Obama Gets Real

By:

Peter Schiff

Friday, December 9, 2011

For most of his time as a national political figure, Barack Obama has been careful to cloak his core socialist leanings behind a veil of pro-capitalist rhetoric. This makes strategic sense, as Americans still largely identify as pro-capitalist. However, based on his recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the President appears to have reassessed the political landscape in advance of the 2012 elections. Based on the growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the recent defeat of Republicans in special elections, he has perhaps sensed a surge of left-leaning sentiment; and, as a result, he finally dropped the pretense.

According to our President's new view of history, capitalism is a theory that has "never worked." He argues that its appeal can't be justified by results, but its popularity is based on Americans' preference for an economic ideology that "fits well on a bumper sticker." He feels that capitalism speaks to the flaws in the American DNA, those deeply rooted creation myths that elevate the achievements of individuals and cast unwarranted skepticism on the benefits of government. He argues that this pre-disposition has been exploited by the rich to popularize policies that benefit themselves at the expense of the poor and middle class.

But Obama's knowledge of history is limited to what is written on his teleprompter. And his selection of the same location that Teddy Roosevelt used to chart an abrupt departure into populist politics is deeply symbolic in the opposite way to that which he intended. It is not by some genetic fluke that Americans distrust government. It is an integral and essential part of our heritage. The United States was founded by people who distrusted government intensely and was subsequently settled, over successive generations, by people fleeing the ravages of government oppression. These Americans relied on capitalism to quickly build the greatest economic power the world had ever seen - from nothing.

But according to Obama's revisionist version of American history, we tried capitalism only briefly during our history. First, during the Robber Barron period of the late 19th Century, the result of which was child labor and unprecedented lower-class poverty. These ravages were supposedly only corrected by the progressive policies of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. We tried capitalism again in the 1920s, according to Obama, and the result was the Great Depression. This time, it allegedly took FDR's New Deal to finally slay that capitalist monster. Then, the account only gets more farcical. Apparently, we tried capitalism again under George W. Bush, and the result was the housing bubble, financial crisis, and ensuing Great Recession. Obama now argues that government is needed once again to save the day.

This view is complete fiction and proves that Obama is not qualified to teach elementary school civics, let alone serve as President of the United States. I wonder what other economic system he believes we followed prior to the 1890s and 1920s (and during the 1950s and 1960s) that that he now seeks to restore? Capitalism did not start with J.P. Morgan in 1890s or John D. Rockefeller in the 1920s as the President suggests. In fact, it was about that time that capitalism came under attack by the progressives. We were born and prospered under capitalism. The Great Depression did not result from unbridled capitalism, but from the monetary policy of the newly created Federal Reserve and the interventionist economic policies of both Hoover and Roosevelt - policies that were decidedly un-capitalist.

The prosperity enjoyed during mid-20th century actually resulted from the incredible progress produced by years of capitalism. Contrary to Obama's belief, the New Deal and Great Society did not create the middle class; it was, in fact, a direct result of the capitalist industrial revolution. The socialist programs of which Obama is so fond are the reasons why the middle class has been shrinking. America's economic descent began in the 1960s, when we abandoned capitalism in favor of a mixed economy. By mixing capitalism with socialism, we undermined economic growth, and reversed much of the progress years of laissez-faire had bestowed on average Americans. The back of the middle class is being broken by the weight of government and the enormous burden taxes and regulation place on the economy.

America's first experiment with socialism, the Plymouth Bay Colony, ended in failure, and our most successful colonies - New York, Virginia, Massachusetts - were begun primarily as commercial enterprises. When the founding fathers gathered to write the Constitution, they represented capitalist states and granted the federal government severely limited powers.

Apparently, Obama thinks our founders' mistrust of government was delusional, and that we were fortunate that far wiser groups of leaders eventually corrected those mistakes. The danger, as Obama sees it, is that some Republicans actually want to reverse course and adopt the failed ideas espoused by great American fools like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin.

The President unknowingly illustrated his own contradictory thinking with the importance he now places on extending the temporary payroll tax cuts. If all that stands between middle-class families and abject poverty is a small tax cut, imagine how much damage the far more massive existing tax burden already inflicts on those very households! If Obama really wants to relieve middle-class taxpayers of this burden, he needs to reduce the cost of government by cutting spending. After all, there is no way to pay for all the government programs Obama wants simply by taxing the rich.

History has proven time-and-again that capitalism works and socialism does not. Taking money from the rich and redistributing it to the poor does not grow the economy. On the contrary, it reduces the incentives of both parties. It lowers savings, destroys capital, limits economic growth, and lowers living standards. Maybe Obama should take his eyes off the teleprompter long enough to read some American history. In fact, he could start by reading the Constitution that he swore an oath to uphold.

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"For America to remain a capitalist nation, America's banks must remain free. Remember this as you listen to anti-bank slanders from the White House"

Socialism: The mob assaults against our banking system by unemployed leftists and their political allies are part of a larger strategy to control the commanding heights of our economy. And we'll all be much poorer for it.

The White House has thrown in with the anticapitalism crowd, and banks had better watch out. You only had to hear President Obama's cynical, politicized expressions of sympathy for the unwashed legions "occupying" Wall Street this week to be worried.

"Not only did the financial sector, with the Republican Party in Congress, fight us every step of the way," Obama said at his news conference Thursday. "But now you've got these same folks arguing we should roll back all those reforms and go back to the way it was."

But no criticism of the demonstrators.

In fact, added Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, "We are going to push back harder," making what sounds like a fairly explicit threat against the banks.

Welcome to class warfare, 2011-style. Obama's ratings have never been lower, and administration policies leading to a dead-in-the-water economy with 9%-plus unemployment are incredibly unpopular.

So he must think his only hope for re-election is to somehow tie the GOP to fat-cat bankers on Wall Street and then convince voters that the banks are to blame for all their ills.

Sound cynical? It is. But this is what Obama and the Democrats are doing. They've even put out a video: "Republicans: On the Side of Wall Street, not Consumers."....(READ THE REST HERE at Investors.com)

The Milton Factor - Statists Would Rather Rule in Hell Than Leave Us the Hell Alone by Robert Tracinski

Recently, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez announced that he was moving the nation's entire overseas reserve of gold bullion, valued at $11 billion, back to Caracas, a move that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars just for security. (Ragnar Danneskjold, where are you?)

There are two theories about why Chavez is doing this. The first theory is that he is withdrawing hard assets that could be attached when the World Bank's International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes rules against him for illegally seizing $14 billion in assets from American and European companies.

The other, wider theory, the one I consider to be more accurate, is that Chavez is being treated for cancer and is paranoid that his weakness will provide an opening to political opponents, so his regime is trying move the country's reserve of hard money to some place where they can physically grab hold of it. In effect, Chavez is piling up gold in his bunker in anticipation of fighting off a Libyan-style insurrection. Roger Noriega sums it up: "These momentous decisions by the ailing leader and his nervous cronies suggest they are more concerned with their ability to hold on to power when Mr. Chavez falters than with the well-being of the Venezuelan economy." No investor will ever touch Venezuela again, and with no foreign reserves, it will function about as well in the global economy as North Korea. But no one will be able to pry the Chavez regime's death grip off of the country.

This is not a new phenomenon, neither in Venezuela nor in the world. It is a principle I call the Milton Factor. No, this has nothing to do with Milton Friedman. I named it after John Milton, author of the epic poem "Paradise Lost," in which he attributes to Satan a classic statement of evil. After being cast down onto the Lake of Fire as punishment for his rebellion against God, Satan accepts his grim fate by declaring that it is "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

Every dictator eventually faces this choice, when he has to choose between economic prosperity and political control. Like Chavez, they usually choose control and cause their economies to collapse, plunging millions into poverty and outright starvation. They choose to rule in Hell rather than to be a minor and inconsequential bureaucrat in Heaven.

It is not just dictators who have to make this choice. Our own "moderate" statists often make the same choice, though in less stark terms. With his recent proposals on jobs and taxes, President Obama is making it, too.

To rule in Hell or serve in Heaven is actually a false alternative, because ruling and serving are not the only options. (If this were true, then on Satan's own terms there is a certain nobility in his choice to reject servitude, which is why Milton has often been accused of sympathy for the devil.) Men are not doomed to be either master or servant, but can live as independent equals, which is what they are in a free society. So the modern statist's version of the Milton Factor is even more perverse. It is not a choice between ruling and serving, but a choice between having control over others and leaving them free. They always want to keep the control, even if it means destruction for everyone.

They would rather rule in Hell than leave us the hell alone.

You can see this in President Obama's latest economic proposals. Consider the fraud of his jobs bill. Even as he abjured Congress to pass the American Jobs Act "right away," there was no such bill. He had not written it yet, he had lined up no sponsor to introduce it in the House, and he had not bothered to secure the support of his own congressional allies. The result, a little over two weeks later, is that no Democrat has even introduced Obama's bill in the House, while Democratic leaders in the Senate have pushed it off into the indefinite future. As to its content, it is just a rehash of the president's previous failed "stimulus" bill.

None of this makes sense as a legislative strategy or an economic policy. It only makes sense as crude political maneuvering: propose a bill that is doomed to fail, then blame the opposition. At a time of dire economic emergency, with long-term unemployment and poverty reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression, President Obama would rather pursue a re-election slogan than propose legislation that might actually pass and improve the economy.

Meanwhile, Obama promised to tour the country pushing his jobs bill, but what he is actually pushing is a new tax on the rich. The real focus of his rhetoric and political energy is the so-called Buffett Rule, based on the alleged fact that billionaire investor Warren Buffett's secretary pays a larger share of her income in taxes than Buffett does.

The whole thing is another fraud. If Buffett feels undertaxed, perhaps he could start with his company's unpaid back taxes. Moreover, his situation is far from typical. In reality, millionaires pay about 30% of their income in taxes, compared to 20% (or less) for the middle class. The top one percent of earners pay 40% of all income taxes, while about half of Americans pay no income tax at all. So who isn't paying their "fair share"? And then there is the fact that "Warren Buffett's secretary" is a fiction. A reporter who actually bothered to call the headquarters of Buffett's investment company discovered that he has several "administrative assistants," whose responsibilities are a lot greater than taking dictation and fetching coffee. (The whole image of a "secretary" is a bit of hopelessly old-fashioned "Mad Men" chauvinism. No wonder the women in Obama's administration describe it as a "hostile workplace.") And given that Buffett's assistants work for a man who manages $100 billion in assets, they probably make more money than you do. They may well make enough, especially when combined with their spouses, to rise above the $200,000 per year income level that will incur higher taxes in Obama's new plan to tax "billionaires."

This new tax is, in effect, just a second Alternative Minimum Tax, and the history of these taxes suggests that they are never limited to "the rich." The income tax itself began as a 1% tax on the rich, before spreading to nab the vast majority of the middle class. The original AMT, meant to prevent a small group of the very wealthy from gaming the government's vast network of tax loopholes, has now crept down to affect the middle class, ensnaring thousands of small businesses. This one will do the same and will create the same kind of drain on the economy.

But remember the Milton Factor. This is not about economics. It is about control. Republicans have criticized this proposal as "class warfare," but I don't think that really names the right issue. America does not have economic classes in the old-fashioned European sense. Long ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that individualism, economic freedom, and the doctrine of "self-interest properly understood" was something one heard, in America, "as much from the poor as from the rich." We certainly don't have anything like old-fashioned class warfare when it is the Warren Buffetts and Jeff Immelts who are providing cover to Obama, while middle-class and blue-collar folks flock to Tea Party rallies. If this is class warfare, the plutocrats and the proletarians have gotten their cues mixed up.

What actually differentiates the warring factions here is the issue of control versus independence. If there are classes involved, they are not "rich" versus "poor," but the "government class" versus the "independent class."

Consider, for example, one Silicon Valley entrepreneur's description of how the Buffett Rule would squash returns for venture capitalists who back high-tech start-ups. Then contrast that to this administration's "venture socialism," as embodied in the Solyndra fiasco, where the Obama administration rushed through a half-billion-dollar loan guarantee to a politically correct, politically connected business.

Philip Klein makes a similar comparison between Solyndra and Social Security. "Obama thinks it's OK for government to risk taxpayer money on business ventures that he deems worthy of investment. But he's outraged at the suggestion that younger Americans be allowed to have more control over the allocation of their own tax dollars."

The pattern is consistent. The government class wants everything to be controlled by a central authority, either through direct government action or through a Solyndra- or Government Motors-style "public-private partnership." They are tyrants, in their own way. And like the world's dictators, even when their policies lead to disaster (witness the current state of the economy), they just cannot bring themselves to give up control.

It's the Milton Factor. They would rather rule in Hell than leave us the hell alone.

VISIT "The Intellectual Activist" at www.intellectualactivist.com.

Judging Obama by All Accounts As a Failure and Bad For America

The stats are in on Obama and no surprises. This man will go down as the worst president in United States history.

One animating theme of Barack Obama's campaign and early Presidency was that he would repair government's post-Reagan reputation, expanding its role in American life so voters would turn once again to Democrats as the party of government, as they did in 1964 and the 1930s. So how's that working out?

Not so well, judging by a remarkable Gallup poll this week that asked the public about its views of government and various businesses. The federal government dropped to its lowest approval levels ever. Only 17% were positive, 63% negative, for a net approval rating of minus-46%. Government never ranks well, but for the first time since Gallup began asking in 2003 it fell to last place—below even the oil and gas industry, which netted minus-44% approval.

In fact, as shown in the bottom chart nearby, the public's hostility to government has climbed to all-time highs under President Obama's tenure. A plurality had a very or somewhat positive view as recently as 2003—41% versus 35%. Dissatisfaction climbed over President Bush's second term amid an unpopular war and tapped-out GOP, then fell slightly on public hopes for Mr. Obama as he took office in 2009. This annual survey is conducted in August, so it may have missed the worst of the public's reaction to the autumn 2008 panic on Wall Street and Capitol Hill. Yet today, negative views are higher, and positive views are lower, than ever before.

Gallup is hardly an outlier. In a mid-August Washington Post poll, merely 21% was satisfied with "the way this country's political system is working," down from 38% in 2009. Some 78% were dissatisfied, up from 61% in the 2009 poll and 64% in 2007. The Pew Research Center also reported last month that only 22% of the public is "basically content" with the federal government, by far the lowest share since the survey began in 1997.

All this is a striking rebuke to the President who rode into Washington planning to rehabilitate the country's confidence in government as a means of advancing entitlements and transfer programs. As Mr. Obama mused during the primaries, he envisioned himself as Ronald Reagan in reverse, making the case that government is the solution and not the problem. His 2009 health-care speech to Congress ended with a soaring peroration about "the perils of too little" government. (READ "In Government We Mistrust" @ WSJ)

Imploding America Brought to You by Obama

Alan Caruba at "Tea Party Nation" shows us the evidence that Obama's goal is NOT to right what is wrong with America but to destroy the very meaning of what America stands for. 2012 is our chance to remove this traitor from the highest office in the land.

...There is no mystery as to how the U.S. can recover from the present recession. Government spending must be reduced. Tax rates must be reduced for corporations and the middle class to encourage investment, growth and more employment. Entitlement programs will have to be revised to ensure they can meet their obligations. They represent sixty percent of all government expenditures.

A government that must borrow forty cents of every dollar to pay its debts and whose current debt of $14 trillion equals the entire annual gross domestic product of the nation is endangering the present and future economy for present and future generations of Americans.

At this writing, it looks as if Obama intends to deliberately implode the nation’s ability to meet its obligations and he has used the most raw fear tactics to achieve his goal, falsely claiming that Social Security checks would not be sent, that the military would not be paid.

If ever a President was begging for impeachment the time for such action has arrived. The evidence that he was ineligible to run for office and to hold it is beyond question, if only because he was not a “natural born” American whose both parents were citizens. His father was a citizen of Kenya.

Raise the debt ceiling. Impeach Obama. America must be set free. What he is attempting to bring about is the worst “change” imaginable in the nation’s history. READ "Obama is Determined to Destroy America".

Sarkozy Can Teach Obama A Thing or Two About Facing the Truth About the Need to CUT GOVERNMENT

France's Sarkozy is doing the right things to get control of runaway pensions, spending and unions - even in the face of severe protests by the French and his lowering popularity. But sometimes in life just as fathers and mothers must do the tough disciplining of their children in order that they straighten up so must a country that has run awry of their duty to govern within their mandates and means. Sarkosy deserves kudos and applause and Obama should learn a lesson in leadership - that is honest leadership.

Leadership: France's President Nicolas Sarkozy signed off on pension reform Wednesday, winning big and saving his nation's system. But the obstacles he stared down went beyond anything average politicians will tolerate.

Ever since he was elected in 2007, the conservative French president has vowed to "modernize" France's stagnant, noncompetitive, socialist economy.

So in just three years, Sarkozy extended the work week, changed laws to permit overtime, scrapped retail price controls, simplified business formation, tamed unions and yanked benefits from work-shirkers.

But his biggest victory to date was this week's reform of France's lavish pension system that was fueled by endless deficit spending.

Naturally, the usual mix of communists, union thugs, illegal immigrants, students and criminals sprang into action to protest any cuts in entitlements, rioting night after night. They did this in the hopes that Sarkozy would roll over for them — just as past French presidents, particularly Jacques Chirac, always did.

When car burnings and street blockades didn't work, they shut down transport, including even air traffic. When that failed, they shut down oil installations, bringing on fuel shortages.

And in the worst blow for a politician, Sarkozy's popularity dropped, precipitously, falling from the high 60s to the low 20s, as the public balked at the reforms he promised.

As the invective and Molotov cocktails flew, Sarkozy refused to back down. "I am fully aware that this is a difficult reform," Sarkozy said. "However, I always felt it was my duty, and the government's duty, to carry it out. With this law, our pension plan by equal division is saved."

He's right that it's not easy to tell workers anywhere that their retirement age must be raised by two years to 62 for a partial pension, or 67 for a full one if the system is to stay solvent.

But it's even harder to argue with economic numbers, which unflinchingly warned that the demographic curve in France was falling and, unless adjustments were made, the system would crash.

Sarkozy, who had held top positions in budget, economy and interior ministries, fully grasped that the situation in France was unsustainable and chose reality over the false promises of socialism.

It was leadership at its finest and a wake-up call to the U.S. that courage will be needed from our own political leaders to stop the flood tide of spending. As incoming U.S. congressional leaders confront runaway spending and the urgent tasks of entitlement reform, including Social Security, Sarkozy provides a useful lesson.

His big message: To win, it takes courage. Will Congress have it? (READ AT IBD Sarkozy's Boldness)

The Sorry Record of a Community Organizer and his False Drama

Like the Greek Gods and their amusing crisis and drama Obama is forever making a bad situation into a crisis. We are currently living in a never ending Obama drama. Victor David Hanson, the noted historian and classicist, looks over Obama's record and shows us that it is not a pretty one. Mainly, he is a man without experience and man who has not kept to not one of his campaign promises. He has confused all of us some of the time and some of us all of the time. He is a man who does everything the exact opposite of what would be reasonable. We all question his motives...but can there be any doubt? He holds anti-American values. Read Hanson's -

Obama Drama Is Classic Tragedy: Would-Be God Heading For A Fall
...But now the once-enthralled electorate is starting to tire of the hope-and-change platitudes, and even of the easy blame-gaming of his predecessor, mostly because almost everything Obama once demagogued in weird fashion is coming back to haunt him.
Obama easily damned everything from Guantanamo Bay to Predator drone attacks in Afghanistan to the war in Iraq, only to adopt those policies and more from Bush.

He sermonized about the morals of a corrupt Republican Congress, only to keep quiet about earmarks, lobbyists and the sins of Democratic cronies such as Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Charles Rangel. Deficits were once supposed proof of Bush's out-of-control spending. What does far-greater red ink say about Obama?

If only swaggering George W. Bush could have been smart enough to reach out to Cuba, Iran and Syria. Then Obama did just that, only to make bad things even worse.

And remember the Obama comment about an arrogant Bush turning off our allies? Why, then, does an aloof Obama seem to alienate them even more?

The reality of Barack Obama is that he was an inexperienced community organizer with an undistinguished record as a Senate newcomer. A perfect storm of popular anger at eight years of George W. Bush, a lackluster John McCain campaign, Obama's landmark candidacy as an African-American, a disingenuous campaign promising centrist and bipartisan governance, and the financial meltdown in 2008 got the relatively untried and unknown Obama elected.

Most mortals in Obama's position would have treaded lightly. They would have kept promises, steered a moderate course and listened more than lectured until they won over the public with concrete achievement.

But headstrong tragic figures do not do that. They neither welcome in critics nor would listen to them if they did. They impute their unforeseen temporary success to their own brilliance — and expect it to continue forever. So would-be gods set themselves up for a fall far harder than what happens to the rest of us.

That's about where we are now, with our president playing a character right out of Greek tragedy, who, true to form, is railing about the unfairness of it all. Read the rest here.

Unions Get the Taxpayers Dough But Brown May Get Massachusetts

The Intellectual Activist has a great article on the suicide of the Democratic party - at least for now. They are totally bankrupt (not that the Republicans aren't bankrupt as well) and they don't seem to realize it. With Obama giving cash and favors to those that vote the right way, it is truly obscene what passes for politics today. Fortunately, regular Americans do seem to realize it as the upcoming election Massachusetts is showing us. Scott Brown has come out of nowhere and is ahead in the polls for the Senate seat left open after Ted Kennedy's death. Maybe the people have had enough of Washington corruption and we can kick the bums out.

...That brings us to the latest on the health care bill. The unions had objected that an excise tax on generous health insurance plans would hit some of their workers. So the Obama administration agreed to eliminate the tax—for the unions. According to reports on the compromise, "In a significant victory for unions, the 40 percent excise tax would not apply to policies covering workers in collective bargaining agreements, state and local workers and members of voluntary employee benefit associations through Dec. 31, 2017."

This is the key to the economic system President Obama wants to create: a system in which economic benefits go only to those with the right political connections—which is always the real meaning and end result of a socialist economy, anyway.

In less than a year in power, the Democrats have exposed themselves to the public as the party of massive, open, brazen corruption. In return, I suspect that they are about to be dealt a string of devastating political defeats.

The latest poll on the special election in Massachusetts shows Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown ahead by 50-46. This is significant, not just because of Brown's numbers, but because it is the first poll showing Democrat Martha Coakley below 50%. For the incumbent, or in this case the presumptive leader in the race, to slip below 50% is usually an indication that voters are inclined to take a chance on the challenger.

A few weeks ago, nearly everyone—myself included—described Scott Brown's candidacy as a shot in the dark, with nearly impossible odds of succeeding. He is quickly becoming the favorite. Read at www.TIADaily.com.

The Empty Suit In The White House (Part 1)

"Barack Obama’s increasing disregard for Britain’s views is no way to treat an ally whose troops have fought side by side with America since September 11, says Con Coughlin."

It says much about Britain’s rapidly disappearing ‘special relationship’ with America that when I happened to mention to some of our senior military officers that I was visiting Washington, they begged me to find out what the Obama administration was thinking about Afghanistan. It is not just that the transatlantic lines of communication, so strong just a few years ago, have fallen into disuse. There is now a feeling that, even if we reached the Oval Office, there would be no one willing to take Britain’s call.

For weeks now, President Obama has been deliberating over what the Afghan strategy should be — and how many troops to send. If there is confusion in Washington, then Britain’s strategy is not much clearer. Gordon Brown has staged a recent flurry of activity on the subject, from writing misspelt letters to grieving mothers to demanding that an exit strategy be established for the withdrawal of British forces. Yet among our top brass, the general perception is that the Prime Minister has little interest in the war. Read at Spectator.

The United Nations, G-20 Summit and Obama Wants Others To Help Us Run Our Economy at PJTV

Don't you feel that it's creepy for the United States President to be cavorting with basically half a room full of thug dictators like Chavez, the nuclear bomb nut from Iran and the other nut from Libya? AND APOLOGIZING FOR AMERICA! HOW DARE HE?

Yaron Brook from ARI and Terri Jones from IBD discuss Obama's New World Order, Violent Protests from the Far-Left at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh while Obama makes his apology tour and continues to push environmentalism by making us into a solar/battery nation. Well worth a listen at PJTV.

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=video&video-id=2495

Obama Fiddles While Iran Builds Nuclear Weapons

Obama either lives in the Land of Oz where lollipops and kindly lions live or else he has the heart of a thug and perhaps that's why there are so many pictures of him hugging Chavez and why he defends the return to power of Zelaya in Honduras. Here is the last paragraph of a very observant piece in the WSJ about Obama refusing to take the Iranian nuclear bomb crisis to heart as he dances fields of white lilies.

...The President brought his soaring sermon about "a world without [nuclear] weapons" before the U.N. General Assembly. He called for a new arms control treaty and won Security Council support for a vague resolution on proliferation. On cue yesterday, Iran showed the world what determined rogues think about such treaties. On the evidence of his Presidency so far, Mr. Obama will not let that reality interfere with his disarmament dreams">

Meantime, the U.S. and its allies dream. Mr. Obama used his global forum this week not to rally the world to stop today's nuclear rogues but to offer lovely visions of disarmament in some distant future. In the bitter decades of the Cold War, we learned the hard way that the only countries that abide by disarmament treaties are those that want to be disarmed. It's becoming increasingly, and dangerously, obvious that Mr. Obama wasn't paying attention.

...Standing together before the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh yesterday, Mr. Obama and the French and British leaders put on their game faces, calling for Iran to immediately admit IAEA inspectors. New deadlines were mentioned—talks with Tehran starting October 1, tougher sanctions by December, and so on. "Everything," said France's Nicolas Sarkozy, "must be put on the table now."

At least the French President tried to sound tough, which isn't hard when you stand next to Mr. Obama. The American said Iran will "be held accountable" but watered this down with extended remarks on Iran's "right to peaceful nuclear power," as if the mullahs, sitting on the world's second-largest natural gas and third-largest oil reserves, have any need for peaceful atomic energy. READ AT WSJ

Obama Began as a Community Organizer at Acorn-That's Where All Leftists Get Their Stripes

If you still are sitting on the fence about Obama and his nefarious connection to the leftist corrupt ACORN group then get informed. One man who has done monumental work to ferret out information on this Acorn organization is Glenn Beck on Fox News. He has made the tie from George Soros, to the Tides Foundation to Acorn and on and on...Their one aim is to turn America left and one of their heroes is Chavez - Dictator of Venezuela. John Fund at WSJ has a piece below delving into some of this Acorn shenanigans and how Obama has been denying any involvement and the exact opposite is the truth - he has been involved up to his ears.

Only one of the five television networks that interviewed President Obama for their Sunday shows bothered to ask him about Acorn, the left-wing community organizing group whose federal funding was cut off last week by an overwhelming vote in Congress.

"Frankly, it's not something I've followed closely," Mr. Obama claimed, adding he wasn't even aware the group had been the recipient of significant federal funding. "This is not the biggest issue facing the country. It's not something I'm paying a lot of attention to," he said.
Mr. Obama added that an investigation of Acorn was appropriate after an amateur hidden-camera investigation had found Acorn offices willing to abet prostitution, but he carefully declined to say whether he would approve a federal cutoff of funds to the group.

Mr. Obama took great pains to act as if he barely knew about Acorn. In fact, his association goes back almost 20 years. In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.

Mr. Obama's success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn's Chicago conferences. In 1995, he became Acorn's attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law's loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.


In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first (it was not an alphabetical list). In the U.S. Senate, Mr. Obama became the leading critic of Voter ID laws, whose overturn was a top Acorn priority. In 2007, in a speech to Acorn's leaders prior to their political arm's endorsement of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was effusive: "I've been fighting alongside of Acorn on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work." READ HERE