Story Of Obama

Will Ignorance Lead to a Second Obama Term?
By Lauri B. Regan, about a year ago

There is a wonderful quote that has been making its way around the internet over the past year. It apparently was translated from an article published in the Czech Republic newspaper Prager Zeitung last April and reads as follows:

"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency...Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president."

The first time I saw this, the Tea Party enthusiasm was in full force and Republicans were on their way to taking back the House and gaining ground in the Senate. Optimism prevailed and the light at the end of the tunnel began to appear. But as Barack Obama announces his reelection bid and the GOP has yet to produce a strong, viable candidate for President, it would be prudent to question the present mindset of the electorate who got the country and the world into the current mess and whether it is possible that "the confederacy of fools" will elect him to a second term.

When Obama won in 2008, I wrote an article for AT in which I analyzed the various reasons that people had for voting for a person who was clearly incompetent, unprepared, unpatriotic, and basically void of any substance other than his own ego and disdain for American exceptionalism. The five categories of Obama voters included (i) individuals suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome, (ii) followers with a mob mentality of assuming that if everyone liked the guy, he must be wonderful, (iii) socialists, (iv) people with racial guilt looking for a post-racial America, and (v) those suffering from simple ignorance due to a lack of intellectual curiosity to understand the man who would be king.

Now, with over half of Obama's term complete, the only relevant categories of Obama supporters are those falling under items (iii) and (v) -- Americans who reside on the far left of the political spectrum and those who remain completely ignorant about world affairs, economics, and the person who is the current leader of the free world. The far left will continue to support and vote for Obama no matter how many flip flops he makes on closing Gitmo, military trials for terrorists, intervention in Mideast revolutions, and other policies that raise their ire.

However, in the face of a dishonest and complicit mainstream media, it is up to all thinking Americans to make efforts to educate themselves, their neighbors, friends, colleagues, and family as to the dangers of four more years of Obama as President. For while the world can withstand four years of incompetence in the White House, eight years will likely result in a world forever changed, with America reduced to mediocrity and powerlessness, Islamic fundamentalism on an unimpeded rise to triumph over the West, and liberty and freedom replaced in many more parts of the world by tyranny and human rights abuses.

While many Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 have woken up to the fact that it was a colossal mistake, there remain too many Americans who simply do not understand just how incompetent and ideologically driven his administration is. There are too many people who would rather watch Joy Behar's ineffectual interview with Helen Thomas, who continue to watch MSNBC's idiotic news programs hosted by the likes of Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, or who consider Jon Stewart and Bill Maher reliable sources of news. There are also those who read The New York Times without any critical analysis of its editorial board's disconnect from reality and publisher's extreme bias resulting in disingenuous reporting.

And then there is the matter of Israel and the Jewish vote. While having little impact in terms of numerical votes, American Jews' continued monetary support of Obama makes explaining the irrationality of that voting bloc extremely difficult. While Israel was not a voting issue for the majority of American Jews in 2008, it may very well become one in 2012 -- and not necessarily because American Jews have suddenly woken up to the fact that the existential threat to Israel is increasing daily under Obama. I believe that Jews overwhelmingly supported Obama in 2008 due to their willful ignorance and lack of interest in his predictable contempt for Israel. Since that time however, Soros-led initiatives such as J Street have led to many American Jews, who have not taken the time to investigate these organizations' missions, to grow contemptuous of Israel and supportive of the least Israel-friendly President since the creation of the Jewish nation.

American Jews are not only living on the left side of lala land, they are blinded by their progressive passions. How else can one explain supporting a President who has spent the better part of the past two and a half years weakening the only Mideast democracy and US ally, the world's only Jewish nation, and a beacon of hope and freedom that welcomes people of all faiths, especially Jews. How else to explain a rabbi who stands before a congregation of thousands and calls Israel "an occupying entity," 900 rabbis who say amen as Obama explains that "We are God's partners in matters of life and death" and orders them to sell his socialist policies to the nation, and hundreds of rabbis who ran a Wall Street Journal ad criticizing Glenn Beck and FoxNews notwithstanding that both clearly stand with Israel.

Just as Richard Goldstone allowed the UN Human Rights Commission to use his name and status as a Jew to demonize Israel in the Goldstone Report, the American Jewish community has allowed Obama to turn them into a bunch of useful idiots. And this combination of stupidity and ideology does not bode well for the future of the Jewish homeland.

So as Obama enters into campaign mode (not that he has ever left campaign mode) and pivots right by agreeing to try KSM in a military court, appearing to care about human rights abuses by striking Libya, and pretending to work with Republicans on a balanced budget, the American people need to wake up. They need to focus on the extremists making decisions and policies in Obama's administration, beginning with Samantha Power and ending with Eric Holder; they need to remember the bipartisanship and dirty tricks used to pass ObamaCare; and they need to recall his abandonment of the freedom fighters in Honduras and Iran, while supporting the "moderate" Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al Qaeda rebels in Libya.

And while they are at it, the U.S. electorate might want to take one more look at Obama swaggering up to the podium for his campaign and post-election speeches and question the intelligence of a man who cannot speak without a telepromptor, who refuses to disclose his college transcripts (let alone his birth certificate), who chose Cairo for his most famous reach-out to a people who hate America, and who appears to care more about enjoying the life of Riley than he does about the free world. If Obama represents the level of intelligence of the American people, then I fear our Republic will not survive the "multitude of fools" who may very well hand the prince a second term.
 
Quote from futurecurrents:

... Obama's a very good, smart president that is doing the right things reasonably well.
More...
Proof that this article talks about you, take another look :)
 
Quote from Yannis:

Proof that this article talks about you, take another look :)
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I don't need to read insubstantial, right-wing propaganda to know what the POTUS has been doing. If you want I could start posting all the things he's done again. But you don't want to see it.
 
Obama believes he can’t be wrong
By Herman Cain

President Obama says very strange things, especially for a guy who presumably wants very badly to be re-elected. As if it wasn’t enough that he last week went off on small business owners for having pride in their accomplishments, this week he actually told a rally audience in reference to the economy – with a straight face – “We tried our plan, and it worked.”

It almost seems gratuitous to start citing all the numbers that obliterate this claim – the 8.2 percent unemployment, the anemic 1.5 percent GDP growth this past quarter, the soaring federal deficit that will top $1 trillion yet again this year. It’s like when the head coach of a 1-15 NFL team tries to make the case that his team is really good. Why sit there and debate him? You just nod your head and think to yourself, “Whatever you say, Coach.”

Yet I think Obama demonstrates something important about himself, and about many politicians like him, when he makes such a claim. For certain people who are so deeply steeped in their ideology, their plan cannot conceivably have failed because their ideas are correct by definition. If they tried their plan and the economy is still awful, it must be because someone else came along and messed up their unassailable brilliance.

The stimulus didn’t produce enough economic growth? Republicans wouldn’t let them spend even more!

The deficit is still out of control? Republicans won’t let them raise taxes on the rich!

Unemployment is still way too high? Greedy businesses are hording cash and not hiring people!

Regulation is crushing business growth? Those horrible CEOs need to stop resisting the government’s wise rules and do what they’re told.

When you’re convinced from the start that your ideas are foolproof, and that any failure must be the result of sabotage, then you’re relieved of the burden of ever re-assessing your ideas. They can’t possibly be the problem! They’re right!

Of course, in spite of the fact that Obama makes all of the above excuses, he does not acknowledge that overall failure has occurred. Remember, “It worked.” That’s what he said.

And this is the other side of the pathological equation. You and I look at the horrible numbers and say, “That sure doesn’t look like success to me.” All Obama has to do is claim the numbers would have been even worse without his policies. It’s absurd but you can’t prove it’s untrue, so it’s good enough for him. He can point to the collapse of the mortgage market, the sharp decline in GDP that occurred during the fourth quarter of 2008 and the rapid collapse that was occurring when he took office – and then he can claim to have stemmed the tide.

When you point out that his is the weakest economic recovery in a century, he and his supporters claim that the so-called “Great Recession” was a unique and special event and that the usual rapid recovery we see after recessions should have not been expected in this case.

Of course, the Obama Administration’s own predictions belie that claim. They said in 2009 that they needed to pass the stimulus to keep unemployment from topping 8 percent. After the stimulus passed, it soared above 10 percent and still hasn’t fallen below 8 percent. Oops! They predicted that economic growth this year would be 3 percent. Halfway through the year, it’s less than 2 percent and it’s just about statistically impossible it will get anywhere near 3 percent. Never mind!

This is failure no matter how you cut it. But you can’t tell that to Obama and his economic team. They decided long ago that their ideas never fail and cannot fail. You picture Obama like the mad professor standing alone in his lab and looking befuddled because his latest concoction didn’t perform whatever magic function he was expecting: “No! It can’t be wrong! It has to work!”

That mad professor is going to try the same concoction again and again, convinced that he will get the result he wants – no matter how brutally the facts smack him in the face. And if re-elected, Obama will do the same. Even now, when he desperately needs to come up with something that will sell the voters on re-electing him, all he can come up with is more spending proposals and more class warfare. It’s the same stuff he’s been doing since he took office, and the rest of us can see that it hasn’t worked – but don’t tell that to the mad professor.

He is always right. The problem is the rest of you – you ungrateful business owners, you rascally Republicans, you dumb people who don’t really know how much worse it would have been without Obama’s steady hand at the wheel.

The rest of us sit there with jaws on the floor, thinking, “Did he really say that?” But it makes perfect sense to the pathological mad professor who is sadly alone in recognizing his own brilliance.
 
Costs More, Covers Less
by Michael D. Tanner

In the weeks since the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the evidence has continued to pile up that, constitutional or not, ObamaCare is bad news.

Yes, fans of the "reform" cheered this week's news reports suggesting that ObamaCare will be less expensive than originally feared.But those news reports were wrong.

The Congressional Budget Office did, in fact, report that two provisions, the expansion of Medicaid and subsidies to help middle-class families buy insurance, might cost $84 billion less over the next 10 years than previously projected. But that's a drop of less than 5 percent of the law's total cost over that period.

Plus, it's a "savings" only in the Washington sense that, instead of spending $1.76 trillion on those subsidies, now we're only going to spend $1.68 trillion.

And the reason for this cost reduction isn't that Uncle Sam has found some new way to provide insurance less expensively — it's that the government is going to cover 3 million fewer people.

In particular, CBO notes that the Supreme Court made the law's Medicaid expansion optional for states, and at least seven governors have already announced that they'll pass. Some of the people who would've gotten Medicaid in those states may qualify for other federal subsidies instead, but not all. So the feds will spend less money providing coverage.

In other words, it'll cost less by covering fewer people. But that's not the end of the CBO report: It also showed that costs for the rest of the program, and for the law as a whole, are still rising.

For projected ObamaCare spending from 2012 to 2021, CBO estimates are now $81 billion higher than they were a year ago. (The big change: CBO now concludes that many of the law's expected savings in Medicare and elsewhere won't happen.)

So: We're going to cover fewer people — and pay more than we'd thought, anyway. That's nothing to cheer about.

Meanwhile, two new studies warn that, contrary to President Obama's repeated assurances, his law will cause many of us to lose our current insurance plan.

An article in the June issue of Health Affairs concludes that more than half of individual health plans won't meet ObamaCare's requirements for "essential coverage." The study dealt specifically with whether those plans could be sold on exchanges, but it's easy to see that the noncompliance would also apply to people who now have individual coverage.

The law won't immediately force people with those non-complying plans to change coverage, but many eventually will end up having to buy new, and likely more expensive, coverage.

At the same time, a new report from the benefits consulting firm Deloitte concludes that at least 10 percent of businesses are likely to drop their insurance over the next couple of years, and many more are thinking about doing so over time. Those workers would end up dumped into the new insurance exchanges, where they could face few choices and higher costs.

It may be even worse. An earlier report by Deloitte's rival, McKinsey & Co., found that as many as 30 percent of firms might drop their coverage. Any way you look at it, this is not good news for workers happy with their current coverage.

Finally, there are continued reports that ObamaCare may drive many doctors out of practice. One poll from the Doctor Patient Medical Association found that an astounding 83 percent of physicians are at least considering quitting or cutting back their practices because of the new law.

The actual number of physicians dropping out of medicine is likely to be far lower (there are reasons to question that survey's methodology), but numerous other polls confirm that many doctors, especially older ones, may quit.

So what have we learned this month? ObamaCare will cost more and insure fewer people. Many of us will lose our current insurance, and it's going to get harder to see the doctor of our choice.

As Chief Justice John Roberts noted, constitutional sure doesn't mean wise policy.
 
Just Can't Resist

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Attachments

No Excuse for Bad Policies
by Richard W. Rahn

The Obama administration and its apologists, including many in the media, keep telling us that the Great Recession was the worst since the Great Depression in the 1930s, and that is why the recovery has been so anemic. Is that true?

When President Obama took office, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent. When President Reagan took office in 1981 the unemployment rate was 7.5 percent. Reagan came into office during a double-dip recession (gross domestic product: -0.3 in 1980 and -1.9 in 1982). When Mr. Obama was sworn in the economy was in recession (GDP: -0.3 in 2008 and -3.5 in 2009), but the recession had bottomed out by the second quarter of 2009 before his “stimulus” took effect. The unemployment rate reached 10.8 percent in the 1982 recession, but only 10 percent in the 2009 recession. When Reagan reached the Oval Office the inflation rate was 12 percent. In contrast, when Mr. Obama assumed office, the inflation rate was zero percent.

Reagan was faced with the problems of slaying the dragon of inflation and reviving economic growth. Mr. Obama only had to revive economic growth. How did they each do?

Under Reagan, the economy grew by an average of 5.6 percent for the first three years from the bottom of the recession, unemployment dropped by 3.8 points, and inflation was cut by two-thirds. Under Mr. Obama, the three years of economic growth from the bottom of the recession only averaged 2.2 percent, unemployment dropped by only 1.8 points, and inflation has increased by more than 2 full percentage points. Mr. Obama has consistently missed his employment and growth targets, including another downgrade on Friday. Reagan exceeded his growth, employment, and inflation targets.

In many ways the economic situation in the early 1980s was as dark, if not darker, as the one that Mr. Obama faced when he took office.

The claim that the economic situation Mr. Obama inherited was worse than Reagan’s is arguably incorrect, or subjective at best. The “misery index” — the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate — was 19.5 when Reagan took office, but only 7.8 when Mr. Obama assumed office. There were six quarters of negative economic growth in the 1980-82 episode (the worst being -7.9 percent under President Carter) and five quarters of negative economic growth in the 2008-09 episode (the worst being -8.9 percent under George W. Bush). The 1980-82 recession was longer and a bit shallower but with higher unemployment and much higher inflation than the 2008-09 recession. Which was worse? Pick your poison.

Obama’s apologists also argue that the recent recession was “different” because it was a “financial recession.” The fact is that recessions differ from each other in some respects, but all of the recent recessions have been “financial recessions.” The reason for this is that in past times, there were periods with very large unintended inventory build-ups, which could trigger a recession, but in the modern era of tight inventory control and “just-in-time manufacturing,” this problem has waned. The current recession was largely caused by a housing bubble created by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two mammoth government-sponsored corporations, and fueled by the Federal Reserve. The inflation disaster in the late 1970s was also created by the Fed through excessive monetary expansion. In both cases, bank balance sheets were heavily damaged.

The Reagan administration’s response to the lack of economic growth was to cut tax rates by about a third for all income levels and restrain the growth in government spending and regulations. The Obama administration’s response to the lack of economic growth has been to increase some taxes (Obamacare contains many new taxes), to provide a short-term cut in payroll taxes (which undermines Social Security funding), and to push for higher taxes on those who create jobs. The Obama program has deliberately increased government spending and regulation greatly — most often without undertaking responsible cost-benefit analyses. The Reagan tax program was aimed at reducing the high marginal tax rates on labor and capital, the inputs necessary to grow an economy. The Obama approach has been to increase taxes on capital — income, capital gains and dividends — which is the seed corn of the economy.

Another major drag on economic and employment growth is the near-zero interest rate policy of the Fed, which now is comprised of a majority of Obama picks. This policy is having a number of negative economic effects. The first is that capital is increasingly allocated on the basis of connections rather than price, so that well-connected big banks and their political friends can get all the capital they want, while smaller businesses and individuals are often finding it nearly impossible to get loans. Yet, individuals and others who have been responsible savers are now being heavily taxed on their savings. If inflation is running at 2.5 percent and the interest rate an individual receives is only 1 percent, which is typical now, there is a loss of principle (which is an inflation tax of more than a 100 percent), even before paying income tax on the 1 percent. During the Reagan recovery, with falling inflation, people were receiving substantial, positive rates of returns on their savings after taxes, which encouraged more savings and productive investment.

The Democratic-controlled Senate voted last week to increase tax rates on interest, dividends and capital gains, and on the incomes of those who create the most jobs. How do you think that will work out?
 
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