerance, superstition and persecution.

By contrast, my daughter and son-in-law have traveled extensively in Southeast Asia and they talk about the gentle, loving natures of the Buddhists in those countries. While Buddhism doesn’t have a monotheistic, anthropomorphic God like Judaism, Christianity and Islam, it does have some good philosophical ideas and does produce good fruit in its adherents.

It’s difficult to say the same thing about Islam. Proponents make a point of saying it is the “Peaceful, Loving religion”, but maybe if you have to say it…

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A recent study by Pew Research finds that illegal immigration from Mexico has stopped and maybe even reversed so illegals are going back home!

Interesting, because way back in September of 2009, I predicted this (President Obama’s Plan to End Illegal Immigration). At that time, with tongue in cheek, I said that President Obama’s plan to end illegal immigration was to decimate the United States’ economy to the point that citizens of the Third World wouldn’t consider coming to the USA worth the effort.

Apparently it’s actually happening.

Of course, being intellectually honest, I will point out that the decline in illegal immigration started during the Bush Administration, with the downturn in the economy. But nothing has happened during the Obama Administration to make the US economy more attractive to those seeking to better themselves, legally or illegally.

It’s Econ 101 folks.

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Please check out this tremendous video from FreeMarketAmerica.Org. Just in time for Earth Day.

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www.usaradionetwork.com/Tom.htm

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