Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Political Digest for July 31, 2012

The Old Jarhead Blog: Bringing you news and information the MSM is too busy covering American Idol, celebrity affairs and sensational missing person cases to cover. Please forward to friends who need to be informed.

Advice for my Granddaughter: For When I'm Gone
All royalties go to the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation.

Gun Control Works
Picture worth seeing and remembering. ~Bob.

Elizabeth Warren Praising Communist China as a Model for America
See picture in link above. ~Bob. Excerpt: Massachusetts residents who tuned in to the Olympics opening ceremony saw a new 30-second campaign commercial from the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Elizabeth Warren, that said America should be more like Communist China.

Excerpt: Here’s the most underreported story of the summer. When the Supreme Court ruled on the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) it inadvertently liberated millions of people who were going to be forced into Medicaid. Now they will have the opportunity to have private health insurance instead. What difference does that make? It could be the difference between life and death. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report this week says there are 3 million such people. The actual number could be several times that size. But first things first. … Now if you were a resident alien, the rules are different. Since they don’t generally qualify for Medicaid, immigrant families at your income level can get subsidized private insurance in the exchange. But alas, you’re a citizen. So this option isn’t open to you.

Swing states give Obama the edge
Excerpt: President Obama has an overall edge in the 12 decisive battleground states that is measurably greater than his advantage in national polling. The dynamic, which may reflect a combination of lower swing-state unemployment rates and demographic advantages for the president, is causing stirrings of unease among Republicans, even as they emphasize that it is important not to read too much into the state of the race right now.

Romney says Israel’s capital is Jerusalem, vows to move embassy
Excerpt: Mitt Romney on Sunday declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel and said he would seek to move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv as president if the Israeli government ascents. "A nation has the capacity to choose its own capital city, and Jerusalem is Israel's capital," the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said in an interview on CNN, conducted in Jerusalem. "I think it's long been the policy to ultimately have our embassy in the nation's capital of Jerusalem." (This will enrage the Jew-haters among both Muslims and Progressives. ~Bob.)

Romney laughs off Newsweek magazine’s 'wimp' cover story
Excerpt: GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney brushed off a Newsweek cover labeling him a “wimp,” saying that the media tried the same tactic to discredit former President George H. W. Bush. “They tried that in George Herbert Walker Bush. He was a pretty great President and anything but,” said Romney in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation. (Trying to drum up subscriptions from Progressives. But this could have a huge impact among Newsweek’s five or six remaining readers. ~Bob.)

Opinion: Obama camp facing cash crisis. By Juan Williams
Real Headline: Media joins Obama fund-raising efforts. This has been a talking point on their “gummier” e-mails lately. ~Bob. Excerpt: Get ready for this year’s “October Surprise” — the news event in the weeks before the presidential election that has the potential to push the remaining undecided voters behind one candidate and decide the outcome. Here’s a sneak peek at the “surprise.” In late October, President Obama announces his campaign is tapped out of money and unable to answer the final round of attack ads from his opponent, Mitt Romney. 

Election up for grabs with 100 days to go
Excerpt: With 100 days until the 2012 election, President Obama has a tenuous lead, but the struggling economy hurts his bid for a second term. Obama leads Mitt Romney by a narrow margin in most national polls, and has a slightly wider lead in most swing states, giving Romney little room for error. But while Obama continues to lead Romney in personal likability — a major asset — there are few signs that Obama’s sustained summer attack on Romney’s business background has changed the contours of the race. (I think 95% of the people have made up their minds, and the others are among the low-turnout folks. So depends on who votes. Or a factor that hasn’t happened yet with the economy or foreign policy. ~Bob.)

Report: Adviser says Romney would back Israeli attack on Iran
Excerpt: A top Mitt Romney foreign policy aide on Sunday said the GOP presidential candidate would back an Israeli military strike on Iran to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. “If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that capability, the governor would respect that decision,” said Romney adviser on Middle East affairs Dan Senor in a briefing with reporters, according to media reports.

Land-Use Regulation Increases Income Inequality
Excerpt: Harvard University economists have proven that land-use regulation is a major cause of growing income inequality in the United States. By restricting labor mobility, the economists say, such regulation has played a "central role" in income disparities, says Randal O'Toole, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute. When measured on a state-by-state basis, American income inequality declined at a steady rate of 1.8 percent per year from 1880 to 1980. The slowing and reversal of this long-term trend after 1980 is startling. Not by coincidence, the states with the strongest land-use regulations -- those on the Pacific Coast and in New England -- began such regulation in the 1970s and 1980s. Forty to 75 percent of the decline in inequality before 1980, the Harvard economists say, was due to migration of workers from low-income states to high-income states. The freedom to easily move faded after 1980 as land-use regulation in many of the highest-income states made housing unaffordable to low-income workers. 9It also increases the wealth of the 1% by putting parks and green areas near their up-scale homes. They get the value, but not the cost, and it eliminates low-income people living near the Obamas, Kerrys, or George Soros. ~Bob.)

Important: IRS Data Shows That Businesses Will Bear Brunt of Obama's Tax Hike. By Scott A. Hodge
Excerpt: Today, President Obama renewed his call for allowing the Bush-era tax rates to expire for families earning over $250,000 while extending the lower rates for taxpayers below that threshold. The president and his economic team tend to dismiss the impact that such as tax hike will have on business activity because only 2 or 3 percent of taxpayers with business income are taxed at the highest rates. While this statistic is true, the more economically meaningful statistic is how much overall business income will be taxed at the highest rates. For example, Treasury data for 2007 indicates that 50 percent of all pass-through income is earned by taxpayers subject to the top two tax brackets of 33 percent and 35 percent. (Alas, so many voters are economically ignorant and not paying attention, these facts will have no impact. ~Bob.)

Why States Have a Huge Fiscal Incentive to Opt Out of Obamacare's Medicaid Expansion. By Avik Roy
Excerpt: Eight state governors have stated that they will take advantage of the recent Supreme Court ruling, allowing them to opt out of Obamacare’s dramatic expansion of Medicaid. Their actions have been dismissed by liberal columnists as mere partisan posturing. After all, argue the liberals, the federal government is picking up most of the tab, so what’s the problem?

Green Jobs Gone Bust : Obama’s green investments drown in red ink. By Deroy Murdock
Excerpt: DOE’s website boasts that its “clean energy” initiatives — dubbed 1703, 1705, and Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) — loaned $34.7 billion and launched “nearly 60,000” jobs. This totals a staggering $578,333 per position. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, private employers pay workers, on average, $62,757 annually in wages and benefits. So, Obama is “creating jobs” at 922 percent of the private sector’s cost of employing workers for a year. For every green job that Obama supposedly spawns with taxpayer dollars and borrowed Chinese money, private enterprises could hire nine people.

New Farm Bill: Welfare in Disguise
Video.

A Healthcare Blueprint For A President Mitt Romney
Excerpt: First, Romney and company must create a functional consumer market for health insurance by changing the way that it’s taxed. Currently, individuals do not have the same ability to purchase insurance tax-free that businesses do. Not only is that unfair — it also drives up the cost of insurance and of care. Because folks don’t directly shoulder the costs of the care they consume, they demand more of it.

Key Pro-Israel Obama Ally Splits. By Eli Lake
Excerpt: Dennis Ross, who had worked with the Obama team since 2008, had the ear of the pro-Israel lobby. Now he’s bowing out of politics, Eli Lake reports, just when Obama needs him most. As Republican donors are financing multimillion-dollar campaigns to bring Jewish voters over to Mitt Romney, one of President Obama’s most important liaisons to the pro-Israel community has opted to sit out the 2012 election cycle.

The East Asia Pivot. By Bill Gertz
Excerpt: A Pentagon-sponsored report to Congress outlines the U.S. military’s new pivot to Asia and calls for adding attack submarines and Marines based throughout the Pacific to head off a future war with China. The report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies presents three options based on impending cuts in defense spending. They include keeping the current status quo forces, mainly in Japan and South Korea, or modestly increasing military forces by adding attack submarines, Marine Air-Ground Task Forces, more warships and bombers, another aircraft carrier strike group, and more intelligence aircraft.

America’s New Bomb Threat
Excerpt: Now, IEDs could be coming to U.S. shores. According to Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero, head of the military’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, some of the same terrorists who amassed the know-how on building IEDs are setting their sights on the U.S. (I’ve been pleasantly surprised it hasn’t happened already. ~Bob.)

Netanyahu: Obama's Sanctions Haven't Stopped Iran By “One Iota”
Excerpt: Speaking with presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney at his side, Netanyahu said a "strong and credible military threat" was needed on top of the sanctions to get Iran to make a change.

Mitt Romney Delivers Foreign Policy Speech From Israel
Excerpt: It is a deeply moving experience to be in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. Our two nations are separated by more than 5,000 miles. But for an American abroad, you can’t get much closer to the ideals and convictions of my own country than you do in Israel. We’re part of the great fellowship of democracies. We speak the same language of freedom and justice, and the right of every person to live in peace. We serve the same cause and provoke the same hatreds in the same enemies of civilization.

Romney faces Palestinian criticism for Jerusalem remarks as he heads to Poland
Excerpt: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney angered Palestinian leaders on Monday when he suggested here that the Israeli economy had outpaced the economy of the Palestinian territories in part because of advantages of “culture.” Palestinians said that Romney had ignored the long-running Israeli restrictions on crossings from the Gaza Strip and West Bank, which they say are an enormous drag on trade. The Romney campaign disputed media accounts of Romney’s remarks. (Romney may have lost the important terrorist vote. ~Bob.)

Romney Goes to Israel and Dershowitz Flacks for Obama. By Roger L. Simon
Excerpt: Why is the august professor suddenly acting like a political hack, a kind of low-rent Ivy League Deborah Wasserman-Schultz, flacking for the president at the exact moment the administration is unleashing various forms of “aid to Israel” in a patently obvious attempt to undermine Romney’s trip?

Tweet from Dan Collins @vermontaigne
Mayo Clinic preliminarily diagnoses Jesse Jackson, Jr with chronic graft, a heritable condition.

Actual Border Patrol representatives describe the real situation
Listening to these two guys explain what really goes on may make your head explode, but what they've revealed needs to be understood by every American. --Del

The Media’s Racial Prison. By Bruce Thornton
Excerpt: Two incidents last week suggest once more that our confused, hypocritical, and politicized notions of race and relations will play a huge role in the presidential election. In the first, Virginia state senator L. Louise Lucas, part of Obama’s “Truth Team” campaigning for the president in Virginia, told a radio interviewer, “Mitt Romney, he’s speaking to … a segment of the population who does not like to see people other than a white man in the White House or in any other elective position. (Any Republican running against Obama would be charged with racism, except Herman Cain. He’d be called “an Uncle Tom..” ~Bob.)

Olympics Opening Ceremony: Liberty Forgotten. By Bruce Bawer
Excerpt: The Olympics hadn’t even started yet when the disgraces began to pile up. First the International Olympic Committee, plainly loath to offend Muslim governments, ruled out a moment of silence at the opening ceremony for the Israeli athletes murdered in Munich forty years ago. Then last Wednesday, when South Korea’s flag was mistakenly displayed instead of North Korea’s at a women’s soccer game, Olympics officials fell all over themselves apologizing to baby tyrant Kim Jung-un’s henchmen for the error. 

New Book: Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-75 By George J Veith
Just saw this, have not read it. It looks good. ~Bob.

‘Summer Brides’: Under-age daughters sold as ‘sex-slaves’ in Egypt, report claims
Part of the “Arab Spring,” roundly cheered by Progressives, the Obama administration and the Liberal Media. ~Bob. Excerpt: Wealthy Arab tourists from Gulf countries are paying money to purchase under-age Egyptian girls as “summer-brides”, claims a new report on human trafficking released by the U.S. State Department. The marriages are not legally binding and end when the men return to their home countries.

Business Owners Battle Obamacare for Religious Freedom
Excerpt: Two days from now, employers across America will become vulnerable to crushing government penalties for exercising their religious freedom. This isn't exactly what lawmakers advertised when they pushed Obamacare, but it is part of the Obama Administration's agenda—forcing nearly all employers to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization services. Beginning August 1, employers must amend their health insurance offerings to include these drugs and services. And if they don't? How about a fine of $100 per employee per day for non-compliance.

Excerpt: A couple of days ago, I posted France24's account of the Muslim mob attack on police in Marseilles while they were trying to do an identity check on a burka-wearing woman. Le Figaro also published a report on it, which has some interesting details the France 24 account left out, notably those that relate to the Muslims declaring that they refused to recognise French law. (Well, they could take a rope and find out if they recognize the law of gravity… ~Bob.)

Foreign Office investigates reports of Britons among Islamist kidnappers of journalists in Syria
Excerpt: During their time in captivity they were threatened with death unless they converted to Islam, and both were shot and slightly wounded when they attempted to flee barefoot. … The group accused them of being spies, and considered holding them for ransom, said Mr Oerlemans. He added: "As soon as Assad has fallen, these fighters want to introduce Islamic law, Sharia, in Syria." (this is the side the Obama administration is helping…. ~Bob.)

Scalia: ‘Limitations’ could be imposed on guns in the future. By Jeff Poor
Excerpt: On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace asked Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to react to the possibility that gun laws might change in the wake of the shooting tragedy in Aurora, Colorado earlier this month. “Obviously, the amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried. It’s ‘to keep and bear,’ so it doesn’t apply to cannons. But I suppose there are hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes, that will have to be decided.” (Already they won’t let me buy a Ma Deuce, which would be very handy in Chicago. ~Bob.)

Rubio's plane makes emergency landing. Marco clowns: 'I know how to take a hint' http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/rubios-plane-makes-emergency-landing/?cat_orig=politics
Excerpt: Sen. Marco Rubio’s plane was forced to make an emergency landing in New Mexico on Saturday, preventing the Florida Republican from stumping for Mitt Romney in Iowa. But the Romney surrogate and contender for the Republican vice presidential nomination saw the humor in his aeronautical adventure in Albuquerque.

Obama's entrepreneurial Communist Manifesto: Chuck Norris examines founders' ideas on building success. By Chuck Norris
Excerpt: President Obama’s business comments a couple weeks ago in Roanoke, Va., in which he said, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” sounded more communistic than capitalistic, especially since the “somebody” to whom Obama referred was, in fact, the U.S. federal government. …. The truth is, Obama’s statements in Roanoke were in no way reminiscent of great capitalists and innovators like Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. On the other hand, his words did smack of a few other societal manipulators

Powerful Wall Street Banks Hijacked TARP and Stole the Recovery
Excerpt: Neil Barofsky, a lifetime Democrat, was picked by then-President George W. Bush (on the advise of his Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson) to police how the banks spent the $700 billion in TARP economic stimulus funds that should have helped the United States avert the recession that all Americans now suffer under. Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee on April 20, 2010, Barofsky said: "To declare TARP a success is revisionist history. TARP was supposed to restore lending, and that didn't happen." (It started out as a socialist program to force banks to lend to the insolvent and just-barely solvent but degenerated into a time bomb that brought economic devastation to the entire world. Even in the hands of morally upright people, socialism can't work. But put it in the hands of the corrupt politicians now nesting in Washington and the disaster spreads at warp speed. --Don Hank)

Worth Reading: California: “The Road Warrior” Is Here. By Victor Davis Hanson
Excerpt: George Miller’s 1981 post-apocalyptic film “The Road Warrior” envisioned an impoverished world of the future. The movie was remarkably prophetic of today's seemingly post-apocalyptic California. (Another great piece from Dr. Hanson, though he should remind us again why he is optimistic about the nation’s future. In WWII Budapest, it is reported that the Nazis (doubtless to the approbation of their Islamic admirers) would line up Jews who were chained together on a bridge over the Danube. They would shoot the more fortunate one on the end, who would fall into the river, dragging the others to their drowning deaths one by one. The world economy has the prudent states chained to the feckless, and ultimately to other economies, eventually to Greece, Spain, Ireland, and the rest of the EU disaster states. In the US, prosperous states, like Texas and North Dakota, are chained to disaster states like California and Illinois. It’s hard to see how their collapse doesn’t drag the rest of us into the abyss with them. We are, I fear, close to fiscal collapse, followed by political and social collapsed. ~Bob. This 4-page article—a bit long, even for Hanson—shows Hanson at his best, reminding us how we got into this mess. When Bob and I were in electronics schools in San Diego in 1965, all of California’s roads were superb. In 2005, I visited for the first time, driving for about two hours on 99, the major north-south highway in the interior of the state. The condition of the road was appalling with many major potholes, broken pavement, and even missing exit signs. Roads in rural areas of “poor” states are usually in better shape than this. Although Hunger Games might be a strong second choice, I think Hanson has hit the perfect metaphor with Road Warrior. –Ron P.)

6-Year-Old Gives 10 Reasons NOT to Vote for Obama!
Video.

2012 Campaign Very Different Than Kerry vs. Bush. By Michael Barone
Excerpt: Does the 2012 campaign look a lot like the 2004 campaign? Many Democrats think so. … But, as William Galston of the Brookings Institution, an alumnus of the Clinton White House, writes in The New Republic, "the evidence in favor of all these propositions is remarkably thin."

Obama in '08: I Will Not Run Negative Campaign Ads
Ho, hum, another BO lie. Who cares? ~Bob.

Excerpt: The threat of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is over, for now. On July 27, the U.S. joined Russia, Indonesia, and India in saying they needed more time to think about the pact before going forward, thus negotiations ended. And although this won't keep the treaty from coming back up should Obama be re-elected, it does means that gun owners can breath a sigh of relief for the next six months.

Obama backs race-based school discipline policies. By Neil Munro
Excerpt: “What this means is that whites and Asians will get suspended for things that blacks don’t get suspended for,” because school officials will try to level punishments despite groups’ different infraction rates, predicted Hans Bader, a counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Bader is a former official in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and has sued and represented school districts and colleges in civil-rights cases. “It is too bad that the president has chosen to set up a new bureaucracy with a focus on one particular racial group, to the exclusion of all others,” said Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity. (Yes, Neil, of Rose Garden Heckle fame—Barb. So, if a black thug murders a decent black citizen [we call that the Weekend in Chicago], we should send an innocent white guy to prison with him to balance punishments. The Constitution used to guarantee “equal protection of the law.” ~Bob.)

Mitt Romney and the wimp factor. By Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake
Excerpt: Newsweek seems to define Romney’s alleged “wimpiness” as a sort of wide-ranging insecurity that forces the Republican presidential candidate into a series of gaffes like the ones he committed in London late last week.

Blown DEA sting riles truck owner
Excerpt: Commandeered by one of his drivers, who was secretly working with federal agents, the truck had been hauling marijuana from the border as part of an undercover operation. And without Patty's knowledge, the Drug Enforcement Administration was paying his driver, Lawrence Chapa, to use the truck to bust traffickers. At least 17 hours before that early-morning phone call, Chapa was shot dead in front of more than a dozen law enforcement officers — all of them taken by surprise by hijackers trying to steal the red Kenworth T600 truck and its load of pot.

DHS Gears Up for Civil Unrest Prior to Presidential Elections
Excerpt: The Department of Homeland Security has ordered masses of riot gear equipment to prepare for potential significant domestic riots at the Republican National Convention, Democratic National Convention and next year’s presidential inauguration. (Even paranoids have enemies… ~Bob.)

Jewish businessmen show support for Romney in Israel with big bucks
Excerpt: In private, President Barack Obama may be kicking himself for missing out on a campaign finance bonanza in Israel after learning that a group of U.S. Jewish businessmen are handing over $50,000.00 each during a fundraising breakfast Sunday with GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to the Law Enforcement Examiner's Israeli police source. (Not to worry. Obama will now buy back Jewish votes with our tax dollars. It’s The Chicago way. ~Bob.)

The Week That Was: 2012-07-28 (July 28, 2012)
Excerpt: EPA has announced that it is delaying until next year the implementation of certain rules, both under the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. These rules largely, but not exclusively, pertain to coal-fired power plants. One can speculate that real reason for this delay is the upcoming election, which may be very close. In a number of states, voters are expressing outrage at the rules which will raise electricity rates and make coal-fired power plants prohibitively expensive. (The excerpt is from Ken Haapala’s summary. I urge reading the 1st and 3rd numbered articles (reprinted in full at the end of the file) and the second article under the heading “Challenging the Orthodoxy” about computer climate models. --Ron P.)

The Sad Truth About Bad Bulbs
Excerpt: Fluorescent bulbs don’t burn out all at once like incandescents do. Instead, they lose their apparent wattage output over time. In my experience, CFLs have a half-life of about 30 months in normal usage. In other words, a 1000-lumen CFL will produce only 500 lumens after two-and-a-half years. By the time the rotten thing finally does completely give up the ghost, you’ll be half-blind from squinting. (Note that these problems are in addition to the mercury/chemical hazard CFLs present. –Ron P.)

PA Hails IOC's Refusal to Honor 1972 Munich Victims
Excerpt: The Palestinian Authority (PA) thanked the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for refusing to hold a moment of silence during today's opening ceremonies in London in honor of the Israeli victims of the 1972 Munich massacre, the Jerusalem Post reports. (I suggest organizing a worldwide “moment of remembrance” the media can’t ignore. ~Bob.)

Obama’s overly optimistic economic forecasts. By James Pethokoukis
Excerpt: Of course, the White House and its Keynesian economic models have continually forecasted mini-booms as being right around the corner. And those forecasts have yet to pan out. (You mean 2009 wasn’t a “Recovery Summer”? Who knew? ~Bob.)

Excerpt: South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley's husband received orders from the South Carolina National Guard on Monday and is expected to deploy to Afghanistan in January, a spokesman in her office said. 1st Lieutenant Michael Haley will deploy to Afghanistan, spokesman Rob Godfrey said.

Flash mob robs Chicago clothing store
Excerpt: A flash mob of nearly two dozen teenagers invaded a Chicago area store, the owner says, stealing thousands of dollars in clothing before walking out the door. (Here’s the video. Don’t mention the ethnic background of the teens, as that would be racist. The truth often is non-PC. ~Bob. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNHVOuKiPQ8)

Another ABC News Reporter Marries an Obama Staffer
Excerpt: President Obama’s Press Secretary Jay Carney is married to ABC News reporter Claire Shipman. Over the weekend a deputy press secretary married another ABC News reporter. How very cozy! (We already knew ABC News was in bed with the Obama campaign, but this is taking it to a whole new level. –Ken Gardner. Well, the good news is they couldn’t be any more biased. ~Bob.)

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