#1
Black hating Arabs and their centuries old Trans-Saharan slave trade and the genocidal maniacs of Darfar are preferred by Tutu to the white western establishment who brought mission schools and clinics to the Bantu, taught them to read, introduced sanitation, and provided free HIV/AIDS medicines.
Interesting is it not, like the Champ, Tutu also blames Bush ?
President Obama's economic report card is at best mediocre. I'd give him a C+, while acknowledging that presidents usually don't much influence the economy. Policy levers are shared with Congress (taxes, spending), the Federal Reserve (financial markets) and regulatory agencies. Yeah! Waitaminute... How did those guys get there?
Presidents often get blamed or credited for the economy when they don't deserve either. But during crises, presidents acquire power. That's why Obama will be -- and should be -- judged on the economy's performance.
More interesting than my overall grade are its components. For the first six months, I'd award him an A-; for the rest, a C- or D. I'd weigh the two grades equally, because he deserves a lot of credit for stopping the economic free-fall when he took office. Stay with me here folks! This gives Samuelson street cred.
Obama can't escape some responsibility for this dismal performance. His mistake was assuming he could pursue his political agenda without compromising the recovery. Passing the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) weakened the economy. For starters, the complex law discourages job creation by forcing some firms to provide health insurance or pay a fine. If you make hiring harder and costlier, you will get less of it. I bet this guy is a PhD! B.S. - Harvard, actually.
The struggle over the ACA also fostered a take-no-prisoners political climate that, by fanning policy uncertainty, further undermined recovery. What followed were stalemates on budget policy, last year's debt-ceiling brinkmanship and today's anxiety over the "fiscal cliff." Uncertainty spawns fear, and fear causes consumers and companies to step back -- to postpone purchases, investment projects or hiring. As the world changed around him, who remained steadfast, unchanging in the maelstrom? Who refused to compromise, because He Won?
These unfavorable economics stemmed partly from Obama's politics. Pursuing "universal health care" was bound to alienate Republicans and polarize politics. This was predictable and knowable in advance. Anger over Obamacare fed tea party turnout in 2010's elections. Partisan gaps widened; compromise became harder. Perhaps all this would have happened anyway, but Obama's political choices guaranteed it.
Even some economists highly supportive of Obama's policies concede that the health plan was poorly timed. "It distracted us from the economy," says Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics. The same mistake occurred for trade, labor and environmental policy. The president subordinated job creation to other goals, says an economist adviser to John McCain in 2008. "When economic growth is so important," he argues, "you have to be ruthless in focusing on it. You have to err on the side of growth, and they haven't done that."
A similar critique applies to Obama's recurring anti-business rhetoric. Though politically expedient, it cannot have helped job creation. Anti-business? That''s ridiculous! Lookit Wall Street! [/sarc.]
To be fair, the weak recovery has other, larger causes: the hangover from the financial crisis and Great Recession. The burst real-estate bubble destroyed $6 trillion of housing values. But Obama's missteps have made the situation worse.
Obama faces a tight reelection race. His performance will be judged against Mitt Romney's promises. He will soon know whether the American people give him a flunking grade.
Posted by: Bobby ||
09/03/2012 08:46 ||
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#1
I think every time I hit the apostrophe key, I get [shift] apostrophe - ".
No shift - ' shift - "
Could be fat fingers... You hit apostrophe twice. Fixed
Posted by: Bobby ||
09/03/2012 9:04 Comments ||
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#2
...presidents usually don't much influence the economy
Because playing crony capitalism, ignoring bankruptcy laws to the benefit of constituents, and failing to pursue and prosecute those who are responsible for the 'paper game' are not played by this Executive Branch's occupants? That certainly doesn't build confidence in the market place and thus the overall economy.
#6
"he deserves a lot of credit for stopping the economic free-fall when he took office."
Don't buy it. Government created the problem and did very little to actually address the causes which is why it never really got better. THe original one-page plan of buying the bad mortgages and untangling everything would have been far better. That and perhaps putting Dodds and Frank on trial. Might not have helped the economy but it would certainly have helped morale.
#7
Oh, and the idea of a tax holiday for a year would have done far more to stimulate the economy than anything else. But of course allowing people to see how much they would be getting without the Government take probably isn't something the political class would willingly allow.
#8
Any sane, educated, and rational electorate would be tossing the Obamateur out for selective disregard of his constitutional oath vis-a-vis not securing the border and not dealing w/illegal immigration enforcement. The economy is just icing on the cake. This guy is a fraud and his AG is an incompetent clown.
As Rush said - we can endure 4 more yrs of the Champ but not a country full of morons that would vote for him.
The people who target religious minorities in Pakistain had been nurtured as the state's proxy warriors; the state then surrendered to them its monopoly of violence
150-strong mob of pious Mohammedans in Islamabad committed vandalism, baying for the blood of a mentally challenged Christian child Ramsha because they thought she had burned the Koran. The police had her under arrest pretending it was for her own security. Earlier, a mad 'blaspheming' man in Bahawalpur was taken out of jail and burned to death. After the imposition of the Blasphemy Law the first major case was also against a 14 year old Christian boy in Gujranwala who had to be smuggled abroad to prevent him from being killed.
According to World Minority Rights Report 2011, Pakistain ranks as the 6th worst country after some African states in respect of safety and rights of minorities. This includes non-Mohammedans, those the state has dubbed non-Mohammedan, and women. Ironically, this behaviour also includes persecution of non-Mohammedans through forced conversion to Islam, through forcible marriages of non-Mohammedan girls to Mohammedans, and apparently willing conversion of non-Mohammedans to Islam to secure themselves against persecution.
Hindus of Sindh have tried to migrate to India. (Nearly 568 FIRs for forced marriages were lodged last year across 40 districts of Pakistain, with the majority of such cases having been filed in Sindh.) Instead of sympathising with such runaways, the liberal PPP government suspected them of being disloyal to Pakistain and stopped them - for some time - from visiting India. Hindus are the largest minority community in Sindh.
The minister who did that himself fears being killed by the elements who hunt Pakistain's Hindu community. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistain's Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... chapter has identified an ongoing exodus of Hindu families from Quetta too due to fear of kidnappings for ransom, yet the Balochistan government does not seem to be doing much to address this problem.
Christians living in the Islamic world are marginalised and threatened with persecution. But Pakistain perhaps began the trend. InFebruary 1997, the twin villages of Shantinagar-Tibba Colony 12 kilometres East of Khanewal, Multan Division, were looted and burnt by 20,000 Mohammedan citizens and 500 coppers. The police first evacuated the Christian population of 15,000, then helped the raiders use battle-field explosives to blow up their houses and property.
In November 2005, the Christian community of Sangla Hill in Nankana District in Punjab experienced a most hair-raising day of violence and vandalism. Daily Dawn (13 November 2005) described it like this:
Under the present PPP government, a Christian federal minister has been killed by Punjabi Taliban in broad daylight in Islamabad
'The burning down of three churches, a missionary-run school, two hostels and several houses belonging to the Christian community by an enraged mob of some 3,000 people in Punjab's Nankana district speaks volumes for the bigotry and intolerance against minorities. Following allegations of blasphemy levelled against one Yousaf Masih by his Mohammedan gambling partners who accused him of also torching the Holy Koran, calls were given from mosque loudspeakers to punish the local Christians'.
In May 2009, some 12 Christian families fled their homes in a village of Sahiwal because they feared that a dispute growing around an act of blasphemy in a school may result in their persecution. The village had at least 6,500 voters in it but the dispute - which may be political - was entwined with the other politics of blasphemy law.
The community cowered in the face of dire announcements being made from mosque loudspeakers. The 'blasphemy' incident took place in a classroom in a local school where a page of the Holy Koran was found with ink splattered on it when the school opened in the morning.
The same month, an incident put the world on notice about what Pakistain is moving towards. In Surjani Town in Bloody Karachi ...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It may be the largest city in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous... , some Pashtun neighbourhood myrmidons wrote graffiti on the church wall saying: 'Taliban zindabad', 'Islam zindabad', 'Christians Islam qabool karo ya jiziya dow', etc, after which an exchange of fire maimed some Christians in addition to killing one.
When the state of Pakistain apostatised the Ahmadis through an Amendment in the Constitution in the 1970s, some observers opined that the Shia community would be next in line for exclusion and slaughter
The attack on the Christians of a Gojra village Korian took place in August 2009, after an alleged desecration of the Koran by the Christians in July 2009. Everyone including the Punjab chief minister anticipated the violence and cautioned the local administration in Gojra to prevent lawlessness. The fear was not that desecration had happened but that it will be conflated with blasphemy and the mobs will take the law into their own hands and go on a spree of murder.
If the state in Pakistain survives, it must call to mind the following articles of the Constitution that give protection to the Christians who form the largest religious minority in Punjab estimated to be between 2 to 4 million:
Article 20: freedom to profess religion and to manage religious institutions; Article 22: safeguards around education with respect to religious freedom; Article 25: equality of citizenship; Article 36: protection of minorities. But these rights and values enshrined in the Constitution have been undermined by a series of legislations related to the affirmation of the state's ideological credentials.
The introduction in 1984 of the Qanoon-e-Shahadat or 'Law of Evidence' reduces the value of court testimony of a Mohammedan woman and a non-Mohammedan male citizen to that of half a Mohammedan and, by extension, that of a non-Mohammedan woman to one-quarter. Similarly the introduction of a series of amendments to the Blasphemy Laws in the PPC [section 295], adding in 1982 section 295-B which provides for mandatory life imprisonment for desecrating the Holy Koran, and in 1986 the even harsher section 295-C, which is mandatory death in respect of the insult of the Prophet (PTUI!), exposes the broadly poverty-stricken Christian community to abuses of the law.
Most Mohammedans hold that violation of some human rights One man's rights are another man's existential threat. takes place because of the tough living conditions and poverty in the country. The view displays all the collective blind spots about human rights. It presumes certain conditions to exist against objective evidence to the contrary. It talks about the minorities in Pakistain without being aware of their view of how they are being treated. Under the present PPP government a Christian federal minister has been killed by Punjabi Taliban in broad daylight in Islamabad.
Today in 2012, you have TV anchors saying more or less the same thing: Mohammedans themselves are being maltreated, so the persecution of non-Mohammedans cannot be blamed on them. Going on a tangent, they allude to the Rohingya Mohammedans of Burma about whom the rascally foreign-funded NGOs have done nothing. (In Burma, the NGOs protesting Rohingya rights are savagely suppressed by the Burmese ruling junta.) The ominous sign in Pakistain is that the majority Mohammedan community is completely inured against what the minorities are going through.
The blasphemy law victims bear the brunt of the rage of the Barelvis like late Maulana Sarfraz Naeemi, secretary general of Tanzimat Madaris Dinia, who actually led a Lashkar to Sangla Hill to punish the Christians already mauled by local Mohammedans. He was later killed by the Taliban who think Barelvis are not good Mohammedans. The Deobandi rage is directed at the Shia community too. When the state of Pakistain apostatised the Ahmadis through an Amendment in the Constitution in the 1970s some observers opined that the Shia community would be next in line for exclusion and slaughter.
The day has arrived. Like the Ahmadis, the Shia are being killed all over Pakistain like lambs at the slaughter house without much disturbance among the Sunni community which leans on anti-Americanism to favour the Taliban and their ancillary warriors originally prepared by the Army against India.
The Shia are not named as a minority in the national census but are informally considered to be nearly 30 percent of the total population. A storm is brewing against them in the Middle East, and Pakistain could be considered as a country where it all began with the help of the state of Pakistain which nurtured the Shia-hating Deobandis and allowed its personnel in the intelligence agencies handling the covert war to be reverse-indoctrinated.
The al Qaeda-linked Lashkar Jhangvi in August 2012 published a gruesome video on jihadist internet showing the beheading of two Shia. In a statement that accompanied the video on one of the forums, a jihadist said Lashkar Jhangvi is part of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Two of the Lashkar fighters then pulled out knives, and proceeded to behead the Shia men. The victims' heads were then placed on their laps. The warriors wiped their knives on the clothes of the slain men.
Lashkar claimed that 'most of the operations against the Shia in Pakistain, if not all of them, are carried out by this group'. It said that Lashkar was the Omar Brigade of Taliban-Pakistain as the Omar Brigade of al Qaeda targeted Badr Brigade and others among the Shia.
The politicians turn their face away; the judges are scared of the clerical backlash. Pakistain as a state is decaying and is eating its minorities first. Before it becomes a pre-modern hell under Al Qaeda and its followers, it has to accomplish the task begun with the decimation of the Shia: it will eat its Sunni Mohammedans too. For the non-Mohammedans it is a prison from which there is no escape.
Pakistain was always dicey with its minorities because of its ideology, but today it is killing its minorities because it is killing itself as a state. The people who have undertaken this destruction have originated in the state of the Mohammedan mind today across the Islamic world, but their midwife in Pakistain was the Army which nurtured them as the state's proxy warriors and then surrendered to them its monopoly of violence.
#2
German Nazis were lynching their own people in the Berlin vicinity as the entire Third Reich was collapsing around them in early 1945. Anyone not acting as a True Believer in der Fuehrer was likely to be killed. Perhaps this is the best analogy to what has been happening.
The Obama Democrats who gather in Charlotte this week have a single big advantage over Tampa's Romney Republicans: Last week's GOP convention gave President Obama a peek at Mitt Romney's playbook. Combining the lessons of this highly public briefing with what's already known about the Romney strategy defines the Charlotte Imperative. Meaning, I suppose, that which the Dems must do to keep the White House and return to their rightful place.
The best lines in both Romney's and Paul Ryan's speeches spoke to the disenchanted. Obama will have to speak directly to them, too: explaining why the economy isn't where it should be, arguing that his path forward is still more promising than Romney's, and linking his second term plans with the hopes of 2008. These goals lie behind Obama's "Forward" slogan. The real question, E. J., is how many people are "disenchanted"? 20%, which you believe, or 60%, which I suspect?
Even conservatives have conceded that Romney left a huge opening by doing little to specify what he would do in office. Yeah! Just like that last guy! The 2008 candidate...
Obama will define the Romney agenda himself, but he'll also have to offer his own plans as a contrast to Romney's vagueness. Since Romney accused Obama of my way or the highway "divisiveness," Obama will have to explain why the division in the country was caused primarily by the duly-elected GOP.
Romney has found real traction on one issue: his broadside against Obama for allegedly ending the work requirement in the nation's welfare program. The fact that the charge is based on a lie -- Obama is not dismantling the work requirement -- has not stopped Romney from running a series of advertisements that cast Obama as the friend of freeloaders.
What's maddening for Democrats is that whenever they point out the racially charged nature of Romney's assault, Republicans piously cast themselves as victims, accusing Democrats of "playing the race card." The GOP reply is disingenuous but effective. I was not aware that "Freeloaders" was a race. If certain ethnic groups are over-represented in the category, perhaps that''s a factor that needs to be addressed, rather than being used as a strawman. Defanging the welfare issue is Obama's highest immediate priority. This task is complicated because voters tend to view Obama as more liberal than he actually is, which means many of them are prepared to believe there may be some truth in Romney's false claims.
Two messages dominated in Tampa: that business is responsible for building the United States and thus deserves more tax and regulatory concessions; Wrong: businesses, and people of all colors, both genders, and all faiths built the United States, and thus deserve to have a limited government that does strictly what needs doing and otherwise stays out of the way.
and that Republicans are the party of opportunity while Democrats are the party of dependency on government. Well, at least you got the point.
The idea that Obama is anti-business is absurd (look at the Dow Jones averages and Alfalfa''s expression) and needs to be refuted. But more important is challenging both Tampa premises. The United States was built not only by business people but also by those who "labor in the oil and gas fields, mines and mills," and by the "hands that work in restaurants and hotels, in hospitals, banks, and grocery stores." The words of Rick Santorum, Romney's former rival, were among the few spoken in Tampa that acknowledged the priority of labor. It's a theme Democrats should embrace. As absurd as Obama''s statement was, to say the Trunks think business built it all by themselves is a bit inaccurate. Business is the engine of the economy, labor is the fuel. A bigger engine needs more fuel. Now, E. J., go ahead and make your final point.
And Obama will have to return unapologetically to the theme of his inartfully cast but philosophically sound "You didn't build that" speech. American government -- through student loans, the GI Bill, the interstate highway system and so many other measures -- has always been primarily about opportunity, investment and enterprise, not dependency. For Obama, winning this argument is a precondition to winning the election. I believe a Tea-Party government would have all those things, but it would not have entitlements that consume half the budget of the richest country in the world. You''ve dodged the issue. Again!
Posted by: Bobby ||
09/03/2012 08:19 ||
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#1
but at least Dear Leader can gaze upon hir likeness in the sand monument built to honor hisself. too bad rain washed a lot away and had to be rebuilt; an apt metaphor for what will need done in 2013. what a vain POS.
#2
usually EJ Dionne is whelping about those extremist Republicans, and telling us what we really think. The stable of WaPo writers is pretty rank except for the Hammer
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/03/2012 11:49 Comments ||
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#3
Do these people really believe what they write?
#4
I think his issue/point conclusions are mostly right, though his path there is a cf.
The collectivists have sat in the choom room too long, and are trying to get a revisit on the chicken/egg question except with money and economoy vs government.
Fact: Business existed here before the creation of the United States
Fact: Back in the beginnings the government broke; it had no money to put into the type of projects noted today, therefore the money for the government came from private sources.
Turnpikes used to be completely private roads which payed for that with a toll fee. River crossings had ferry businesses. Read Laura Ingalls Wilder again, business and industry existed without DCs help.
Fact: If government idles, nothing really happens except in extreme cases such as war. If private industry idles the whole format struggles - people have no money and tax revenue drops. Government money comes from the private sector. Period.
But hey, want to have that arguement about how the Federal Government and Washington DC dealerships do it so much better, let's have that talk.
#5
EJ does because this is how he gets paid. Now the level of enthusiasm can mark how on-board a paid opinionator is with the assignment.
This has all the enthusiasm of a die-hard baseball team fan who just watched the other team not only take the lead in the top of the 7th, but has had only two hits since the 1st and two bush league infield errors which allowed runs.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The people who target religious minorities in Pakistain had been nurtured as the state's proxy warriors; the state then surrendered to them its monopoly of violence
The minister who did that himself fears being killed by the elements who hunt Pakistain's Hindu community. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistain's 
The same month, an incident put the world on notice about what Pakistain is moving towards. In Surjani Town in 
Defanging the welfare issue is Obama's highest immediate priority. This task is complicated because voters tend to view Obama as more liberal than he actually is, which means many of them are prepared to believe there may be some truth in Romney's false claims.
