Hillary Clinton Continues Liberal Pattern Of Thinking They Are Above The Law As They Impose The Law On Everyone Else

Why hasn’t Hillary Clinton been charged with the same crime that General David Petraeus was charged with?  Petraeus pled guilty to removing and retaining classified information.  Well, what the hell did Hillary Clinton do when she violated the Federal Records Act to use her own private email account on her own private server to a) avoid any oversight by Congress and by her own State Department; and b) remove herself from all the protections that would have and should have been available from the IT and security staff at the State Department to protect her emails from spying/eavesdropping?

Even the way, waaaaay left of center New York Times is all but branding Hillary Clinton a felon:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.

“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Aside from ignoring the “serious breach”, Hillary Clinton has done two remarkably dishonest things: 1) she has essentially labeled this criticism a “vast, right wing conspiracy” and 2) she has laughably said that she has asked the State Department to release her emails.

As for the last, we had this:

Late Wednesday night, Mrs. Clinton tweeted: “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.”

I mean,holy crap, what are you even talking about, you Stalinist priestess?  YOU have all the emails.  You created your own damn SERVER in your damn HOUSE and NEVER had a State Department official account:

The move followed the revelation that Clinton had installed a private server at her New York home that allowed her, and not the State Department, to store her e-mail correspondence and later decide which ones to turn over as public records.

and:

But, agency officials said, the decision over which e-mails would be deemed public record fell to Clinton and her private advisers — not to government officials or archivists.

That last sentence ought to scare the hell out of you.  This is your Joseph Stalin, your Adolf Hitler, your Chairman Mao, Your Kim Jong Un – and yes, your Barack Hussein Obama and now Hillary Clinton – declaration that they are above the law because they alone get to decide what the law is both for themselves in pursuit of their own partisan and ideological axes and for everyone else.

And that vein keeps being mined by the article:

But government transparency advocates said the use of a private e-mail account and a private server meant that for years, Clinton’s e-mails were off-limits to public records requests filed with the State Department.

The long delay in turning records over to the State Department also places enormous power in the hands of her closest aides to decide which of her e-mails should be made public and which should be shielded from view.

“There’s no legitimate way to claim that there wasn’t a requirement, certainly to keep with the spirit of the law, to make real-time copies available to the agency,” said David Sobel, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In Congress, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said new subpoenas were a good step because lawmakers do not have confidence Clinton has turned over all of her relevant e-mails to the State Department.

Agency officials have said they have submitted 300 of Clinton’s e-mails to the committee investigating the Benghazi attack.

“The prime reason to set up an account like this is to skirt the law, avoid disclosure,” Chaffetz said. “The question isn’t the number of e-mails she has turned over, it’s the percentage. I want to know who decided what we could see.”

There is simply no question that an untrustworthy woman acted in a blatantly untrustworthy manner and covered it up the same way Benghazi was covered up.  Who gets to cherry-pick the record?  Hillary Clinton and her troupe of traitors, that’s who.

She doesn’t want the public to “see” anything but LIES.

The Washington Post article also points out that:

Meanwhile, government transparency advocates expressed concern over the level of control Clinton had asserted over her records. Security experts wondered if hackers could exploit weaknesses in the Clinton server to gain access to sensitive information.

Was that merely a possibility, or did something like that actual happen due to Hillary Clinton’s indifference to US security?  We find that Hillary Clinton exposed the United States of America to every threat you can imagine.  These paragraphs from MRC TV say it all:

A Romanian hacker currently imprisoned in Bucharest (alias “Guccifer”) is responsible for exposing Hillary Clinton’s secret use of a private email account to the world, and Clinton registered the domain “clintonemails.com” the day she was confirmed to be Secretary of State. Clinton used only this email address (hdr22@clintonemail.com) for her entire four-year tenure at the State Department. […]

The server that hosted Hillary Clinton’s email was run out of her New York home, according to the AP, and despite the Federal Records Act, no record was kept of her emails. Top Hillary aides also have @clintonemail.com addresses and have used them to conduct government business, Gawker reports.

Hosting email through one’s own server is typically the exclusive domain of technical experts, so Clinton’s move was highly unusual. It would give her “impressive control over limiting access to her message archives,” reported the AP, because investigators would have to go directly through her, and could not appeal to a corporate email host like Google or Microsoft.

So we have Clinton and her fellow Clinton goons having complete and total and solitary access to pretty much everything that Hillary Clinton did and no one else.  We have an intentional violation of the law from the very damn getgo of the debacle of the Hillary Clinton Secretary of State-ship.  We have an obvious callous disregard for the security of the United States in favor of Hillary Clinton’s pathological penchant for secrecy.

And for the record, this came out in the Benghazi hearings in which a criminal Obama Administration, in participation with a criminal Clinton State Department, criminally covered up a TERRORIST ATTACK during which the first U.S. ambassador since the failed CARTER YEARS was murdered as a result of shocking and disgraceful incompetence and shocking and disgraceful politicized foreign policy.

What else was happening?  What OTHER Clinton shenanigans were going on during this corrupt woman’s corrupt tenure as the corrupt Obama regime’s corrupt Secretary of a corrupt State?  This Washington Post headline says it pretty well:

Foreign governments gave millions to foundation while Clinton was at State Dept.
By Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger February 25 

The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed Wednesday.

Most of the contributions were possible because of exceptions written into the foundation’s 2008 agreement, which included limits on foreign-government donations.

The agreement, reached before Clinton’s nomination amid concerns that countries could use foundation donations to gain favor with a Clinton-led State Department, allowed governments that had previously donated money to continue making contributions at similar levels.

The new disclosures, provided in response to questions from The Washington Post, make clear that the 2008 agreement did not prohibit foreign countries with interests before the U.S. government from giving money to the charity closely linked to the secretary of state.

What are the chances that we will find Hillary Clinton offering quid pro quo conditions to foreign governments – including governments that have terrorist connections – in exchange for money to Hillary’s greedy foundation?  ZERO, because Hillary Clinton and her priestesses are the sole key-keepers to the Clinton secrets vault.

Hillary Clinton would be charged with federal crimes and be forced to plead guilty to avoid doing hard time in prison.  Because she did FAR WORSE than General David Petraeus did.

According to a 2009 federal law which applied during Hillary Clinton’s tenure, you have to archive any and all private emails with your government agency.  Hillary Clinton CLEARLY did not do that according to the above quotes from the above Washington Post:

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department.

Liberals are trying to raise dust clouds by saying Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice did the same thing.  In fifteen words, let’s take that on by the horns: “Did either of them run for president either before or after their tenures as SecState?”  NO.  That fact ALONE obviates any comparison with Powell and Rice unless Hillary does NOT run for president.  Because if you run for president, you put yourself under a completely different standard and a completely different level of scrutiny.  And secondly, did the law change AFTER both Powell and Rice served their terms?  YES:

The Times article, by Washington-based reporter Michael Schmidt, stated that Clinton’s exclusive use of a personal email address at the State Department “may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.” In reports and press releases, Brock’s groups argued that Schmidt’s article neglected to mention that the relevant portions of the Federal Records Act pertaining to such requirement did not go into effect until November 2014, after Clinton’s tenure at State.

Unfortunately for these pro-Hillary groups, the regulations that are relevant to Schmidt’s report – the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requirements – have been in place since at least 2009, when Clinton became secretary of state.

According to Section 1236.22 of the 2009 NARA requirements, which Schmidt provided in an email, “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.”

In short, the State Department was required to ensure that Secretary Clinton’s emails, including those on personal accounts, were preserved in an agency record-keeping system. The failure to ensure such preservation would therefore likely be in violation of the federal requirements, though it’s not clear whether all of her personal emails – or just those related to official business – would be required.

Schmidt believes that all of Clinton’s emails would be required, and pointed to a 2008 definition from NARA that defines federal records as “documentary materials that agencies create and receive while conducting business that provide evidence of the agency’s organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and operations, or because they contain information of value.”

The law regarding emails dates back to 1995 stating that all such communications be archived.

If Hillary Clinton created a system whereby her private/personal and official emails were intermixed – which she clearly did by creating a server and an email account in her own home – then ALL of her emails become “official.”  And if ANYONE ought to decide which emails are off limits at this point, it ought to be the most rabidly partisan conservative tea party member in America.  Because she created this mess for HERSELF.

I submit that Hillary Clinton did not violate the Federal Records Act once; she violated it thousands and in fact likely tens of thousands of times.  Because every single time she sent an email from her private account and did not archive it with the State Department – EVERY SINGLE DAMN TIME SHE SENT A NEW EMAIL – she broke the law anew.  And we know as a FACT that she set out to break the law from the very moment she was foolishly and wickedly confirmed by the Stalinist Democrat Party.

So where’s Eric Holder spending the next three years investigating her and preventing her from even mounting a campaign the way he did to General David Petraeus?  Nowhere to be found.  Because under the criminal Obama administration the law has become a political weapon just like the IRS became a political weapon.

As for the Hillary Clinton team charge that this is nothing but a vast, right wing conspiracy – such as the one that someone managed to secretly insinuate Bill Clinton’s semen on a very young woman’s dress – this isn’t just Republicans anymore:

• “There’s always another shoe to drop with Hillary,” said Dick Harpootlian, a former Democratic Party chairman in South Carolina who has said he hopes Vice President Biden runs. “Do we nominate her not knowing what’s in those e-mails?”
• Don Paulson, chairman of the Muscatine County Democrats in Iowa, said he was disturbed by the Clinton Foundation’s practice of accepting donations from foreign governments at a time when Mrs. Clinton was preparing a campaign for the White House. He saw that as one reason why the party should vet her and other candidates in a competitive primary, rather than allow her to coast to the nomination without a real fight. “It’s a healthier thing all around if there’s competition,” he said.
• Kim Weaver, chairman of the O’Brien County Democrats in Iowa, which holds the nation’s first presidential contest, said: “The questions need to be answered.” She added she would like to hear whether the personal email system Mrs. Clinton used carried adequate security protections. “If it’s no big deal, why not just come out and say what it is.”

Trust this radical disciple of leftist radical Saul Alinsky to your peril.

At this point, it is safe to say that another Democrat president means another fascist in the White House.

Hillary Clinton is a dangerous woman with a dangerous past who has dangerous future plans to finish off the United States of America for good.

She needs to go the way of the dinosaurs.  In her case, extinction is a GOOD thing.

 

Pawlenty on Obama: ‘You can’t be pro-job and anti-business. That’s like being pro-egg and anti-chicken.’

Tim Pawlenty just went way up on my list of candidates after that particular remark in my title.

Is Obama anti-business?  Well, how about this for a factoid: 77% of investors think he is.  He was anti-business in 2009.  He was anti-business in 2010.  And he is still anti-business in 2011.  How many eggs are you going to get when you’re out to get all the chickens and when the chickens know you’re out to get them?

Here’s an article that talks about this former governor who has been successful where Obama has failed, failed and failed some more.  What is interesting is how we hear Pawlenty talk about how to fix our broken economy, and Obama talking about wtf???

Republican presidential candidate Pawlenty: ‘We are in deep doo-doo’
By Abdon M. Pallasch Political

How badly has President Barack Obama managed the United States’ economy?

Pretty badly, says plain-talking former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty in a campaign stop in Chicago Tuesday.

“We are in deep doo-doo. We are in deep crap,” Pawlenty said Tuesday, in a locale meant to drive home the Republican presidential candidate’s differences with the president.

In a classroom at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies, located across the street from the law school where Obama used to teach, Pawlenty laid out his tax-slashing, budget-cutting proposal that he says will save the U.S. economy:

There would be only three tax rates: Zero, for low-income earners who currently pay no federal tax; 10 percent, for single people earning up to $50,000, or married couples who earn up to $100,000; and 25 percent, for people who earn more than that (down from a top rate of 35 percent now). He would cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent and end the estate tax.

Those tax cuts, plus a freeze on federal spending, would spur growth of 5 percent a year, he said.

Democrats immediately said Pawlenty’s proposed tax cuts would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

Obama senior advisor David Axelrod, who finished a speech on the North Side just before Pawlenty started his, credited Pawlenty with “good stagecraft” for holding the speech on Obama’s old stomping grounds. But he said Obama’s budget-fixing recipe is better.

Pawlenty “left his own state with a $5 billion deficit and now he’s counseling the rest of the country on how to handle finances,” Axelrod said. “He proposes massive new tax cuts for upper-income Americans … that would produce huge new deficits. He wants to replay the same formula that got us into the jam in the first place.”

But Pawlenty told the classroom full of students at the university that people should not focus on “whether this makes some group a little more wealthy or a little less wealthy. You can’t be pro-job and anti-business. That’s like being pro-egg and anti-chicken.”

Flirting with the so-called “third rail” of American politics, Pawlenty said he would raise the retirement age for younger workers to start collecting Social Security in the future. People nearing retirement now would not be affected, he said.

“If you’re coming in new to the work force, gradually, over time, we are going to raise the retirement age,” Pawlenty said. “If you’re wealthy, you’re not going to get the cost-of-living adjustment.”

Proposals that can be short-handed as “cutting Social Security” can kill campaigns, but Pawlenty said, “It’s going to be the ‘Jack Nicholson election.’” Referring to the movie “A Few Good Men,” Pawlenty said, “There’s that famous line when he’s on the witness stand and he said, ‘You can’t handle the truth.’ The American people, I think, can handle the truth. It doesn’t mean we freak ’em out. It doesn’t mean we scare ’em. … I’m only doing this because I love the country. We’ll only get it to a better place if people are willing to tell the American people the truth. I am. President Obama isn’t. He’s ducking, bobbing, weaving.”

In a speech at the Misericordia, a home for children and adults with disabilities, Axelrod told the story of how, back in April, he and Obama were crafting a joke about Pawlenty for Obama to use at the White House Correspondents Association dinner. The two were interrupted by a National Security Council staffer who had to brief Obama on something, so Obama asked Axelrod to leave the room.

When Axelrod came back in, Obama rejected a suggestion for a joke about how Pawlenty “could really be a strong candidate but for his unfortunate middle name: bin Laden.”

“ ‘That’s so hackneyed, bin Laden, that’s so yesterday, Why don’t we take that out,’ ” Obama said, Axelrod recalled. “ ‘We’ll put in “Hosni.’’ ’ ” Axelrod didn’t think that was as funny, but he agreed to it.

“It was only the next day that we realized that he had not only eliminated Bin Laden from the joke. He had given the order to eliminate bin Laden from the face of the Earth,” Axelrod told the crowd.

Later, speaking to reporters, Axelrod laughed when asked if he agreed with potential Republican candidate Sarah Palin, who said over the weekend that Paul Revere’s famous ride was an attempt to “warn the British’’ — that the British were coming.

“I think that’s a good reflection of why we can’t abandon education,” he said. “We need good education so everybody knows their history lessons and gets them properly.”

Pawlenty just laughed when asked the same question. He proceeded to a fund-raiser.

Well, first of all,we are – to put it in Pawlenty’s accurate term – ” in deep crap” – and the best Axelrod can do is talk about a joke that Obama’s people are going to go after Sarah Palin for an impromptu remark about Paul Revere when their guy is on the record saying he’d visited 57 states with one more yet to go?

And Obama’s going to talk about Pawlenty’s $5 billion deficit?  Seriously?  And just how many TRILLIONS of deficit does he have just so far???  Obama’s budget just for this term would add THIRTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS to the national debt.  From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama proposed a $3.73 trillion budget Monday  for fiscal 2012 that he said will start reining in runaway budget deficits, but  his plan envisions the gross national debt swelling by almost $13 trillion over  a decade.

Obama’s budget sets up a clash with the  Republican-led House of Representatives over how to recover from the deep  recession of recent years and strengthen the economic foundation for the future,  with federal spending the pivotal battleground.

Obama added $3 trillion to the deficit in less than two years.  Another way to put it: In just nineteen months, Obama added more to the debt than every single US president from George Washington to Ronald Reagan – combined.

And this idiot is talking about $5 billion???  Like we’re not supposed to laugh our asses off and then impeach Obama as a clear and present danger to the United States?  Particularly when in fact Pawlenty in fact DID actually leave office with the budget balanced?  If you’re going to talk about devastating developments after the guy was gone – especially when that characterization is being made by the guy’s political enemies – at least have the courtesy to do the same sort of redacting with Bill Clinton’s legacy – who managed to take all the credit for balancing the budget but wasn’t in any way responsible for the disastrous Dotcom crisis that unfolded on his watch.

Which is to say, Democrats should either give Tim Pawlenty plenty of credit for balancing the budget or at least shut the hell up.

Tim Pawlenty as a man has a good, solid life.  And he’s got the background and the bona fides to get behind.  He is a candidate worthy of consideration.

On Cavuto’s Fox News program on Friday, Cavuto pointed out that the White House was questioning whether Tim Pawlenty was being realistic about whether he could create the kind of 5% GDP that he is talking about.  Pawlenty’s response was almost as good as his quip in my title.  I don’t have an exact quote, but basically he said “I’m an optimist, and I have an optimistic view of America’s future.  We’ve been great before, and I believe we can be great again.  And if Barack Obama could say that he was going to provide jobs for the all the jobless, slow the rising oceans, heal the planet, end all the wars and basically remake our nation, I think I can talk about doubling our GDP.”

Touché.

Tim Pawlenty wants to increase our GDP and grow our economy and create jobs by NOT being anti-chicken while claiming to be pro-egg.  In other words, the man actually makes sense.

Obama has spent three years demonizing and attacking businesses while demanding that they create more jobs.  That, by stark contrast, is 100% pure insane, no additives or preservatives.

Pawlenty wants profound tax cuts.  And while liberals want to ignore history and argue that the more you tax, the more you collect in tax revenue, Pawlenty cites the fact that every single time we have cut tax rates, we have dramatically increased our tax revenues.  See my article “Tax Cut’s INCREASE Revenues; They have ALWAYS Increased Tax Revenues” for that documented history.

Think of it in terms of gas (as I’ve argued before in more detail).  As the price of gas went up and up and up, did people buy the same amount of gas?  No way; they very quickly cut back on their driving.  If you increase the price of something, you sell less of it.  And in the same way, if you increase tax rates, you invariably end up encouraging counter-productive behavior, as the wealthy find it worthwhile to quit investing and instead pursue tax shelters and loopholes to protect their assets.

It is simply a repeatedly documented fact that every single time we have cut tax rates, we have ended up with increased revenues, as businesses and individuals were encouraged to invest because they were being rewarded with the ability to actually keep more of their own profits.  It comes down to this: if I give you a job, and you work hard, but at the end of the day the tax man comes and takes it all away, you’re not going to bother to take my job.  With total taxes exceeding 50% in a number of states, businesses and individuals are put in a position in which they take all the risks in hiring and investing – and if they lose they lose big – but even if they win they aren’t allowed to keep enough of their money to make the risks worth taking.

Democrats claim that the deficit has increased with lower tax rates.  And that is true.  But that isn’t the fault of the lower tax rates – WHICH AGAIN ACTUALLY INCREASED THE GOVERNMENT REVENUES DRAMATICALLY.  The bizarre argument that Democrats are making is analogous to the argument that the guy who lives in his parent’s basement and makes minimum wage and lives within his modest means actually makes more money than the multi-millionaire who buys multiple mansions, yachts and cars and then finds himself in debt.  It was the reckless spending that put us into the hole, not the tax policies that resulted in the politicians who spent that money having more money to spend.  Pawlenty is arguing that we need to profoundly cut tax rates and simultaneously have a balanced budget amendment and dramatically cut our spending.

That isn’t even mentioning the constant hypocrisy of the Democrats as they fail to live up to their own demagogic rhetoric.

Then there’s the issue of the Bush tax cuts.  Democrats say we’ve had the Bush tax cuts, and look what’s happened.  Two things.

First, consider this: Obama signed the compromise to extend the Bush tax cuts for two more years on December 17, 2010.  Many experts believed Obama would be forced to do this as a result of the Republican landslide victory that changed the political landscape in early November.  So let’s look at what has happened to the jobless rate since November:

November 2010: 9.8%
December 2010: 9.4%
January  2011: 9.0%
February 2011: 8.9%
March    2011: 8.8%
April    2011: 9.0%
May      2011: 9.1%

Interestingly, Obama initially appeared to be reaching out to the business leaders he had been attacking.  After getting his head handed to him in November 2010, Obama began to reach out to Republicans.  And then in mid December, he began to reach out to business – with his signing of the Bush tax cuts extension a major part of that reaching out.  In early January, he appointed as his new chief-of-staff a man who had a “business-friendly” persona.

And the market, the investors, the businesses, ordinary Americans, liked what they heard.  The public clearly, overwhelmingly wanted to see Obama reach out to the party that had just won massively.  Republicans are the party of business; reach out to business.  Let’s get to work growing this economy rather than attacking the people who grow the economy.

But even as people liked what they heard, there was always a question, as asked in this case by CNN Money:

“So is Obama really changing his tune on big business? Or is the president merely glad-handing big business while plowing ahead with his 2012 goal of making the rich pay more?”

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long before the business and investment community realized that Obama hadn’t changed his spots at all.  It’s either “same lies, different tune,” or “different lies, same tune” with this guy.

Before hardly any time had passed, “William Daley” became an afterthought and Obama was right back to attacking business with the same ferocity as before.

Obama’s senior economist Austan Goolsbee – now the FIFTH senior Obama economist to jump Obama’s HMO Titanic (with “HMO” standing for “His Majesty Obama” had this to say shortly before HE left.  And this according to an obvious liberal:

When Amanpour asked [Goolsbee] what the Administration could or should be doing to improve conditions, he ticked off items you’d expect to hear from a typical GOP Presidential adviser:  we’ve got to get the debt under control; we have a White House effort to identify and get rid of governmental regulations that are preventing the private sector from growing the economy; we should pass “free trade” agreements backed by the Chamber of Commerce; and we should leverage limited public dollars to release billions in private funding for investments.

Goolsbee’s bottom line:  “It’s now up to the private sector.”  That’s exactly what you’d expect from President Romney’s economic adviser.

And, of course, that brief flash of clarity was immediately followed by Goolsbee’s resignation.  We won’t be having any anti-Marxist heresies on Comrade Obama’s watch, no sir commissar.

Just in case you’re wondering why the economy seemed to be improving before going back into the toilet, there’s your answer.  The people who actually create jobs began to think that Obama finally had some level of actual awareness about how the economy and business and job-creation works, before Obama slammed the door on that idiotic thesis.  They believed Obama’s lies right after the election, then Obama demonstrated (“dictated” is more like it) that he hates business as much as he ever did, then he renewed his war on business, and it’s right back into the crapper with the U.S. economy.

So there’s the backstory behind the economy appearing to improve before diving headfirst back into the gave.  Obama is right back to being “pro-job” but “anti-chicken.”

Up above, I said there were “two things” about the Bush tax cuts and their impact on the economy.  The first point is that the extension of the Bush tax cuts DID work for five months of straight improvement – at least until Obama and the Democrats made sure that businesses and investors knew that they were as hated as ever.

The SECOND point about the Bush tax cuts – or ANY other tax cuts, for that matter – is that they have to be consistent and long-term before they will truly succeed.  This is because businesses need to know their operating environment before they will be willing to take risks such as hiring more workers.  They need to have a clear, long-term picture (most think at least five years) of what their tax liability will be.  And they need the same kind of knowledge about their health care liability and their regulatory liability.  If you start or expand a business, you’ve got one primary question: “Am I going to be able to make this work?”  And in order to answer that fundamental question, you need to know what your costs will be.

Obama signed the Bush tax cut extension for two years – and then very quickly went back on that signature by demagoguing the very thing he’d signed.  Will these tax rates be there for them in two years?  Certainly not, if Obama wins.  And there goes the window to make important investment/growth decisions.  Obama made sure that business owners wouldn’t have a long-term understanding of their taxes.  ObamaCare has thousands of pages being written as we speak; Obama’s regulations are being written as we speak; and nobody knows anything about how any of it will affect them.

Hence the paralysis.

Tim Pawlenty knows that no nation and no economy has ever had a recession that lasted forever – save when leftists have been allowed to run those nations/economies.  He also knows that economic growth and expansion are there just waiting for Obama to leave us the hell alone and get off our backs so that business owners can build better lives for themselves and their families – and create the jobs that result from those businesses growing – by allowing wealth creators to keep more of their own money.

He knows that if you really want to be pro-job, you had better be pro-business.  And that is something that Barack Obama has now proven he will never be, regardless of what he might say to the contrary.

[Update, 8/13]: Today, Michelle Bachmann won the Iowa Straw Poll, versus Pawlenty – who had spent a lot more time and money – coming in a very distant third.

I can’t explain why Iowans basically walked away from Pawlenty, but I can tell you why I’ve been annoyed with him.  It’s simple: his non-stop attack on Michelle Bachmann.

You want to go after people, Tim?  Go after Obama.  Heck, go after Mitt Romney like a lot of people said you should have done during the first debate.  But to go after Michelle Bachmann is just dumb.

To not go after Romney and then go after Bachmann makes you look like a guy who was afraid to fight the star quarterback and then started punching a cheerleader to show you were still “tough.”

You’re trying to present yourself as a true-blue conservative.  Everyone KNOWS Michelle Bachmann is a true conservative.  So why go after her when you could be going after a Mitt Romney who has held whatever position made him look good at the moment?

To continue, some of your attacks against her are just stupid.  Like the one that Michelle Bachmann didn’t stop things like cap and trade and ObamaCare being passed in the House.  As if she was somehow the Imperial Queen of the chamber rather than one minority Republican (at the time) in a chamber with 434 other representatives.  That was just a plain dumb attack.

You finished a distant third, Tim.  Which apparently will allow you to survive.  But if you keep tee-ing off on Bachmann, you won’t be around much longer.

After Two Terrible Years Of Obama, Here’s Our ‘Change’

From an email I received (and liked):

AFTER TWO YEARS OF OBAMA, HERE’S YOUR “CHANGE”: 

	January 2009	TODAY	% chg	Source
Avg.. Retail price/gallon gas in U.S.	$1.83	$3.94	84%	1
Crude oil, European Brent (barrel)	$43..48	$99..02	127.7%	2
Crude oil, West TX Inter. (barrel)	$38..74	$91..38	135.9%	2
Gold: London (per troy oz.)	$853.25	$1,369.50	60.5%	2
Corn, No.2 yellow, Central IL	$3.56	$6.33	78.1%	2
Soybeans, No. 1 yellow, IL	$9.66	$13..75	42.3%	2
Sugar, cane, raw, world, lb. Fob	$13..37	$35..39	164.7%	2
Unemployment rate, non-farm, overall	7.6%	9.4%	23.7%	3
Unemployment rate, blacks	12.6%	15.8%	25.4%	3
Number of unemployed	11,616,000	14,485,000	24.7%	3
Number of fed. Employees	2,779,000	2,840,000	2.2%	3
Real median household income	$50,112	$49,777	-0.7%	4
Number of food stamp recipients	31,983,716	43,200,878	35.1%	5
Number of unemployment benefit recipients	7,526,598	9,193,838	22.2%	6
Number of long-term unemployed	2,600,000	6,400,000	146.2%	3
Poverty rate, individuals	13.2%	14.3%	8.3%	4
People in poverty in U.S.	39,800,000	43,600,000	9.5%	4
U.S.. Rank in Economic Freedom World Rankings	5	9	N/a	10
Present Situation Index	29.9	23.5	-21.4%	11
Failed banks	140	164	17.1%	12
U.S.. Dollar versus Japanese yen exchange rate	89.76	82.03	-8.6%	2
U.S.. Money supply, M1, in billions	1,575.1	1,865.7	18.4%	13
U.S.. Money supply, M2, in billions	8,310.9	8,852.3	6.5%	13
National debt, in trillions	$10..627	$14..052	32.2%	14

Just take this last item: In the last
two years we have accumulated national debt at a rate more than 27 times as
fast as during the rest of our entire nation’s history.Over 27 times as
fast. Metaphorically speaking, if you are driving in the right lane doing 65 MPH
and a car rockets past you in the left lane. 27 times faster, it would be doing
7,555 MPH!

Sources:(1) U.S. Energy Information
Administration; (2) Wall Street Journal; (3) Bureau of Labor Statistics; (4) Census Bureau; (5) USDA; (6) U.S.
Dept. Of Labor; (7) FHFA; (8) Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller; (9)
RealtyTrac; (10) Heritage Foundation and WSJ; (11) The Conference Board;
(12) FDIC; (13) Federal Reserve; (14) U.S. Treasury

It has only taken Obama two years to do this much damage to America.

Imagine how much more he can do in two more years.

Imagine how much more he would do with a second four-year term.

How’s that socialism workin’ out for ya?

Obama’s Growing List of Man-Caused Disasters

I hoped I would find a more or less complete assemblage of all the attempted terror attacks on U.S. soil that we’ve experienced since Obama came to office promising to end terrorism with his sheer exalted wonderfulness.

It wasn’t easy.  List like this one are far and few between.  I had to go back and stumble across a few names based on some attacks I remembered, and start entering search terms.

The media have clearly dropped the ball in keeping track of Obama’s “success” in dealing with this very real threat.

Barack Obama refused to even use the word “terrorism,” instead calling terrorist attacks “man-caused disasters.”  Whereas George Bush took terrorism seriously and went to war to take on those who would kill Americans wherever they were, Barack Obama decided that there was no war, and renamed it an “overseas contingency operation.”

I provided all the html links, and added a couple of comments in brackets.

Man-Caused Disasters Remained A Concern In 2009

Posted by: RFW @ 2:00 pm

Despite the hope and change brought along with a new administration, Americans discovered in 2009 that the threat of terrorism remained. There were several near disasters this last year along with a couple of actual man-caused disasters. While creating the following list I was surprised by the large number of arrests on American soil. I assume my surprise is due to the fact that the media generally forgets about these incidents within a very short period of time and does not make any attempt to report them as another piece of a larger puzzle.

– On May 20, 2009 three U.S. citizens (James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams) and one Haitian (Laguerre Payen) from Newburgh, New York were arrested in a plot to blow up two synagogues in the Riverdale community of the Bronx. The men allegedly placed bombs wired to cell phones in three separate cars outside the Riverdale Temple and nearby Riverdale Jewish Center. It was also alleged that they planed to shoot down military planes operating out of Stewart Air National Guard Base. Both the car bombs and the missiles were actually fakes given to the plotters with the help of an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. [It is also important to note that all three were black converts to Islam radicalized while in the prison system].

– On June 1, 2009 an assailant opened fire on a United States military recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, an American who had converted to Islam, was accused of killing Private William Long. According to law enforcement officials, Muhammad had conducted research on other targets, including military sites, government facilities and Jewish institutions throughout the country. [Note: a successful terror attack].

– On July 27, 2009 seven men were arrested in North Carolina and charged with plotting to wage “violent jihad” outside the United States. Daniel Patrick Boyd, who authorities allege was the ringleader of a group of men that trained in North Carolina, was later also charged with planning to attack the U.S. Marine base at Quantico, Virginia. Boyd and another man, Hysen Sherifi, were charged with conspiring to murder U.S. military personnel.

– On September 14, 2009 Law enforcement agents raided residences in New York City and later that day briefed members of Congress about their terrorism investigation. Authorities found 14 new black backpacks during the raids fueling concern the plan may have been to use them with suicide bombs. Najibullah Zazi and his father Mohammed Zazi were arrested five days later at Najibullah’s home in Denver, Colorado. FBI agents also arrested Ahmad Wais Afzali in New York. Najibullah Zazi, linked by authorities to al Qaeda, was charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.

– On September 23, 2009 Michael Finton, a 29-year-old convert to Islam who went by the name Talib Islam, was arrested in an alleged plot to blow up a federal building in Illinois. Finton drove a van containing what he thought was explosive material and parked it directly in front of the northwest corner of the Paul Findley Federal Building, a courthouse in Illinois. He attempted to detonate it remotely but the explosive was actually harmless, supplied to Islam by the FBI.

– On September 24, 2009 Hosam Maher Husein Smadi was arrested after he placed and attempted to detonate what he believed to be a car bomb in the garage of the 60-story Fountain Place office tower in Dallas. The fake explosive was given to him by an undercover FBI agent.

– On October 21, 2009 Tarek Mehanna, a Boston area man who lived with his parents and wrote a blog about Islam, was arrested for conspiring to become a jihadist and kill Americans. His alleged plots – all failed – included the assassination of prominent politicians, attacking US troops in Iraq and shooting randomly in a unidentified shopping mall.

– On November 5, 2009 a gunman killed 14 people (including one unborn baby) and wounded 30 others at the Fort Hood military base located near Killeen, Texas. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the only suspect in the crime, was radicalized by Muslim ideology. A muslim cleric said Hasan asked him in a December 2008 e-mail “whether killing American soldiers and officers is lawful or not” under Islamic law. [There’s your second successful terrorist attack].

– On December 25, 2009 a Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to detonate the explosive PETN on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. An apparent malfunction in the device and the quick reaction of passengers saved the airplane and 278 lives on board. After being taken into custody, Abdulmutallab told authorities he had been directed by al-Qaeda.

If the media were looking for a theme, as they always do this time of year, 2009 could be called the “Year of the Home Grown Terrorist” as six of those arrested (James Cromitie, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, Daniel Patrick Boyd, Michael Finton, Tarek Mehanna, and Nidal Malik Hasan) were born right here in the United States.

When George Bush took office, there was absolutely no program in place to keep America safe.  There were dozens of al Qaeda terrorist attacks against US targets, and Clinton did nothing nothing.  The USS Cole was attacked by al Qaeda in Yemen in October 2000 during the waning days of the Clinton administration, with 17 American sailors killed, and Clinton swept it under the rug to create the illusion of a “clean slate.”

And George Bush, naively “looking forward, not backward,” attitude, failed to do anything to change our lack of protection under that terrible day seven months into his presidency.

Bush woke up fast.  And with fury and determination unlike anything this country has seen since the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, the Bush administration devised a successful system to keep this country safe.

Barack Obama, taking incredibly foolish attitude that terrorism was merely a crime that he could stop with what amounted to a personality cult based on his own wonderfulness, systematically dismantled many of the Bush protections even as he apologized for America’s efforts to keep its citizens safe.

One of the most important things Bush did was to dismantle the wall that the Clinton administration erected preventing the CIA and the FBI from communicating with one another.  Liberals want to maintain that the Clinton policy did not change the law, but merely clarified it.  But the fact remains that the Clinton administration strengthened the communications barrier when he should have been encouraging intelligence-sharing between our security agencies.

We had a wall separating intelligence agencies into separate and disconnected fiefdoms prior to 9/11.

From the LA Times, April 14, 2004:

WASHINGTON — The scapegoat emerging from the Sept. 11 commission inquiry isn’t an elected official or agency but an obscure government policy that came to be known as “the wall.”

On Tuesday, as FBI, CIA and Justice Department officials continued to point the finger of blame at one another, they all seemed to agree that the wall was the overarching villain. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, for one, described it as “the single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11.”

Bush took great measures to tear down that wall.

To Obama’s great discredit, he picked Clinton Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to become his Attorney General, after almost selecting Jamie Gorelick – Clinton’s General Counsel – for the post.  And both men were at the very top of the food chain in strengthening the wall between the FBI and the CIA.

In other words, Obama decided to surround himself with the men who – out of liberal notions antagonistic to a strong intelligence community – built/strengthened the wall.

Obama selected Leon Panetta, another Clinton political hack, and a man who had absolutely no intelligence experience to qualify for leadership, to run the CIA.  And then he selected Janet Napolitano, again an unqualified selection with absolutely no intelligence experience whatsoever, to run Homeland Security.

Obama made political loyalty, rather than experience or ability, his criteria for choosing the officials most responsible for keeping this country safe.  And from the very start of his administration, he has politicized intelligence.  They have taken nothing but a demagogic politicized (and incompetent) approach since.  And we are beginning to see the risks with national security these people are willing to take to demagogically blame everyone but themselves for their failures:

The White House, according to the source, is in full defensive spin mode. Other administration sources also say a flurry of memos were generated on December 26th, 27th, and 28th, which developed talking points about how Obama’s decision to effectively shut down the Homeland Security Council (it was merged earlier this year into the National Security Council, run by National Security Adviser James Jones) had nothing to do with what Obama called a “catastrophic” failure on Christmas Day.

“This White House doesn’t view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it’s a political issue,” says the White House source. “That’s why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue.”

After Obama appointed Eric Holder to be Attorney General, the man who pardoned terrorists for Bill Clinton went right to work attacking the CIA who had helped catch those terrorists in the first place.  Democrats and the Obama administration repeatedly demonized the CIA and just as repeatedly threatened to criminalize their efforts to keep us safe.

Thanks to Obama’s demagoguery, the morale of the agency that is essential to our protection is depressed, sullen, and enraged:

[T]he CIA better change their mission to “CYA,” because our government is not going to stand behind you.”

Those concerns were echoed by a retired undercover operative who still works under contract for the agency (and asked to remain anonymous when discussing internal agency politics). Clandestine Service officers are both demoralized and angry at Obama’s decisions to release the memos and ban future agency use of aggressive interrogation tactics, the former operative said. “It embarrasses our families. You just can’t keep hitting us. Sooner or later we’re going to stop going out and working.” The official added that “a lot of offense was taken” among some Clandestine Service veterans when Obama declared that the interrogation practices the agency employed under Bush were wrong, even though the new Administration would not prosecute operatives for carrying them out.

Did you hear that?  “Sooner or later we’re going to stop going out and working.”  That’s Obama’s “change” for you: demonizing and even criminalizing the people who kept us safe.  Forcing them to protect themselves rather than take risks protecting the country.

And you wonder why Obama’s national security is falling apart now.

Obama made waterboarding the hallmark of his campaing to demonize Bush.  Now “58% of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day,” and just 30% take Obama’s side and oppose the use of such techniques.

Americans were stupid to join with Obama and oppose waterboarding a year ago.  But Obama is far more stupid in his ideological commitment to prevent America from protecting itself.

The use of waterboarding led to the breakthroughs in intelligence that allowed us to dismantle al Qaeda.

Four former CIA directors loudly objected to Obama’s release of CIA memos.  Among other things, the release of those memos – again, for purely partisan political reasons – enabled al Qaeda to know exactly what US interrogators would and would not do and prepare for our new limited and hamstrung techniques.

Now we’re left with, “Tell us what you know, or we’re give you a polite but firmly-worded scolding.”

And we wonder why our national security is breaking down.

We can see Obama’s weakness and incompetence everywhere we turn.  Obama has officially lost TWICE AS MANY American soldiers in Afghanistan as Bush did in 2008.  And this after months of useless dithering that ultimately assured our enemies that we weren’t going to have the fortitude to fight the good fight over the long haul.

Just the other day, eight CIA officers were killed by a suicide bomber inside the safety of a US military base in Afghanistan in yet another example of Obama’s naive “terrorists can be our friends” policy.  They were so busy trying to get the terrorist to change sides and love Big Brother Obama and so afraid of being “politically correct” or “profiling” that they didn’t dare search him.

You might not see this pathetic episode as a microcosm for Obama’s entire failed foreign policy and national security strategy, but you certainly can’t maintain the assertion that what he’s doing is working.

I started out providing a list of terrorists and attempted and successful terrorist attacks.

We could add Iran to that list.  Because we’re certainly going to see Iran and Iranian-trained terrorists rearing their ugly heads due to Obama’s weakness soon.  Every single day, with every new in-your-face step forward in their nuclear weapons program, amounts to a new terrorist attack upon the United States and Israel.  For what it’s worth, I have been predicting that Iran would obtain nuclear weapons under a Democrat presidency since May of 2008.

When Iran gets its nukes and the ballistic missiles to deliver them (and they are very close to both goals), the world will become a different place.  They don’t have to launch atomic Armageddon to use their nuclear weapons; all they have to do is block the Strait of Hormuz and drive up oil prices tenfold, or send out a wave of international terror attacks.  Will we go to war with them, knowing that if we do they will destroy several of our cities and kill millions of our people?

In other words, we haven’t even BEGUN to see the fruit of Obama’s failures in his “man-caused disasters.”

Democrats Sinking Down To Crazy Town In Polls

From Real Clear Politics:

November 11, 2009

Why Things Don’t Look Good For Dems In The Midterms

Independent political observers and Democrats themselves have been saying for months that 2010 is shaping up as a bad year for Democratic candidates, and the latest Gallup generic congressional ballot test only reinforces the point. Not only do Republicans lead 48 percent to 44 percent, but independents now favor the GOP by 52 percent to 30 percent.

Although generic Republican candidates hold just a 4-point lead, the GOP’s perpetual turnout advantage means their lead would likely be higher if the midterm elections were today. Even a single-digit lead for Democrats in Gallup’s testing often only means the two parties will be competitive, as more registered voters identify with the Democratic Party but more Republicans go to the polls on Election Day.

In the final Gallup survey before the 1998 midterms, Republicans trailed by 9 points but still went on to win a small majority of House seats. In the 2002 midterms, Republicans were down 5 points just before the election but again kept a slim majority in the House.

A year before the 2006 midterm elections –when Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress — generic congressional ballot testing forecast the shifting mood of the country. An August 2005 Gallup survey found Democrats leading by 12 points — one of the widest margins between the parties Gallup had found since the GOP took back Congress in 1994.

That survey was far from the only one to show a shifting mood. This is the first Gallup survey to show Republicans leading this cycle, and while a year is a long time in politics, the poll falls in line with other signs pointing in the GOP’s direction.

“It’s better to look at a series of these polls than one of them, but the fact is Republicans haven’t led the generic ballot since the stone ages,” said David Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the Cook Political Report. “Any sort of deficit is dangerous for Democrats because their support is more heavily concentrated within a few base districts.”

The last time Republicans led was September 2008, just after the Republican National Convention. The poll was an outlier, as no other generic ballot test by any other polling firm had shown Republicans leading in at least four years. None did soon after, either, and Democrats went on expand their majority to more than 75 seats in the House.

Further significance in the poll is the shift among independent voters. The 22-point advantage for Republicans is a far cry from July, when the two parties were statistically tied. The migration of independents toward the GOP mirrors what occurred in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections last week, when a Republican knocked off the incumbent governor in the Garden State and the GOP nominee won by nearly 20 points in the Old Dominion.

The independent swing shows in the new Pew Research survey also released today. It found incumbents — most of which are Democrats these days — in a perilous place, with just 52 percent saying they want their representative re-elected and only 34 percent say most representatives should be re-elected.

“Both measures are among the most negative in two decades of Pew Research surveys,” Pew reports. “Other low points were during the 1994 and 2006 election cycles, when the party in power suffered large losses in midterm elections.”

The latest Gallup survey was conducted Nov. 5-8 of 894 registered voters with a margin of error of +/- 4 percent. The Pew poll was taken Oct. 28-Nov. 8 of 1,644 registered voters.

First of all, let’s look at how the Democrats have “progressed” in a single picture from Gallup:

You’ve got a 10 point swing in the four months that Democrats have fixated on Obamacare, with Democrats losing 6 points, and Republicans gaining 4 points.

And when you see independents now trending Republican over Democrat by more than 20 points, all you can say is WOW.

Obama currently has an approval of -9 (meaning that 9% more voters strongly disapprove of him than strongly approve.  And only 47% of voters at least somewhat approve of him.  That according to the best pollster, Rasmussen, which nailed the results of the 2008 election.

Humorist Dennis Miller, commenting following the disastrous-for-Democrats 2009 off year-election, said that Obama has “smaller coattails than a naked midget.”  If Democrats are counting on Obama to win them re-election, they’d better think some more.

Just keep drinking that Kool-aid, Democrats.  And if it tastes like it has cyanide in it, don’t trouble yourselves.

The current Democrat fairy tale is that the reason Democrats took such a historic pounding in 1994 was because Democrats had failed to pass their massive government takeover of health care.  But the fact is that they got driven out of office because they’d TRIED to pass such an evil monstrosity, and the public didn’t want any more of their poison.

And now here we are again.  And the 2009 off-year elections actually shows Republicans having even greater success than they did at the 1993 off-year elections, which preceded and anticipated the massive rejection of Democrats in 1994.

The funny thing is that during the last two elections from 2006 and 2008, it was Republicans ignoring or explaining away the polls.  Now it’s Democrats.

Go ahead and be the proverbial ostrich, Democrats – or worse yet be this guy

– but the way things are going, you won’t like the “change” you’ll be confronted with when you finally pull your heads out.