UK Telegraph: Obama Calling Voters Stupid Again

…….so Toby Hernden writes at  Telegraph.co.uk.   How  does our English friend view the president’s electioneering?

“President Obama and his fellow Democrats are mocking Republicans and the Tea Party as stupid. But they could be the ones who look foolish on election day.

So what is the closing argument of Barack Obama’s Democrats before next Tuesday’s midterm elections? The President is no longer the self-proclaimed “hope-monger” of 2008, who vaingloriously declared that his vanquishing Hillary Clinton marked “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”.

He has stopped patting voters on the back for choosing, by voting for him, to listen not to their doubts or fears but to their “greatest hopes and highest aspirations”. Instead, he is berating Americans (most of whom now do not believe he deserves a second term) for not being able to “think clearly” because they’re “scared”.

 Having failed to change Washington or, as he promised that night in St Paul, Minnesota in June 2008, to provide “good jobs to the jobless” (unemployment was 7.7 per cent when he took office and is 9.6 per cent now), Obama is changing tack.

Boiled down, the new Obama message to Americans is: you’re too stupid to overcome your fears. To be fair, it’s not entirely new. During the 2008 campaign, Obama was caught on tape at a San Francisco fund-raiser saying it was not surprising that voters facing economic hardship “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them”.

At a fund-raiser in Massachusetts this month, Obama spoke of Democrats having “facts and science and argument” on their side. As opposed, presumably, to the lies, superstition and prejudice that Republicans rely on.

This year, Democrats have embraced with gusto the notion that Republicans, and by extension anyone thinking of voting for them, are dimwits. Their mirth over the likes of Tea Party figures like Christine O’Donnell, the former anti-masturbation activist who once she had “dabbled” in witchcraft and is now a no-hoper Senate candidate in Delaware, seems to know no bounds.

The most chortling of all about the populist Tea Party and its anti-tax, anti-government uprising against the Republican establishment can be found on the shows of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the edgy liberal satirists on Comedy Central. Mocking Republican candidates last week, Stewart declared the midterm elections as “the best chance ever for a bowl of fresh fruit” to be elected.

Three days before the elections, Stewart will hold a “Rally to Restore Sanity” in Washington on the same day as Colbert, who adopts the character of a Right-wing talk show host, leads a “March to Keep Fear Alive”. The thinly-disguised message: Republicans are crazies who trade on fear.

In choosing California and Massachusetts, two of the most liberal states in the union, to demean ordinary Americans during election campaigns, Obama did not display a whole lot of his much-vaunted intelligence. But Obama’s decision to plug Stewart’s rally approvingly and appear on his show three days beforehand is even more foolish.

In the 1990s, Democrats managed to get away from their image as “eggheads” in the 1950s or “pointy-headed liberals” in the 1970s. Bill Clinton spoke like a Good Ol’ Boy from the Deep South, ate junk food and enjoyed trashy women. He was clever, but he did not look down on people.

Obama, by contrast, has become a parody of the Ivy League liberal smugly content with his own intellectual superiority and pitying the poor idiots who disagree with him. It is an approach that shares much with the default anti-Americanism of British and European elites, who love to mock the United States as a country full of gun-toting, bible-clutching morons.

David Cameron has made nods to this sniffy condescension, speaking of the Sarah Palin phenomenon as being “hard for us to understand” (how about giving it a go, Dave?) and describing American conservatism, inaccurately, as moving in a “very culture war direction”. This might be part of the reason why he seems to have hit it off with Obama.

The problem for Obama and the Democrats is that belittling the Tea Party movement, which is taking hold of much of Middle America, merely fuels the popular sense that the party in power is out of touch. It also highlights the reluctance of Obama and the Democrats to discuss the Wall Street bail-out, economic stimulus and health care bills because they know they are not vote winners.

Joining the Europeans in mocking ordinary Americans for their supposed idiocy may play well at big-dollar fund-raisers. In adopting this as a political strategy, however, the Democrats could be the ones who end up looking stupid.”

Governor Pawlenty Greets President Obama to Minnesota with some Reminders

President Obama has planned to visit Minnesota to do some politicking.  Minnesota is a very, very blue state.  The majority of our legislators   are driven to spend money beyond our means.   The state would be bankrupt but for a law passed some many years ago requiring the legislature to balance the budgets in creates. 

The last time Minnesota voted for a Republican for president was when Richard Nixon ran against George McGovern in 1972.   It was the only state in the country to tally for Walter Mondale in 1984.

Here is a Breitbart video of Governor Pawlenty’s welcome to President Obama for his visit to our North Star State”

http://www.breitbart.tv/gov-tim-pawlenty-welcomes-president-obama-back-to-minnesota/

Governor Christie Battles The Entrenched, Well Funded, NJEA

“Gov. Christie’s Ultimate Test” the headline says in the Saturday edition of my Wall Street Journal, an article written by Monica Langley. 

She reports on a nearly life or death battle between the governor and the plush, exceedingly expensive and powerful state teachers’ union, the NJEA. 

“The governor already has persuaded many voters on a fundamental point:  New Jersey pays way too much for education.  Mr. Christies’s poll numbers dipped earlier after the teachers union began running TV commercials critical of him.  But his numbers have rebounded in recent polls.    Frederick Hess, education-policy director at the American Enterprise Insitute, a think tank that pushes for market -oriented solutions, says a likely new crop of Republican governors who have promised to slash  budgets and reform schools will be watching to see how Mr. Christie fares.”

(Governor Christie’s enemy is  Barbara Keshishian) who says, ‘change for the sake of change’ isn’t necessary because”, she argue, the state’s public school system is among the best in the nation.  “

‘Every single day the goverrnor gives new meaning to the term bully pulpit by attacing me or NJEA-all to raise his political profile,’ she said.”

…..Let’s stop for a moment.  Ms.  Keshishian used to teach math, so maybe following  reason isn’t her strength. 

Do you think for a moment Governor Christie is examining the fluff in public education to change  for the sake of change and not for  solving the economic crisis in New Jersey?

New Jersey is a state, one of many states long ‘managed’ by Democrats, on the edge of bankruptcy, the price one pays for soliciting votes.   What happens when there is no money left?    Perhaps Ms. Keshishian reads only union papers unaware of what lies beyond its print.  Her union has spent millions of dues dollars attacking  Mr. Christie, both as a candidate and since, as governor, as he attempts to govern.   The union has been exceptionally abusive toward him.

If Mr. Christie has any chance to save  his state from bankruptcy, he has to organize a strategy to reduce spending……there is no other choice except to raise taxes which primarily Democrats have done willy-nilly for at least a generation.  What choice is there except a bully pulpit to identify  the issues and opponents who use their endless resources  to bully those who challenge them?

Ms. Keshishian marvels that the state’s public school system is among the best in the nation…..a cliche which is universally attached to the recitations of teacher union officers around the nation.  But, is the boast true?

(Continuing the article:)   “The governor called the state legislature into an emergeny session and pushed through a 2% cap in annual increase of property taxes, which have risen 70% in the past decade in New Jersey.  He halted popular projects, including a multibillion-dollar  train tunnel to Manhattan.

Various factors drive education costs expecially high in New Jersey.  A state supreme court decision years ago found that children in poor communities got inadequate educations and mandated increased funding for their schools.  New Jersey is heavily unionized with relatively high salaries for public workers of all stripes, teachers included.

For years, the teachers union has argued that New Jersey pays more but gets more.  The states’ high-school graduation rate is 82%, the highest in the nation, and New Jersey ranks among the top five states in key subject areas, according to the Education Law Center in Newark, which pushes for better funding for public schools.  Its graduation rate for black males is 69%, the highest for a state with a large African-American population, according to a recent report from the Schott Foundation, which advocates ‘fully resourced hgh-quality’ public education.

The state is home to elite suburban school districts, including some with, racially diverse student bodies.  But students in urban school districts fare far worse, prompting Mr. Christie to hammer away at the  ‘achievement gap’ between lower and high-income students. 

New Jersey spends $17,794 a year per pupil, highest in the nation after Washington, D.C.  New York isn’t far behind at $16,981.  California, Florida, and Illinois all spend about $11,000;  Mississippi, Utah, Tennessee, and Idaho spend only about $8,000.

The average  New Jersey teacher makes $61, 277 a year, well above the U.S. average of $52,800, according  to the National Education Association.  New Jersey teachers get medical and other benefits costing $19,140 a year, according to the teachers union.  The New Jersey Treasurer estimates its unfunded liabilities relating to lifetime health benefits for current and retired teachers is $36.32 billion.

To foot that and other bills, New Jersey residents pay an average of 11.38% of their income in state and local taxes, the highest in the nation, according to the Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C. think tank.  The average property tax bill for owner-occupied residences in New Jersey is $6,579, also a U.S. high.”

For more from the article, go to the Wall Street Journal.

George Will on Tim Pawlenty’s Battle Against A Legislature In Love With Socialism

“Northern Iowans are Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Vikings fans. This fact could be portentous 16 months from now when the Iowa caucuses occur and Minnesota’s two-term governor, Tim Pawlenty, probably will be seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

The son of a South St. Paul truck driver, Pawlenty was 16 when his mother died. A short while later, his father lost his job. Nevertheless, Pawlenty became his family’s first college graduate. His political message — he calls himself a Sam’s Club rather than a country club Republican — should resonate in a social climate conditioned by voters’ recoil against spending and the political class that does it. “All the stuff the country is now favoring, I’ve done,” he says.

Settled by many Scandinavians and Germans who arrived with European, especially Bismarckian, notions of social democracy, Minnesota has furnished leaders of American liberalism — Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, Paul Wellstone. In the four decades before Pawlenty was elected governor in 2002, the average two-year increase in state spending was 21 percent. During his tenure, the average annual increase has been 2 percent. He says that the current two-year budget cycle will be the first in 150 years in which spending will be cut in real, constant dollars.

It took, he said, “World War III” with the teachers unions to make Minnesota the first state to offer performance pay for teachers statewide. The state is second in the nation in health savings accounts: Approximately 10 percent of privately insured Minnesotans have these tax-preferred savings accounts that enable them to shop for routine health needs not covered by high-deductible insurance plans.

Pawlenty has benefited from an affliction — Minnesota’s Legislature. Currently, Republicans are outnumbered 47 to 87 in the House and 21 to 46 in the Senate. As a result, he has had, and has seized, ample opportunities to veto things, including increases in taxes on incomes, gasoline, beer and wine. He holds the Minnesota record for most vetoes cast in a single legislative session.  The Cato Insitute murmurs, “Be still my heart.”

A libertarian think tank ardent for government both limited and frugal, Cato gives A grades for fiscal responsibility to only four governors — Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), Bobby Jindal (R-La.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), and Pawlenty, the only one governing a blue state.

Pawlenty dismisses the Obama administration’s stimulus as “mostly government sustenance money.” He would have preferred a cut in payroll taxes. Actually, giving the nation a one-year holiday from federal payroll taxes would have been no more expensive and more stimulative than Obama’s stimulus.

Tall (6 feet 3), slender and rarely strident, Pawlenty probably is the only potential president who will announce: “I’m not exactly Lady Gaga.” Indeed, he must solve the problem of “Minnesota nice” — his state’s reputation for a pleasantness incompatible with today’s appetite for politics with a serrated edge.

He is, therefore, eager to emphasize brawls he has initiated, and won, such as cutting $2 billion from public employees’ pensions and helping to win a 44-day bus strike — it concerned retirement benefits — in this, the nation’s 16th-largest metropolitan area.

His mild manner seems to appeal to some jalapeño-flavored conservatives. A new biography of Rush Limbaugh says that, so far, Pawlenty is second only to Sarah Palin as Limbaugh’s choice for 2012. Dick Armey — the former Texas congressman who became majority leader when Republicans took control of the House in 1994 — is about as close to a leader of the Tea Party movement as its agreeable anarchy permits. He has his “eye on Pawlenty,” who is on the “safest ground” of any potential candidate: “He has no major disappointments behind him.”

Because Minnesota was the one state that President Ronald Reagan did not carry in his 1984 contest with native son Walter Mondale, it is the only state that has voted Democratic in nine consecutive elections. So it might seem to be a strange base for a Republican candidacy. But the candidate who carries the states of the Mississippi Valley — basically, the Midwest — usually wins the White House. Two other Republican practitioners of Midwestern conservatism are considering presidential runs — Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and South Dakota Sen. John Thune.

Undeterred by the fact that George W. Bush is the only Republican since Dwight Eisenhower to win in his first try for the presidency, Pawlenty has dutifully enriched his résumé for national office by visiting Iraq five times and Afghanistan three times. And Iowa six times this year.”

Comment:  The State of Minnesota has a law which requires its Legislature to balance each budget it creates.     That law was not passed by any  Wellstone Socialists obviously.

The balanced  budget law has no effect whatsoever on the Democrats, called DFL…(Democrat-Farm Labor).  They  propose and propose spending regardless of the consequences.  There is nothing “Nice” about Minnesota Democrats when Tim Pawlenty or any other Republican governor slashes this and that from Leftwing pork and paunch.  They will be called anything from  the basement of your mind.  It helps their reelections.

Minnesota is a thoroughly Blue state……loyal blue and true.   No matter how  blue the corpse, the state’s  DFL makes certain he and she will still vote.  

It prides itself on becoming a leader for  modern America in many other ways as well.  It is represented by Al Franken in the Senate and  Islam man, Keith Elison,  from Minneapolis in the House.

George Will is a regular columnist at the Washington Post.

Frank Rich’s Loyal Soviet Socialist Line: Hate Wall Street….

………but conveniently ignores  the Democrat Party conspiracy to marry Wall Street to Left Wingers ”guarding”  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac such as Barney Frank and Chris Dodd guaranteeing that speculators, crooks, foxes, and Countrywide lefties running the show  could raid the American taxpayers to assist insolvent people buy homes with insolvent funding.   The biggest crook of all is Barney Frank, the protector of the scam.  Mr. Rich must have forgotten or hoped we had.

If the Democrat Party’s most loyal constituency, the inner city plantation black can buy houses without funds and histories of insolvency, why can’t everyone else. 

This was the Democrat Party Socialist system to force its socialist way into Wall Street, wasn’t it?   President George W. Bush warned the nation of  the crisis.   Barney and friends assured America nothing was wrong.  All this is available in video.  Look it up if you want the truth.

There is no morality noticeable on Wall Street.  Most experts believe that if there were, the world’s economy would collapse from the inefficiency.  If the Democratic Party  led drive to force Wall Street to hand out houses throughout the country on script and a promise, why can’t that corruption become the norm? 

Three of the most profiteering persons from Countrywide money handouts was President Barack Obama, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd. 

President Obama has many mouths and speaks from all of the when convenient.

Mr. Rich writes differently:

“No matter how much Obama talks about his “tough” new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change. That’s not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It’s also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.

This intractable status quo is being rubbed in our faces daily during the pre-election sprint by revelations of the latest banking industry outrage, its disregard for the rule of law as it cut every corner to process an avalanche of foreclosures. Clearly, these financial institutions have learned nothing in the few years since their contempt for fiscal and legal niceties led them to peddle these predatory mortgages (and the reckless financial “products” concocted from them) in the first place. And why should they have learned anything? They’ve often been rewarded, not punished, for bad behavior.

The latest example is Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide and the godfather of subprime mortgages. On the eve of his trial 10 days ago, he settled Securities and Exchange Commission charges for $67.5 million, $20 million of which will be footed by what remains of Countrywide in its present iteration at Bank of America. Even if he paid the whole sum himself, it would still be a small fraction of the $521 million he collected in compensation as he pursued his gambling spree from 2000 until 2008.

A particularly egregious chunk of that take was the $140 million he pocketed by dumping Countrywide shares in 2006-7. It was a chapter right out of Kenneth Lay’s Enron playbook: Mozilo reassured shareholders that all was peachy even as his private e-mail was awash in panic over the “toxic” mortgages bringing Countrywide (and the country) to ruin. Lay, at least, was convicted by a jury and destined to decades in the slammer before his death.

The much acclaimed new documentary about the global economic meltdown, “Inside Job,” has it right. As its narrator, Matt Damon, intones, our country has been robbed by insiders who “destroyed their own companies and plunged the world into crisis” — and then “walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact.” These insiders include Dick Fuld and four other executives at Lehman Brothers who “got to keep all the money” (more than $1 billion) after Lehman went bankrupt. And of course Robert Rubin, who encouraged Citigroup to step up its investment in high-risk bets like Countrywide’s mortgage-backed securities. Rubin, now back as a rainmaker on Wall Street, collected more than $115million in compensation during roughly the same period Mozilo “earned” his half a billion. Citi, which required a $45 billion taxpayers’ bailout, recently secured its own slap-on-the-wrist S.E.C. settlement — at $75 million, less than Rubin’s earnings and less than its 2003 penalty ($101 million) for its role in hiding Enron profits.

It should pain the White House that its departing economic guru, the Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers, is an even bigger heavy in “Inside Job” than in the hit movie of election season, “The Social Network.” Summers — like the former Goldman Sachs chief executive and Bush Treasury secretary Hank Paulson — is portrayed as just the latest in a procession of policy makers who keep rotating in and out of government and the financial industry, almost always to that industry’s advantage. As the star economist Nouriel Roubini tells the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, the financial sector on Wall Street has “step by step captured the political system” on “the Democratic and the Republican side” alike. But it would be wrong to single out Summers or any individual official for the Obama administration’s image of being lax in pursuing finance’s bad actors. This tone is set at the top.

Asked in “Inside Job” why there’s been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, Roubini answers: “Because then you’d find the culprits.” With the aid of the “Manhattan Madam” (and current stunt New York gubernatorial candidate) Kristin Davis, the film also asks why federal prosecutors who were “perfectly happy to use Eliot Spitzer’s personal vices to force him to resign in 2008” have not used rampant sex-and-drug trade on Wall Street as a tool for flipping witnesses to pursue the culprits behind the financial crimes that devastated the nation.

The Obama administration seems not to have a prosecutorial gene. It’s shy about calling a fraud a fraud when it occurs in high finance. This caution was exemplified most recently by the secretary of housing and urban development, Shaun Donovan, whose response to the public outcry over the banks’ foreclosure shenanigans was to take to The Huffington Post last weekend. “The notion that many of the very same institutions that helped cause this housing crisis may well be making it worse is not only frustrating — it’s shameful,” he wrote.

Well, yes! Obama couldn’t have said it more eloquently himself. But with all due respect to Secretary Donovan’s blogging finesse, he wasn’t promising action. He was just stroking the liberal base while the administration once again punted. In our new banking scandal, as in those before it, attorneys general in the states, where many pension funds were decimated by Wall Street Ponzi schemes, are pursuing the crimes Washington has not. The largest bill of reparations paid out by Bank of America for Countrywide’s deceptive mortgage practices — $8.4 billion — was to settle a suit by 11 state attorneys general on the warpath.

Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash’s con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he’s fronting for the industry even if he’s not. Voters are not only failing to give the White House credit for its economic successes but finding it guilty of transgressions it didn’t commit. The opposition is more than happy to pump up that confusion. When Mitch McConnell appeared on ABC’s “This Week” last month, he typically railed against the “extreme” government of “the last year and a half,” citing its takeover of banks as his first example. That this was utter fiction — the takeover took place two years ago, before Obama was president, with McConnell voting for it — went unchallenged by his questioner, Christiane Amanpour, and probably by many viewers inured to this big lie.

The real tragedy here, though, is not whatever happens in midterm elections. It’s the long-term prognosis for America. The obscene income inequality bequeathed by the three-decade rise of the financial industry has societal consequences graver than even the fundamental economic unfairness. When we reward financial engineers infinitely more than actual engineers, we “lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase” for Wall Street riches, as the economist Robert H. Frank wrote in The Times last weekend. Worse, Frank added, the continued squeeze on the middle class leads to a wholesale decline in the quality of American life — from more bankruptcy filings and divorces to a collapse in public services, whether road repair or education, that taxpayers will no longer support.

Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it’s pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid — the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates. Should those forces prevail, an America that still hasn’t remotely recovered from the worst hard times in 70 years will end up handing over even more power to those who greased the skids.

We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.”

Further comment:  Mr. Rich puts lots of words together.  Few of them approach truth.    Name calling, name dropping, insinuations of wrong, charges of wrong are fabricated, inventions of Mr. Rich or age-old hate cliches of the Far Left.  

The smearing of the Supreme Court decision to which he refers was a decision based on democratic justice, not on some conspiracy with the “deep pockets of oil billionaires”…..Such statements freely were broadcast  out of Moscow for decades.  

 Mr. Obama is still officially president.  It is his responsibility through his administration to enforce the law.  As is typical of Marxist dictatorships and their  devotees in other governments, enforcements  which assists the advance of this religion are abetted,  and that which diminishes is manipulated as needed.

What counts is that in the end, the population is forced to be “equal”  with the Obamas of the nation deciding what equal will be.   For certain, equal will never include those who decide equality.   Marxist Democrats will always be more equal than others.  

Rich rails about Angel Mosilo honcho in Countrywide.   Am I wrong, but wasn’t Countrywide a concoction of the Democrat Party to begin with.   Weren’t the vast majority of the sweet loans given to Democrats in Congress?

Frank Rich writes at the New York Times.