Could Obama Finally Have Overplayed His Hand

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Photo Credit: Jason ReedIs it possible that Obama’s arrogance, personal pettiness, sanctimoniousness and egotism (for starters) could finally be his unraveling? Even the liberal media are starting to notice, but will it last?

Up to this point, they’ve dutifully played along with his Alinskyite tactics — converting the office of the presidency into a headquarters for community organizing at a federal level and a position to organize and fund a perpetual campaign against his political opponents instead of governing.

The liberal media share Obama’s leftist policy goals and the ends-justify-the-means mentality that accompanies them and have thus far been eager not only to ignore Obama’s thuggishness and deceit but also to proactively help him in accomplishing his goals and concealing his chicanery.

But perhaps his willingness to hurt the country to make political points, which until recently they’d overlooked, has finally gotten their attention — with his brazen lies about the sequester cuts and his release of dangerous criminal illegals onto the streets. I’ll not be Pollyannaish in hoping for a sustained liberal-media blowback toward Obama, but these matters have at least caught their attention and inched ever so slightly forward from the back burner. That’s something to build on.

Cocky from his re-election and from a string of triumphs in his negotiations with Republicans, Obama calculated he could continue to be as dictatorial and unreasonable as he had been and even ratchet it up a notch and get away with it. He knew he was lying when he said Republicans were currently causing the sequestration because they wouldn’t agree to more tax increases. He was the one primarily responsible for the impasse because he had already gotten his tax increases and was still refusing to play ball on the spending and entitlements side — the only side that can make a difference in solving our debt crisis — as he always has.

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Time For Colleges To Have Skin In The Game-They Need To Guarantee Student Loans

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Photo Credit: Irish Central America’s student loan debt is in excess of 1 trillion dollars; it is believed this will be our next huge financial crisis as these loans go into default.

One of the reasons people are having a difficult time repaying their student debt, is that they can’t find jobs as newly minted college graduates. See the 10 worst college degrees by Forbes.

Granted the economy is in the doldrums and good jobs are hard to find. But a college education was sold to these students by the education industry as their ticket to a good paying job.

Let’s use some outcome based education for a change. If you are going to let a student burden him/herself with a huge debt in order to graduate from your school, you should have some skin in the game. Colleges should have to guarantee these loans, instead of laying that debt off onto taxpayers if the student defaults. Perhaps there would be a change in admissions, stricter standards and heavier counseling.

Right now colleges and universities have the best of all worlds. Many are in receipt of government funding, many have endowments and almost all are the recipients of an unending stream of government guaranteed tuition. There is no incentive for them to see if the student loans ever get paid back.

It’s a one way street in the higher education system and it’s time to make some changes. . These easy government backed student loans are correlated to rising costs. Colleges have every incentive to raise costs knowing the loans will be adjusted upward to reflect those costs.

Colleges should have job placement programs for the students they graduate. There needs to be some responsibility from the higher education system and some accountability.

Should taxpayers be put on the hook for a college graduate with a liberal arts degree who can’t find a job? Or if the jobs available with those degrees are low paying and will never be able to justify the student loan amount?

Additionally, let’s face it, many of those attending college aren’t college material and should be learning a trade or craft. Skilled craftsmen make on average far more than many college graduates. Why aren’t colleges and universities offering these types of educations?

The country has a problem supplying the manpower needs of our high tech sector, so much of a problem, that special laws are being created to allow foreign workers into our country that have the math and engineering skills necessary to work in this environment.

We should be proactively pushing students to get educations in the sectors the country desperately has a shortage in, even offering discount tuition, etc. Perhaps even using a hybrid of the voucher system that the Friedman Foundation is promoting for public school choice and introduce some competition.

If a student wants a degree in ethnic/gender studies, music appreciation, law and a whole host of liberal arts that don’t necessarily translate into lucrative careers, then there should be an agreement between the college and the student over how the tuition gets paid. Let colleges aid the student in finding scholarship help, etc.

We saw the problem that unfulfilled promises academic institutions made to students when our cities were clogged with Occupy Wall Street. Many of these young people expressed anger at their inability to find a job, a good paying job with the liberal arts degrees they possessed. They felt they were lied to by their education institutions…in a way they were.

There is also growing unrest among students who are seeing their ever increasing college tuitions rise, while chancellors and educators don’t take a hit and in fact get raises.

Here is an excerpt from an excellent expose’ by JosephPalermo in the California State University system:

“Last year, CSU executives were paid between $240,000 and $400,000 in salary alone. On top of that, each executive is allotted $12,000 per year as an auto allowance. Campus Presidents and the Chancellor each receive either state-owned homes or housing allowances of $50,000 or $60,000 per year. Other perks available to executives include special retirement packages such as lifetime employment as a tenured professor.”

Looking at the above salaries you can see these educators are insulated from the realities that many graduates face after they leave their institutes of higher education. Instead of raises, many of them should be fired. Let’s get some accountability into education

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The Rich Get Richer: Obama-Style Crony Capitalism

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Photo Credit: Brendan SmialowskiFor most Americans, Friday was not a very good day. Sequestration kicked in amid a drumbeat of reports about the pocketbook hits that we would take and the illegal immigrants released because of the cuts, the Commerce Department announced that personal income took its biggest hit in 20 years, and the Performance of Manufacturing Index reported a drop. Oh, and earlier in the week, fourth-quarter GDP growth was revised to a paltry 0.1 percent. Unemployment has remained up, the ranks of the poor have swelled, existing small businesses are staggering, and few new ones are being created.

But, for the privileged few at the high-end of President Obama’s coalition, things look far less bleak. The stock market yawned at sequestration and then rose. The S&P is near a five-year high and is up by 10 percent over the past 12 months.

How concerned is Obama by the bad news and the sequester cuts that on Friday he termed “dumb,” “unnecessary,” “arbitrary,” and “inexcusable”? Not very, one would think, since his own 2012 budget forecast projected the very cuts in discretionary spending that the president now abjures, and described them in glowing terms. As Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs recently pointed out. “the level of spending for fiscal year 2013 under the sequestration will be nearly the same as Mr. Obama called for in the draft budget presented in mid-2012.” Indeed, the White House budget forecast boasted that it would “bring domestic discretionary spending to its lowest level as a share of the economy since the Eisenhower administration.”

For some reason, none of this feels like government by or for the people, and it isn’t. Rather, it seems as though “crony capitalism” is the watchword for this administration. Strip away Obama’s showmanship and scolding, and the president has done just fine in protecting the interests of the top 1 percent, especially among those who were his contributors and the right kind of 1 percenters.

Take green energy, the holy grail of the high end of the president’s base. Solyndra, the now-bankrupt manufacturer of solar panels, received more than half a billion dollars in government-guaranteed loans. One of the company’s key backers was billionaire George Kaiser, a 2008 Obama fundraiser—small world.

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No, Obama Has Not Offered A Plan On Entitlements

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Photo Credit: Mark WilsonDuring a Friday news conference, a reporter asked President Obama whether he had any responsibility for the onset of the automatic spending cuts that he has warned will be devastating for the nation. “The problem that we have is a long-term problem in terms of our health care costs and programs like Medicare,” Obama said in his response. “And what I’ve said very specifically, very detailed is that I’m prepared to take on the problem where it exists — on entitlements — and do some things that my own party really doesn’t like — if it’s part of a broader package of sensible deficit reduction.”

Obama is correct that entitlements in general and health care programs in particular are the biggest source of the nation’s long-term fiscal problems. But it’s a complete falsehood that he’s offered detailed and specific plans to do something about it.

At various times during his presidency, Obama has vowed to tackle the nation’s entitlement programs. It’s true that his health care law did cut projected Medicare spending by about $700 billion over a decade. But those projected savings, along with tax increases, were used to offset $1.7 trillion in new health care spending under Obamacare rather than go toward debt reduction. In other words, they don’t fix any of the program’s structural fiscal problems.

Since Republicans took over Congress in 2011, Obama has consistently said he’d be willing to address entitlements if Republicans agreed to raise taxes — but he’s either spoken vaguely about this willingness or offered proposals that represent minor tweaks to the programs rather than fundamental changes that would put them on a sustainable financial trajectory. For instance, during the “fiscal cliff” debate, Obama floated the idea of changing the measure of inflation used to calculate Social Security benefits — a move that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would save $127 billion over a decade.

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A President Who Wants Power but No Responsibility

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Over the past two weeks, conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has been advancing a theory about why President Obama’s approval ratings remain above average, despite the fact that most Americans say they are dissatisfied with the direction the country is taking.

Limbaugh has hypothesized that many Americans, perhaps the “low-information voters,” are not connecting Obama’s policies to what is actually happening in the country, because the president never actually governs. Obama’s is a non-governing presidency, one that is built on an eternal campaign, a never-ending community organization effort.

Aided by a relatively weak Republican Party, Obama travels around the country, appearing to be fighting against the horrific consequences of his own policies. Consequently, the president has remained fairly popular without having to own any of his destructive strategies and programs. It’s all about perception.

The situation with the sequester is a perfect example. The White House came up with the idea of sequestration as a punishment/enforcer during the debt ceiling debate of 2011. The sequestration–an across-the-board spending cut, or a slowing in the growth of spending–was the compulsory “trigger” designed to appear to cut spending. The White House believed it would never happen because Republicans allegedly would do anything to avoid cuts to defense spending in particular.

Fast forward to the present day, however, where we have Barack Obama traveling around the country denying he came up with the sequester idea as he warns Americans of the apocalypse that is upon them because of the compulsory cuts the Republicans want them to endure.

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Has The Bell Begun To Toll For China?

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Photo Credit: Human Events“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered,” China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, told a closed meeting of party elite in Guangdong province.

“Finally all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone,” said Xi, according to notes obtained by The New York Times.

“Everyone is talking about reform, but in fact everyone has a fear of reform,” said Chinese historian Ma Jong. “The question is: Can society be kept under control while you go forward? That is the test.” That is indeed the test.

What is it that gives a party its legitimacy, its right to rule? What holds a nation together when its cradle faith, its founding ideology, has been abandoned by both elites and the people? That is China’s coming crisis.

With victory in the civil war with the Nationalists in 1949, Mao claimed to have liberated China from both Japanese imperialists and Western colonialists, and restored her dignity. “China has stood up!” he said. His party’s claim to absolute power was rooted in what it had done, and also what it must do. Only a party with total power could lead a world revolution. Only an all-powerful party could abolish inequality in a way that made the French Revolution look like a rebellion at Berkeley.

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Mark Steyn: Sequestageddon

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Photo Credit: National Review A few weeks ago, Ann Coulter announced that she was bored of American politics and was spending her days watching Turner Classic Movies. I confess that, when it comes to Beltway melodrama, I too am fighting vainly the old ennui, and minded to plump up the pillows and settle back with a bucket of bonbons and a beribboned Shih-tzu for an all-night Norma Shearer marathon. At least, unlike Washington, there’s a chance you may catch something you haven’t already seen a hundred times before. For example, I’ve a yen to see Roberta (RKO, 1935), in which Irene Dunne sings:

Yesterdays
Yesterdays
Days I knew as happy sweet sequester’d days . . .

I believe that was the last known use of this blameless and mellifluous word until it was conscripted by the political class for this month’s dreary Mayan Apocalypse of the Month thrill ride. Say what you like about those Mayan guys, but they only schedule an apocalypse once every 5,126 years. Only Washington would try to pull it off every six weeks. If I understand correctly, by the time you read this, the planes will be dropping from the skies; the drip-feeds in every emergency room will be dry; every creature on the endangered species list will have broken free from our pristine federally manned national parks to be left for roadkill in the potholed asphalt of America’s crumbling interstates; you’ll turn on your bathroom faucet only to find the town reservoir choked with fecal coliform; the Ebola virus will be rampant across Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, and other swing states, where it will nevertheless enjoy higher approval ratings than Marco Rubio and every other prospective GOP nominee. The sequester supposedly cuts $44 billion from the federal budget — or from the rate of growth of the federal budget. Whatever. $44 billion is about what the United States government borrows every nine days, so it’s not a lot. But it’s apparently responsible for everything that matters in American life.

That being so, maybe it would be easier to reinstate this critical $44 billion and cut the other $3.8 trillion, which is apparently responsible for nothing other than Harry Reid’s beloved federally funded cowboy-poetry festival and the cost of the dress uniforms for the military detachment accompanying the first lady at her Oscars appearance. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, warned of “over 170 million jobs that could be lost” thanks to the sequester. There are only 135 million jobs in America, but the sequester gods are so powerful they can eliminate every job in Canada, Britain, and Germany too. Why, because of this weekend’s looming Mayan Apocalypse, President Obama declined to deploy a carrier to the Persian Gulf, concerned that it might be left on the other side of the planet completely sequestered with no fuel to limp back home and insufficient stores in the mess-hall larder to cook up federally compliant slop. So, when the mullahs go nuclear and drop the big one on Tel Aviv, it will be the fault of the Republicans for failing to agree to a prudent, balanced, fiscally responsible plan — like the Senate’s latest deficit-reduction proposal, which, as is traditional, increases the deficit (by $7 billion).

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Obama Is Setting Us Up

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In the days since the November elections, the pace of Obama’s destruction of America has increased significantly. Now that the Marxists have secured the executive branch for another four years – thanks to massive voter fraud, a cowardly Republican Party, and a couple of million self-righteous fools who refused to vote, apparently preferring a Muslim Marxist over a moderately conservative Mormon – Obama and his lawless unindicted co-conspirators have thrown caution to the wind.

Every day, new outrages are proposed, all aimed at the destruction of the Middle Class and America as a free, capitalist, constitutional republic. However, in our efforts to recognize and combat the internal attacks – the tax increases, the land grabs, the granting of citizenship to illegal invaders, the undermining of private property rights, etc. ad nauseam – we are failing to notice the external threats that Obama’s policies are abetting. The re-militarization of Russia and their much more aggressive and threatening attitude is of great concern; but there are other, much less publicized ones we need to be aware of.

China has made trillions of dollars off us, thanks to massive interest payments on the uncontrolled borrowing by the Obama administration as well as a huge and ever-increasing trade deficit, where they export to us way, way more than we export to them. During the Obama “presidency,” China surpassed America as the world’s leading economic power. They have used this money to radically increase the size and sophistication of their military to the point where it is very questionable whether we could do anything should they move to start taking over other Asian countries, like the Philippines, Japan, or South Korea.

This is not an irrational fear, either. The dispute with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands appears to be a test by China to see who will do what as they aggressively move to take territory claimed by Japan. Chinese admirals, who never speak without government direction, have threatened World War III to “protect” Iran. But ultimately, it is the good ol’ USA that is their target. Does anyone remember when Russia was selling off military equipment after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and China bought every last one of their attack subs that were specifically designed to target the US Navy? Since at least the 1990s, the Democrats have aided and abetted China in the upgrading of their military capabilities – remember the technology that Clinton sold them that allowed them to get their missiles to actually hit what they aimed at? Obama has been carrying on this tradition, allowing formerly restricted advanced technology to be sold to the Chinese military. And just a reminder: the Panama Canal, vital to our national security, is, thanks to the Democrats, run by a company – Hutchison-Whampoa – with ties to the Chinese Military, as is a port facility 50 miles off the East Coast in the Bahamas that has an 11,000 foot-long runway, capable of handling the largest of military aircraft.

Add to this the fact that the North Koreans, who have nuclear weapons, are testing missiles capable of hitting American cities. They appear to believe that the US and South Korea are gearing up to attack and invade them.

Read more from this article HERE.

Republicans and Immigration

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Photo Credit: National Review Republicans are terribly confused over illegal immigration. They still can’t quite figure out its role in the last election.

Did the issue lose them the Latino vote? Maybe — but why did they also forfeit the Asian vote, and by nearly the same margin? Why did the caricature of Republicans as old white nativists resonate with Asians as well? If support for closing the border and refusing amnesty lost Republicans the election, why do a majority of Americans continue to poll in opposition to any sort of collective amnesty?

And why, in some polls, did Latinos seem more concerned about continuing big-government readiness to help the poor and tax the wealthy than about immigration reform? Alan Simpson and Ronald Reagan, who helped to give us the 1986 amnesty, are not heroes to the Latino community. Is there statistical support for the often-repeated axiom that Latinos, as a group, are more likely than members of the so-called majority culture to embrace traditional family values — lower divorce rates, lower rates of illegitimacy, lower crime rates, higher graduation rates?

Of course, kinder, gentler talk — unlike the buffoonery that was heard in some of last year’s sloppy Republican primary debates — would have helped. Yet in 2008 circumspection and prudence did not aid all that much the moderate John McCain, who in the past had championed a sort of amnesty lite. And all the silly and often gratuitous braggadocio about upping the height of the border wall or electrifying it was more than trumped by the crass pandering of Barack Obama, who called on Latinos to “punish our enemies”; joined with a foreign nation, Mexico, to sue one of his own states, Arizona; and claimed his opponents wanted to arrest children on their way to ice-cream parlors. Note there is no national commentary deploring the fact that the president of the United States engaged in just the sort of crass ethnic showmanship that characterized the Republican debates. Apparently, because his pandering worked and the Republicans’ did not, under the laws of politics only the latter was pandering.

Confused by questions like these, Republicans don’t quite know what to do about the 11 to 15 million illegal aliens in our midst, with more to come in future years. And in lieu of wisdom, principles, and consistency, Republican are mostly experimenting, trying to square the circle and win the Latino vote with clichés about conservative values and a vaguely familiar message of amnesty for those already here predicated on no additional illegal immigration. But the problem can be only reduced, not solved, by kinder, gentler language and outreach to Latino groups, for in the end it is an existential issue well beyond trimming.

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Se·ques·ter: To Isolate, Or Hide Away

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Photo Credit: Irish Central Sequester. Since we are getting bombarded with the word, I decided to look it up to see what it means in the dictionary.

In its noun form, it is a general cut to government spending

In the verb, it means to isolate or hide away. In this case I think it’s use is the verb and the truth is hidden away.

In order to get the Republicans to agree to avert the fiscal cliff/debt ceiling crisis two years ago, the President said he would be glad to cut expenditures…in two years. So the President came up with a deal and it was called sequestration. Well the two years is up and the cuts will occur in two days.

Like all of the other fiscal cliffs and debt ceiling crises we have been exposed to for the past 4 years, nothing gets done until the last minute. There is no leadership, no one at the helm to bring all of the parties together and hammer out a deal.

Obama’s sequestration included cuts to the military that he figured would be revolting to Republicans and they would eventually agree to compromise with him. But the Republicans seem willing to go along with these cuts, the wars are winding down and there is less pressure on the military.

This reaction from the Republicans was unexpected to Obama. In his sequestration he had also included cuts to many social programs his base relies on…cuts he never thought he would have to make.

President Obama has taken to the road to try to drum up outrage against Republicans to pressure them to cave in on the sequestration cuts.

President Obama treats the sequester like it is a red headed step child, as if he was the innocent bystander and had nothing to do with it…But award winning journalist Bob Woodward, blew the whistle and firmly placed paternity rights to sequestration in Obamas corner.

But in this case “sequester” hides the truth. The truth is that these so called “cuts” are only a pinprick to the growth of government spending.

Both sides are equally guilty of protecting their pet projects and sacred cows which automatically grow fatter each year under baseline budgeting.

Senator Tom Coburn who knows better than most what the game is about, said the other day: “There’s easy ways to cut this money in ways the American people will never feel. What you hear is an outrage because nobody wants to cut spending.”

Senator Coburn has documented billions in waste and fraud that could be cut from the budget…read his excellent, 2012 Wastebook. But none of this is being addressed in the “sequester.”

The CATO Institute did an exhaustive study on how we are spending 100 billion on corporate welfare. But none of this is being touched with the “sequester” either. Here is their excellent report: Corporate Welfare in the Federal Budget.

The people and their children who will have to shoulder the burden of this out out of control spending, are tired of having the truth about the debt and deficit “sequestered” away by their leaders.

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