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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sandintoes who wrote (69952)	4/7/2014 6:07:22 PM
From: FJB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

False. Many times worse than Carter.

To: sandintoes who wrote (69952)	4/12/2014 12:52:57 PM
From: greatplains_guy	1 Recommendation Recommended By sandintoes Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

While the order of worstness is debatable everyone can agree that Carter and Obama are the two worst people ever to occupy the Whitehouse.

To: sandintoes who wrote (69952)	4/12/2014 12:53:16 PM
From: greatplains_guy	Respond to of 71588

Will Left Come to Grips With Obama's Failures? A Glimpse into the Political Future Jonathan Chait’s advance apologia for the Democrats’ defeat in November Fred Siegel 11 April 2014 Jonathan Chait has written a thoughtful, if debatable, 6,000-word article on race in the Obama years that has stirred a good deal of discussion. It can be read as an advance apologia for the Democrats’ defeat in the 2014 elections. Chait’s thesis, as he sums it up in an online surrebuttal, is that “American politics in the age of Obama has become balkanized not along racial lines, but by how people think about race.” In other words, Chait argues, “the Obama era has produced a cleavage along ideological rather than racial lines,” so that neither black conservatives who support the Tea Party nor the far more numerous white liberals who nod in agreement with Al Sharpton’s preachings on MSNBC are as anomalous as partisans assert. “Liberals,” Chait writes, “dwell in a world of paranoia of a white racism that has seeped out of American history in the Obama years and lurks everywhere, mostly undetectable.” Similarly, he goes on, “Conservatives dwell in a paranoia of their own, in which racism is used as a cudgel to delegitimize their core beliefs. And the horrible thing is that both of these forms of paranoia are right.” One can commend Chait for his evenhandedness—which has stirred a hornet’s nest of opposition from liberals—without accepting the equivalence he draws between these two views. But the real problem with his essay comes when he steps out of the realm of ideology and into the world of practical outcomes. Six years into the Obama presidency, Americans have ample grounds, independent of race, to dislike him. The shortcomings of the Obama administration, ranging from a still-sluggish economy to a slow-witted foreign policy, have produced an opposition that doesn’t always fit into Chait’s ideological grid. Parts of the public, not necessarily on the right, have caught on to Obama’s double game, in which his administration has been rhetorically egalitarian and operationally elitist. The economic winners of the Obama years have been, in Joel Kotkin’s terms, the “oligarchs of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.” The losers have come not only from the private-sector middle class, but also from heavily Democratic minority groups. “Many of the Americans who support government programs that disproportionately offer blacks a leg up are Democrats,” Chait blandly asserts. This is only half-true. Democratic politicians have been the great beneficiaries of the racially charged patronage programs spun off by the Great Society—but the supposed “leg-up” offered to blacks has produced, despite trillions in expenditures, a relatively stable poverty rate over the past 50 years, with African-Americans disproportionately present among the poor. Chait never considers the possibility that some who oppose Obama are tired of paying for an ongoing failure. They’re also tired of liberals’ inability to come to grips with it. Despite a welfare state roughly as generous as Europe’s, American society is increasingly divided between those from two-parent families, who do okay or better, generally speaking, and those forced to struggle against the odds because of the absence of fathers. Today’s liberalism has little to say about how to help people rise from the bottom into the middle class. Rather, its proposals—like raising the minimum wage—are designed to make the already-working poor more comfortable. That’s perhaps an admirable goal, but it’s also a path to a class-stratified society. The other great liberal political success story has been the rise of public-sector unions, which fueled both Obama’s reelection and Bill de Blasio’s victory in New York City’s mayoral race. They are now a key component of the liberal coalition. The upshot of Obama’s policies is that he has, Chicago-style, fed the top-bottom alliance of crony capitalists and the social-service state—the government-worker providers and the recipients of aid. This has left the private-sector middle class out in the cold. Chait’s rhetorical nuance leaves no room for anger at a president whose supervision of Obamacare combines the administrative failings of George W. Bush in Iraq with the underhanded tactics of Richard Nixon. (Like Obama, Nixon tried to use the IRS to attack his enemies.) Obama has also shown no qualms about misleading the public—from claiming that the terror attack in Benghazi was the product of an anti-Islamic videotape to promising that “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.” If the Democrats do take a shellacking this November, they will no doubt attempt to pin blame on the supposed psychological failings of Republican voters. It’s a trope dear to liberals since the 1920s. For the good of the country, though, let us hope that, unlike Chait, they will come to grips with the all-too-material failures of the Obama years. Fred Siegel is the author of the recently published The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Undermined the Middle Class from Encounter Books. city-journal.org

To: sandintoes who wrote (69952)	4/12/2014 1:03:00 PM
From: greatplains_guy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Democrats wage war on women's intelligence By David Freddoso APRIL 9, 2014 AT 6:23 PM If there are gender studies textbooks out there, surely they are filled with cases just like this one. A white, Southern male boss not only gropes female staffers on the job, but in fact defiantly defends his right to do so. “Oh, shut up,” he counters when confronted by a colleague. “I do whatever I want to Yolanda!” There are elements of sex, power and even race at play here, since the state legislative employees he speaks of and treats like his property are black women. That is the true-life story of now-former Kentucky state Rep. John Arnold, a Democrat, who was spared censure late last year by his Democrat colleagues in a party-line committee vote. The story continued this week when Democrat appointees to a legislative ethics commission, through a combination of two convenient absences and one crucial “no” vote, spared him further public reprimand and punishment. Arnold's alleged victims, two Democrat staffers and one nonpartisan staffer, were livid at this week's vote. “We sacrificed trying to make things better for our agency and for protection of women,” said Yolanda Costner. “Women that are being sexually harassed here in Frankfort, you can just forget it. ... You just have to take a spanking on the butt, you have to take having your underwear pulled, you have to take being verbally assaulted, and nobody's going to care about it.” That very day, the same state party's candidate for U.S. Senate, Alison Lundergan Grimes, denounced her likely Republican opponent, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, as having “yesterday's view of women.” Afterward, she refused to answer reporters' questions about how her political allies -- including a maxed-out donor to her campaign -- had probably protected a predator in hopes of protecting themselves and the narrow state House majority they risk losing later this fall. There's a lesson here, but first there's another example to be found in this week's Equal Pay Day celebration in Washington. Washington Examiner readers have known for years not to trust the assertion that women earn only 77 cents on a man's dollar - a statistic that ignores both hours worked and type of job. Unfortunately for President Obama, this was the year the rest of the media figured it out too. Mainstream outlets finally discerned that using Obama's own crude and deliberately misleading calculation, his White House is a terrible underpayer of women. Some of his Senate Democrat allies - self-styled solvers of gender pay inequality - are even worse, paying them (again, by their own flawed method of calculation) as little as 71 cents on a man's dollar. Now, be careful what conclusions to draw here. Neither these Democrats' defense of employers who take sexual license with employees and interns, nor their underpayment of female employees, prove that Democrats are hypocrites, or that the tenets of liberalism or feminism are false. Yet both demonstrate just how abstract and theoretical are the priorities of the opportunists who claim to fight for women whenever there's an election coming up. To them, the actual treatment of real-life women does not matter much. As a goal, justice and fair treatment for women in the workforce is subordinate to a political cause they hold to be pro-woman as a matter of definition – a political cause that conveniently involves their own elevation. This sleight of hand forms the basis of the Democrats' pitch to 51 percent of America's voting population. It looks like someone has declared war on women's intelligence. DAVID FREDDOSO, a Washington Examiner columnist, is the former Editorial Page Editor for the Examiner and the New York Times-bestselling author of "Spin Masters: How the Media Ignored the Real News and Helped Re-elect Barack Obama." He has also written two other books, "The Case Against Barack Obama" (2008) and "Gangster Government" (2011). washingtonexaminer.com