As German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy do their best to put on a public face of cooperation in resolving Europe’s escalating sovereign debt crisis, behind the scenes both leaders are seething.

They are angry with each other, angry with each other’s policy choices, angry with each other’s friends and allies.

It’s well-known that German taxpayers are fed up with footing the bill for Greeks who take longer vacations than they do and retire on full government pensions many years earlier than they can. Less known is that the German government is actively considering allowing Greece – and possibly Portugal and even Italy and Ireland – to drop out of the Euro-zone.

“If the Euro fails, it will be Merkel’s fault,” a senior advisor to French president Sarkozy told me recently. “Germany has been resisting efforts to prop up the Euro. If the Euro collapses, it will be as much Germany’s fault as it will be that of the over-indebted Euro-zone members.”

Europeans are used to duplicity. That’s why they weren’t surprised to hear President Obama sharing derogatory personal remarks about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to French president Sarkozy when both leaders apparently thought the microphones were off.

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Read More at frontpagemag.com By Kenneth R. Timmerman, frontpagemag.com

On Tuesday, Barack Obama gave a speech (stop the presses!) of dubious veracity in the small town of Osawatomie, Kansas, in a desperate attempt to wrap himself in the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt. But one wonders whether anyone in the Obama campaign read Roosevelt’s original speech before choosing it as a template for the two parties to follow, since it contradicts Obama’s most fundamental beliefs and defining policies on class warfare, cradle-to-grave welfare, wealth redistribution, crony capitalism, equality of opportunity, and endorsing politically violent movements like Occupy Wall Street. And the nation’s youngest president has yet more to teach his immature successor.

Obama wished to conjure up memories of a groundbreaking speech Teddy delivered in the city in 1910 entitled, “The New Nationalism.” Selecting Roosevelt as the model Republican seems odd, since the founder of the (real) Progressive movement stood closer to liberal hero Woodrow Wilson than Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan. But it is clear which part of the speech appealed to Obama. Teddy said he favored “far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country,” that “each nation must do its own part in international police work,” and that “the executive power as the steward of the public welfare.” The government, he said, may “take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.” Yet Obama overlooked significant lessons TR would want him to learn.

No Violence

Obama has endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose members have committed numerous felonies and misdemeanors against one another and left their hosts with a hefty bill and a huge mess to clean up, when they leave at all. Would the advocate of “The New Nationalism” hail a movement whose members sang, “F— the USA”? Would the hero of San Juan Hill stand with the rabble of Zuccotti Park?

In the speech Obama cited, TR warned against political “excess,” saying, “I do not want to see our people, for lack of proper leadership, compelled to follow men whose intentions are excellent, but whose eyes are a little too wild to make it really safe to trust them.”

Like whom? Teddy told the Kansas crowd, “in the interest of the working man himself, we need to set our faces like flint against mob-violence just as against corporate greed; against violence and injustice and lawlessness by wage-workers just as much as against lawless cunning and greed and selfish arrogance of employers.”

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 Read More at Floyd Reports By Ben Johnson, Floyd Reports

Election ’12: One thing is certainly true about President Obama — no matter how many times people point out the falsehoods in his speeches, he just keeps making them. Case in point: his latest “economic fairness” address.

In that speech Tuesday, Obama once again tried to build a case for his liberal, big-spending, tax-hiking, regulatory agenda. But as with so many of his past appeals, Obama’s argument rests on a pile of untruths. Among the most glaring:

• Tax cuts and deregulation have “never worked” to grow the economy. There’s so much evidence to disprove this claim, it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s begin with the fact that countries with greater economic freedom — lower taxes, less government, sound money, free trade — consistently produce greater overall prosperity.

Here at home, President Reagan’s program of lower taxes and deregulation led to an historic two-decade economic boom. Plus, states with lower taxes and less regulation do better than those that follow Obama’s prescription.

Obama also claimed the economic booms in the ’50s and ’60s somehow support his argument. This is utter nonsense. Taxes at the time averaged just 17% of the economy. And there was no Medicare, no Medicaid, no Departments of Transportation, Energy or Education, and no EPA. Had Obama been around then, he would have decried it all as un-American.

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 Read More at investors.com

For a conservative, observing the average liberal mind is an exercise in disorientation. In the photo lab of reason, they appear to have gotten only the negatives. Although we believe in civility and dialogue, speaking with a doctrinaire left-winger often proves meaningless unless you intend to write dialogue for Bizarro World. Now, another such moment is upon us. Judging from the liberal media, the newest talking points have apparently gone forward in the bid to bludgeon Middle America into accepting amnesty: The fact that the Obama administration has arrested fewer illegal immigrants than anytime in the last 40 years proves his policies are working, so we must now grant amnesty to all illegal immigrants living in the United States.
While the mainstream media clearly have an agenda, it is rarely so well illustrated as in a Washington Post story from December 5. “The Border Patrol apprehended 327,577 illegal crossers along the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2011, which ended Sept. 30,” it noted, “numbers not seen since Richard Nixon was president.”

For most Americans, fewer apprehensions would show a deteriorating state of enforcement, rather than rousing success. But not to the experts of the Beltway media. The journalists insist this proves the border is more secure, because fewer illegals are attempting to cross.

The story then abruptly pivots: “Such a steep drop in illegal crossings gives supporters of immigration reform ammunition to argue that now is a good time to tackle the issue.”

Thus is laid bare the liberal agenda: pretend the border is secure, then press for amnesty in an election year.

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Read More at Floyd Reports Floyd Reports

The Republican Establishment long ago settled on Mitt Romney as its preferred representative. Endless commentary and polling was expended trying to create the broad impression that he was the inevitable choice anyway, so conservatives should just get on board. The effort was wasted. The early stages of the primary process established only one thing with absolute certainty: Tea Party conservatives, the most serious and motivated faction in the process, will not support Romney.

What was described as “strong and steady” polling early on has revealed itself for what it really was all along: a flat-lining campaign. No amount of money and organization was able to will Romney past that twenty-five percent barrier. The “flavor of the week” challengers, as some have tried to dismiss them, are not going away. That is to say, the names may change, but the impetus to seek alternatives will not.

Recognizing this, even some Establishment types are beginning to look for a Plan B. Some believe they have found it in Newt Gingrich. They have a point: He is a clever enough politician to have understood better than Romney which way the wind was blowing, and he has found his way into, if not the hearts, then at least the frightened calculation, of some conservatives. The problem with Gingrich, however, is that his career reveals him to be a man for whom “which way the wind is blowing” is more than just a tactical consideration: it is his core. He does not want to save his country as much as he wants to be world-famous for doing so. Newt is for Newt. Part of his method is to find a trend, and then leap onto it with such gusto that he almost appears to be the leader of the movement. One recent example of this was his big Social Security proposal, delivered with the typical Gingrich white paper brio–and which, at its essence, was merely a reiteration of the plan, modelled on the Chilean system, which Herman Cain had been pitching for months.

On the subject of Gingrich the political animal, George Will makes the point succinctly in his Dec. 4 column:

“[He] embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything.”

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 Read More at Canada Free Press By Daren Jonescu, Canada Free Press