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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Farmboy who wrote (72051)	5/17/2012 10:27:38 PM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 103300

Ooops..... I did indeed. Message 28153235 I will accept your apology if you are man enough to make one.

To: Farmboy who wrote (72051)	5/17/2012 10:33:46 PM
From: TopCat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

"And .. I see you still have not provided a link to a single post where you defended Bush against personal attacks either. So, your failure to do so indicates .. what?" Why don't you just do a simple search yourself? Use the search feature, put in jlallen as the author, Bush as your keyword and search in 2007. There's literally hundreds of posts where jlallen defended Bush. I don't get what your problem is. I've found you to otherwise be a pretty level headed guy. I think a little research might help you out.

To: Farmboy who wrote (72051)	5/18/2012 12:27:08 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 103300

Looming 'Fiscal Cliff' Of Tax Hikes Threatens U.S. By LAWRENCE KUDLOW House Speaker John Boehner is playing a heroic role right now. In his efforts to prevent the Bush tax cuts from expiring, Boehner is aggressively taking on President Obama's leadership ineptitude on the economy. In essence, Boehner is pushing a Republican policy to wrap up a debt-limitation bill and extend the Bush tax cuts in one fell swoop before the election — and before all the last-minute, crisis-oriented, political machinations that would come in a lame-duck Congress, threatening another credit downgrade and leading to a business-hiring freeze and plunging stock market, all of which happened last year. Tax-cut certainty is so vital right now because the anemic economic recovery may be moving toward deflation. That's the message of a gold price that has collapsed by nearly 20%, falling from around $1,900 an ounce to the mid-$1,500s. With a risk-averse economy at home, and with the Greek and European financial crises abroad, the demand for dollars seems to exceed the dollar supply printed by the Fed. This could be solved by more quantitative easing. But a better approach for a system already oversupplied with unused liquidity would be the extension of tax-rate growth incentives, not more monetary pump-priming. The uncertainty over the Bush tax cuts already has caused a number of business leaders to threaten a hiring freeze and a dampening of investment until they can figure out the after-tax cost of capital and rate of return on investment. Hiring has slowed noticeably in recent months. And a number of Wall Street economists are marking down the anemic recovery even more, suggesting that the 3% growth at the end of last year, which faltered to 2% growth in the first quarter, could be even less in the period ahead. A bunch of CEOs have even formed their own march on Washington. Eighteen of them just wrote to Treasury man Timothy Geithner, begging him to oppose tax-rate hikes on dividends (from 15% to 45%) and capital gains (from 15% to near 30%, taking the "Buffet Rule" into account). "Equity capital is the life blood of investment and job creation for U.S. companies," they wrote. And they argued that the administration's tax-hike plans would do great harm to American competitiveness and capital formation. According to accounting firm Ernst & Young, the top U.S. integrated tax rate on corporate profits and dividends is on course to hit 68.6%, significantly higher than all other OECD countries, as well as Brazil, Russia, India and China. Capital gains would rise to 56.7%. And Speaker Boehner knows this. So he's begun a valiant fight to get supply-side tax reform at the top of the congressional agenda well before the election. Similarly, House budget chair Paul Ryan is suggesting at least a six-month extension of the Bush tax cuts, so as not to disrupt business. (By the way, the Ryan tax-and-spending-reform budget got 41 votes in the Senate, while Obama's budget got none.) In a recent interview, former top Obama economic advisor Larry Summers told me the U.S. recovery is going "ahead of schedule." Really? But former Obama economist Austan Goolsbee gives a more realistic assessment by referring to a subpar 2% forecast that is way too slow to spark faster job creation. Bizarrely, some 25 million people have vanished from the labor force — from unemployment, underemployment or simply dropping out all together. And half of U.S. households are now on some form of federal-transfer-payment assistance. So as we pay so many people not to work, we're sapping the vitality of the economy. Mitt Romney recently gave a fine speech, blasting Obama's profligate spend-and-borrow policies. He described "a prairie fire of debt sweeping across Iowa and the nation," and he tied our newfound debt to the "tepid recovery." But lower spending alone, while important, is not going to solve the economic-growth problem. Yes, moving spending to 20% of GDP from 24% will free up private resources. But lower tax-rate incentives on the extra dollar earned and invested is a more powerful economic-growth tool. Romney should push his 20% tax-rate-reduction plan. That would add liquidity to fight deflation, and would provide new economic-growth incentives. As for John Boehner's goal of an early extension of the Bush tax cuts, it's going to be an uphill climb. Democrats want to raise taxes, not cut them. But at least the GOP will have a coherent growth-and-jobs message. They can tell the public how important it is to avoid falling off the massive tax cliff that looms ahead. Deflationary fears can ease. And they can make it plain to voters that the GOP has a growth message in these perilous economic times, while the Obama Democrats do not.

To: Farmboy who wrote (72051)	5/18/2012 12:28:01 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

Obama's Wages An Unending War On American Capitalism The Obama Record: The president has made Mitt Romney's Bain Capital a target of his re-election campaign. That's one way to divert attention from poor performance. It's also a way to undermine capitalism. At a New York fundraiser Monday night, Obama called the free market "the greatest wealth generator ever devised by man." Those are fine words for a campaign stop among the moneyed set. But those words aren't backed by the actions of a president who only months ago claimed the free market "has never worked." The same day Obama flopped back to his "capitalism is good" position, his team set out to taint Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney co-founded and ran as CEO. In a campaign video, Romney is described as a "vampire" and "job destroyer." The Obama camp charges him with taking profits "at great cost to American workers and their communities." That's the work of the real Obama, who's just another of those malcontents who has become a success, thanks to capitalism yet rants regularly about its evils. During Obama's 40 months in the White House, he has undermined capitalism and impugned business as a matter of routine. The former community organizer had just entered office when, in the summer of 2009, the federal government gave General Motors $49.5 billion in aid, including a $6.7 billion loan, to finance its bankruptcy. The result: Washington, not private shareholders, took roughly 61% ownership of GM. The bailout wasn't to save capitalism; it was a payback to the United Auto Workers union that gave Obama and his party more than $4 million. The UAW's pension fund was given 17.5% of the new GM, worth about $7 billion. GM wasn't Obama's only trophy. Chrysler was bailed out in 2009 as well, receiving $30 billion from Washington. Once again, the UAW was rewarded, this time with a 55% share of the company. In both bailouts, those with nonunion financial interests in the companies, from bondholders to creditors, received third-class treatment. While it's comforting to think the bailouts ended with GM and Chrysler, Obama has ominously said, "What's happening in Detroit can happen in other industries." It's reasonable to think he was signaling he might bail out/take over other industries. Obama has continued his capitalism-wrecking, union-favoring campaign by naming members to the National Labor Relations Board who tried to block Boeing from opening a plant in South Carolina to build the company's 787 Dreamliner. The NLRB accused Boeing of locating in a right-to-work state as a reprisal against union workers who organized strikes at the company's Washington plant — one of which delayed production of the long-awaited 787 and cost the company $1.8 billion. The NLRB has since relented, but only when Boeing agreed to build its 737 Max, due for 2017 deliveries, in Washington. In his first State of the Union address, Obama already was attacking free enterprise. His to-do list from that 2009 speech was so appalling that columnist Lawrence Kudlow claimed the president had declared "war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private-equity and venture-capital funds." Other decisions that define Obama's contempt for capitalism and business include: • Trying to put private insurers out of business and taking over one-seventh of the economy through ObamaCare. • Seizing, in effect, the bank industry and nationalizing the student loan program. • Blocking the Keystone XL pipeline. • Delaying approval of the South Korea, Colombia and Panama trade deals. • The sharp spike in costly regulations. • His hope of hiking the tax burdens on oil companies by stripping them of the same tax breaks available to all industries. Remember, this is the president who said in "Dreams From My Father" that he felt like "a spy behind enemy lines" when he worked briefly as a researcher for a "consulting house to a multinational corporation." He's the same guy who promised that the price of electricity, the lifeblood of business and capitalism, would skyrocket if the industry used fuel he didn't approve of. Candidate Obama vowed to transform America. The record shows he tried. Now he needs to be thrown out of office before he does more damage

To: Farmboy who wrote (72051)	5/18/2012 12:32:41 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

Tim Stanley Dr Tim Stanley is a historian of the United States. His biography of Pat Buchanan is out now. His personal website is www.timothystanley.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @timothy_stanley. [iframe class=bylineSocialButtonTwitter src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/follow_button.html?show_screen_name=false&show_count=true&screen_name=timothy_stanley" frameBorder=0 allowTransparency scrolling=no][/iframe] Obama's literary agent says he was 'born in Kenya'. How did the mainstream media miss this? By Tim Stanley US politicsLast updated: May 18th, 2012 1506 Comments Comment on this article Conservatives claim that Obama manipulated his Kenyan roots to gain attention Whatever you think of Breitbart.com’s punishing vetting process, it has exposed just how little work the mainstream media did in investigating candidate Obama back in 2008. Not all of Team Breitbart’s revelations have been election-deciders, but they have often been stuff that a simple Google would have uncovered. If they revealed tomorrow that he’d had his own cross-dressing-themed sitcom on primetime TV in the 1980s, I wouldn’t be surprised. The latest find is a fascinating inversion of the birther conspiracy. Breitbart.com has discovered that in 1991 Barack Obama’s literary agent (who also represented New Kids on the Block) published a booklet that included a biography of the future President. The audience was “business colleagues” in the publishing industry and it was designed to promote Obama’s anticipated first book (later abandoned) called Journeys in Black and White. Here’s how it describes the author’s origins. Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. The key phrase here is “was born in Kenya" – and this bio line was apparently being used as late as 2007. Today, the President has satisfied all right-minded folk that he was in fact born in Hawaii. Breitbart.com itself has always rejected the absurd cult of birtherism. In fact, this story is really the opposite of birtherism – Breitbart infers that in the past Obama encouraged people to think that he was born abroad in order to establish an identity as an authentic, exotic voice in the debate on racial politics. Obama’s old literary agent has issued a terse statement to the effect that the wording was all her fault and she never consulted her client. If that’s true, she’s a bad agent. A different agent, quoted by Breitbart.com, disagrees. He told the website “that while ‘almost nobody’ wrote his or her own biography, the non-athletes in the booklet, whom ‘the agents deal[t] with on a daily basis,’ were ‘probably’ approached to approve the text as presented.” If we accept that Obama didn’t provide the biography, it would seem highly unlikely that he didn’t get a chance to vet it. Accepting that he didn’t do that either, it’s incredibly strange that the literary agent approached by Breitbart.com does not remember Obama calling the agency to register a complaint and make a correction. My mother spent a lot of her childhood in Grenada. If my literary agent told people I was born in the Caribbean, I’d at least pick up the phone to set the record straight. Look beyond the sordid details and the big story here is that this nugget wasn’t part of the wider discussion had back in 2008 about Obama's background and credentials. And why not? The documents were easy to find – the one that showed that “born in Kenya” was still being used in 2007 was on the Internet. As for Obama, the vetting continues and Republicans have yet more to play with – with the focus, sadly, once more on race. For those who think that the Tea Party media is being obsessive and nasty, think of this as an exercise in levelling the playing field. If The Washington Post is going to write about how Mitt Romney once cut the hair of a guy it presumes was gay (because, well, his hair needed cutting), then Breitbart.com probably thinks it has every just cause to shout about every occasion that Obama ate a dog or told someone he was half-Phoenecian to get their vote. Tit for tat, although the Rightwing's tat is a little better researched.