Obama is Obama as Obama was Made to Be

Modern Sophists, Ancient Trade
By William J. Meisler

article sent by Lisa Rich:

As the scandals surrounding the Obama administration continue to brew and spread, certain apologists for the president are once again accusing Obama’s critics of indulging in conspiracy mongering in order to torpedo Obama’s presidency. The president’s accusers, for their part, claim that the facts back up their suspicions of foul play with regard to Obama’s goals, activities, and his disdain for the Constitution. Such a charge against a president is a serious matter. Are these critics of Obama justified in their suspicions, or are they suffering from some type of delusion?

The dilemma of distinguishing opinion, including opinion leading to delusion or false suspicion, from reality has its roots in the ancient Greek metaphysical debate concerning the existence of a fixed independent reality versus a changing or relative reality based upon individual sensory perception. Are there fixed truths by which human virtue and events can be defined, judged and fully understood in a way relevant to all human beings, or do no fixed standards exist, and is “man the measure of all things,” as declared by the sophist Protagoras (as reported by Plato), because truth and virtue in human society have only relative value and are judged to be valid based solely upon a particular person’s choosing or perceiving them to be so?

Since we live in an age that credits extreme relativism, rather than in an age that strives to understand eternal truths, it should come as no surprise that confusion or even outright denial will occur when someone declares or tries to ascertain the facts of the truth, since for too many people these days the truth — any truth — is regarded to be strictly subject to one’s point of view and preferences, just as they were taught in the public schools; a very advantageous state of affairs for our modern sophists who, like their ancient counterparts, use every means at their disposal to buttress their efforts to cloud the truth in order to win the public debate. In doing so, the relativist resorts to two major subterfuges: abuse of information and abuse of language.

Abuse of information includes the distortion, the misrepresentation, the false correlation, and the willful and willing ignorance of facts, of logic, of common sense, and of preceding events and known patterns of human behavior. Presentations of statistics are a prime example of how data can be cleverly distorted to create a false reality. A selective presentation of only certain historical events can similarly distort the actual historical reality, via what might be termed intentional acts of omission. Ignorance or dismissal of known historical precedents of behavior is another way to distort the narrative or deny reality. If, for example, a politician has a long paper trail and well-established pattern of behavior concerning his sympathies, opinions, or goals, to ignore such a paper trail and behavior is to deny evidence before your eyes and represents an act of folly. Marcus Aurelius stated the maxim best:
It is a shameful and reproachful thing to be surprised when a fig tree produces figs. (Meditations 8.15)
For example, in Mein Kampf and in numerous public statements Hitler made very clear what he intended to do if elected chancellor of Germany, for which reason any opponent of Hitler who brought Hitler’s plans to the German public’s attention in 1933 could not have been rightly accused of engaging in fabricating a conspiracy concerning Hitler’s intentions. Yet to many Germans in 1933 talk of concentration camps, mass exterminations, and the other subsequent vile excesses of the Nazi regime could have appeared (or could have been made to appear) to represent the near lunatic ravings of Germans determined to oppose Hitler’s assumption of power; ravings which then easily could have been ascribed to a conspiracy to undermine Hitler’s promises to transform Germany for the better.

By analogy, when a presidential candidate runs on a platform of hope and change, it is reasonable to look at his paper trail (books he wrote and read, his public voting record, his previous activities and statements) and background (who raised and educated him, his personal and professional friends and associates, his pastor and church) in order to determine what hope and change will mean once he ascends to the presidency, and then not be surprised when that candidate proceeds to implement his program as soon as he is empowered to do so. Not to credit all this evidence represents a foolish abuse of information.

Since language is our medium of communication, abuse of language represents an exceedingly powerful tool with which to cloud reality, direct the parameters of the public debate and sway public sentiment. As the saying goes, he who defines the terms has already won half the battle. Because the left controls so much of the public square these days, opponents of the left must exert constant vigilance with regard to the terms and underlying assumptions of public debate, in order that their conservative message not be undermined by being defined and characterized in terms favorable to the left.

Complaints about the abuse of language on the part of rhetoricians and politicians were nearly ubiquitous in antiquity, starting with the revolution in language usage by the sophists in fifth century BC Greece. The traveling Greek sophist Gorgias of Leontini created a sensation in Athens upon his first visit there in 427 BC by his novel use (and abuse) of language, and while some sophists like Prodicus of Ceos pioneered the accurate use of language and the study of linguistics, many others shamelessly exploited the Greek language, an activity which, in conjunction with their ability to “make the lesser argument the greater,” gave many sophists a bad name, and often rightly so, as can be seen in the dialogues of Plato or the Clouds of Aristophanes. The innovations of the sophists were hand-made for usage in the assemblies and law courts of Athens and other Greek cities, whence those innovations for better or worse passed into the hands of the rhetoricians and became part of the curriculum of rhetoric which persisted as an integral part of higher education until late antiquity. It should come as no surprise that these linguistic and rhetorical devices have had their greatest applications in politics, diplomacy, and the law courts over the centuries.

It is Thucydides who, while describing the civil war on the island of Corcyra during the early part of the Peloponnesian War, gives the most gripping description of how political expediency can change the meaning of words:
The affairs of the cities were rent by civil discord, and in those cities, where civil discord arrived later and where news became known of how such civil discord had been handled previously in other cities, matters were carried to an even greater degree of excess by the devising of new concepts and ideas, as seen in the great cunning of the participants’ undertakings and the inappropriateness of their forms of revenge. And men changed the accustomed meaning of words to conform to the nature of their present deeds as they judged them. Thoughtless daring was judged to be courage in support of one’s allies, prudent delay was termed veiled cowardice, moderation was considered the cloak of the unmanly, the ability to comprehend the whole issue was seen as the ability to do nothing, rash and sharp action was considered the proper portion of a man, to take counsel in safety was called a well-reasoned excuse for desertion. The man who advocated violence was considered in all ways trustworthy, the man speaking against violence was suspected. He who succeeded in plotting was considered intelligent, he who anticipated a plot was considered even more clever, but whoever contrived ahead of time to do neither was called a destroyer of his party and frightened of his enemies; simply put, whoever preceded another in doing evil was praised, as was the man who encouraged another to commit evil who previously had not considered it… (Book 3, Chapter 82).
Similarly, nowadays government spending is termed investment, illegal racial preferences are called affirmative action, abortion is about reproductive justice and the right to privacy, stealing from one person and giving to another is justified as public welfare or redistribution of income, brainwashing is called sensitivity training, leadership is from behind, wanting to improve your own lot and that of your family is selfish greed, amongst an endless parade of Orwellian nonsense that assaults us on a daily basis.

Thus I do not think that it is a matter of delusion or conspiracy for citizens to harbor serious concerns about Obama’s intentions toward our country. By the sophistic manipulation of facts, information and language a great deal of sleight of hand has taken place in order to endow Obama with the patina of an exceptional intelligence conjoined to a squeaky clean and “cool” public persona, while at the same time suppressing the very real evidence of his paper trail and his close friends and associates. The very perception of all that sleight of hand is alone enough to justify a fear of foul play.

Note: Does anyone remember Barack Hussein Obama’s most important ‘teachers’ in his life, father figure, antiwhite racist, 22 year “church” confidant, Jeremiah Wright, the president’s Harvard fellow Marxists, and Obama’s attachment to Saul Alinsky’s community organizing of communist cells for urban action? Obama is what Obama was made to be…..a fast talking irresponsible Marxist of the third world type.

Lefty Eleanor Clift’s Mean Old Republicans Plotting Hunger for America

Eleanor Clift is standard American newsprint Marxist, 2013.

Eleanor Clift remembers the good-old-days especially those when Bob Dole liked the idea of feeding ‘the poor’.

But, in those days, food stamps were directed to aiding the destitute…..not buying votes Obama style.

What is the real number of food stamp collectors at present? Do you know, dear readers?

Somewhere around 48,000,000 Americans and others use GIFT food stamps paid for by the 49% of Americans who still pay federal income taxes from which foreigner president, Barack Hussein Obama can drill for more revenue…..Most are conservatives.

The majority of these fed-by-the-government have been hustled by our American 44th president……The major function of the present U.S. Department of Agriculture seems to be to build the Marxist base for present and future elections. It isn’t the only federal department to be devoted to this cause.

Eleanor Clift avoids the financial and political matters in her following article, preferring to remind lefties at and from the Daily Beast how mean, viscious, inhuman conservatives really are.

It is a female way of looking at things. Problem solving seldom arrives in the female mind. Feelings, such as doing good by robbing Peter to pay Paul with food stamps and re-electing security Marxists, help these unthinking make their way through the day.

Ms. Clift writes at the Daily Beast:

FOOD STAMPS UNDER THREAT: House GOP Wants to Cut $20.5B From SNAP

With the House about to take up the farm bill, the Republican Party’s ascendant libertarian wing is taking aim at the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Eleanor Clift on whether food stamps will survive.

It’s a big number and it gets people’s attention when they hear it: 47 million Americans receive food stamps in what is now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The program has expanded significantly under President Obama, who boosted benefits and allowed states to waive some work rules under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Still, the spiraling need for food assistance even as the unemployment rate has come down is tied to the weak economy and jobs that are so marginal that millions of working people earn so little they still qualify for SNAP.

This week, thirty members of Congress embarked on the “SNAP challenge,” eating on a SNAP budget for a few days or a week. “That’s $4.50 a day.” Above, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter took on a week long food stamp challenge, April 2012. (Matt Rourke/AP)

For decades, since the 1970s, food stamps enjoyed bipartisan backing, with farm-state senators and legislative icons George McGovern and Bob Dole championing the program. More recently, even the authors of the famed Simpson-Bowles report on deficit reduction left SNAP untouched. But House Republicans have a different mind-set about food stamps and want to cut $20.5 billion over 10 years from SNAP, five times more than the $4 billion authorized by a big bipartisan vote, 66 to 27, in the Senate this week, setting the stage for the kind of class-based and racially tinged debate about the poor that poisons our politics and on occasion breaks out into the open.

“All of a sudden it’s become a popular thing to go after SNAP. Some members want to eliminate it entirely,” says Rep. James McGovern (D-MA). “Balancing the budget by making it harder for poor people to get food is a rotten thing to do.”

Asked if he thought the fight over SNAP had a racial component, said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), “No question about it.” Opponents of food stamps are “intentionally creating myths to demonize the poor,” he says. Democrats quietly tucked an amendment sponsored by Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) into the bill rather than vote on the punitive measure. It prohibits murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from getting food stamps once they’ve served their time. Cleaver says one of the myths is that prisoners receive food stamps, “and most people never take the time to ask what day do they put the prisoners on a bus and drive them to the Safeway.”

“Here’s my prediction,” Cleaver told The Daily Beast. There will be a fierce battle on the House floor to reduce the $20 billion in cuts and a Democratic proposal to cut subsidies to big oil instead. Democrats will lose, “and so the bill coming out of the house will cause many people to puke because of the damage done to the poorest people.” Democrats may regain some ground when the bill goes to conference and must be reconciled with the Senate version, but splitting the difference between $4 billion and $20 billion in cuts would still be significant.

The farm bill is close to $1 trillion over 10 years, and nearly 80 percent of that is food stamps, making it an attractive target for the new ascendant libertarian wing of the GOP. “They see a program that helps people who aren’t helping themselves, and they want to kick the crap out of it,” says a House Democratic aide. House Speaker John Boehner inflamed the divisions within his own party when he said this week that he will vote for the farm bill. The Heritage Foundation’s political arm is running radio ads against three Republicans and one Democrat in agriculture districts, accusing them, complete with pig squeals in the background, of “putting a tuxedo on a pig” by backing a farm bill that is really a food stamp bill.

They see a program that helps people who aren’t helping themselves, and they want to kick the crap out of it.”
Heritage is demanding Republicans honor their commitment to cut spending, and that includes subsidies to farmers as well as food stamps. Republicans have expanded a crop insurance program that is a federal subsidy by another name and potentially more costly. Heritage Action spokesman Dan Holler says the merits of food stamps and farm programs should be debated separately and that it’s time to end the “legislative log rolling” that couples the interests of farm state and urban members in the same bill. He concedes that it’s an open question whether either program would pass on its own.

More white people receive food stamps than black people, and able-bodied people without dependents are limited in the amount of time they can access the program. Sixty percent of working-age people in the program are women, most with children, and if the cuts go through, 210,000 children would lose their free school lunch benefit. On Thursday, almost 30 members of Congress embarked on the “SNAP challenge,” eating on a SNAP budget for a few days or a week. “That’s $4.50 a day,” says Michael Mershow, McGovern’s press secretary, “And no cheating, no office coffee in the morning, no bacon-wrapped scallops at receptions in the evening.”

Republicans say these Democrats are grandstanding and point out that SNAP is a supplemental feeding program that was never intended to be someone’s sole diet. But for the unemployed, the disabled, the elderly, or people just down on their luck, it’s what they depend on. Politics will determine whether food stamps, once an untouchable program, will suffer a body blow or survive largely intact. “What’s been sold over the years is that SNAP is an urban program, and the word urban can sometimes be a substitute for black or brown,” says Cleaver, who has worked hard to convince the farmers in the rural county of his district they have as much to gain from a robust food program as the folks in Kansas City.

Further comment: Lefties active in politics, Eleanor Clift for example, like to insert comfort reading to those racially and racistfully inclined, with phrases like…”the majority of recipients who receive federal benefits are WHITE….politically ignoring the fact that 88% of the American population is NOT BLACK.

Criminals, the violent, the brutal, in America are black males relative to their position of the American population as a whole…..yet, the majority of Americans in the rape, pillage, and burn business are certainly white…wouldn’t we all agree?

Statistics are things Marxists, especially Obamalings, love to play with, whether they are true or not.

Delinquency Rates of FHA Loans HIGH

Will U.S. Taxpayers Need to Bailout the Federal Housing Administration?

from the National Center for Policy Analysis:

The conventional mortgage market has tightened lending standards in the past few years and, consequently, witnessed a decline in delinquency rates, says John L. Ligon, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

While delinquency rates have recently decreased in most of the conventional mortgage market, the delinquency rate in the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) portfolio remains high. Indeed, more than 16 percent of FHA loans have been delinquent 30 days or more over the past two years; over 11 percent were delinquent 60 days or more. The high rate of delinquency and default on loans seriously impacts the financial solvency of the FHA book of loans.

•The FHA backs a total loan portfolio of over $1 trillion — even though it has a little more than $1 billion (or 0.1 percent) in capital, leaving it with a forward capital shortfall (portfolio insolvency) in the range of $20 billion per year.
•The losses in the FHA insurance fund are likely to continue and could ultimately necessitate a substantial taxpayer bailout.
The conforming loan limit in FHA’s book of loans is 16 percent higher than the conforming limit in the conventional mortgage market. The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA) increased the maximum conforming loan limit for mortgages in the FHA and other government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) to $729,750 for loans held in their respective books of business.

Small yet prudent actions are necessary and urgent to decrease the credit risk in the FHA book of loans, reduce its share of the mortgage market by lowering its maximum loan limits, and establish proper incentives with lenders.

•Reduce market share by decreasing the FHA conforming loan limit.
•Establish responsible credit requirements for borrowers.
•Increase risk sharing from FHA lenders.
The FHA needs to properly align incentives for borrowers and lenders and return to a smaller, more targeted role in the mortgage market.

Source: John L. Ligon, “Will FHA Require the Next Round of Housing Bailouts from the Taxpayer?” Heritage Foundation, June 6, 2013.

The Death of Small Town America?

Murphysboro & The Death of Small Town America
By Alex B. Berezow

On March 18, 1925, the deadliest tornado in U.S. history — the Tri-State Tornado — destroyed my hometown of Murphysboro, Illinois. Though it overestimated the final death toll, the front page of the Chicago Herald-Examiner said it all: “In the twinkling of an eye, Murphysboro was no more.” According to the Fifteenth Census of the United States, the town’s population fell from 11,070 in 1920 to 8,958 in 1930.

However, Murphysboro proved resilient. It rebuilt. When I graduated high school in 2000, the population was 13,295.

But then something happened. Many people moved away. By the 2010 census, Murphysboro suffered a breathtaking 40% drop in population. Currently, the town has 7,970 residents — fewer than in the aftermath of the Tri-State Tornado.

What happened? Murphysboro appears to be yet another victim among a much larger demographic trend: The slow death of small town America. From 2010-2012, for the first time in history, rural (“nonmetro”) America declined in population.

……. nonmetro America’s population has always grown — albeit in fits and starts. But notice how the gray line (“total population change”) dips below the dotted line starting around 2010. That represents population loss, and it’s happening because of falling birth rates and net migration out of rural areas. Click below to view chart with full article:

http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2013/06/10/murphysboro__the_death_of_small_town_america_106556.html

It’s hard to imagine this trend reversing. Indeed, immigration into urban areas has been a global phenomenon for decades. In 2007, more people in the world lived in cities than in rural areas.

For my hometown of Murphysboro, losing 40% of its population isn’t the first catastrophe to hit, but it may very well be the last. In another 50 years, the joys of small town America may be just a distant memory.

The Orwellian Obama is Making America Orwellian

OBAMA’S ORWELLIAN LEGACY

by Justin Walker at realclearpolitics

Is America moving toward the Big Brother dystopia envisioned by George Orwell in some of his most famous novels?

That question has been on many minds in the wake of revelations about the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of phone records and Internet data. The ACLU, for one, called these programs “beyond Orwellian” in a statement released last week. The ACLU’s response is characteristically feverish, but in at least one respect, the organization is right: We are indeed approaching an Orwellian world.

Given the safeguards in place against abuse, the surveillance programs are not the problem. Although Americans are right to jealously guard their liberty and to display a healthy degree of suspicion about government programs of this scale, suspicion should not obscure two truths. First, the evidence released thus far suggests that the programs are necessary and effective in disrupting, dismantling, and defeating terrorist networks that so often rely upon phone and Internet communications. Second, the Constitution’s checks and balances are at work in the oversight of these programs.

The phone monitoring component does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s calls without a court order. PRISM — the program that collects emails, videos, and other data from major Internet companies — is limited to foreign targets and does not include U.S. citizens. These programs have been supervised by all three branches of government; Congress has approved them and is regularly briefed, and federal judges continue to scrutinize requests for targeting of specific terror suspects.

But the fact that these operations are operating under the rule of law is not the end of the story. For if we are not approaching the totalitarian nightmare of a novel like “1984,” the revelations provide a stunning example of how President Obama has come to resemble a character in Orwell’s other dystopian parable, “Animal Farm.”

That 1945 novella tells of a farm revolution led by pigs, who drive out their oppressive human master, only to move into his house, don his clothes, and wield his brutal whip to subjugate the other animals. At the story’s conclusion, the pigs’ victims gaze in on their new masters drinking and playing cards with half a dozen farmers. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

To anyone comparing the conduct of Barack Obama with that of George W. Bush, the sense of confusion should feel familiar. America’s 44th president ran against almost all of Bush’s national security policies. But once power was in his hands, he began to embrace them as avidly as the pigs wielded their whips.

Senator Obama had voted against renewal of the Patriot Act in 2005 because he said it allowed the government “to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document — through library books they’ve read and phone calls they’ve made.” But in 2011, President Obama signed the renewal of the same law and defended its roving wiretaps and searches of business records as vital to America’s counterterrorism efforts.

Presidential candidate Obama ran against the very ethos of Bush’s national security program, saying it put forward “a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” But just last week in California, President Obama told Americans they “have to make some choices as a society” because “you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.”

The real effect of the NSA stories is to cement a narrative about Obama that will likely become part of his legacy: the liberal senator and constitutional law professor who, like the pigs in “Animal Farm,” metamorphosed into what he had so notoriously opposed. Guantanamo remains open. Drones still rain down on Pakistan, Yemen, and anywhere else the president sees fit. Leaks are prosecuted vigorously and reporters are investigated to uncover their sources. And now, the president is affirming the surveillance practices he once mused could be unconstitutional. In light of these actions alone, it seems that Barack Obama has learned that George W. Bush got a lot of things right.

The point of noting the president’s porcine transformation is not to criticize his current policies, but rather to serve as an instructive example for future White House aspirants: The responsibilities of power are difficult to reconcile with lazy criticism that is so easy to dispense from the sidelines. As long as he fails to recognize the debt that he, and the nation, owe to his predecessor, he will be practicing a vice that Orwell was a master of depicting: hypocrisy.

Dustin Walker is the editor of RealClearDefense.

Comment: Considerably more Orwellian in Obamaling society is the nation’s one party press, educational, entertainment, and even religious industries, none of them concerned regarding there own bigotry, its power, and what controlled thinking and believing has done to the nation and the nation’s individuals.

ObamaCare Includes ‘Bribing’ Funds…..$2,000.000.000 per year

and all of it at taxpayer expense……those who bother to pay federal income tax, that is. Remember 55% of the Democrats who voted for 3rd World Candidate, Barack Hussein Obama, don’t pay any federal income tax at all.

‘Bama doesn’t mention that in his partisan rantings.

The following article is from the National Center for Policy Analysis:

ObamaCare Bill Includes Lobbying Funds
June 11, 2013

A rarely noticed part of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act channels some $12.5 billion into a vaguely defined “Prevention and Public Health Fund” over the next decade. That money is going for everything from massage therapists who offer “calming techniques” to groups advocating higher state and local taxes on tobacco and soda, and stricter zoning restrictions on fast food restaurants, says Stuart Taylor, a nonresident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution.

The program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has raised alarms among congressional critics, who call it a “slush fund” because the department can spend the money as it sees fit without going through the congressional appropriations process. The sums involved are vast.

•By 2022, HHS will be able to spend $2 billion per year at its sole discretion, in perpetuity.
•What makes the Prevention and Public Health Fund controversial is its multibillion-dollar size, its unending nature (the fund never expires), and its vague spending mandate: any program designed “to improve health and help restrain the rate of growth” of health care costs.
Republicans in both the House of Representatives and Senate have complained that much of the spending seems politically motivated and are alarmed that some of the federal money went to groups who described their own activities as contacting state, city and county lawmakers to urge higher taxes on high-calorie sodas and tobacco, or to call for bans on fast food restaurants within 1,000 feet of a school, or total bans on smoking in outdoor venues, such as beaches or parks.

Source: Stuart Taylor, “ObamaCare’s Slush Fund Fuels A Broader Lobbying Controversy,” Forbes, May 30, 2013.

What the Uneducated and Other Obamalings Would Like You to Believe about Conservatives

Jon Favreau was Barack Obama’s ‘mouth’ for a considerable period of time.

A chief PROGRAM he and his Obama introduced to the White House is RACISM, CLASSISM, SEXISM, AND THE MARXISM THAT GOES WITH THE MOVEMENT’S GODLESSNESS. The weapon most often used besides intimidation is projection….the art of attacking an opponent for performing ones own evils.

Jon Favreau, without a doubt, has gone to college somewhere where he memorized the following to accompany the art of projection Obamalings have become so successful employing in its political campaigns.

College attendant Favreau learned at college what he writes in his Daily Beast advice below to GOPers of the present as prelude to the death of the GOP which he predicts:

College Republican National Committee Report Has Grim Findings for GOP
by Jon Favreau at the Daily Beast:

Here’s what many millennials don’t like: the ‘closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned’ GOP. That’s the finding of a sober study by the College Republican National Committee. Jon Favreau says it’s a wake-up call.

If you were among the roughly 97 percent of Americans who didn’t tune into one of the Sunday shows this weekend, you might not realize that the only two issues currently worthy of sustained national debate are the stupidity of some IRS bureaucrats and the overzealousness of some certain federal prosecutors during an investigation of leaks that may have jeopardized U.S. assets within al Qaeda and North Korea.

Perhaps you are old-fashioned and have additional concerns that are a bit more naive, even trite. For example, what is the political system doing to help businesses create jobs or lift incomes? What are both parties proposing to help people afford a decent education, buy a home, or save for retirement? Who, if anyone, is offering a compelling agenda that speaks to the aspirations of younger generations?

How cute. And yet, while one Sunday show was asking panelists to analyze painfully awkward clips of IRS employees line dancing (please stop that), the College Republican National Committee was busy launching a sober, thoughtful, well-researched conversation about the future of a major political party that is now viewed favorably by only 33 percent of Americans under 30.

As a Democrat who turned 32 on Sunday, which just barely qualifies me as a millennial (1980–2000), I find this conversation hugely important. Young voters, long dismissed by pundits as too cynical and disengaged to vote, famously did so in record numbers in the 2008 election. In 2012, when we were supposed to stay home and sulk because President Obama didn’t take us from near depression to full employment in 45 months (Politico: “Young Voters Sitting Out This November?”), we surpassed our previous turnout, handing the president his larger-than-expected margin of victory over Mitt Romney.

With the help of the Republican Party’s leading millennial pollster, Kristen Soltis Anderson, the College Republicans set out to discover how to win back some of these Americans in future elections. And what they found is younger voters simply don’t want the current brand of crazy that so much of the national Republican Party has been selling with such fervor.

One of the headlines from the study were the words that up-for-grabs young voters used to describe today’s GOP: “closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.” And the party clearly is out of step with millennials on many of the social issues that receive so much media attention. The College Republican survey found that only 30 percent of young voters believe marriage should be legally defined as only between a man and a woman. Even strongly anti-abortion-rights voters said they were disturbed when Republican candidates talked about defunding Planned Parenthood and “redefining rape.” Young people were more likely to value environmental protection than older voters and most frequently listed a path to citizenship as the best way to reform immigration.

The Republican Party cannot keep hiding from an entire generation of voters who expect both sides to address their aspirations with smart, sensible, mainstream solutions.
Jon Favreau took to ‘The Daily Show’ to discuss the difference between rhetoric and reality in politics.

But to me, the most significant finding in the survey was the wholesale rejection of the national Republican Party’s economic agenda. For four years, Republican candidates have been telling Americans that Obama’s policies are responsible for nearly all their financial ills. Yet a majority of young people believe Republican policies played either a major role or the biggest role in bringing about the Great Recession, giving Democrats a 16-point advantage over Republicans in handling jobs and the economy.

After decades of pushing bigger and bigger tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest individuals and largest corporations, Republicans must face the fact that only 3 percent of the next generation wants more tax cuts for the wealthy. Three percent. In a survey taken after the January budget deal that raised taxes on the richest Americans, a majority of young voters still believe those taxes should be even higher.

Despite a push for lower corporate tax rates that has come from both Republicans and Democrats in Washington, only about a third of young people think such a policy would help create jobs or improve their lives. Despite a sustained Republican jihad against even the most basic regulations on Wall Street banks or insurance companies or corporate polluters, only 40 percent of young people believe they’d be better off if business regulations were reduced.

And after the 37th failed vote by House Republicans to repeal Obamacare—a perverse obsession that seems to defy both substantive and political logic—only 37 percent of young Americans believe they’d be better off if the law no longer existed. Today Obamacare is favored by 9 points among young people, 44 percent of whom say “basic health insurance is a right for all people, and if someone has no means of paying for it, the government should provide.”

It’s clear that young Americans are concerned about unnecessary government spending and unsustainable debt. But unlike much of Washington, we have not been afflicted with Simpson-Bowles fetish syndrome. In the College Republican survey, young people want more spending on education, not the massive cuts proposed by nearly every Republican candidate and congressman. We worry about the rising cost of entitlements, but not nearly as much as we worry about the rising cost of college and student-loan debt. In the survey, young people clearly recognize that the president is working to address these challenges while Republicans have been indifferent at best.

Soltis Anderson ends the College Republican report with an admonition: “Economic growth and opportunity policies cannot just be about tax cuts and spending cuts.” Among the next generation of American voters, she has found ample evidence to support that claim. And yet, if a Republican candidate for president said such a thing, he or she would be driven from the race by a horde of torchbearing, pitchfork-waving Tea Partiers.

The truth is, the Republican Party today doesn’t have an economic agenda that goes beyond tax cuts and spending cuts. It can spend the next few years hiding behind investigative witch hunts and over-the-top rhetoric that most Americans don’t take seriously. It can hide behind another 37 failed repeal votes of a health-care program that’s already working as it’s supposed to in states like California. But the party cannot keep hiding from an entire generation of voters who expect both sides to address their aspirations with smart, sensible, mainstream solutions.

As millennials, we’re not stupid, cynical, or naive. We’re educated, we’re engaged, and we’re ready for a serious conversation about our future.

Jon Favreau is the former chief speechwriter for President Obama.

Fifty Years of Failure for U.S. Foreign Aid

Why U.S. Foreign Aid Fails….from the National Center for Policy Analysis
May 31, 2013

For upwards of 50 years the U.S. federal government has been sending developmental aid to other countries trying to create vibrant economies. Yet, there have been no recorded monumental successes with the use of developmental aid. Based on the high standard of living enjoyed in the United States, you might think that the U.S. government would know how to replicate that standard of living, but they don’t, says Christopher Coyne, F. A. Harper professor of economics at the Mercatus Center.

In the minds of many first world leaders, development of impoverished nations does not come from going through the same long process first world countries did. Instead, it contains a top-down approach that promises great things like ending poverty. However, there are multiple reasons why state-provided aid cannot bring nations out of poverty:

•Policymakers do not have access to the knowledge needed to allocate scarce resources to their best uses. In his critique of socialism in the 1930s and 1940s, Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek made this exact point, noting that even the most qualified and benevolent planners lack the knowledge to produce even the most basic items in a cost-effective manner.
•Aid creates the incentive for already dysfunctional governments to remain ineffective. A cross-country study by Stephen Knack of the World Bank found that foreign aid undermines the quality of political institutions in recipient countries through weakened accountability of political actors, more corruption, greater chances of conflict, and a weakening of the incentive to reform inefficient institutions and policies.
•Government agencies tend to focus on spending money as quickly as possible on observable outputs to signal their importance and the need for more money. In the absence of clear lines of accountability, money is often wasted.
The current operations of aid to foreign countries fail because there is not enough supervision as to where the funds go, or how the funds are spent specifically. The real solution to these problems is the guarantee of person liberty and property for citizens in those impoverished nation. Human nature will do the rest.

Source: Christopher Coyne, “Why Government Aid Programs Aren’t the Best Way to End Poverty,” Mercatus Center, May 21, 2013.

Full Article List

Senator Levin, Big Tax Lefty Denounces as Stingy, CEO Paying $16 million a Day in Taxes

We have truly entered the world of “Alice in Wonderland” when the CEO of a company that pays $16 million a day in taxes is hauled up before a Congressional subcommittee to be denounced on nationwide television for not paying more.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was denounced for contributing to “a worrisome federal deficit,” according to Senator Carl Levin — one of the big-spending liberals in Congress who has had a lot more to do with creating that deficit than any private citizen has.

Because of “gimmicks” used by businesses to reduce their taxes, Senator Levin said, “children across the country won’t get early education from Head Start. Needy seniors will go without meals. Fighter jets sit idle on tarmacs because our military lacks the funding to keep pilots trained.”

The federal government already has ample powers to punish people who have broken the tax laws. It does not need additional powers to bully people who haven’t.

What is a tax “loophole”? It is a provision in the law that allows an individual or an organization to pay less taxes than they would be required to pay otherwise. Since Congress puts these provisions in the law, it is a little much when members of Congress denounce people who use those provisions to reduce their taxes.

If such provisions are bad, then members of Congress should blame themselves and repeal the provisions. Yet words like “gimmicks” and “loopholes” suggest that people are doing something wrong when they don’t pay any more taxes than the law requires.

Are people who are buying a home, who deduct the interest they pay on their mortgages when filing their tax returns, using a “gimmick” or a “loophole”? Or are only other people’s deductions to be depicted as somehow wrong, while our own are OK?

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out long ago that “the very meaning of a line in the law is that you intentionally may go as close to it as you can if you do not pass it.”

If the line in tax laws was drawn in the wrong place, Congress can always draw it somewhere else. But, if you buy the argument used by people like Senator Levin, then a state trooper can pull you over on a highway for driving 64 miles per hour in a 65 mile per hour zone, because you are driving too close to the line.

The real danger to us all is when government not only exercises the powers that we have voted to give it, but exercises additional powers that we have never voted to give it. That is when “public servants” become public masters. That is when government itself has stepped over the line.

Government’s power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us. When Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department started keeping track of phone calls going to Fox News Channel reporter James Rosen (and his parents) that was firing a shot across the bow of Fox News — and of any other reporters or networks that dared to criticize the Obama administration.

When the Internal Revenue Service started demanding to know who was donating to conservative organizations that had applied for tax-exempt status, what purpose could that have other than to intimidate people who might otherwise donate to organizations that oppose this administration’s political agenda?

The government’s power to bully has been used to extract billions of dollars from banks, based on threats to file lawsuits that would automatically cause regulatory agencies to suspend banks’ rights to make various ordinary business decisions, until such indefinite time as those lawsuits end. Shakedown artists inside and outside of government have played this lucrative game.

Someone once said, “any government that is powerful enough to protect citizens against predators is also powerful enough to become a predator itself.” And dictatorial in the process.

No American government can take away all our freedoms at one time. But a slow and steady erosion of freedom can accomplish the same thing on the installment plan. We have already gone too far down that road. F.A. Hayek called it “the road to serfdom.”

How far we continue down that road depends on whether we keep our eye on the ball — freedom — or allow ourselves to be distracted by predatory demagogues like Senator Carl Levin.
Copyright 2013, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Related Topics: Taxes, Congress

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/28/the_bullying_pulpit_118569.html#ixzz2UdPlCkFi
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter

Cicadas and Obama Politics: Our Political Left has so Little Good to Spread about Itself, it Chooses Routinely to LIE

17 YEAR CICADAS FIND TEMPERATURE SAME AS BEFORE by Craig Rucker at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow:

Dennis Prager often remarks:

“THE LEFT DESTROYS EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES”…..It is one of the great truths of the past century and a half. Its Marxism has arisen from revolutionaries and the academic Left in the 19th century, from its wars, riots, despotism, racism, Stalinism, Naziism and Maoism, Pol Potism, their death camps, and countless other isms among the gay, black, Latino, university, and Hollywood outsiders, Christian and American haters of the 20th century, and to date of Obamaling rule rising from America’s 21st collapse of honest intellectuality, pursuit for truth, tolerance, and belief in God, the eternal good in human behavior as the core for the good life.

The evil and stupidity of Marxism success came late to our American political scene. Foreigner Barack Hussein Obama is the first president elected from ‘afar’, beyond the homeland, raised in a foreign environment, and educated in a closeted university culture, the first to have had no shame of hiring the hating by admitted Marxists who advertise their haters to lead his attack upon democratic traditions. It has been nourished by one of the most devoted lies ever spread by the social science, political, and claimed intellectual world in the history of the human animal…..feminists insanity that their is no difference between the human female and male beyond socialization.

To the stoned at college and sexed in school, especially among the first stage thinking which genetically plagues the human female isolated from normal society, it appears that the primary purpose of Obamaling politics is to force equality by Obamaling edict on Americans starting with making American females equal to males on all matters physical, mental, and political.

That is what our young go to school and college for these days….with the possible exception of many of the fields of honest, that is, natural science.

Unless that science happens to be funded by the Left, such as the United Nations which led the Marxist-Muslim-and other 3rd world tyrants. Their recent Global Warming bandwagon publicized in America by the intellectual crook, former Democrat Vice President, Al Gore, was based on the politics that global warming is a looming disaster to humans everywhere and it is caused by Americans who use up too much of the world’s fossil fuels as a result of its alleged ‘greed’ and ‘hording’, its exploitation of the world’s poor and suffering, its backwardness, ignorance, and criminality, and the nation’s ‘militarism’.

Change came to America. Truths became fiction…Fiction became Truths.

Barack Hussein Obama was oblivious to all world’s outside of Marxism, himself and his learnings at Harvard, and the dark halls of Chicago politics and its crooks. He has been steadfast in his drive to punish the nation he leads by promising Change and, well, dear readers, you know the up-to-date results how that is going as well as any learned American.

(Our president has publicly called our nation’s marine corps as our “Marine Corpse” with no snottiness meant at all, to illustrate certain vacancies in his modern education. Further, I believe he and his provocateurs have credited his teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as professing about the American Federal Constitution.

Judge for yourselves what that teaching must have included and excluded.

The following is an article about cicadas.

I learned about cicadas when I was in the 8th grade. Some are endemic in our Twin Cities, or so I was told by Mrs. Dagmar McClement, my 8th grade teacher then. I was a landscaper of sorts even that early in life…an outdoors kid who gardened with passion even then. On a hot Twin City August afternoon certain years outdoor kids occasionally would notice piercing noises, noises louder than any other insect could ever engine up in our northland.

Cicadas make those noises, went the instruction…..Many plagues of crops have been ruined by those of the seventeen year variety when they become public by the billions….looking for some forage and a mate or two.

When cicadas emerged we saw they were huge superflies. as if noisy flies from outer space. We learned that they were temperature sensitive.

The following article will remind us of the modern left wing fraud once called “Global Warming”, altered early-on by the Left to gather a larger political following now to be titled “Climate Change”. Barack Hussein was thrilled with this leftwing science and immediately planned to rid the American tax payer of a trillion dollars of hard earned money to gift the third world as punishment for American economic excesses over the years.

from Crain Rucker:

17 year cicadas outraged to find temperatures unchanged

Seventeen years ago billions of cicadas burrowed underground. While they were down there change swept the world.

911, the internet, markets crashed and rose, governments changed hands and then changed back, we had a shale energy revolution, China and India gave free markets a try and took off.

Temperature on the other hand… remained stable.

The global warming people keep denying it, but there has been no meaningful change to world temperatures since the nineties.

That may be good news for people (if you don’t count up the waste), but we’re told the cicadas are not amused.

Find out why.

It may be mating time, but this cicada is not happy.

We’ve been patiently sucking roots underground for 17 years. Now billions of us dig for the surface and what do we find? Pretty much the same world temperatures we had when we went under and America smack in the middle of one of the coldest starts to spring since humans started keeping records.

SNOW on the ski slopes? ON MEMORIAL DAY?!? It’s all over Climate Depot!

For too many of my swarm companions, our sweet cicada song of insect love may be loud, but this year it is wistful at best.

When brood II burrowed underground seventeen years ago, global warming activists assured us we would reemerge to a warmer world than that we left behind. Just the way we like it. Climate computer models predicted it. Activists from warming pressure groups (the one’s with the unbelievably big bucks!) told us the science was “settled” and too sacrosanct to discuss.

That was enough for us. We’re insects after all. We put the word out. No more thinking. We shut any anti-science cicadas we caught questioning right down. A skeptical cicada? Who needs that? You’re head species. You’ve got a peer review process. We trusted you!

So brood II burrowed down, snug as bugs in dirt, and what happens while we’re resting? World temperatures stabilized and global warming stopped cold. Took a break. Went on hiatus. Failed to keep up with computer models! What’s more accurate than a computer?

Next thing we know the true global warming believers (the one’s who made all the promises!) were wandering around the internet in denial. They’ve only just begun to admit that the global temperature data shows what it shows. CFACT erected a billboard at the gates to Washington, D.C. to help them along – 17 years too late! READ MORE

* * * * *