Sunday, October 31, 2010
An Interesting Comparison... Mike Walker, Colonel USMC (retired)
All,
President Obama had often been compared to JFK and, most notably by Time Magazine, to FDR.
You be the judge:
FDR
Age 23 Graduates “Cum Laude” from Harvard, President of the “Harvard Crimson newspaper”
Age 26 Leaves Columbia Law School early having already passed the NY Bar
Age 27 Lawyer with “top drawer” Wall Street Investment Bank
Age 28 Elected to NY State Senate in 1910
Age 31 Appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1913. Oversees the largest expansion of the US Navy in history up to that time during WWI. Sails on destroyers in U-boat infested Atlantic waters to assess first hand US Naval forces performance in wartime.
Age 38 Nominated as the democratic Vice Presidential Candidate in the 1920 election. The ticket loses badly.
Age 39 Contracts polio beginning a multi-year battle with a crippling illness. Continues to practice law.
Age 47 Elected Governor of NY in 1929. NY at that time was the most important, populous, and wealthiest state in the union.
Age 50 Elected President of the United States. Leads America through the Great Depression and World II. Forever remember for his unstinting courage, positivism, and unifying optimism symbolized by the quote, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
JFK
Age 23 Graduates from Harvard in 1940, lettered as member of the varsity swim team, spent time at Princeton and London School of Economics. Had already traveled across Europe as well as the USSR. Graduating thesis on European appeasement of Nazi Germany. Writes bestseller “Why England Slept”
Age 24 Leaves graduate business school at Stanford. Joins US Navy prior to Pearl Harbor attack. Initially served in naval intelligence
Age 26 Served in South Pacific as a PT boat commander. On 7 December 1942, Kennedy commands PT 109, one of 8 PT boats that defeat a superior Japanese force off Guadalcanal. Kennedy is later personally decorated for heroism for his performance in the Pacific
Age 29 Elected to his first of three terms to the US House of Representatives. During his time in the House, the Marshall Plan is passed along with several key laws that lead to the post-war economic boom
Age 35 Elected for the first of two times to the US Senate
Age 38 Along with Ted Sorenson writes “Profiles in Courage” which wins the Pulitzer Prize in 1955
Age 43 Elected President of the United States
Barack Obama
Age 21 Graduates from Columbia University in 1983
Age 22 Works for the Business International Corporation in NYC that supports US interests abroad
Age 23 Worked for NYC-centered university public interest group aligned with Ralph Nader
Age 24 Becomes a community organizer in Chicago
Age 27 Enters Harvard Law School. Serves as editor of the “Harvard Law Review”
Age 30 Graduates “Cum Laude” from Harvard Law School in 1991
Age 32 Finishes two years as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School in 1993
Age 34 Publishes “My Father’s Dreams”
Age 36 Ends a four period of practicing law and serving in management at a Chicago law firm. Also active in key leadership roles in several Chicago foundations
Age 36 Elected to the first of two terms in Illinois State Senate in 1996
Age 43 Elected to the US Senate in 2004
Age 47 Elected President of the United States
Semper Fi,
Mike
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Please, don't go crazy! Can you imagine that it has come to this? With all of the problems in this world there are "officials" that can act on this type of complaint... and, there are people going around reading church bulletin walls trying to ferret out criminals that might be trying to advertise for Christian room mates. If you will notice there are strong constraints on every aspect of being a human except for gender, hmmm, am I the only one who sees a familiar pattern? I seem to remember words like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and doesn't it seem that the pursuit of happiness might include advertising for a Christian room-mate if you are a Christian and desire continuity in your life? BH
Michigan Woman Faces Civil Rights Complaint for Seeking a Christian Roommate
Published October 22, 2010| FoxNews.com
A civil rights complaint has been filed against a woman in Grand Rapids, Mich., who posted an advertisement at her church last July seeking a Christian roommate.
The ad "expresses an illegal preference for a Christian roommate, thus excluding people of other faiths,” according to the complaint filed by the Fair Housing Center of West Michigan.
"It's a violation to make, print or publish a discriminatory statement," Executive Director Nancy Haynes told Fox News. "There are no exemptions to that."
Haynes said the unnamed 31-year-old woman’s case was turned over to the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. Depending on the outcome of the case, she said, the woman could face several hundreds of dollars in fines and “fair housing training so it doesn’t happen again.”
Harold Core, director of public affairs with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, told the Grand Rapids Press that the Fair Housing Act prevents people from publishing an advertisement stating their preference of religion, race or handicap with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling.
"It's really difficult to say at this point what could potentially happen," he told the newspaper, noting that there are exemptions in the law for gender when there is a shared living space.
But Joel Oster, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing the woman free of charge, describes the case as "outrageous."
"Clearly this woman has a right to pick and choose who she wants to live with," he said.
"Christians shouldn't live in fear of being punished by the government for being Christians. It is completely absurd to try to penalize a single Christian woman for privately seeking a Christian roommate at church -- an obviously legal and constitutionally protected activity."
Haynes said the person who filed the initial complaint saw the ad on the church bulletin board and contacted the local fair housing organization.
The ad included the words, "Christian roommate wanted," along with the woman's contact information. Had the ad not included the word "Christian," Haynes said, it would not have been illegal.
"If you read it and you were not Christian, would you not feel welcome to rent there?" Haynes asked.
Oster said he hopes the case will eventually be dropped and that he's sent a letter to the state asking the authorities to dismiss the case as groundless.
"The First Amendment guarantees us Freedom of Religion," he said. "And we have the right to live with someone of the same faith. The Michigan Department of Civil Rights is denying her rights by pursuing this complaint."
But Haynes said officials plan on pursuing the matter.
"We want to make sure it doesn't happen again," she said.
Todd Starnes is a Fox News Radio Reporter and the author of a new book on the culture war, “Dispatches From Bitter America.”
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Obama has no clue about entrepreneurship
By: LINDA CHAVEZ
President Obama has finally admitted that a core premise of his nearly trillion-dollar stimulus package was false. In an interview this week with The New York Times' Peter Baker, the president acknowledged that "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects," despite the president's near-constant invocation of the term over a two-year period to explain how government spending was going to create jobs.
The president's admission is no minor matter; it goes to the heart of why his economic policies have been such a failure. Not since President Jimmy Carter's confession in 1980 that it took the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan for him to fully understand "what the Soviets' ultimate goals are" has a sitting president so fully exposed his ignorance.
Obama's admission might be refreshing if it meant he would rethink his economic assumptions, but the Baker interview gives no such indication. Instead, the president seems to think his biggest problem has been his failure to communicate his policies effectively.
"There is probably a perverse pride in my administration -- and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top -- that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular," he said. "And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion."
The statements are both stunningly arrogant and misleading. The president of the United States is not a philosopher king. In a democracy, the president doesn't determine what "the right thing" is and let the people who put him in office be damned.
Nor did the president and his team neglect the "marketing and P.R." of his policies. The "shovel-ready" comments were all salesmanship and no substance.
In his first year in office, the president gave 411 speeches, sat for 158 press interviews, conducted 42 news conferences, and visited 30 states, according to a compilation by CBS News. Failing to communicate was not the issue.
The president's problem is that he has neither experience in, nor understanding of, the private economy. He has worked exclusively in the nonprofit and government sector.
He has an unlimited faith in government and limited trust in private industry. And the president surrounds himself with people who share his myopia.
When the president visited plants from Buffalo to San Francisco on his much-touted jobs tours during the spring and summer, he was there to tell workers that government saved or created their jobs.
But that is not how it's done. Job creation happens when individuals take personal risks: A man notices that all his friends and neighbors have garages stuffed with junk they don't want and starts a new business with $700 in startup capital and an old beat-up truck. A few years later, Brian Scudamore's 1-800-GOT-JUNK has 100 franchises across the country.
A young woman decides her chocolate chip cookies deserve to be enjoyed beyond her family. Debbi Fields borrows money, opens a small storefront, and within seven years, her company, Mrs. Fields Cookies, had revenues of more than $45 million.
A college student spends his time in his dorm room building personal computers for his friends and selling them for less than the name brands. He drops out of school, but by the time he's 27, Michael Dell is the youngest CEO on the Fortune 500 list of largest companies in America.
These individuals created great wealth for themselves, but they also created thousands of jobs for other people. The fallacy in Obama's thinking is the assumption we'd be better off taxing rich people more and having government spend the money directly.
But government can never be as efficient as the market. Scudamore, Fields, and Dell might just as well have failed as succeeded.
When entrepreneurs fail, they've lost their own money and that of investors who have freely chosen to take the risk.
Government programs, however, play with other people's money -- since government has no money of its own. When government programs fail, the consequences aren't born by the people making the decisions but by the taxpayers.
So when Obama finally realizes there's no such thing as a shovel-ready project, he's admitting he's wasted our money -- billions of dollars -- not his own. But his only answer is to raise taxes so he can spend yet more. It's the kind of thinking that dooms his presidency and our economy.
Examiner Columnist Linda Chavez is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Chris Mathews reading from the
official MSNBC "talking points" teleprompter....
referring to the Tea Party and what would happen
if they were in the Chilean mine for 69 days...
“They would have been killing each other after about two days.”
Hard to believe that the average population is viewed in such
a negative way. It couldn't be that he just doesn't see the common
disagreement with the direction of the current government
as being the "designed-in" balance our founders envisioned. He, and
others are desperate to do anything to shut up average Americans and
to marginalize any form of dissent.
Saturday, October 09, 2010
The Colbert Democrats
Friday, October 8, 2010
A president's first midterm election is inevitably a referendum on his two years in office. The bad news for Democrats is that President Obama's "reelect" number is 38 percent -- precisely Bill Clinton's in October 1994, the eve of the wave election that gave Republicans control of the House for the first time in 40 years.
Yet this same poll found that 65 percent view Obama favorably "as a person." The current Democratic crisis is not about the man -- his alleged lack of empathy, ability to emote, etc., requiring remediation with backyard, shirt-sleeved shoulder rubbing with the folks -- but about the policies.
And the problem with the policies is twofold: ideology and effectiveness. First, Obama, abetted by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, tried to take a center-right country to the left. They grossly misread the 2008 election. It was a mandate to fix the economy and restore American confidence. Obama read it as a mandate to change the American social contract, giving it a more European social-democratic stamp, by fundamentally extending the reach and power of government in health care, energy, education, finance and industrial policy.
Obama succeeded with health care. Unfortunately for the Democrats, that and Obama's other signature achievement -- the stimulus -- were not exactly what the folks were clamoring for. What they wanted was economic recovery.
Here the Democrats failed the simple test of effectiveness. The economy is extraordinarily weak, unemployment is unacceptably high, and the only sure consequence of the stimulus is nearly $1 trillion added to the national debt in a single stroke.
And yet, to these albatrosses of ideological overreach and economic ineffectiveness, the Democrats have managed in the past few weeks to add a third indictment: incompetence.
For the first time since modern budgeting was introduced with the Budget Act of 1974, the House failed to even write a budget. This in a year of extraordinary deficits, rising uncertainty and jittery financial markets. Gold is going through the roof. Confidence in the dollar and the American economy is falling -- largely because of massive overhanging debt. Yet no budget emerged from Congress to give guidance, let alone reassurance, about future U.S. revenues and spending.
That's not all. Congress has not passed a single appropriations bill. To keep the government going, Congress passed a so-called continuing resolution (CR) before adjourning to campaign. The problem with continuing to spend at the current level is that the last two years have seen a huge 28 percent jump in non-defense discretionary spending. The CR continues this profligacy, aggravating an already serious debt problem.
As if this were not enough, Congress adjourned without even a vote -- nay, without even a Democratic bill -- on the expiring Bush tax cuts. This is the ultimate in incompetence. After 20 months of control of the White House and Congress -- during which they passed an elaborate, 1,000-page micromanagement of every detail of American health care -- the Democrats adjourned without being able to tell the country what its tax rates will be on Jan. 1.
It's not just income taxes. It's capital gains and dividends, too. And the estate tax, which will careen insanely from 0 to 55 percent when the ball drops on Times Square on New Year's Eve.
Nor is this harmless incompetence. To do this at a time when $2 trillion of capital is sitting on the sidelines because of rising uncertainty -- and there is no greater uncertainty than next year's tax rates -- is staggeringly irresponsible.
As if this display of unseriousness -- no budget, no appropriations bills, no tax bill -- were not enough, some genius on a House Judiciary subcommittee invites parodist Stephen Colbert to testify as an expert witness on immigration. He then pulls off a nervy mockery of the whole proceedings -- my favorite was his request to have his colonoscopy inserted in the Congressional Record -- while the chairwoman sits there clueless.
A fitting end for the 111th Congress. But not quite. Colbert will return to the scene of the crime on Oct. 30 as the leader of one of two mock rallies on the Mall. Comedian Jon Stewart leads the other. At a time of near-10 percent unemployment, a difficult and draining war abroad, and widespread disgust with government overreach and incompetence, they will light up the TV screens as the hip face of the new liberalism -- just three days before the election.
I suspect the electorate will declare itself not amused.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Obama Approval Index Month-by-Month
Obama’s Full-Month Approval Rating Falls to New Low
When tracking President Obama’s job approval on a daily basis, people sometimes get so caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations that they miss the bigger picture. To look at the longer-term trends, Rasmussen Reports compiles the numbers on a full-month basis, and the results can be seen in the graphics above.
The number of voters who Strongly Disapprove of the president’s performance inched up a point to a new high of 44% in September. At the same time, the number who Strongly Approve held steady at 27%.
Those figures generate a full month Presidential Approval Index rating of -17, down a point from last month. Over the past four months, the Presidential Approval Index has been at -16 or -17 every month. Those are the lowest levels yet recorded for the current president. From December 2009 to March 2010, the president’s approval index bounced back-and-forth between -14 and -15. In April, the index jumped four points to -11, the highest level of optimism measured since October 2009. That number, however, has steadily declined in the following months.
The full month numbers show Strong Approval from 54% of Democrats with Strong Disapproval from 75% of Republicans and 49% of unaffiliated voters. These findings show little change from last month.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
