Thankyou American Hero, Marine Corporal Dakota Meyer!

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Scott Johnson in Afghanistan    (and ‘at’ PowerLine)

The mission behind the Medal

“Bing West’s Wall Street Journal column on the Medal of Honor awarded to then Marine Corporal (now Sergeant) Dakota Meyer provides context and detail lacking in most of the news accounts occasioned by yesterday’s White House ceremony. Sergeant Meyer was awarded the Medal for his day-long heroics during a September 2009 ambush in Afghanistan rescuing a group “abandoned by their chain of command,” according to West. West spoke with Sergeant Meyer within a few days of the incident, as one can tell from this excerpt of the column:

21-year-old Cpl. Meyer listened to radio calls for artillery fire that were refused by officers at higher headquarters due to concern for endangering villagers. Cpl. Meyer hopped into the gun turret of a Humvee and persuaded a fellow adviser, Sgt. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez, to drive him straight into the battle.

When the Humvee lurched into the wash, Cpl. Meyer saw the bodies of roughly a dozen Afghan soldiers strewn across the terrain, some dead and others crying. With bullets striking his truck, he leaped out, stuffed five wounded Afghans inside, and then hopped back up behind the machine gun and hammered away as the pulverized vehicle crawled out of the wash.

Leaving the wounded in the rear, Cpl. Meyer and Sgt. Rodriguez-Chavez swapped Humvees. This time the enemy was waiting in a dry streambed. Rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun bullets followed Cpl. Meyer as he repeatedly left his armored turret to load the truck with wounded Afghan soldiers. At one point, he shot a tall man with a black beard. When another leapt forward under the barrel of his machine gun, Cpl. Meyer grabbed his M4 rifle and shot him in the head.

“You’ll have to kill me,” he shouted in the rage of battle (he had expected to be killed, he told me a few days later at his outpost in Afghanistan), “because that’s the only way you’ll stop me.”

Please read the whole thing, as well as the Journal article by Julian Barnes, both of which can be accessed in full with a little effort.”

Roger Kimball: “About the Word, ‘Ponzi’….” and a few words about Charles Ponzi

A few thoughts about the word “Ponzi”

by Roger Kimball    at Pajamas Media

“In the debate among Republican Presidential candidates the other day, Texas Governor Rick Perry made a splash when he suggested that Social Security was a “monstrous lie” to the American public and a “Ponzi scheme.”

That set the cat among the pigeons. “For God’s sake, don’t call it a Ponzi scheme, Gov! Don’t say that!” Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, another (some say “the other”) Republican Presidential hopeful, took sharp issue with the characterization, as did many in the commentariat.

What’s the truth of the matter?

“Strictly speaking,” wrote Laura Meckler online at The Wall Street Journal, “the metaphor is misleading. A Ponzi scheme, named after Boston conman Charles Ponzi, is a fraudulent investment operation. In its essential design it’s a con.”

Social Security, by contrast, was not designed to be a con. It was designed as a government insurance program. “Ponzi’s scheme was unsustainable,” Meckler explains, “because the basic math of his system required ever increasing and unrealistic numbers of investors.” And how about Social Security? The math is not so frightening as in Ponzi’s scheme. According to Forbes columnist Howard Gleckman, “if Washington does nothing, young people will receive three-quarters of their promised benefits.”

So it’s not, Gleckman points out, a “monstrous lie.”

And yet. The Social Security system is “underfunded.” Why? Because more people are taking dollars out now while fewer are putting dollars in. “Social Security’s system is unsustainable,” Meckler concluded, “at least as presently written, because the U.S. has an increasing number of retirees and fewer workers to support them.”

Not Ponzi, exactly, because the intent to defraud is absent, and the pyramid is not so steep. Your typical Ponzi scheme lasts a couple of years before the dearth of new investors wrecks the scheme; Social Security has been chugging along for some 70 years.

Nevertheless, Rick Perry has a point. For Social Security is Ponzi-like because the demographic arithmetic is, to put it mildly, sobering. If you have, say, 5 or 10 young ‘uns beavering away for every 1 retiree, well, everyone is sitting in clover. But what happens if the numbers are reversed: what happens if it’s only 3 or even 2 young ‘uns for every oldster? What then?

That, in essence, is the reality that underlay Rick Perry’s remark.

What I found most interesting, though, was the semi-hysterical (or was it only politically expedient?) response by Mitt Romney and others. “You can’t say that to tens of millions of Americans who have lived on Social Security,” Romney replied.

That was the basic response to Perry’s remark by the establishment. “You can’t call Social Security a Ponzi scheme because millions of Americans depend on it.” What sort of reasoning is that? I depend on this good thing, ergo it will always be there. “Under no circumstances,” quoth candidate Romney, “will I ever say . . . it is a failure.”

But what if it is a failure? The $700 billion item in the Federal budget marked “Social Security” is not the fiscally horrifying basket case that Medicare and Medicaid represent, but it is, to say the least, a troubled program. Will Mitt Romney’s refusal to call Social Security a failure if it does fail, will that verbal recourse change the reality of failure?

Any high-stakes political campaign generates a good deal of posturing. Perhaps Rick Perry’s “Ponzi scheme” metaphor was an ill-advised hyperbole. But at least it underscored a troubling reality. The establishment’s response was not only logically flawed, it was also a model of disingenuous equivocation. I suppose we’re in for a lot of that in the months ahead.”

Comment:   Among the many outstanding interviews Dennis Prager has led during his radio show, few were as interesting and entertaining as well as informing as his interview with Michael Zuckoff who had just written a biography of Charles Ponzi, “”Ponzi’s Scheme:  The True Story of a Financial Legend”.

 

First to say is Charles Ponzi, an immigrant from Italy when a young man, was no thugish conartist bent on making millions ruining people.   Mr. Zuckoff marked Ponzi as a  hard worker and a  hero on more than one occasion, sacrificing a good amount of his own skin to save the life of a young lady horribly burned.

 

It was Mr. Zuckoff’s view that Ponzi did not look at his scheme as a crime, but a way of making money by providing a service.   He seemed to think everyone would benefit in the long run as long as their  money remained in the pool.   But when a Boston  reporter cast doubt on the man and his ‘scheme’, there was a rush on his assets which of course wasn’t enough to pay the slower-on-the-move  worriers.

 

Charles Ponzi is likely the nicest, best meaning guy ever to have such a mischaracterizing name…as conman.   Like the Social Security Administration, Charles Ponzi apparently never meant to con anyone when he launched his enterprise.

 

Read the book……it is a terrifice read.   I was so taken by the interview, I ran out to now defunct Borders Books an bought my copy.    

Getting Lefties to Sing Alike on Obama’s Solyndra Failure/Scandal

How to Talk About Solyndra

—By Kevin Drum     at Mother Jones

 

President Barack Obama speaks at an event at Solyndra in May 2010. The company went belly-up in August. jurvetson/Flickr

“You’ve probably heard of Solyndra by now, right? It’s the solar power company that got $500 million in Recovery Act loans from the Department of Energy and then went belly up a couple of weeks ago.

Conservatives have been trying to paint this as a big scandal of some kind, despite the fact that: the company had plenty of private investors too; it’s the only DOE loan that has failed so far; and there’s no real evidence that anyone in the White House did anything worse than push OMB to speed up their decision-making process a bit in 2009. Stephen Lacey has the full timeline here.

But I think Dave Roberts probably has the bigger picture right:

Watching this unfold over the last week, I keep thinking back to “Climategate.” When it first broke back in late 2009, lefties and bloggers and Dem lawmakers just ignored it, because it was obviously dumb. This left the field entirely open to a massive attack from the right, coordinated among ideological media, staffers, lobbyists, and pols. When the left finally stirred itself to action, all that emerged were a bunch of long, boring investigations into the details and good-faith efforts to be fair about how both sides a point. By the time five separate investigations had cleared the scientists of all wrongdoing, the damage was done. Now we’re seeing the same script play out again.

…The right is going after this whole hog, trying to make the name synonymous with clean energy boondoggle. And the left is flailing around, throwing out this fact and that fact with no coherent message. Lord am I tired of watching this script play out.

Unfortunately, I think that a bit of flailing was inevitable. Conservatives had a clear attack line: anything and everything that makes Solyndra look bad. They didn’t care what. Liberals didn’t have the same luxury. At the time this story broke, none of us knew enough about Solyndra to really have any idea if the company itself was defensible, so a bit of hesitancy was inevitable. But Dave is right: At this point we do know enough, and there’s really no reason to hesitate any longer. Basically, Solyndra was working on a solar technology that promised to be cheaper than silicon, and at the time of the loan it looked really promising both to DOE and to private investors. But then the market turned: Silicon prices dropped, and China started producing super low-cost silicon PV. That spelled doom for Solyndra. They had a good idea, but it didn’t work out.

In any case, Solyndra is a tiny fraction of DOE’s green-energy loan program, and Solyndra’s loan guarantees are dwarfed by those of both fossil fuel and nuclear companies, which range into the multiple billions. There was no scandal in the loan process, and there’s nothing unusual about having a certain fraction of speculative programs like this fail. It’s all part of the way the free market works.

Want to learn more? Read the timeline here, and then listen to Rep. Ed Markey at Wednesday’s hearing. You’ll learn the facts from one, and how to talk about Solyndra from the other. No more flailing, okay?”

Comment:   Marxist speech control in action.

Think Money Disappears Quickly in Obamaland? How about the 2 Billion in Britain?

What’s $2 billion between friends?

   by Buttonwood    at the Economist

(Correction…..forgive the Economist editors  for their careless use of the  English.   The headline should read “What’s $2 billion among friends?”         ‘Between is limited to two poles, among to more than two poles.”)

The Economist:  “THE news that a trader has lost $2 billion at UBS is quite a shock. All the banks were supposed to have reviewed their system after the Jerome Kerviel affair to prevent this kind of thing from happening; trading positions should be limited, accounts reconciled on a daily basis etc etc. It will be fascinating to find out how it happened.

The loss comes hard on the heels of the publication in Britain of the Vickers report on banking reform and will doubtless be used as evidence in the debate. Indeed, my inbox already includes this comment from Sonia Falconieri of the Cass Business School that

While the separation of investment and commercial banking will prevent this kind of episode from impacting on depositors, it will not prevent further incidents from happening. Compensation packages with excessive bonuses and unrealistic targets are the reasons for excessive risk taking among traders, particularly at a moment of high financial instability that makes difficult to achieve the required targets. This together with a loose internal control system makes investment banks vulnerable to rogue trading.

We ought to be able to agree on two things. First there will always be bad lending decisions, rogue traders etc. But second, the government should act to ensure that, as far as possible, the costs of these crises do not fall on the taxpayer. It seems to me that the Vickers report is headed in the right direction.

There is something different about retail banking in that it oils the wheels of the economy, ensuring that payments are made between employers and workers, customers and shops. Furthermore, the experience of 1930s bank failures persuaded authorities round the world to insure deposits. This is a subsidy to the banks in the sense that depositors do not differentiate between the weak and the strong, and this lowers the cost of funding. 

While this subsidy is justified in public policy terms, the same does not apply to investment banking. Of course, some of the services offered by investment banks are useful; the provision of liquidity to markets, for example, or risk management to companies. But such services can be provided by other sectors (hedge funds, insurers) which don’t benefit from a public subsidy. The danger was that, in the run-up to the crisis, universal banks used the benefits of cheap funding to speculate in a way that enriched their employees in the boom but left the taxpayer with the losses in the bust.

This is NOT to say that retail banking isn’t risky or didn’t run into trouble in the crash; of course, it did as the examples of Northern Rock and HBOS showed. Indeed, that is why the Vickers committee wants the retail banks to take on extra capital to provide a greater cushion against the risks, while leaving the investment banking arms to meet the Basle rules (thus not disadvantaging them against their competitors). Will this lead to a greater cost of funding for small businesses? In yesterday’s FT, John Kay wrote that

The assets and liabilities of British banks exceed £6,000 billion, four times the country’s income. Lending to UK businesses accounts for about £200 billion of that, or 3 per cent of the total.

So it is not clear why higher capital costs should fall exclusively on business lending; if they do, that is the bankers’ choice. And those higher costs may well be offset, as the report suggests, by the reduced cost of future crises.

A certain degree of cynicism about the ability of regulators to spot future banking problems, or the ability of the banks (and other sectors) to get round the rules, is understandable. But surely we can’t go on as we are, with all Swiss taxpayers theoretically responsible for UBS’s inability to control its traders? Taxpayers and public sector workers are being asked to make many sacrifices at the moment; this is not a cost they should be asked to bear.

As for the bankers, they remind me of the post-1815 Bourbon monarchs who had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”. They still see themselves as masters of the universe rather than as servants of the taxpayer as a result of their previous mistakes. Of course, the crisis wasn’t all the fault of the banks but there were still plenty of errors of judgment that cast extreme doubt on whether they deserve their high salaries. Investment bankers claim to be in favour of free markets so let them prove it by cutting themselves off from the public purse.  

UPDATE: Just to emphasise the point, see Martin Wolf in today’s FT.

Thank you, UBS. As a member of the UK’s Independent Commission on Banking, under Sir John Vickers, I could not have asked for a better illustration of the unregulatable risks to which investment banks are exposed than Thursday’s announcement of a loss of $2 billion in unauthorised trading. No sane country can allow taxpayers to stand behind such risks

In response to one comment, UBS took a hit of $2 billion this time without troubling taxpayers, but what if the next hit is $20 billion? Who can be confident the bank’s risk managers will limit the loss in time?”

 

Think Obama is a Loose Cannon Lefty? Howabout the Socialists in Oslo?

Cowardice: Norway Ejects Danish Cartoonist, Welcomes Jihadist

Kurt Westergaard gets sent home, but a jihadist kicked out of Saudi Arabia is allowed in Oslo.

 

by Bruce Bawer    at Pajamas media

“If you’ve seen the now-iconic image of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban, then you’ve experienced the work of Kurt Westergaard, the most famous of the Danish cartoonists whose 2005 drawings of the Muslim prophet for the newspaper Jyllands-Posten led to worldwide mayhem.

That one drawing changed Westergaard’s life. After Danish police arrested three Muslims in 2008 for plotting to kill him in retaliation for the cartoon, he was put under surveillance and a panic room was installed in his house. That room saved his life on New Year’s Day 2010, when another Muslim broke into his home wielding an axe and screaming about revenge.

Fast forward to September 9, 2011. Westergaard and his wife traveled to Oslo, where four days later he was to take part in a press conference at a cultural center called Litteraturhuset. The occasion: the publication of a new children’s book for which Westergaard had done the illustrations. But on September 12, the day before the event, Westergaard flew home.

The reason given to Litteraturhuset — and to the press — was that Westergaard, 76, had taken ill. But almost immediately it was reported that he had left the country at the behest of the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST).

PST communications director Trond Hugubakken refused to address this report directly, saying only that “Westergaard lives with a death threat hanging over him and is a vulnerable person.”

As soon as Westergaard was back in Denmark, however, he confirmed in an interview with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) that he had indeed been told by Norwegian officials to go back to Denmark. The PST, he explained, had made the decision in concert with the Danish Security and Intelligence Service:

I was informed that we were to return home at once. … The official explanation is that I had heart problems. You must decide for yourself whether you believe that or not.

Curiously enough, Westergaard’s Danish publisher, John Lykkegaard, stuck to the cover story:

He didn’t feel well. That was why he went home.

Meanwhile, Westergaard’s collaborator on the children’s book, Geirr Lystrup, offered his own rather odd comment:

I think these are strange times we’re living in. I think that this can’t be serious. But then it is serious, and maybe I didn’t entirely understand that when I made contact with Kurt Westergaard to ask him to do the drawings for the book.

Huh?

It goes without saying that Kurt Westergaard should not have to take part in an event at which he might take the risk of being killed. But that decision should have been his to make, not the PST’s. On the contrary, it is the job of the PST to make it possible for a man like Westergaard, whose work has antagonized a substantial, and vocal, portion of the population of Oslo, to continue to speak in public without putting his life at risk. By shipping Westergaard back to Denmark, the PST was taking the easy route, shirking its responsibility, and sending out a signal that it really does not care very much about protecting freedom of expression.

This is the same PST, by the way, that did absolutely nothing when it was informed by Interpol Norwegian Customs earlier this year that a young man named Breivik — who would later be arrested for the atrocities in Oslo and Utøya — had purchased suspicious chemicals abroad.

On September 14, under pressure for having sent Westergaard out of the country, the PST passed the buck: Hugubakken said it was the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) that had made the decision to cancel Westergaard’s appearance and send him back to Denmark. However, in an interview (also posted on September 14) with the editors of Sappho, the website of the Danish Free Press Society, Westergaard seemed to confirm that the decision had indeed been made by the PST.

But that’s not all, folks. As it happened, on September 12 — the day Westergaard returned to Denmark from Oslo — a devout young Muslim activist named Mohyeldeen Mohammad arrived in Oslo from Saudi Arabia. This was the same fellow who, in February of last year, gave a speech at a huge Oslo rally protesting a cartoon of the prophet Muhammed (not Westergaard’s) that had appeared in Dagbladet. “When will Norwegian authorities and their media understand the seriousness of this?” Mohyeldeen Mohammed had thundered before a highly receptive audience of around 3000 Muslims in Oslo’s University Square. “Perhaps not before it is too late. Perhaps not before we get a September 11 on Norwegian soil.” He added, unpersuasively: “This is no threat, this is a warning.”

(After the cancellation of Westergaard’s appearance at Litteraturhuset, one could not help reflecting that the same PST which put the kibosh on it had allowed that rally in University Square to go on without a hitch.)

In the year and a half since his now-famous speech, Mohammed, who immigrated to Norway with his Iraqi parents at age three, had publicly praised Osama bin Laden, declared that gays and infidels deserve the death penalty, and celebrated the death of Norwegian soldiers in Afghanistan. Then, in early September, he flew to Saudi Arabia to study the Koran. He was arrested at the airport in Medina, and after being detained and questioned for several days, was sent by Saudi authorities back to Norway, arriving at Oslo Airport, as noted above, on September 12.

No reason was given for his detention and return. The natural conclusion, however, was that Mohammed, while not too extreme for Norway, is too extreme for Saudi Arabia.

This, then, is Europe in the year 2011. On the very day that Norwegian officials hustle a hero of free speech out of the country for fear that his exercise of that freedom will lead to violence, they welcome back home an outspoken champion of violence and a sworn enemy of liberty who has just been deported by one of the world’s most oppressive nations.

The PST’s cowardice and lack of moral responsibility are — to put it mildly — deeply dispiriting. And with this sad episode, the ever-darkening long-term prospects for the survival of freedom in Norway grow even dimmer.”

Bruce Bawer’s most recent books are While Europe Slept and Surrender.

Obama’s Campaign of Self Love is not Selling Well among fellow Democrats

 

 

 by Steven Hayward   at PowerLine

Obama’s Last Chance

Future historians are likely to look back on this week as the period Obama passed the point of no return for his presidency, and they may identify today, September 16, as the single most important day in his undoing.  I wonder if Obama has any clue that his presidency is collapsing in real time?  Dumb question: of course he doesn’t.

Yes, I was obviously playing around with my post earlier today on “Operation Chaos,” but then something deeply serious occurred here in Washington that I didn’t notice until the evening news: 36 Senators from both parties held a big press conference calling on the debt ceiling supercommittee to “go big” with sweeping pro-growth tax reform—one that would slash rates and lower rates dramatically.  In particular, I was struck by Oregon’s Sen. Ron Wyden, a smart liberal, who cited the 1986 Reagan-tax reform that he said created millions of jobs.  He may not be correct strictly speaking about the job creation bit, but that misses the point:

This press conference was not meant for the supercommittee.  It was meant for Obama. 

It is already crystal clear that Obama’s jobs bill Stimulus II can’t even pass the Democratic Senate, let alone the House.  It is such an obviously transparent play to try to set up his own re-election as Harry Truman redevivus, but the political mistake Obama has made is thinking that Democratic Senators whose own poll numbers are collapsing (78-year-old Dianne Feinstein is 60 percent closer to retiring next year according to the latest California polls) will want to be his advance guard and vote for a suicidal measure on his behalf.  The Senate press conference today was as close as you’ll get to a political intervention—they are trying to tell Obama, in the midst of his “you-love-me-pass-this-bill” tour that he has one chance to save his presidency.

Conservatives like to ask: What would Reagan do?  How about this: What would Bill Clinton do?  Clinton would grab this opportunity with both hands, and cruise to re-election.

Obama is so besotted with class warfare mentality that he is unwilling to grasp the one huge bipartisan opportunity that is in front if him—an opportunity that has been in front if him for months.  He doesn’t care about economic growth; he cares only about redistribution and gaining more political control over the economy.  His dismissal of his own deficit commission last year showed his inclinations on this.

I reckon Obama has only about four days to see the light on this.  Harry Reid has said the Senate won’t take up his urgent jobs bill Stimulus bill until after their next recess.  If Democratic Senators go home without a course change from Obama, you can count on them coming back to DC with the attitude of “Obama jobs bill?  What Obama jobs bill?  Obama?  Obama who?”

Raising Taxes through Sneaking “Standards”……Putting your money to work for Obama

The Reality behind Clean Energy Standards

Climate activists failed to achieve comprehensive greenhouse gas controls in the United States in the form of a cap-and-trade program.  And while they pursue incremental greenhouse gas regulation at both the federal and state level, they have not given up on their Holy Grail of a comprehensive national regime to control greenhouse gas emissions.  Instead, they have rebranded their campaign, says Kenneth P. Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

• The current incarnation of the greenhouse gas agenda is hidden in the campaign for a national Clean Energy Standard, or CES.
• Other terms for this approach are Renewable Energy Standards (RES), or, even more obliquely, Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS).
• While many states have already implemented such standards, the push now is for federalization.

What they all come down to, at the end of the day, is a governmental mandate that energy utilities must buy and distribute a certain percentage of energy that comes from so-called “clean” sources, such as wind power, solar power, nuclear power, “clean coal,” and so on.

Here’s why Clean Energy Standards are a bad idea:

• They are hidden energy taxes.
• They are hidden subsidies.
• They are hidden greenhouse gas controls.
• They are hidden technology standards.
• They decrease consumer choice.

The new stealth approach to energy policy being pushed under the guise of a Clean Energy Standard is frankly dishonest, says Green.

Source: Kenneth P. Green, “Not Free to Choose: The Reality behind Clean Energy Standards,” American Enterprise Institute, August 23, 2011.

For text:

http://www.american.com/archive/2011/august/not-free-to-choose-the-reality-behind-clean-energy-standards

For more on Environment Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=31

Will Jewish Voters Back Obama NO MATTER WHAT? Apparently…writes Eric Alterman

 

Don’t Sweat the Jewish Vote

 

Pundits are pointing to the Republicans’ capture of Anthony Weiner’s seat

as a sign that Jews will abandon the Democrats in 2012.

 Eric Alterman on why it’s nothing but wishful thinking

The following  Message by Eric Alterman  is from the Daily Beast: 

“Here we go yet again. Democrats lost a heavily Jewish seat in Brooklyn and Queens that they’ve held for almost a century, and just as they have done now for over 30 years, neoconservatives are predicting an exodus of Jews away from the Democrats into the Republican party.

Most enthusiastic on this point is former Bush administration official Dan Senior. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, he insists that “New York’s special congressional election on Tuesday was the first electoral outcome directly affected by President Obama’s Israel policy,” and he blames this on the fact that the president has “a record of bad policies and anti-Israel rhetoric.”

Actually, not true.

Senior is a Republican partisan who publicly considered—and then backed away from—a run for Kirsten Gillibrand’s Senate seat. To say that he is rather heavily invested in an analysis that relies more on propaganda than evidence is to state a truism. So, too, Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who argues, “It’s very easy to extrapolate to the 2012 election and say Obama is going to have trouble with Jewish voters in battleground states like Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.” These two are hardly alone in their views, which threaten to cement into conventional wisdom any minute now. The reporter Ben Jacobs, writing in the Jewish magazine Tablet, insists that “the issue on voters’ minds was Israel” and that this accounts for the Democrats’ loss.

Reporters always say this kind of thing. But if they stopped to think about it for even a moment they would realize that a) they cannot read people’s minds, and b) when tens of thousands of people undertake, individually, to decide between a set of choices, it is foolish to ascribe a single motivation to all of them. (Remember, most of the eligible voters decided to stay home. And let’s not forget furthermore that a significant percentage of the district’s voters are in fact, Catholic.)

President Barack Obama is seen as he speaks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on May 22, 2011 in Washington, D.C., Joshua Roberts / Getty Images

Though he dismisses their significance, Jacobs actually does a decent job of explaining some of the reasons Israel may not have been on some voters’ minds. He notes, for instance, that at least some of them might have voted for Bob Turner because David Weprin, an orthodox Jew, supported gay marriage, something that virtually no other orthodox Jews do. Weprin was, moreover, Jacobs admits, a lousy candidate, who missed a debate with a phony excuse, did not understand the debt limit debate, and did not even live in the district in which he was running.

And remember, during that entire Anthony Weiner penis-photo mishegas, who were the only folks who actually thought the congressman ought to be allowed to keep his job? That’s right, the voters in his district who elected him in the first place. Might they be a little pissed off at the national Democratic leadership that forced him out against the wishes of his constituents? The Daily Beast quoted one Weprin volunteer observing, “Some people say he’s not charismatic enough. Well, you know what the situation is. We liked Anthony Weiner.”

Then there’s the fact that it was widely reported that if Weprin won the seat, Democrats planned to eliminate it when New York is forced to give up seats in the next redistricting round. That was actually one of Weprin’s big selling points, according to reports—that he promised not to challenge anybody else. (And the Queens boss he promised, Joe Crowley, happens to live in Virginia.) So if you voted for the Democrat, you were voting to get rid of your district—not a really strong selling point in a campaign, I’m guessing.

But let’s grant that I’m wrong about all of the above and that this really was a message from the district’s Jews to Obama and the Democrats to get with the Israeli program. Does that mean that we can expect Jews to abandon the president and his party in significant numbers in 2012? Again, not so much. In the first place, most American Jews are secular and extremely supportive of both gay marriage and liberal reproductive-choice laws, unlike their orthodox counterparts. They vote on a multiplicity of concerns, of which Israel is a part, but hardly, for most of them, the determining factor. Second, despite what you might read in the harrumphing columns of neoconservative Jewish pundits, most Jews are not really so verklempt about Obama’s policies toward Israel. The pro-peace, pro-Israel group J-Street did a poll last year and found that 71 percent of American Jews questioned supported the U.S. “exerting pressure” on all parties in the Palestinian conflict, including Israel. A clear majority supported the belief that an American administration should publicly disagree with the Israeli government when it felt it had a different view. And to top it all off, Israel came in a mere seventh among concerns of American Jews in determining their votes in 2010.

Most Jews are not really so verklempt about Obama’s policies toward Israel.

Typically in a district with a preponderance of old Jews, Democrats are able to play the “he’s going to cut your Social Security and Medicare” cards, but in this case, with Obama reportedly offering to do those things himself, the issue was lost. This brings us to the proverbial elephant in the room: the economy, which, in case you haven’t noticed, is pretty lousy. The president’s approval ratings just hit an all-time low with only 41 percent of American adults approving of his job performance, according to a recent Gallup poll. So the fact that Democrats polled 47 percent in a special election—where, don’t forget, only the truly motivated bother to show up at all—does not say much of anything.

As unpopular as Barack Obama may be with some Jews, remember that New York City Republicans are not a lot like “real Republicans,” those nutty folk who keep debating one another about whether America should let sick, poor people die or give them the death penalty. And for those Jews who might think of straying next year, Democrats have two words for them: “Rick Perry.”

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Are There Any Democrats in Congress? Where are they on Obamajobs Bill?

Some Democrats Are Balking at Obama’s Jobs Bill

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER   at the New York Times

 

WASHINGTON — President Obama anticipated Republican resistance to his jobs program, but he is now meeting increasing pushback from his own party. Many Congressional Democrats, smarting from the fallout over the 2009 stimulus bill, say there is little chance they will be able to support the bill as a single entity, citing an array of elements they cannot abide.

“I think the American people are very skeptical of big pieces of legislation,” Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, said in an interview Wednesday, joining a growing chorus of Democrats who prefer an à la carte version of the bill despite White House resistance to that approach. “For that reason alone I think we should break it up.”

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, has said he will put the bill on the legislative calendar but has declined to say when. He almost certainly will push the bill — which Mr. Obama urged Congress to pass “right now!” — until after his chamber’s recess at the end of the month; Mr. Reid has set votes on disaster aid, extensions for the Federal Aviation Administration and a short-term spending plan ahead of the jobs bill.

Republicans have focused their attack on the tax increases that would help pay for the spending components of the bill. But Democrats, as is their wont, are divided over their objections, which stem from Mr. Obama’s sinking popularity in polls, parochial concerns and the party’s chronic inability to unite around a legislative initiative, even in the face of Republican opposition.

Some are unhappy about the specific types of companies, particularly the oil industry, that would lose tax benefits. “I have said for months that I am not supporting a repeal of tax cuts for the oil industry unless there are other industries that contribute,” said Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana.

A small but vocal group dislikes the payroll tax cuts for employees and small businesses. “I have been very unequivocal,” said Representative Peter A. DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon. “No more tax cuts.”

His voice rising to a near shriek, he added: “We have the economy that tax cuts give us. And it’s pretty pathetic, isn’t it? The president is in a box.”

There are also Democrats, some of them senators up for election in 2012, who oppose the bill simply for its mental connection to the stimulus bill, which laid at least part of the foundation for the Republican takeover of the House in 2010.

“I have serious questions about the level of spending that President Obama proposed,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, a Democrat from West Virginia, in a statement issued right after Mr. Obama spoke to a joint session of Congress last week.

While Mr. Reid, who is known for trying to protect Democrats from casting tough votes, may be delaying the bill to insulate his party, the White House has a tacit agreement with Senate Democrats that Mr. Obama be permitted to take his American Jobs Act around the country to try to sell it to voters. The White House is to brief Democratic senators on the granular aspects of the proposal on Thursday.

The White House does enjoy support from many Democrats still. “I am so happy to hear them talking about the most important thing, which is jobs,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.

As he barnstormed again on Wednesday, Mr. Obama told voters in North Carolina, “If you love me, you’ve got to help me pass this bill,” but even some members of Congress from that state may prefer to stay just friends.

Senator Kay Hagan declined on Wednesday to say her support for the bill that Mr. Obama spent the day promoting in her state was indubitable. “We’ve got to have legislation that is supported by Democrats and Republicans,” she said. “I’m going to have to look at it. “

    Representative Heath Shuler, another North Carolina Democrat, said Congress should tame the deficit before approving new spending for job programs.  “The most important thing is to get our fiscal house in order,” said Mr. Shuler, a leader of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition. “Then we can talk about other aspects of job creation.”

Earlier in the week, David Axelrod, the president’s top political adviser, said in an interview with “Good Morning America” that the White House was “not in negotiation to break up” Mr. Obama’s bill, and that Congress would not have an option for an “à la carte menu.”

But it is very likely that the bill will be cherry-picked for items that appeal to large swaths on both sides of the aisle, like the payroll tax cut and a job training program for the unemployed.

Senate Democrats would certainly relish the idea of bringing numerous bills to the floor to fail — like those that would benefit first responders — potentially embarrassing the opposing Republicans. However, if Democrats end up dumping some of the more controversial methods of paying for the infrastructure and other big-ticket items in the bill — and most of them annoy Republicans or Democrats or both — either the administration or the House and Senate will still be stuck finding another way to pay for them.

Barack Obama, the president FOREIGN to America, Attacks America’s ‘Giving’

 

Mark Waldeland sent in the following article clarifying our FOREIGN AMERICAN PRESIDENT’S solution how he’s going to pay for another ‘stimulus’ package to fund his Marxist projects……$447,000,000,000 worth. 

 

This president, the first foreigner to occupy the White House  will paralyze charity…..   He did, after all, spend 22 years basking in the racist religious environment of Jeremiah “Goddamn America” Wright’s parish in Chicago.   Mr. Obama acknowledged Wright as his ‘father figure’ in his prose for his  public.    The president said he was obtuse to any such anti-American messages to this racist parish……all twenty two years of his membership.

 

Racist, Jeremiah Wright was a close advisor to Mr. Obama and his family.

 

 

 

 By FAY VINCENT

I am one of those people President Obama continually tries to tax more aggressively. And I’m willing to pay more if the additional taxes are part of a sensible tax policy. But Mr. Obama wants to pay for much of his new jobs legislation by restricting the deductibility of charitable contributions (along with other items such as home mortgage interest and state taxes) by those he has defined as wealthy.

In my opinion his willingness to punish churches, synagogues, schools and other charitable organizations is badly considered.

 

The president is under pressure to find ways to finance the $447 billion jobs plan he announced last week. Of that amount, he proposes to raise $405 billion over 10 years by limiting the value of itemized deductions. The way this will work is that individuals making a gift to a college, for example, will only be able to reduce their taxes by 28% of the gift, even if they are in the 33% or 35% tax bracket.

The effect is as follows. Under the current law, if an individual donates $1,000 and is in the highest, 35%, bracket, his taxes would be reduced by $350. Under the president’s proposal, his tax savings will be capped at $280.

The president thus will inhibit giving by making it less attractive to give. And this will impose pain on the recipients.

Why would he want to raise taxes by this convoluted method? Clearly the jobs proposal is a high priority for the White House. But does Mr. Obama really want to make it harder for me, or others in my position, to give?

At the moment a fine young woman is at the Mayo Clinic Medical School under a fellowship program I fund annually to pay her costs. She is a remarkable woman on her way to a superb medical career. If this new proposal either causes me to diminish my gift, or worse, to terminate it, I doubt the president would applaud.

 

His plan may assume I will continue to give because the gift still will be deductible but to a lesser degree. Yet by attempting to increase my taxes in this indirect manner, the president is not only giving an intentional whack at us wealthy but he will likely punish those who benefit from our gifts.

After all, there is only one reason to make a charitable gift deductible and that is to encourage giving. Tax policy is Congress saying we will use the tax laws to influence taxpayer behavior. Here the president is trying to influence me by increasing the costs to me of my gift. He may see it as a tax increase. I see it as a blow at the young medical student or at others who will be hurt if I and millions of others reduce our charitable giving.

When the president tells voters of his plans to increase taxes on the “millionaires and billionaires,” as he often does, he seldom acknowledges the risks or potential costs to the nation if those wealthy taxpayers change their behavior and reduce their economic activities.

If tax policy influences behavior, increased taxes will reduce individual risk taking and make most of us more cautious. It is difficult to believe Mr. Obama would be willing to stand tall at the teleprompter to announce he wants fewer and lesser gifts to support minority education or medical research or any of the myriad other laudable programs and causes paid for by tax-deductible funds.

The lesson in all of this is clear. There are no easy solutions to the need for additional federal revenues. The jobs plan may be flawed. But the method the president has chosen to pay the costs of this new jobs effort unwisely conflates taxes and charitable giving.

Mr. Obama seems to believe that additional taxes will soak the rich. I believe he ought to look not at donors who will pay more, but at those who may get fewer and lesser gifts. There is no merit in a measure that would restrain individuals’ charitable donations in order to raise their taxes.

Mr. Vincent, who has served as CEO of Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., is a former commissioner of Major League Baseball.