GUARD YOUR KITCHEN SINK, WITH YOUR LIFE IF NECESSARY

!!!!


 

October 26, 2012

SHARE

Throwing the kitchen sink

By Wes Pruden

If you've got a nice kitchen sink, guard it well. A surrogate for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney (or someone pretending to be) could be lurking in the shrubbery under the kitchen window, plotting to scavenge something to throw into the campaign.

It's the season of the October surprise.


If you see a woman in red it's probably Gloria Allred, the Los Angeles lawyer for scorned women just arrived from hell with their furies and long memories. Mzz Allred promised the president she had a doozie for this October. The doozie so far looks like only bitter recriminations of a scorned floozie, but the October surprise season is still young.


Mzz Allred is peddling the story of a contentious divorce of 25 years ago, and paints Mitt Romney as the villain of the piece because he testified for the husband about the value of stock shares in the settlement, which the wife agreed to and later decided she didn't like.


This tastes like pretty thin soup, something the National Enquirer might have found in a musty bound volume in the basement of the court house. Husbands and wives have been known to shout in Divorce Court. That's about the value of a kitchen sink. You heave it over the side and hope it hits somebody. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.


The origin of the October surprise lies in the 1968 campaign, when Lyndon Johnson announced a "peace breakthrough" in Vietnam and halted the bombing of North Vietnam to guarantee an end of the war and "co-incidentally" assure the triumph of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The veep got a little bounce but Richard Nixon won by a margin of less than a percentage point.


Four years later, the Vietnam war was still alive and well and Mr. Nixon and George McGovern were fighting it out over who could end it. On Oct. 26, just 12 days before the November election, 

Henry Kissinger, the president's national-security guru, announced that "peace is at hand." Peace, such as it was, would wait for three more years, but Mr. Nixon won 49 states and defeated Mr. Magoo by 20 points. The president would have won, anyway, but "peace is at hand" might have contributed to the landslide.


In late October 1980, the Iranian government and President Jimmy Carter announced that it wouldn't release the American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran until after the November election. This was not much of a surprise, but it fed fevered speculation in Washington that the Reagan campaign had made a secret deal with Iran to delay their release to avoid giving Mr. Carter the happy surprise. There was actually a January surprise, when the hostages were released minutes after Mr. Reagan took the oath of office. The controversy over what had happened lasted for years, but two congressional investigations concluded there was no deal, and best of all, we didn't have to give the hostages back.


The vultures were not finished. Caspar Weinberger, the defense secretary for Ronald Reagan, was accused of criminal complicity in a deal to send missiles to fight Saddam Hussein, which he opposed, and a special prosecutor with not much to show for his investigation pursued Mr. Weinberger after he left office, and indicted him on the eve of the 1992 election, hoping to prevent George H.W. Bush's re-election. Mr. Bush was defeated and gave Mr. Weinberger a full pardon the day before he left office.


Since then, the October surprises have become smaller stuff. On the eve of the 2000 election there was the news that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving 24 years earlier, when he was young and callow. He won anyway. Eight years after that, The Associated Press discovered that Barack Obama's aged Aunt Zeituni Onyango was living in Boston as an illegal immigrant from Kenya. Her nephew won anyway.


This year the October surprises, such as they are, are -- so far -- even less consequential. Donald Trump promised something about Barack Obama's college transcripts if the president would release them for a $5 million contribution to his favorite charity. A man went to the Romney campaign with "proof" that Mr. Obama scored cocaine hits in college and the Romney campaign told him to get lost.

All we've seen this year are frail skeletons from closets long since abandoned, and Gloria Allred's well-done nothingburger from an ancient divorce proceeding. She should stick to chasing more promising ambulances. One of them might have a kitchen sink inside.



Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

GEORGE McGOVERN. R.I.P.

!!!!

• BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
• October 22, 2012
• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

Decency and Division

George McGovern wouldn't be proud of Obama's re-election campaign.

By JAMES TARANTO

George McGovern, who died yesterday at 90, and Barry Goldwater make for a nifty historical parallel. Both were U.S. senators who became their parties' nominee for president. Both were men of principle, or ideologues if one views them unfavorably. Both got trounced in the general election by the other party's flawed incumbent, largely because voters saw them as too extreme.
But both had long-lasting effects on the ideological outlooks of their respective parties. 


Without Goldwater, it's often argued, there would have been no President Reagan. We'd add that without McGovern, there would have been no President Obama.

McGovern helped move his party to the left on defense and social issues, but of particular importance was the influence he wielded over his party's presidential nomination process, described in his New York Times obituary:

He . . . became the chairman of a Democratic Party commission on delegate selection, created after the fractious 1968 national convention to give the rank and file more say in picking a presidential nominee.

What became known as the McGovern commission rewrote party rules to ensure that more women, young people and members of minorities were included in delegations. The influence of party leaders was curtailed. More states began choosing delegates on the basis of primary elections. And the party's center of gravity shifted decidedly leftward.

Though the rules were not written specifically to help Mr. McGovern win the nomination, they had that effect.

One might say McGovern reinvented the Democratic Party by putting identity politics at its center--by encouraging members to think of themselves first in terms of sex or age or skin color (or, later, by sexual orientation). E pluribus, multis.


In the 1973 book "Sexual Suicide," George Gilder speculated that such an approach "would find its reductio ad absurdum in a President who is an exact ethnic and sexual composite of the American demography--some kind of multiracial hermaphrodite from Kansas City."


When Gilder wrote that, Barack Obama was 12.


McGovernism has never proved sufficient to win an election for the Democrats. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama both made gauzy promises to unify the nation, and Bill Clinton, 20 years after volunteering for the McGovern campaign as a law student, ran as a centrist. This year, however, Obama is being forced to try. With a record that is both lousy and divisive, he has little alternative but to attempt to construct a majority via appeals targeted to electoral subgroups.


One of the words most associated with McGovern is "decency." "Everybody noticed George S. McGovern's decency," writes political scientist Bruce Miroff in a Times op-ed remembrance. Robert F. Kennedy called him 'the most decent man in the Senate.' " In case you didn't get that, Miroff adds: "Mr. McGovern, who died early Sunday at the age of 90, was a decent man."


At The New Republic's website, the lefty author Rick Perlstein writes that McGovern's "unlikely victory" for the 1972 nomination "seemed to vindicate an abiding liberal fantasy, which President Obama sometimes seems to share: that if you just show yourself to be decent enough, the skeptics cannot help but come around."


Stipulating that McGovern was thoroughly decent and Richard Nixon far from it, it seems to us that Obama personifies a different liberal fantasy, namely the delusion that left-wing politics and decency are one and the same thing. This moral vanity leads the left to excuse, or even not to notice, indecent behavior on the part of their own. It is the reason Obama's re-election campaign has been less McGovernite than McCarthyite (and we don't mean Gene).


A mild example comes from the Hill: "President Obama on Friday mocked Mitt Romney's recent efforts to appeal to centrist voters, telling supporters at a Virginia rally that his Republican rival is suffering from 'Romnesia.' "-


Such juvenile wordplay may be worthy of Mother Jones's David Corn, who came up with "Romnesia" a few months ago, or of MoveOn.org ("General Betray Us"), or of Tailgunner Joe, who used to mock Arkansas's William Fulbright as "Senator Half Bright." Barack Obama does not regard it as beneath the dignity of the office with which he has been entrusted.

Would George McGovern have approved this message? Barack Obama did.

In a more sinister vein is a new Obama ad touting Obama's bailout of General Motors and Chrysler and aimed at Ohio. The ad is highly misleading: It criticizes Romney for penning an op-ed titled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" but doesn't note that GM and Chrysler did in fact go bankrupt.


But that's within the bounds of ordinary political tendentiousness. What's shocking is the words that appear on the screen at the end of the ad, over a silhouette of the Buckeye State: MITT ROMNEY. NOT ONE OF US.


If a Republican candidate for dogcatcher in Bugtussle, Ky., said Barack Obama was NOT ONE OF US, every liberal journalist in America would be demanding to know if Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner agreed. No one is asking that of Barack Obama. Then again, he's already answered. The ad begins with the president's voice: "I'm Barack Obama, and I approved this message."


"Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle," declares the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof. "We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome." This, of course, was in a 2008 column titled "The Push to 'Otherize' Obama." And here's a YouTube compilation of MSNBC's Chris Matthews and some Turkish dude complaining that Obama's critics were trying to portray him as "not one of us."


Have any lefties criticized the Obama campaign for not only trying to "otherize" Romney but actually using the phrase NOT ONE OF US? We put out a query on Twitter the other day, and the only examples anyone came up with were a tweet from the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty (" 'Not one of us' has a specific, ugly history in US politics. Bad place for the Obama campaign to go"), whom we hadn't thought of as especially left-wing. Tumulty follows up with an article today.
Then there was this comment in a Daily Kos thread (quoting verbatim):

The "Not One of Us" tagline at the end is very powerful, but also slightly disturbing, given that Obama's had to put up with all the "otherness"Kenyan-Muslim/un-American"exotic" crap since 2007.

Then again, I suppose that's the whole point of using that phrase.

 Even this weak and swiftly rationalized-away expression of discomfort met with hostile responses from defenders of the foul ad, such as this one (again quoting verbatim):

I tend to encourage courtesy over rudeness on most occasions, which this is not.

We are in a fight that must be won. Not won at all costs, but as loosing isn't an option, I'm willing to go to the mat with counter-tactics that are effective. And calling out BS and divisiveness and lies is necessary. And citing the 'otherness' of the super-rich and super-entitled is necessary. The super-rich are mostly 'other'.

Like me, Obama had one foreign-born parent. Mine happened to be from Canada, but he was foreign-born. There are millions and millions of us with foreign-born parents.

But there are not millions and millions of us as rich as the Romneys. Those are the true 'others', which I think the Obama ad captures very well.

There are many adoptable cats and dogs being rescued around the country. You can save a life by adopting one.

You see how the logic works here. It's OK for us to "otherize" you, because, well, we're us, the good people, and therefore to say that you're NOT ONE OF US is a simple statement of fact. Plus, loosing isn't an option.


"There's safety in numbers / When you learn to divide," Peter Gabriel observed in his catchy 1980 tune "Not One of Us." Obama certainly hopes that's true, and in that sense he is a disciple of McGovern, with his bean-counting approach to politics.
But if McGovern were alive, he would strongly disapprove of the ugly turn the Obama campaign has taken. He was, after all, a decent man.

OUR MUSLIM PRESIDENT'S FAILED FOREIGN POLICY WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY LEAD US INTO WAR WITH IRAN

!!!!




ROS-LEHTINEN: Obama still trying to sweet-talk Iran out of building the bomb

Weak foreign policy poses serious threat

By Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

Friday, October 19, 2012 

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

• 
  Enlarge Photo
  Illustration Iran’s Weapons by Greg Groesch for The Washington Times more >

Just a few days ago, Mansour J. Arbabsiar pleaded guilty to working with Iran’s Quds force to carry out an attack on U.S. soil and assassinate a foreign diplomat stationed in Washington. 


Earlier this month, Hezbollah, a terrorist proxy of the Iranian regime, reportedly launched an Iranian-supplied drone that penetrated Israel’s airspace before being shot down. 


Late last month, the Iranian navy launched four missiles as a show of force and its capacity to shut down access to the Persian Gulf. 


These are just a few examples of how the Iranian threat has become more dangerous since the Obama administration took office.
Unfortunately, despite its rhetoric to the contrary, the administration has not done what is necessary to effectively address the threat from Tehran. 


Iran’s nuclear program, particularly its ability to produce enriched uranium, has expanded exponentially since President Obama took office in 2009. Yet the president continues to embrace engagement and meaningless negotiations with Tehran while refusing to set clear red lines with respect to Iran’s nuclear program. 


The administration’s behavior has sent a clear message to our allies and the Iranian regime: The United States is not willing to do what it takes to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability.
Nonetheless, sanctions spearheaded by Congress — even with the administration fighting us every step of the way — have made an impact. Iran’s oil revenues are falling and could drop much lower as the embargo on Iranian oil expands and investment in Iran’s oil sector dries up. Economic sanctions also are inflicting increasing damage on Iran’s long-term oil-production potential. Concurrently, Iran is experiencing a currency crisis that could threaten the stability of the regime. 


The Iranian regime also reports that consumer prices rose more than 40 percent from spring 2010 to spring 2012. Updated data have not been published in recent months, presumably because the data show further hyperinflation. 


We must exploit this vulnerability. To do so, the president must make full and immediate use of the tools Congress has provided him. Sanctions on Iran’s oil industry and banking system are curtailing the foreign partnerships on which Iran’s oil industry has relied. Given these trends, it is not unreasonable to contemplate the end of oil exports from Iran, with resulting damage to government finances, foreign exchange earnings and the larger Iranian economy.


However, incremental, a la carte implementation of sanctions limits the potential impact on the Iranian regime’s ability to pursue its dangerous activities. The effectiveness of these foreign-policy tools has been further undermined by the Obama administration’s naive view that if we keep “talking” to the Iranians and convince them to return to the negotiating table, Iran will stop its drive for nuclear capability.


 he Iranians in the past have agreed repeatedly to discussions over their nuclear program, in some cases even giving the impression that a deal was in place before reneging. Thus, Tehran’s tactics have another, more fundamental purpose: Iran benefits from dragging out the negotiations as long as possible in order to provide its nuclear program extra time to keep refining uranium, getting Iran its goal of a bomb. Again, if the Iranians can convince the P5+1 countries that negotiations are leading toward an agreement, it is possible the European Union and the administration will quietly ease sanctions, as part of the “flexibility” Mr. Obama thinks he will have in his second term.


There is a growing disconnect between the president’s public rhetoric and the process by which U.S. diplomatic efforts have allowed Tehran to do the stalling that he claims he opposes.


We need an administration that will implement a coherent policy to compel the Iranian regime to abandon its nuclear program and other dangerous activities. America and our ally Israel cannot afford another four years of failed Obama administration policies on Iran, policies that will not produce a deal but only buy Tehran more time to cross the nuclear finish line.



Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican, is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Read more: ROS-LEHTINEN: Obama still trying to sweet-talk Iran out of building the bomb - Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/19/obama-still-trying-to-sweet-talk-iran-out-of-build/#ixzz29x4o0bes
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

COMING SOON TO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU

!!!!

Muslims in America

This is great satire in the UK ... rest assured this

is

  coming to the USA, to a neighborhood near YOU.

  

 

www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=wq_lhlIn1e0

HERE ARE FIVE QUESTIONS ROMNEY NEEDS TO ASK OBAMA AT MONDAY NIGHT'S DEBATE

!!!!

Five (Non-Libya) Questions for Monday’s Debate

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman 10.19.2012 - 3:35 PM 

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/10/19/five-non-libya-questions-for-mondays-debate/ 

 

Are you safer now than you were four years ago? That’s the most important question that needs to be answered in Monday night’s foreign policy debate. Unfortunately for President Obama, there’s ample evidence that the answer is no. His administration killed Osama bin Laden, but the war on terror is still very much alive. And while the Benghazi attack has been getting most of the attention lately, it’s just the latest symptom of a much more systematic national security problem for this administration.
Here are some questions that are indirectly related to Benghazi that would be interesting to raise at Monday’s debate. And since it’s never a good idea to ask a question at a debate that you don’t know the answer to, the answers to all of these are already known:


Question One: Did you underestimate al-Qaeda’s Arabian Peninsula affiliate before the 2009 Christmas Day bombing attack?
Answer: Yes.


Obama’s counterterrorism advisor John Brennan surprised reporters when he referred to AQAP as “one of the most lethal, one of the most concerning” extensions of al-Qaeda at a press briefing two weeks after the attack, and noted that “They carried attacks against Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in Saudi Arabia, against Saudi targets, inside of Yemen, against Yemeni as well as against U.S. targets.”
U.S. targets — and yet the Obama administration hadn’t even designated the group as a terrorist organization until after the failed attack.
“We had a strategic sense of sort of where [al-Qaeda-Arabian Peninsula] were going, but we didn’t know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here,” Brennan added. “And we have taken that lesson, and so now we’re all on top of it.” At least until the next attack.


Question Two: Did you call the Christmas Day bomber an “isolated extremist” three days after the attack?
Answer: Yes.


Despite the fact that there was already evidence that showed Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been training in Yemen weeks before the attack, and despite a statement from AQAP taking credit for the attack, President Obama called him an “isolated extremist” in his first public speech on the matter.
“This incident, like several that have preceded it, demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist,” said Obama.
It’s one thing for the president to say he wanted to wait for facts before making a definitive judgment on Abdulmutallab’s al-Qaeda ties. But Obama actually did make a definitive judgment — that Abdulmutallab was not affiliated with al-Qaeda, despite evidence to the contrary.


Question Three: Did John Brennan admit before the U.S. attack that al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate was capable of attacking the homeland?
Answer: Yes.


In John Brennan’s January 2010 press conference, he said the Obama administration “saw the plot was developing, but at the time we did not know in fact that they were talking about sending Mr. Abdulmutallab to the United States.” Again, if they saw the plot developing, why had they not characterized AQAP as a threat to the country? Why was Obama so reluctant to say Abdulmutallab was tied to al-Qaeda?


Question Four: Did you underestimate the Pakistani Taliban’s ability to attack the homeland prior to the Times Square bombing?
Answer: Yes.


The administration was caught flat-footed by the 2010 failed Times Square car bomb attack, which was carried out by a terrorist tied to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Until then the TTP was not widely regarded as a group that was capable of carrying out an attack on U.S. soil.
And yet after the attack, Brennan told Fox News that the TTP was a significant threat that was “almost indistinguishable” from al-Qaeda.


Question Five: Did you miss warning signs in 2009, when CIA officers were killed in a suicide attack by a double-agent?
Answer: Yes.


Seven CIA operatives were killed when a fake informant working for the Pakistani Taliban blew himself up inside a U.S. base in Afghanistan. A subsequent investigation found numerous red flags and intelligence breakdowns, including one CIA officer who had been warned about the informant weeks in advance, but hadn’t passed on the information. The investigation said that CIA officials may have ignored warning signs because they were desperate to find someone who could lead them to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.


The U.S. can’t have eyes everywhere all the time, and there is always the possibility that a plot will be missed. But all of these incidents show that the Benghazi attack wasn’t an isolated lapse. The Obama administration has a pattern of intelligence breakdowns and missing clear signs prior to an attack. It also has a pattern of downplaying threats that may be politically harmful.


This isn’t just a critique of past failings. There are implications here for the future. As Jeffrey Goldberg wrote yesterday: “Biden said [at the vice presidential debate] the U.S. would know if the Iranians had begun to manufacture a warhead. But the U.S. didn’t know its ambassador in Libya would be assassinated. It didn’t know that the World Trade Center would be attacked. American intelligence doesn’t know a lot of things. Such is the nature of intelligence. Biden’s sanguine approach to weaponization suggests either that he strayed far from Obama administration policy, or that the White House is more relaxed and confident about stopping Iran than it should be.”


Can we rely on the Obama administration — the same administration that overlooked the threat from AQAP, dismissed the threat from the Pakistani Taliban, and ignored the multiple attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that led up to the 9/11/12 attack — to have a clear grasp of the Iranian nuclear threat? 

Preventing an Iranian bomb means that we’ll need to rely heavily on intelligence, something the Obama administration has not had a great track record of gathering, processing, or acting on for the past four years.

Topics: 2012 presidential election, al-Qaeda, Benghazi, Iran, national security, Pakistiani Taliban, war on terror

THE ECONOMY IS IMPORTANT BUT ROMNEY CANNOT AFFORD TO NEGLECT BENGAZI

!!!!

October 19, 2012

Clearing the record of a fiasco in Libya

By Wes Pruden

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are on a collision course over Libya, and both men want to talk about something else.

Mr. Romney wants to talk about the economy. When he does, his questions and answers are sure, sharp, crisp and right on target. He doesn’t have to look at a teleprompter for facts and figures. 


The economy is his home field. Foreign policy is his road game.
The president wants to talk about anything but Libya. It’s his No. 1 screw-up abroad and he knows it. He thought he could talk his way out of taking responsibility for what happened in Benghazi and in the subsequent public-relations fiasco. But for once his remarkable gifts of blab and bluster have failed him. The cover-up of the sad, tragic story of what happened to Ambassador Chris Stevens, and why, continues to unravel. The president promises an investigation, but is trying to run out the clock until after the election, when the real story can’t any longer cost him.



The mainstream media, as usual, is doing what it does best, rooting through effluvia in search of trivia, sensation and irrelevancy. Some of the media glitteries seized on Mr. Romney’s use of the word “binders” to describe where he kept names of qualified women for high positions in state government when he was governor of Massachusetts. 


Certain women too delicate to go out in the sun without a parasol accuse Mr. Romney of wanting to put them in some sort of kinky exercise. But “binder” is a perfectly appropriate word for “loose-leaf notebook” (available at any Staples or Office Depot); if he had said “loose-leaf notebook” he could be accused of wanting to consort with “loose women” -- and it’s a good thing for him he didn’t say he kept the lists of women “under covers.”



The New York Times even took Mr. Romney to task for recalling how, as governor, he prescribed flexible hours for women with small children, to enable them to leave the office early to get home to make supper for them. This enraged the editorialists: “But what if a woman had wanted to go home to study Spanish? Or rebuild an old car? Or spend time with her lesbian partner?” (Neither Jonathan Swift nor Evelyn Waugh could make up satire as good as this.)



But Mr. Romney isn’t addressing his campaign to lesbians eager to get home to finish ring-and-valve jobs on old Pontiacs while listening to their partners tutor them in Spanish pronoun declensions. Instead, he’s casting a wider net for votes. He wants to assure women – even “the little lady [eager] to go home early and tend to her children” – that he understands the burdens and responsibilities of women and wants to make their lives easier. Such women, as alien as they may be to the mainstream media, have been hurt, and badly, by the economic incompetence of Barack Obama.



Just ask them. When CBS News, no friend of Republican candidates, asked a polling sample just after the second presidential debate who they thought was better on the economy – the most important issue in the campaign – 65 percent of them answered “Romney.” Only 34 percent said “Obama.”



Results like this encourage Mr. Romney, as some of his wise men have, to go easy on the Libyan fiasco in the final debate. But he shouldn’t. With considerable help from an inept moderator, President Obama further muddled the miserable record on how he screwed up on Libya. Candy Crowley admitted afterward that Mr. Romney was “essentially” correct when he said that for two weeks the president couldn’t admit the Benghazi tragedy was a terrorist attack.



The president, with Miss Crowley’s help, took refuge in the ambiguous transcript of his muddled remarks in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, but Mr. Romney has one last opportunity to put the record straight. For 14 days, the president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his ambassador to the United Nations, and his press flack spun the imaginative tale that the tragedy was the result of an Internet video that almost nobody saw. This conflicted with the fiction, peddled endlessly by the president, that he destroyed Islamic terrorism when he dispatched Osama bin Laden to wherever evil Muslims go when they die. This is the lie Mr. Romney must drive a stake through.

Pool Photo

Going after Obama foreign-policy mistakes and misadventures cries out for the sure, sharp, crisp questions and answers Mr. Romney displays when he talks about the economy. The overriding concern in this campaign is the consistent, driving incompetence of Barack Obama in everything he touches – at home and abroad. That’s what Mr. Romney must make him talk about.



Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

WELFARE RECIPIENTS MAY WELL DETERMINE THE OUTCOME OF THE VOTE ON NOVEMBER 6

!!!!

Welfare spending jumps 32% during Obama’s presidency.

• People wait in line to enter the Northern Brooklyn Food Stamp and DeKalb Job Center, Friday, Feb. 24, 2012 in New York. The state of the nation's economy is a dominant issue in this presidential election year. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
• In this photo provided by the Michigan Lottery, Amanda Clayton holds her $1 million lottery check. The state says Clayton who won a $1 million lottery prize but continued to get food stamps has been removed from a food assistance program. (AP Photo/Courtesy Michigan Lottery via Detroit Free Press) DETROIT NEWS OUT; AOL OUT
• In this Sept. 15, 2011 photo, Bill Ricker, 74, looks out the screen door of his trailer home on a rainy day, in Hartford, Maine. Ricker, who has two college degrees, has worked as an electronics repairman, a pastor and a TV cameraman. He and his first wife had seven children. Now he receives food stamps and heating fuel assistance and gets donations from a local food pantry. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
• A photo shows a brochure promoting the Food Stamp Friday event at the Rose Supper Club in Montgomery, Ala., Friday, March 30, 2012. The club will start "Food Stamp Friday" theme nights in April. Manager Harman Wilson says the night is meant to complement the club's other theme nights, such as Fat Tuesday, Karaoke Wednesday or Thirsty Thursday. Wilson says patrons will not be able to use their food stamps to purchase alcoholic beverages. He says he hopes the novel approach will draw people to the club. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)
•      s goes into effect in Pennsylvania, which critics say will disqualify thousands of low-i

The Washington Times

Thursday, October 18, 2012

• 
  Enlarge Photo
  
  

• 
  
  
  

• 
  

• 
  

Federal welfare spending has grown by 32 percent over the past four years, fattened by President Obama’s stimulus spending and swelled by a growing number of Americans whose recession-depleted incomes now qualify them for public assistance, according to numbers released Thursday.



Federal spending on more than 80 low-income assistance programs reached $746 billion in 2011, and state spending on those programs brought the total to $1.03 trillion, according to figures from the Congressional Research Service and the Senate Budget Committee.
That makes welfare the single biggest chunk of federal spending — topping Social Security and basic defense spending.



Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee who requested the Congressional Research Service report, said the numbers underscore a fundamental shift in welfare, which he said has moved from being a Band-Aid and toward a more permanent crutch.

“No longer should we measure compassion by how much money the government spends but by how many people we help to rise out of poverty,” the Alabama conservative said. “Welfare assistance should be seen as temporary whenever possible, and the goal must be to help more of our fellow citizens attain gainful employment and financial independence.”

Welfare spending as measured by obligations stood at $563 billion in fiscal year 2008, but reached $746 billion in fiscal year 2011, a jump of 32 percent.



Complex story



The numbers tell a complex story of American taxpayers’ generosity in supporting a varied social safety net, including food stamps, support for low-income AIDS patients, child care payments and direct cash going from taxpayers to the poor.



By far, the biggest item on the list is Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor, which at $296 billion in federal spending made up 40 percent of all low-income assistance in 2011. That total was up $82 billion from 2008.



Beyond that, the next big program is food stamps at $75 billion in 2011, or 10 percent of welfare spending. It’s nearly twice the size it was in 2008 and accounts for a staggering 20 percent of the total welfare spending increase over those four years.



Several programs to funnel cash to the poor also ranked high. Led by the earned income tax credit, supplemental security income and the additional child tax credit, direct cash aid accounts for about a fifth of all welfare.



Mr. Sessions’ staff on the Senate Budget Committee calculated that states contributed another $283 billion to low-income assistance — chiefly through Medicaid.



Richard Kogan, senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that while the dollar amounts for low-income assistance are growing, they still represent about the same slice of the budget pie when viewed over the long run. He said the costs may have spiked during the recession, but are projected to drop back to more normal levels once the economy recovers.  “In short, whatever one thinks about the merits or costs of these programs, other than Medicaid, they are contributing nothing to long-run budgetary pressures,” he said.



As for Medicaid, where major spending increases have been made, Mr. Kogan said even there it may be a savings.
“Medicaid provides health care at a noticeably cheaper price than Medicare does, and both are cheaper than the cost of private-sector health insurance,” he said. “The problem is not that the programs are badly designed — it is that the entire health care system in the U.S. is much more expensive than in any other advanced country.”
Combined with several programs also directed at health care, the category made up 46 percent of total welfare spending in 2011.
Mr. Kogan said the cash assistance figure was “a shockingly small amount of money” in the scheme of things.



“Virtually all the rest is in the form of in-kind assistance: Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, housing vouchers, Pell Grants, LIHEAP and child care vouchers; or in the form of direct services, such as community health centers, Title 1 education, foster care, school lunch and Head Start,” he said.



Rather than straight transfers, those other programs provide support for services Congress has deemed worthy of funding. SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that used to be called food stamps; LIHEAP is the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program; WIC is the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program; and Pell Grants provide assistance for college costs.
The conservative Heritage Foundation said roughly 100 million Americans get benefits from at least one low-income assistance program each month, with the average benefit coming to around $9,000.



The think tank estimates that if welfare spending were transferred as straight cash instead, it would be five times more than needed to lift every American family above the poverty line — though many of the programs help those above the poverty line.



Mr. Sessions’ Budget Committee staff said that at current projections, the 10 biggest welfare programs will cost $8.3 trillion over the next decade.



The Congressional Research Service looked at obligations for each program as its measure of spending. It included every program that had eligibility requirements that seemed designed chiefly to benefit those with lower or limited incomes. The report looked at programs that had obligations of at least $100 million in a fiscal year, which meant some small-dollar welfare assistance wasn’t included.



Political wrangle



The report was released as President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney fight over the size and scope of government assistance.



Mr. Obama has taken heat from Republicans for a new policy that Republicans argue would remove work requirements from the 1996 welfare reform. The administration said it is merely adding more flexibility for states, which still would have to prove the law is meeting its jobs goals.



Mr. Romney was damaged last month by caught-on-camera remarks in which he said 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government and see themselves as victims.
In Tuesday’s debate, Mr. Romney blasted Mr. Obama for overseeing a 50 percent increase in the number of people on food stamps, which has risen from 32 million to 47 million.
But the two men also share some agreement on safety-net programs. In the debate, Mr. Romney said he wants to increase the Pell Grant program to help low-income students pay for college.

 

Read more: Welfare spending jumps 32% during Obama's presidency - Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/18/welfare-spending-jumps-32-percent-four-years/#ixzz29kykpxbW
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

IT WASN'T "CHRIS" WHO WAS KILLED, IT WAS THE AMBASSADOR OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO THE GOVERNMENT OF LIBYA

!!!!


According to the Getty caption for the image below, the photo shows Libyan civilians attempting to help Stevens following the overnight attack.

A second image was posted by Getty, again captioned as Libyan civilians helping an unconscious man identified as 52-year-old Christopher Stevens:

Both photos via AFP/Getty Images




Obama and Hillary talk about "Chris" being killed but they carefully avoid referring to Chris as "The American Ambassador" because they prefer to focus on the loss of a friend named "Chris" rather than the fact that the United States had it Ambassador to Libya assassinated by al Queda.
They know that American outrage will be a lot less over the loss of a friend of Barack and Hillary than over the loss of a representative of the people of the United States of America which is what an Ambassador is.

- Leo Rugiens

Yes, They Played Politics on Libya

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary 10.17.2012 - 1:07 AM

 
  

COMMENTARY

 President Obama went ballistic during the presidential debate at Hofstra University when Mitt Romney questioned the conduct of the administration in its reaction to the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya:

And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our U.N. ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive. That’s not what we do. That’s not what I do as president. That’s not what I do as commander in chief.

It was potentially a strong moment for the president as he was able, at least for the moment, to deflect concern about the administration’s failure in Libya and turn into a question of whether Romney overstepped the mark in his criticism. 


But a dispassionate look at the question on which the president made his grandstand play shows that his administration stands guilty of doing exactly what he denied.




The whole point about the administration spending more than two weeks trying to claim that the assassination of the U.S. ambassador to Libya was merely the result of an overheated reaction to an offensive film is that it dovetails with the political needs of the Obama re-election campaign.



We have yet to discover exactly what President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice knew about Libya and when they knew it as well as why the consulate’s requests for security were denied and who made that decision. The president was asked a direct question about that at Hofstra and chose not to answer it.



Though this issue was diverted into one largely about whether the president called the incident a terror attack the next day, what is being ignored is the fact that even though Obama uttered the word “terror” the following day, his administration spent the following days and weeks shouting down those who spoke of it as terrorism.



Their motivation wasn’t just the product of confusion about the available intelligence. It was the product of a desire to silence any speculation about the revival of al-Qaeda affiliates in Libya.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 anniversary, U.S. diplomatic facilities were attacked throughout the Middle East with American flags being torn down and replaced by al-Qaeda banners. Throughout the region, Islamist terrorism continues to fester and even gain strength in certain countries.



That’s a grim fact that not only needs to be acknowledged but understood as a major cause of the Libya disaster. But it is not something that the administration is comfortable saying because the keynote to the president’s foreign policy and security re-election platform is the notion that al-Qaeda is as dead as Osama bin Laden.



Having staked so much on the “bin Laden is dead” theme, the administration dragged its feet when it came to telling the truth about Islamist terrorism in Libya. They repeatedly claimed that the ambassador died as the result of film criticism run amuck. While they claim this was the result of faulty intelligence, there’s no mystery about why they embraced this false narrative so enthusiastically. 


Talking about an offensive anti-Muslim video (albeit one that virtually no one has actually seen) allowed the president’s foreign policy team to avoid saying the words “terror” and “al-Qaeda.” Instead, they talked about a movie for which they endlessly apologized. The president’s faux outrage notwithstanding, if that isn’t playing politics with security issues and misleading the American public, I don’t know what is.

.......................................................................................................

Obama and the “T” Word

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman 10.17.2012 - 11:05 AM

COMMENTARY

When did President Obama refer to the Benghazi attack as an “act of terror”? According to Candy Crowley and White House spin artists, it was in his Rose Garden speech on September 12. But as I wrote last month, the reference was ambiguous at best. It was never clear whether Obama was referring to the Benghazi attack, the 9/11 attacks, the unrest across the Muslim world, or just terrorism in general.


However, at Foreign Policy, Josh Rogin dug up a transcript of Obama referring to the Benghazi attack more directly as an “act of terror” on Sept. 13 — at a campaign event in Colorado:

President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney sparred over whether Obama called the Sept. 11 murder of four Americans in Benghazi a “terrorist” attack. In fact, Obama did refer to the attack as “an act of terror,” but he did not do so directly in the Rose Garden the next day.
Romney said during Tuesday night’s debate that it took 14 days for Obama to acknowledge that the attack was a terrorist attack, while Obama and CNN’s Candy Crowley agreed that Obama said so Sept. 12 in remarks in the Rose Garden. In those remarks, journalists noticed, he did not explicitly refer to the Benghazi attack as an “act of terror,” though he did use those words. …
But on Sept. 13, at a campaign event in Colorado, Obama again used the phrase “act of terror” and this time tied it directly to the Benghazi attack.
“So what I want all of you to know is that we are going to bring those who killed our fellow Americans to justice. I want people around the world to hear me: To all those who would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished.

The bottom line? CNN’s Candy Crowley seriously erred in “correcting” Romney on that point, since Obama’s comment in the Rose Garden speech was debatable from the context. However, if the president now wants to clarify that he was referring to the Benghazi attack as an “act of terror” on September 12, let’s take him at his word.


Of course, clearing that up raises more questions than answers.
For one, why, if the president immediately knew Benghazi was a terrorist attack, did he fly to Las Vegas for a fundraiser the very next day? Why didn’t he inform UN Ambassador Susan Rice before she went on the Sunday shows and blamed the attack on the anti-Islam film? Why didn’t he tell his own spokesperson, who insisted days later that “We have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack…And while the violence is reprehensible and unjustified, it is not a reaction to the 9/11 anniversary that we know of, or to U.S. policy”? Why did the president himself go on “The View” nearly two weeks later, and — when asked point-blank whether Benghazi was a terrorist attack — say that “well, we’re still doing an investigation” and “it wasn’t just a mob action”?
More importantly, if President Obama believed it was a terrorist attack from Day One, why didn’t he share this with the American public? Why would he make a vague one-line reference to it in a single campaign stump speech in Ohio, but not give a full address to the American people, outlining what he knew?

 

Topics: 2012 presidential election, Benghazi, presidential debate

FED CHAIRMAN BEN BERNANKE'S EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT

!!!!

Ben Bernanke

This is truly an extraordinary find!

Rare footage of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's childhood has recently surfaced...


http://i.imgur.com/XaiUx.gif

THE BRITISH HAVE A KEEN INSIGHT INTO OUR POLITICS

!!!!











I really love British humor.  I loved "Are You Being Served",, "Frawlty Towers", even the comedy of some of their more bawdy comics.  However, I really do admire the candor with which the British Press view the current antics of our President.  Here is just a little sample:
 


 












 
 

HARRY TRUMAN, "THE BUCK STOPS HERE!"

!!!!

Hillary Apologizes for Benghazi, But Where’s Obama?

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman 10.16.2012 - 10:00 AM 

COMMENTARY


 

  

President Harry Truman at his desk in the Oval This is nothing short of disastrous
 for President Obama.

After dodging responsibility for the Benghazi attack for over a month, pointing fingers at everything from the State Department to the intelligence community, theWhite House is outclassedby…HillaryClinton.

By taking the blame now, Hillary effectively 1.) Undermined Obama’s leadership, 2.) Put pressure on him right before a major debate to take the heat:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday tried to douse a political firestorm around the deadly assault on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya, saying she is responsible for the security of American diplomatic outposts.

 “I take responsibility” for the protection of U.S. diplomats Clinton said during a visit to Peru. But she said an investigation now under way will ultimately determine what happened in the attack that left four Americans dead. …

Clinton said President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are not involved in security decisions.
“I want to avoid some kind of political gotcha,” she added, noting that it is close to the election.

This puts Obama in an incredibly uncomfortable position.


If he let’s an underling like Hillary accept responsibility, he’s going to look even weaker than he has over the past few weeks. But even if Obama does step up and take the blame for the Benghazi attack today, it might be too late. Not only will it look like he did it under political pressure, but Hillary falling on her sword just highlights the politically-craven blame-game the White House has been playing for the past month.

Topics: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Libya consulate attack, State Department


....................................................................................


 

"THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SOUND IN THE WORLD IS THAT OF THE MEUZZIN CALLING THE FAITHFUL TO PRAYER"

!!!!

Important - look at this! It is very short but very interesting!

This just broke. Share this quickly as YouTube may scrub it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jhx_2TqffE

YouTube - Videos from this email