Financial Times: Say Bye-bye to Eurozone?

Wolfgang Munchau and Martin Wolf [and at the time, Amity Shlaes until she graduated to the WSJ] were the first columns I would turn to when the Financial Times was delivered to my door a couple years before sending my daughter to U of Miami rendered me impecunious [even tho she qualified for scholarship aid, etc.]. Here's the lead para and due to the FT's stringent copyright rules, you'll have to link to the column to read the rest.

It is time to prepare for the unthinkable: there is now a significant probability the euro will not survive in its current form. This is not because I am predicting the failure by European leaders to agree a deal. In fact, I believe they will. My concern is not about failure to agree, but the consequences of an agreement. I am writing this column before the results of Sunday’s European summit were known. It appeared that a final agreement would not be reached until Wednesday. Under consideration has been a leveraged European financial stability facility, perhaps accompanied by new instruments from the International Monetary Fund.

After some technical details, Wolfgang cuts to the chase:

The simple reason why there can be no technical quick fix is that the crisis is, at its heart, political. The triple A-rated countries have left no doubt that they are willing to support the system, but only up to a certain point. And we are well beyond that point now. If Germany continued to reject an increase in its own liabilities, debt monetisation through the European Central Bank and eurobonds, the crisis would logically end in a break-up. There is no way the member states of the eurozone’s periphery can sustainably service their private and public debts, and adjust their economies at the same time.
Each of Germany’s red lines has some justification on its own. But together they are toxic for the eurozone. The politics is not getting any easier. The behaviour of the Bundestag underlines the political nature of the crisis. Last month’s ruling of the Germany’s constitutional court strengthened the role of parliament. But it also reduced the autonomy of the German chancellor, who now has to seek prior approval by the Bundestag’s budget committee before negotiating in Brussels. This power shift will not prevent agreements, such as the one currently negotiated, but it will make it harder to co-ordinate policy in the European Council on an ongoing basis.

Is Europe heading for a catastrophe, though they are experts always in not calling a catastrophe a "catastrophe."

Policy co-ordination among heads of state is both undemocratic and ineffective. A monetary union may require more than just a eurobond and a small fiscal union. It may require a formal, if partial, transfer of sovereignty to the centre – that includes the rights to levy certain taxes, impose regulation in product, labour and financial markets, and to set fiscal rules for member states.
Under normal circumstances, European electorates would not accept such a massive transfer of sovereignty. I would not completely exclude the possibility that they might accept it if the alternative was a breakdown of the euro. Even then, I would not bet on such an outcome. Current policy is leading us straight towards this bifurcation point, which may only be a few weeks or months away.
The biggest danger now is the large number of politicians drawing red lines in the sand, and the lack of even a single EU authority willing and capable of cutting through them. Given the multiple uncertainties, there is no way to attach any precise probabilities to any scenarios. But clearly, the chance of a catastrophic accident is bigger than merely non-trivial. The main consequences of leverage will be to increase that probability.

Anyone who believes that all the Eurozone members will vote to cede some more sovereignty to the faceless arrogant unelected gnomes of Brussels has my sympathy and should see their local pharmacist.

Michael Lewis's recent Vanity Fair article that quoted a German economist who predicted catastrophe if the Germans ever abandoned the Deutschmark is a prophet.

And those in the UK calling for their adoption of the euro should head for more than a pharmacist, because intensive psychiatric treatment is the only way to treat delusional disorders of that magnitude.

Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz Dies, Prince Nayef now Crown Prince

Religious Zealot?

Prince Sultan was Secretary of Defense in Saudi Arabia [technically MODA or "Ministry of Defense and Aviation,"] when I served for two years as the Political/Military Officer in the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia. My job was to get to know the top military colonels in their forties who had received American educations and were primed for future high commands, as well as watch over the incredible increase in American "security assistance" which burgeoned in the late seventies after the Saudis hit the OPEC jackpot and had more money than they knew how to spend.

Prince Sultan's son, Bandar bin Sultan, was one of my favorite interlocutors, as he had a Sudanese slave mother and thus had been excluded from the regular family tree, which basically consisted of lazy good-for-nothing layabouts who got senior commands because their daddy was MODA chief & they had a mommy with royal pedigree. Bandar, on the other hand, was born with princely pedigree, but an actual work ethic and a voracious desire to learn and excel---the rarest commodity in the Saudi Royal Family of Saud.

I also cultivated a number of young Saudi officers, several of whom rose to very high government positions later. I was commended by the American Ambassador Porter who had served under Henry Kissinger as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in a special addendum to my "efficiency report" or report card, with a remark that of all the American officers in the Embassy, I had managed [partly through my Arabic language skills acquired at the Foreign Service Institute in Beirut] to get more information from the "working level" of my Saudi counterparts than any other officer [except of course for the legendary DCM, Hume Horan, who spoke perfect Arabic, though unfortunately with a Libyan accent--the equivalent in the USA of a hillbilly accent].

Indeed, the young officers were close to MODA Minister Sultan and when they came to Jeddah where I maintained a residence where they could "sleep over," they would immediately begin drinking beer, which they much preferred to hard liquor which was available everywhere in Riyadh and Dhahran and other military bases. My diplomatic status meant I could order cases of Carlsberg and other European beers unavailable inside the "Magic Kingdom," as we called it back then.

With tongues loosened, the young officers, or some of them, would tell naughty stories about their princely boss. Not only his massive corrupt practices, but his practice of marrying a young Saudi virgin for a forty-day training cruise, so to speak. If the young woman proved acceptable, she could join his collection of concubines. If not, she was sent off with a handsome retainer.

My favorite story, to speak ill of the dead, was of a distant relative of one of the young officers, who shared her dismay about the wedding night with the morbidly-obese prince who was also their Minister of Defense. As Prince Sultan maneuvered his portly frame on top of the fragile teenager, a door opened and an immense black man with an immensely huge extended private part approached the Prince's anus and began to insert same, which in turn gave the Prince himself a boost enabling congress with his supine teen bride. She shouted in fear and disgust and suddenly extracted herself before the process had even begun to proceed vigorously. She was immediately expelled from the bridal suite and sent home packing with a six-figure hush-money good-bye gift. I wrote this down for an airgram because of a lot of details about more venal forms of corruption going on and Ambassador Porter told me that if this airgram ever reached Foggy Bottom, it would arrive at the Israeli Embassy within hours and be the talk of the diplomatic circuit for months.

So we filed it in the circular file and now it can be told.

Sadly, the death of Sultan means that the fragile King Abdullah will be immediately succeeded by Prince Nayef, whom I am one of the few Americans to have met in the last three decades. Even with the disaster in the nineties when 19 Americans were killed by an Iranian-sponsored terror explosion in Dammam, FBI Director Louis Freeh had to wait for days to meet Prince Nayef, whom I met when visiting senior Ministers along with Ambassador John West, former governor of South Carolina. Prince Nayef looked at Ambassador West and almost refused to shake his hand. Prince Nayef is a true Salafist Wahhabi fanatic and hates Americans as the embodiment of spiritual and material evil. He hates Shi'ites as well, which might be to America's advantage were a confrontation with Iran to occur while he was King after Abdullah passes on, but otherwise, I am straining hard to think of any way that this America-hating senior prince, who is the ultimate unbending and uncompromising patriarch, could ever be persuaded to follow American advice, even on vital oil and military issues important to both countries.

This is being written late in the evening and tomorrow I will check my notes and my literature on the Royal Family----I own a dozen books on the subject and when I returned from Saudi, I was extensively debriefed in Langley about a number of remarks and such I'd written on State Dept. telegrams, so there is some residual stuff remaining in my mind. Let me sleep on it and in the meantime, let's wonder who's going to be the next Saudi Minister of Defense and Aviation.

My final thought before turning in. If Khalid bin Sultan, the head of the Saudi Armed Forces in the First Gulf War succeeds his deceased father, I can assure the gentle reader that one of my friends who was Khalid's PERSONAL BANKER during the war showed me one of the checks that Khalid received DAILY from the French food and other perishable materiel during the war. Even this cynical and hardened Saudi, [whose house I visited rather than meet Gen. Schwartzkopf because the two events coincided the same evening [and where I met many influential Saudis who whined that the Americans were hitting mosques in Baghdad during their occasional bombing runs there---all this while Iraqi Scuds were raining on RIyadh almost daily] was ashamed, in his own words and showed me a check for roughly one million dollars that he had just received and would deposit in Khalid's personal private account the very next morning.

Khalid bin Sultan had been extorting millions from Raytheon for its air defense system a decade before when I knew them in Jeddah----a guy named Ray Carver insulted me and the US Embassy in San Diego at a conference shortly after my return and then, six months later, absconded to Brazil with what Raytheon told me was "over fifteen million dollars."

Ray said the US Embassy was negligent and uncaring. Of course, he himself was very caring, of old number one & his family. He may still be rotting in Rio somewhere, but he and Khalid bin Sultan were the perfect marriage of American corruption and Saudi moral squalor---or vice versa, if you will.

All I can say is that King Abdullah will be remembered after he leaves us as, along with King Fahd, one of America's closest friends in the Middle East.

Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, unless his personal views and virulent hatreds have subsided, will be difficult to deal with. And Barack Obama will have to shine this arrogant zealot's shoes to gain the slightest respect or even attention from the Salafist who would be King.

Steve Jobs Biography Reveals He Told Obama, 'You're Headed For A One-Term Presidency'

Steve Jobs was far more than simply a business genius. He was a one-of-a-k­ind prophet. His remarks on Bill Gates being a second-rate­e schemer and first-rate cat burglar of other peoples' technologi­es is right on the money.

But he is a realist when he says to Obungler: ""You're headed for a one-term presidency­," he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administra­tion needed to be more business-f­riendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where "regulatio­ns and unnecessar­y costs" make it difficult for them.

Jobs also criticized America's education system, saying it was "crippled by union work rules," noted Isaacson. "Until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform." Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year."
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Fox News also covers the "one-term presidency" story which is being studiously avoided by the DNC-controlled lamestream MSM.

Memory Chalet: Tony Judt's Long Goodbye to "ALL THAT"

Tony Judt is/was more than a great historian. After learning that he had ALS ["Lou Gehrig's Disease"], he demonstrated that as his faculties slowly waned until he was hardly able to move that his well-stocked mental cabinet was still full of brilliant asides on the strangeness of the Twentieth Century---about which his magisterial book Postwar remains the principal memoir I have read about how a continent which in thirty-one years [1914-1945]destroyed itself tried like the legendary Phoenix to rise from its own ashes.

We are now witnessing the Eurozone in the throes of an economic meltdown which may mean the ejection of Greece, which was rashly admitted into said monetary compact through the deceptive manipulations of Greek banks and government officials---all bearing witness to Virgil's famous line from the Aeneid, "Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes." The Trojan Horse referred to is one of the PIIGS [Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece & Spain] now dragging the rest of Europe [and to a certain extent, North America & other parts of the EU] into some sort of fiscal/monetary black hole. Postwar should have won the Pulitzer for History, but Victor Navasky and the other leftist fascisti at the Pulitzer Board couldn't allow quality to outweigh ideology. And in his latter years, Tony Judt outgrew ideology just as somewhere in Memory Chalet he notes that "By the age of twenty, I had outgrown Marxism, Zionism and communitarian egalitarianism---no mean feat for a kid who grew up in Putney." Or words to that effect.

Judt's characteristic humanity and humility shines from every page. He is able to evoke his years at Ecole Normale Sup with effortless ease, in one case, dismissing the insufferable buffoon Bernard Henri-Levi with a diffident shrug. He reminds us of Arthur Clarke's long-ago comment in Childhood's End that, "in sum, the French are the world's best second-raters."

His years at Cambridge, coming from a background as lower class and humble as any student at that prestigious school, are similarly not remembered with elegiac intensity. And his childhood trips to the humblest chalet in Switzerland, where down-and-out British actors used to spend a month skiing during the off-season in London, are the source of the title. I would have loved to meet Rachel Roberts, then a struggling youngish actress, as described by young ten-year old Tony.

A sort of long wave from the rear platform of a train as it leaves a station to which it will never return, Tony's book is moving and wonderful, with the painful knowledge that it was published posthumously after his death in August 2010 the saddest elegy one can leave for oneself.

Marco Rubio Slammed by Washington Post Castro Commie

Erick Erickson has a great riposte to the absurd Marxist moron who wrote a hit-piece on Marco Rubio, at the behest of the Commissars in Charge of the nation's second-worst source of "news," the editorial-on-the-front-page fiasco called the Washington Post.

Post fits in with my recent blog "May dogs eat your bones," because the attitude of a dog toward a post is as a good place to leave a yellow marker, which this lousy broadsheet is now become. A peeing spot for dogs, or an employment place for dogs like the Manuel Roig-Franzia, a real mutt with rabies, as his article on Marco manifestly exhibits.

Sayonara, the WaPo is going the way of the Redskins QB Rex Grossman, who showed his true colors last weekend when the YELLOW & Burgundy were trounced after Rex's four INTs...!

Matteo Ricci, S.J. Great Explorer Tipped for Sainthood?

Matteo Ricci is well described in Jonathan Spence's great biography, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, as having a phenomenal gift for mnemonic devices, [i.e., things and methods to employ to increase one's power of memory]. But Pope John Paul II opened up the process for his beatification in 1984 and the project got a new boost in 2010. The man should be canonized for sheer brainpower alone, but he lived a pious life in Macau and Beijing, where he was the VERY FIRST FOREIGNER ever allowed to be buried---due to the Ming Emperor Wanli's admiration for his personal qualities.

Ricci was the second person to learn classical Chinese thoroughly, taught by his fellow Jesuit Fr. Ruggiero, and learned the entire Confucian code of an ethical life and the "Lord of Heaven" concept which accompanies Confucianism. He and some fellow Jesuits gained immense influence in the Imperial Court by predicting solar eclipses, which were highly important to the Chinese and one of the few arts this highly intelligent culture had yet to master.

In addition, Ricci built clocks and other western timepieces, and in his spare time constructed a map of the world so modern and detailed that it amazes scholars to this day that a man could have the erudition to do so. His ability to continually amaze and impress the most influential members of the Ming court led to the Emperor Wanli to consider one of history's greatest counterfactuals.

The Emperor, whom Ricci never met face-to-face because of his reclusive nature, was so influenced by the Empress about Ricci's preaching that Confucianism was a stepping-stone to Christianity, which adored "The Lord of Heaven" even more fervently than the Confucians, that he was said to have been willing to convert to Catholicism were the Mass to be recited in Chinese instead of the Latin language.

However, the Pope was persuaded by [jealous?] Dominican and Franciscan advisors that the Jesuits in China had acquired such immense influence by trimming elements of The True Faith to the sails of the Confucian tenets---hence what the Pope would be doing were he to approve this highly iffy exception to the universality of the Latin Mass, according to the Savonarolas surrounding the Pope, would be sanctioning another form of Protestantism or a heterodox form of Christianity at best.

And so this unsung geniuses near-brush with immortality was quashed by Roman courtiers whose Jansenist and Calvinist attitudes were already hampering the Jesuits' heroic efforts to launch an effective "Counter-Reformation" in countries already overrun by the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican versions of Christianity. Luckily for the Jesuits, Poland remained faithful to Rome, largely out of their dislike of the Russian Orthodox and Saxony Lutheran enemies eager to carve up their Sejm, and the "eternal treaty of 1698 giving the Ukraine to Czar Peter the Great in perpetuity. But that's another story.

Ricci also had much influence on a Korean delegate to the Imperial Palace in Beijing, who brought back some Jesuit ideas to his country.

Like St. Francis Xavier, who was the first westerner to reach Japan, Ricci was a Jesuit priest whose love of God and learning combined to forge new avenues of communication between cultures long before globalization became a byword for post-modern diversity.

Let the Dogs Eat His Bones!!!

Qaddafi is dead and all's just a little bit better on the planet. The curse in my headline is the worst one can use on a dead Muslim, according to the Chechens who have been fighting the Russians [for centuries, it seems].

My favorite Qaddafi story was from Basil Tsakos, a Greek arms dealer who was trying to close a deal on a sale of half-tracks to the Libyan loon. He had a personal appointment just around twilight, and was seated in a chair in the very end of a long tent with lights on the ground shining upward and illuminating the white silk of the long rectangular tent. Tsakos told me that there was a very long and expensive-looking white runner of a rug along the 150 feet of the tent, only about a yard and a half wide.

Tsakos waited and waited and waited and it wasn't until around 1100PM that he spied the tall figure of Col. Qaddafi striding all the way down the white rug with the lights shining up into his DIAPHANOUS silk see-through robe. He was wearing NOTHING beneath.

Needless to say, they conducted their business in an atmosphere of utter eerie sexual tension [though Tsakos was in his fifties at the time, he says.] Watching this forty-year old walking 50 yards down a long runway rug with lights shining up onto his naked body proved to Tsakos that Qaddafi was either a madman or a pervert---probably both.

Again, may dogs eat this murderous freak's bones.

Egyptian State Dept. Funded Agitator Advising OWS

A Dude named Death Ray found this in a blog called "Fellowship of Minds" on Wordpress put there by "Eowyn:"

As a forethought, I don't think Glenn Beck & Sean Hannity & Rush Limbaugh or Darrell Issa really support OWS and happily, there is no US Senator from FL named Alan Grayson, because that insult to the human race was sent packing from Congress after lying, cheating, stealing and doing other misdeeds typical of Demonrat politicians. A real sewer rat, but he's rich enough to run again for office.

Susan Sarandon, a grad of Catholic University, just called Pope Benedict XVI a "Nazi." Just saw the terrific movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose on AMC yesterday and Susan reminded me of Belial or perhaps Lucifer's nasty little sister, two of the demons claiming to inhabit poor Emily Rose. Susan S lives in her own private hell.

Deepak Chopra, master of the nuances of foreign policy, blames the USA for the Pakistani ISI-sponsored terrorist attacks on Mumbai last year.

Roseanne Barr is actually trying to duplicate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, at least career-wise, with her insane inane observations. Rosie O'Donnell remains comatose, happily for the viewing public.

It should be noted that empty-headed bimbo Diane Sawyer, who got her start as Ron Ziegler's go-fer girl in the Nixon White House, noted that OWS demonstrations are taking place "in over a thousand countries." Eight hundred of these countries still have not become members of the United Nations.

I thought you guys might find this information interesting:
Celebrities who’ve spoken out in support of Occupy Wall Street:
Yoko Ono: $500 million
Russell Simmons: $325 million
Rosie O’Donnell: $100 million
Roseanne Barr: $80 million
Deepak Chopra: $80 million
Kanye West: $70 million
Alec Baldwin: $65 million
Susan Sarandon: $50 million
Tim Robbins: $50 million
Michael Moore: $50 million
Danny Glover: $15 million
Talib Kweli: $14 million
Mark Ruffalo: $10 million
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass): $188.37 million
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca): $160.05 million
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Ca): $152.62 million
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va): $81.50 million
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas): $73.75 million
Sen. Mark Warner (D- W.Va): $70.19 million
Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo): $56.49 million
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla): 55.47 million
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ): $49.70 million
Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Ca): $46.07 million
Sen. Alan Grayson (D-Fla): $31.41 million
Rep. Harry Teague (D-NM): $25.52 million
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca): $21.74 million (supports OWS)
Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NY): $19.90 million
Sen. James Riche (R-Idaho) : $19.69 million
Rep. Gary Miller (R-Ca): $19.37 million
Rep. Kenny Marchant (R-Tx): $18.41 million
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn): $18.21 million
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo): $15.73 million
Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY): $14.90 million
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine): $12.52 million
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn): $12.12 million
Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont): $10.90 million
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz): $10.52 million
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa): $10.45 million
The Media:
Rachael Maddow: $12.5 million
Matt Drudge: $15 million
Brian Williams: $30 million (networth); $13 million (annual salary)
Keith Olbermann: $35 million (networth); $10 million (annual salary)
Sean Hannity: $35 million
Diane Sawyer: $40 million (networth); $12 million (annual salary)
Katie Couric: $55 million (networth); $15 million (annual salary)
Jon Stewart: $80 million (networth); $15 million (annual salary)
Glenn Beck: $85 million
Anderson Cooper: $100 million (networth); $11 million (annual salary)
Barbara Walters: $150 million
Rush Limbaugh: $300 million (networth); $40 million (annual salary).
Oprah Winfrey: $2.7 Billion
Non-elected political figures:
Louis Farrakhan (leader of Nation of Islam): $3 million
Ralph Nader: $4.2 million
Chelsea Clinton: $5 million
Al Sharpton: $5 million
Joy Behar: $8 million
Ann Coulter: $8.5 million
Rev. Jesse Jackson: $10 million (supports OWS)
Henry Kissinger: $10 million
Eric Holder (U.S. attorney general): $11.5 million
Sarah Palin: $12 million (networth); $1 million (annual salary)
Hillary Clinton: $21.5 million
Arianna Huffington: $35 million (Forbes calls her the 2nd most influential liberal in the media)
John Edwards: $55.5 million
Al Gore: $100 million (supports OWS)
Mitt Romney: $250 million
Here are the networths of some of the Super-Rich, the Top 0.01% (from Forbes’ richest 400 in America list):
Steve Jobs: $8.3 Billion
Carl Icahn (leveraged buyouts): $12 Billion
Sergey Brin (Google): $15.9 Billion
Charles Koch (manufacturing, energy): $19 Billion
Michael Bloomberg (NY mayor): $20 Billion
George Soros: $22 Billion
Jim Walton (of Wal-Mart): $23.4 Billion
Lawrence Ellison (of Oracle): $27 Billion
Warren Buffet: $50 Billion
Bill Gates (Microsoft): $57 Billion
Raging socialist and President-for-life of Venezuela Hugo Chavez has an estimated networth of $1 Billion (!) — the same as Prince Albert II of Monaco. Another raging socialist, Fidel Castro of Cuba, has an estimated networth of $900 million.
Credit: ~Eowyn — fellowshipofminds.wordpress

I don't think Jobs supports OWS from his newly-acquired status and Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin & Ann Coulter are also doubtful. But it is hilarious that so many stupid rich people are essentially calling for their own financial downfall.

My Two Cents Worth on the Vegas GOP debate

I think that the biggest "tell" that Romney let slip was when he answered Perry's rather rude question was:

"I'm running for office!" I can't be seen hiring illegals to do my yard work!!

A tiny glimpse beneath the polished and otherwise-impressive fellow who up to then I considered the best dude for pounding Obama into the ground.

I'm sure the Democrats will pick up on that un-Freudian slip as well. Appearances are what count. After all, that's what got the numb-nut now ruining the country elected POTUS in 2008.

I wasn't impressed at all with Cain's stumbling and bumbling explanations of how he "mis-spoke." But if Art Laffer and Paul Ryan are in favor of 9-9-9, I'm giving it a closer look.

Perry led with his jaw, ancient fossil Newt did well with the two "b's," bicker & broke, & Michelle still isn't that bad on the eyeballs, plus she was a tax attorney for a while and she sure out shown Sarah Palin who demonstrated mediocrity in the Fox after-debate analysis.

Santorum is too sententious and Newt is impressive, but lacks judgment, all brain & little ethics. Huntsman is out of the race, thank God, so we don't have to listen to RINO yammer, which Romney will supply in plentiful supply.

Obama Says "America in Decline? Never"

After Martin Wolf Gideon Rachmann is the Financial Times most perspicacious writer for the Financial Times [Amity Schlaes was, but now works for the Wall Street Journal as its best financial reporter.] The NYT's Joe Nocera is a minor leaguer in the international finance journalism world, and submissive to his dominator, Big Brainless Boss Pinch Sulzberger. Krugman is a Little League wannabe.

Here's Gideon from a sane perspective, which the illiterate in this WH & the dunce in the Oval Office are too simple to comprehend:

Recently I met a retired British diplomat who claimed with some pride that he was the man who had invented the phrase, “the management of decline”, to describe the central task of British foreign policy after 1945. “I got criticised,” he said, “but I think it was an accurate description of our task and I think we did it pretty well.”
No modern American diplomat – let alone politician – could ever risk making a similar statement. That is a shame. If America were able openly to acknowledge that its global power is in decline, it would be much easier to have a rational debate about what to do about it. Denial is not a strategy.

The witless second-rater in the WH has surrounded himself with third-rate "yes-men" whose one job is to keep this Little Leaguer playing in the Major Leagues. Contrary to his delusional remarks from time to time, he "hasn't got game" and a whole new Peter Principle book should be written to describe the writings and squirmings of this serial finger-pointer.

President Barack Obama has said that his goal is to ensure that America remains number one. Even so, he has been excoriated by his opponents for “declinism”. Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist, has accused the president of embracing American weakness: “Decline is not a condition,” he declared. “Decline is a choice.” The stern rejection of “declinism” is not confined to the rabid right. Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor and doyen of US foreign policy analysts, regards talk of American decline as an intellectual fad – comparable to earlier paranoia about the US being overtaken by Japan. Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, has just published a book that is subtitled, “What went wrong with America – and how it can come back”.
What is not permissible, in mainstream debate, is to suggest that there may be no “coming back” – and that the decline of American power is neither a fad nor a choice but a fact.
Admittedly, America’s relative decline is likely to be much less abrupt than the falling-off experienced by Britain after 1945. The US is still the world’s largest economy and is easily its pre-eminent military and diplomatic power. However, the moment at which China becomes the world’s largest economy is coming into view – the end of the decade seems a likely passing point. Of course, it is true that China has its own grave political and economic problems. Yet the fact that there are roughly four times as many Chinese as Americans means that – even allowing for a sharp slowdown in Chinese growth – at some point, China will become “number one”.
Even after the US has ceded its economic dominance, America’s military, diplomatic, cultural and technological prowess will ensure that the US remains the world’s dominant political power – for a while. But although economic and political power are not the same thing, they are surely closely related. As China and other powers rise economically, they will inevitably constrain America’s ability to get its way in the world.
That is why America needs to have a rational debate about what “relative decline” means – and why the British experience, although very different, may still hold some valuable lessons.
What the UK discovered after 1945 is that a decline in national power is perfectly compatible with an improvement in living standards for ordinary people, and with the maintenance of national security. Decline need not mean the end of peace and prosperity. But it does mean making choices and forging alliances. In an era of massive budget deficits, and rising Chinese power, the US will have to think harder about its priorities. Last week, Hillary Clinton insisted that America will remain a major power in Asia – with all the military expenditure that this implies. Very well. But what does that mean for spending at home? Few politicians are prepared to have that discussion. Instead, particularly among Republicans, they fall back on feel-good slogans about American “greatness”.
Those who refuse to entertain any discussion of decline actually risk accelerating the process. A realistic acknowledgement that America’s position in the world is under threat should be a spur to determined action on everything from educational reform to the budget deficit. The endless politicking in Washington reflects a certain complacency – a belief that America’s position as number one is so impregnable that it can afford self-indulgent episodes such as the summer’s near-debt default.
The failure to have a proper discussion of relative decline also risks leaving American public opinion unprepared for a new era. As a result, the public reaction to setbacks at home and abroad is less likely to be calm and determined and more likely to be angry and irrational – feeding what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics”.
For the fact is that management of decline is as much to do with psychology, as to do with politics and economics. In 1945, the British task was made much easier by the afterglow of victory in the second world war. Britain’s adjustment was also helped by the fact that the new global hegemon was the US – a country tied to Britain by language, blood and shared political ideas. It will be tougher for America to cede power to China – although the transition will also be much less stark than the one faced by Britain.
These days the British have learnt almost to revel in failure. They buy volumes with titles like the “Book of Heroic Failures” in large numbers. It is quite common for the supporters of a losing English soccer team to chant, “We’re shit and we know we are.” This is not a habit I can see catching on in the US. When it comes to managing decline, self-abasement is optional.

To describe Charles Krauthammer as a member of "the rabid right" negates a lot of Rachmann's credibility, as does his ritual bow to Richard Hofstadter. However, some of his points are well-taken, BUT he does neglect to mention that the paranoia about Japan in the '80s and its subsequent collapse might possibly be mirrored in the "teens" by factors in China that an adoring journalistic fetishist mafia of the socialist sort has yet to discern.

Bill Daley Jr. sings an Irish Lullaby for the Deaf!

I lived in Chicago for a decade
and got to know a lot of influential people in the Windy City through my contacts connected to my job at Amoco as Political Risk and Economics Advisor to the Chairman and CEO Larry Fuller. At the time, we at Amoco were trying to set up a series of gas stations in Mexico, which was difficult to do because the ruling PRI Party was a socialist/populist regime so nationalist in its petroleum policy that there were ZERO US-owned & operated facilities in the gigantic corruption-ridden political warehouse for PRI family and friends that was [and still is] PEMEX.

I was in charge of trying somehow to get the NAFTA negotiations out of the doldrums that they had fallen into and in 1993 came up with the idea of Amoco's co-sponsoring a conference on NAFTA in DC with CSIS, where I had previously worked for about a year as a fellow. CSIS agreed, but said that Amoco had to provide the money to put on the conference. I personally worked up a proposal and since Larry and his Vice=Chairman Pat Early liked the idea, wrangled a couple of hundred thousand dollars to fund CSIS's conference-facilitation scheme.

I asked personal friend Bill Richardson, for whom I had sponsored a fund-raiser in my home in the late '80s, and head Democrat on the Energy Committee, if he would be a headliner and he said not only that, he'd try to get his friend Senator Bill Bradley, a pro-NAFTA advocate, to be the co-star along with a number of oilmen and economists.

The conference, due to timing and luck, not only went forward, but was a rousing success which was noticed in Mexico City by the Presidente, and downstream negotiations began to move forward rapidly, just as the NAFTA negotiations, stuck because of the opposition of left-wing Democrats driven by big union money, were tossed out in the 1994 elections and suddenly, NAFTA sailed through soon afterward with Republicans in favor of Free Trade now a majority in both houses.

Soon afterward, Bill Daley, who was Sec'y of Commerce under Bill Clinton during the NAFTA negotiations, left his job and returned to Chicago to a seven-figure job with a very influential law firm. A senior partner in the firm and I were friends and he kindly asked if I ever wanted a one-on-one meeting with Daley, he would see if he could set it up. Amazingly, Bill Daley, after checking me out, agreed and he, myself, and my friend had a friendly one-hour conversation in their plush facilities in the Loop. Over coffee and tea and crumpets, we covered the landscape of oil and politics and US trade policy, etc.

I proudly narrated my role in initiating the CSIS conference on NAFTA, and how coincidentally or not, it had seemingly been so successful that it'd seemed to help get the Congress and the Mexican government both out of their respective stuck-in-the-mud positions on NAFTA and moved the process on the Hill forward, even though it was a small event in the larger picture.

To my surprise, suddenly Daley became irritated and brusquely told me that he'd always thought NAFTA and other free trade agreements were "a bad idea" and, though following the Democrat Party line laid down by Billy Jeff Clinton, had been opposed to it from the start and was still skeptical that it would ever work. Now that he was free to speak about his real opinion on the issue, he didn't mince words on how NAFTA and free trade agreements in general were not good for the American economy.

Let's flash forward more than a decade and a half later, and listen to the first question the NYT's highly-respected Bill Harwood asked in a one-on-one interview published in the NYT:
Q. This is a sour time in Washington, but you got the trade deals done. Tell the average struggling business owner, or person looking for a job, how’s this going to affect their life?

A. Well, in addition to the three trade deals for Korea, Panama and Colombia we got trade adjustment assistance, which really is going to people who are negatively affected by trade deals. And there are negatives to them. But over all, you’re creating jobs in the U.S. because of lowering barriers in foreign countries, especially in Korea. The other thing it does, John, is it sends the message to the rest of the world that in these economic times the U.S. will continue to be aggressive about doing trade deals. Our economy is very open to the world.
The rest of the interview is equally interesting, but this gives one a great optic on how a second-rate POTUS like Obama tends to surround himself with third-rate yes-men like Axelrod, Plouffe, and yes, Bill Daley, who is now his White House Chief of Staff.

Politics not only makes strange bedfellows, but it has a tendency to create total hypocrites. In Chicago, of course, this goes back to Machine Politics which have strangled the city's political development for the last century and a half [to be fair, even the GOP participated with Big Bill Hayward's machine in the teens and the twenties].

Like a modern-day Al Jolson, this rotten apple will sing any song required if the Dude in the Big House tells him to.

Like his much-lamented [!?!] daddy, former mayor William The First, Billy-boy's Irish songbook are full of all sorts of tunes that are generated, in this case, in Kenya and Indonesia. This apple didn't fall far from its tree.

To a native of Wisconsin and born in Milwaukee, which was run for decades by Mayor Zeidler, a socialist, and who re-elected Victor Berger, a socialist, even though he was in jail in 1918 during his re-election, there is no comparison. Wisconsin's politics may be skewed and occasionally zany, but they are not the sink of corruption and moral sewage which prevails in "The City of Big Shoulders." The big shoulders are necessary to carry the weight of all the political money siphoned off to the Democrat machine and its crony capitalists.

In south Florida, the politics aren't pretty, but nowhere matches Chicago, New York, Boston and LA for pure putrid politics.*

*Yes, I left out New Orleans, but NO doesn't qualify in the size of the peculations and brazen thievery that prevails in the four capitals of crony capitalism named above. In Milwaukee, socialism wasn't pretty, but it was clean and didn't rob honest taxpayers.

Obama's Houseboy Billy-boy Daley singing some blackface BS for "His Massa"!

I lived in Chicago for a decade
and got to know a lot of influential people in the Windy City through my contacts connected to my job at Amoco as Political Risk and Economics Advisor to the Chairman and CEO Larry Fuller. At the time, we at Amoco were trying to set up a series of gas stations in Mexico, which was difficult to do because the ruling PRI Party was a socialist/populist regime so nationalist in its petroleum policy that there were ZERO US-owned & operated facilities in the gigantic corruption-ridden political warehouse for PRI family and friends that was [and still is] PEMEX.

I was in charge of trying somehow to get the NAFTA negotiations out of the doldrums that they had fallen into and in 1993 came up with the idea of Amoco's co-sponsoring a conference on NAFTA in DC with CSIS, where I had previously worked for about a year as a fellow. CSIS agreed, but said that Amoco had to provide the money to put on the conference. I personally worked up a proposal and since Larry and his Vice=Chairman Pat Early liked the idea, wrangled a couple of hundred thousand dollars to fund CSIS's conference-facilitation scheme.

I asked personal friend Bill Richardson, for whom I had sponsored a fund-raiser in my home in the late '80s, and head Democrat on the Energy Committee, if he would be a headliner and he said not only that, he'd try to get his friend Senator Bill Bradley, a pro-NAFTA advocate, to be the co-star along with a number of oilmen and economists.

The conference, due to timing and luck, not only went forward, but was a rousing success which was noticed in Mexico City by the Presidente, and downstream negotiations began to move forward rapidly, just as the NAFTA negotiations, stuck because of the opposition of left-wing Democrats driven by big union money, were tossed out in the 1994 elections and suddenly, NAFTA sailed through soon afterward with Republicans in favor of Free Trade now a majority in both houses.

Soon afterward, Bill Daley, who was Sec'y of Commerce under Bill Clinton during the NAFTA negotiations, left his job and returned to Chicago to a seven-figure job with a very influential law firm. A senior partner in the firm and I were friends and he kindly asked if I ever wanted a one-on-one meeting with Daley, he would see if he could set it up. Amazingly, Bill Daley, after checking me out, agreed and he, myself, and my friend had a friendly one-hour conversation in their plush facilities in the Loop. Over coffee and tea and crumpets, we covered the landscape of oil and politics and US trade policy, etc.

I proudly narrated my role in initiating the CSIS conference on NAFTA, and how coincidentally or not, it had seemingly been so successful that it'd seemed to help get the Congress and the Mexican government both out of their respective stuck-in-the-mud positions on NAFTA and moved the process on the Hill forward, even though it was a small event in the larger picture.

To my surprise, suddenly Daley became irritated and brusquely told me that he'd always thought NAFTA and other free trade agreements were "a bad idea" and, though following the Democrat Party line laid down by Billy Jeff Clinton, had been opposed to it from the start and was still skeptical that it would ever work. Now that he was free to speak about his real opinion on the issue, he didn't mince words on how NAFTA and free trade agreements in general were not good for the American economy.

Let's flash forward more than a decade and a half later, and listen to the first question the NYT's highly-respected Bill Harwood asked in a one-on-one interview published in the NYT:
Q. This is a sour time in Washington, but you got the trade deals done. Tell the average struggling business owner, or person looking for a job, how’s this going to affect their life?

A. Well, in addition to the three trade deals for Korea, Panama and Colombia we got trade adjustment assistance, which really is going to people who are negatively affected by trade deals. And there are negatives to them. But over all, you’re creating jobs in the U.S. because of lowering barriers in foreign countries, especially in Korea. The other thing it does, John, is it sends the message to the rest of the world that in these economic times the U.S. will continue to be aggressive about doing trade deals. Our economy is very open to the world.
The rest of the interview is equally interesting, but this gives one a great optic on how a second-rate POTUS like Obama tends to surround himself with third-rate yes-men like Axelrod, Plouffe, and yes, Bill Daley, who is now his White House Chief of Staff.

Politics not only makes strange bedfellows, but it has a tendency to create total hypocrites. In Chicago, of course, this goes back to Machine Politics which have strangled the city's political development for the last century and a half [to be fair, even the GOP participated with Big Bill Hayward's machine in the teens and the twenties].

To a native of Wisconsin and born in Milwaukee, which was run for decades by Mayor Zeidler, a socialist, and who re-elected Victor Berger, a socialist, even though he was in jail in 1918 during his re-election, there is no comparison. Wisconsin's politics may be skewed and occasionally zany, but they are not the sink of corruption and moral sewage which prevails in "The City of Big Shoulders." The big shoulders are necessary to carry the weight of all the political money siphoned off to the Democrat machine and its crony capitalists.

In south Florida, the politics aren't pretty, but nowhere matches Chicago, New York, Boston and LA for pure putrid politics.*

*Yes, I left out New Orleans, but NO doesn't qualify in the size of the peculations and brazen thievery that prevails in the four capitals of crony capitalism named above. In Milwaukee, socialism wasn't pretty, but it was clean and didn't rob honest taxpayers.

The anti-Amity Schlaes Fine Whine of "Declinism"

Peter Baker wrote a fine book about Putin's new version of Stalinist totalitarianism in 2005 and his wife Susan Glasser helped him co-write it. But she echoes Richard Holbrooke, whom I lunched with [twice] in Lyon, France soon after he founded Foreign Policy, a great mag in the beginning which has declined to become another DNC sounding board. Glasser is now Editor-in-Chief of the Zhdanov/Goebbels type mediocre tripe FP produces nowadays. Here's her latest whine about the Tea Party:

The Amerislump is upon us.

Conservative agitator Pat Buchanan’s new book says America might not survive until 2025; it’s called “The Suicide of a Superpower.” Even less alarmist observers are suddenly sounding a lot like Buchanan, as economists now predict that China may surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy a lot sooner than we thought, and important conferences are convened to deal with what Fareed Zakaria memorably dubbed “the post-American world.”

Over at Foreign Policy, my colleague Joshua Keating (coiner of the “Amerislump” phrase) has taken to tracking all the gloom-and-doom punditry under the heading “Decline Watch” on our website—and not a day goes by without a classic example, from the poverty-stricken new muppet on Sesame Street who doesn’t have enough to eat, to the supposed cocaine slump on Wall Street and the new government initiative to attract Chinese shoppers here — so they can buy Made in China goods, but at the cheap prices caused by our undervalued dollar.

The zeitgeist about America is so bleak that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even begins her speeches these days being forced to remind audiences that the U.S. economy is still the world’s largest and its workers by far the most productive. Clinton, no declinist, invariably does her best to convince us that America is not retreating from the world at a time of national angst. Or at least that it should not.

“Beyond our borders,” she wrote in a recent piece for Foreign Policy that argued that the United States should make a strategic pivot away from the wars of the Middle East and toward the economic opportunities of Asia, many now question “America’s intentions — our willingness to remain engaged and to lead. In Asia, they ask whether we are really there to stay, whether we are likely to be distracted again by events elsewhere, whether we can make — and keep credible economic and strategic commitments, and whether we can back those commitments with action.”

Clinton’s answer is a resounding yes, but the questions themselves are revealing — even extraordinary — coming from a sitting Secretary of State, and the context is pretty clear: These are angst-ridden times to be an unabashed advocate of America’s role in the world, when everyone from Tea Partiers at home to financial markets abroad wonders about the staying power of this humbled superpower.

Sixteen years ago, when another sitting Secretary of State wrote for Foreign Policy, the world looked like a starkly different place to a top American official — a post-Cold War mix of opportunities and threats, bound together not so much by anything except the promise of American leadership. Indeed, said Warren Christopher, “the simple fact is that if we do not lead, no one else will.” It was an age, and one that now seems quaintly outdated, of America the indispensable nation.

If Pat Buchanan is an "agitator," then Glasser is an agitprop specialist, let's call her an "agitpreppie," whose adherence to the Axelrod/Plouffe party line is finely-tuned to keep the restless Volvo-and-brie crowd from escaping the Demonrat plantation.

Holbrooke was a unique combination of lover/fighter/asshole who did have the gumption to get things done, like the American Institute in Berlin of which he should be proud to be the founding godfather. But FP has simply become another dishonest knock-off of Pravda for the pretentious Chardonnay-loving lefties of the Upper West Side.

I knew Warren Christopher personally as an FSO back in the day, and he was always a dependably uninspiring drudge whose legacy led to Madeleine Albright, whom I worked for in the Mondale campaign in 1984 and who is the true author of the phrase that the USA is the "indispensable nation."

It still is indispensable, but is being led by another uninspiring mediocrity who resembles Les Gelb's famous statement about Holbrooke that, "rumors that Dick Holbrooke is half-Jewish are only half-true." Obama is only half-black, but is descended from SLAVEOWNERS and SLAVERS* on both sides of his weird pedigree. He wants to keep the rest of the American blacks on the plantation.

*Barry Soetero's father is a member of the Luo tribe in Kenya who served as middlemen in capturing other black Africans for the slave market in Zanzibar who would be sold to the Arabs and sent to work in the salt mines of Mesopotamia or the harems [after painful castration in which one of ten survived because sand was used as the antioxidant in the grisly procedure] of Cairo and Istanbul. His mother is descended from slaveholders who moved to "Bleeding Kansas" in the 1850s after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1850 made Kansas a state which would vote on whether or not to remain slave or free. Many famous western outlaws, including Jesse James and the Clinton Gang were also slaveholder advocates from Kansas who "went rogue" after their cause [defended by the Democratic Party and its racist oligarchy and supported by many Democrats in the North] was defeated in the Civil War. Somehow, the Demonrats managed, with help from victims of academicide like Krugboy & his ilk, to con the semi-literate portion of the citizenry that the GOP was responsible for the Confederacy, Connect the dots....

The anti-Amity Schlaes Fine Whine of "Declinism"

Peter Baker wrote a fine book about Putin's new version of Stalinist totalitarianism in 2005 and his wife Susan Glasser helped him co-write it. But she echoes Richard Holbrooke, whom I lunched with [twice] in Lyon, France soon after he founded Foreign Policy, a great mag in the beginning which has declined to become another DNC sounding board. Glasser is now Editor-in-Chief of the Zhdanov/Goebbels type mediocre tripe FP produces nowadays. Here's her latest whine about the Tea Party:

The Amerislump is upon us.

Conservative agitator Pat Buchanan’s new book says America might not survive until 2025; it’s called “The Suicide of a Superpower.” Even less alarmist observers are suddenly sounding a lot like Buchanan, as economists now predict that China may surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy a lot sooner than we thought, and important conferences are convened to deal with what Fareed Zakaria memorably dubbed “the post-American world.”

Over at Foreign Policy, my colleague Joshua Keating (coiner of the “Amerislump” phrase) has taken to tracking all the gloom-and-doom punditry under the heading “Decline Watch” on our website—and not a day goes by without a classic example, from the poverty-stricken new muppet on Sesame Street who doesn’t have enough to eat, to the supposed cocaine slump on Wall Street and the new government initiative to attract Chinese shoppers here — so they can buy Made in China goods, but at the cheap prices caused by our undervalued dollar.

The zeitgeist about America is so bleak that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even begins her speeches these days being forced to remind audiences that the U.S. economy is still the world’s largest and its workers by far the most productive. Clinton, no declinist, invariably does her best to convince us that America is not retreating from the world at a time of national angst. Or at least that it should not.

“Beyond our borders,” she wrote in a recent piece for Foreign Policy that argued that the United States should make a strategic pivot away from the wars of the Middle East and toward the economic opportunities of Asia, many now question “America’s intentions — our willingness to remain engaged and to lead. In Asia, they ask whether we are really there to stay, whether we are likely to be distracted again by events elsewhere, whether we can make — and keep credible economic and strategic commitments, and whether we can back those commitments with action.”

Clinton’s answer is a resounding yes, but the questions themselves are revealing — even extraordinary — coming from a sitting Secretary of State, and the context is pretty clear: These are angst-ridden times to be an unabashed advocate of America’s role in the world, when everyone from Tea Partiers at home to financial markets abroad wonders about the staying power of this humbled superpower.

Sixteen years ago, when another sitting Secretary of State wrote for Foreign Policy, the world looked like a starkly different place to a top American official — a post-Cold War mix of opportunities and threats, bound together not so much by anything except the promise of American leadership. Indeed, said Warren Christopher, “the simple fact is that if we do not lead, no one else will.” It was an age, and one that now seems quaintly outdated, of America the indispensable nation.

If Pat Buchanan is an "agitator," then Glasser is an agitprop specialist, let's call her an "agitpreppie," whose adherence to the Axelrod/Plouffe party line is finely-tuned to keep the restless Volvo-and-brie crowd from escaping the Demonrat plantation.

Holbrooke was a unique combination of lover/fighter/asshole who did have the gumption to get things done, like the American Institute in Berlin of which he should be proud to be the founding godfather. But FP has simply become another dishonest knock-off of Pravda for the pretentious Chardonnay-loving lefties of the Upper West Side.

I knew Warren Christopher personally as an FSO back in the day, and he was always a dependably uninspiring drudge whose legacy led to Madeleine Albright, whom I worked for in the Mondale campaign in 1984 and who is the true author of the phrase that the USA is the "indispensable nation."

It still is indispensable, but is being led by another uninspiring mediocrity who resembles Les Gelb's famous statement about Holbrooke that, "rumors that Dick Holbrooke is half-Jewish are only half-true." Obama is only half-black, but is descended from SLAVEOWNERS and SLAVERS* on both sides of his weird pedigree. He wants to keep the rest of the American blacks on the plantation.

*Barry Soetero's father is a member of the Luo tribe in Kenya who served as middlemen in capturing other black Africans for the slave market in Zanzibar who would be sold to the Arabs and sent to work in the salt mines of Mesopotamia or the harems [after painful castration in which one of ten survived because sand was used as the antioxidant in the grisly procedure] of Cairo and Istanbul. His mother is descended from slaveholders who moved to "B leading Kansas" in the 1850s after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1850 made Kansas a state which would vote on whether or not to remain slave or free. Many famous western outlaws, including Jesse James and the Clinton Gang were also slaveholder advocates who "went rogue" after their cause was defeated in the Civil War. Connect the dots....

Amity Schlaes on why cutting taxes enriches us all.

Amity Schlaes and Martin Wolf were my favorite economic analysts when I had the Financial Times delivered to my door. I read her book on the phony claims of the "New Deal" engineered by FDR & his army of orcs and became convinced that what jump-started the US economy wasn't government spending per se, but the unique circumstances of World War II on energizing the creative juices of the American singular ability to turn dreams into reality, even if they result in the atomic bomb.

Here Amity explains how Steve Jobs' success was the result of an obscure Wisconsin congressman named Steiger [as a Wisconsin native, I am proud to point this out] and several other legislative and regulatory reforms:

Sometimes two separate news events turn out to be related. That's the case with the Wall Street protesters and the extraordinary mourning at the death of Steve Jobs.

Some protesters have praised Jobs as the billionaire who was different—unlike the callous Wall Streeters, he was "beneficial to society." There's a second connection. More than anything else, the Wall Street protesters feel powerless, mere individuals against great banks. Maybe the mourning over the Apple founder is so intense precisely because Jobs gave individuals power. It's hard to think of a gift more empowering than your own personal computer.

Also fueling the grief is a more general suspicion that another Jobs won't come along soon. He was a creature of his times, the late 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s. There wasn't merely Jobs; there was also that economy in which he and other venture-capital recipients operated. Americans fear that the opportunities Jobs enjoyed won't come again.

It's worthwhile therefore to go back and look at what happened in those years, and then to look at how policy changes may have affected innovating firms that received venture capital.

The era didn't start well. The mid-1970s were a dead period. Then suddenly, from 1977 to 1978, new private capital devoted to venture capital increased by 15 times, to $570 million in 1978 from $39 million the year before.

In 1977, public underwritings of firms with a net worth of less than $5 million amounted to a meager $75 million. By 1980 that figure was $822 million, as Michael K. Evans, founder of Chase Econometrics, points out. The venture-capital boom continued down the decades, serving computing, technology, biotech and many other areas.

Jimmy Carter's disastrous four-year term did have one upside---deregulation. And this is the only time you'll see me say anything positive about the bumbler from Plains.

Over time, what we might call the Jobs Economy led to a jobs economy. In the past quarter-century, Apple and innovative companies like it yielded employment for a whole region, Silicon Valley; an improvement in America's standard of living with the creation of personal computing; and productivity gains throughout the economy.

But what caused this boom? Three policy changes. The first was a tax cut for which this newspaper campaigned.

In the late 1960s, Congress had raised the tax rate on capital gains dramatically, to 49%. The received wisdom behind the increase was that mainly wealthy people realized capital gains, and that, a la Warren Buffett, the wealthy ought to pay a larger share of social programs for lower earners. But venture capital dried up so much that by 1977-78 even the Carter administration nursed doubts about high rates.

Voices advocating a rate cut soon grew louder. The idea found a champion in 40-year-old Rep. William Steiger, whom Time magazine profiled as "a baby-faced Wisconsin Republican who has the gung-ho style of a JayCee president." Time worriedly reminded readers that in Steiger's capital gains tax-cut plan "the benefits go to people with incomes of $100,000 or more"—back then, the rich.

Steiger nonetheless found dozens of co-sponsors. He succeeded in getting Congress to pass the Steiger Amendment, which halved the capital gains rate, to an effective 25%.

Many wealthy people did indeed make more money as a result, including some of those less-lovable billionaires on Wall Street. But they then invested in companies like Apple. The revenues from the rich-man's rate cut were stronger than expected, so the federal government got more money to spend—more money than expected for those social programs.

A second policy change came in pension law. In 1974, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, known as Erisa, codified the common law prudent-man principle by warning pension investors that they might be neglecting their fiduciary responsibilities if they invested in risky projects like Apple. The pension funds and portfolio investors duly stayed away. That changed when the definitions were relaxed later in the 1970s, as Josh Lerner and Paul Alan Gompers have noted in "The Money of Invention." Pension funds could again tell themselves and their clients that they were acting responsibly when they invested in start-ups. The funds began to put more cash into venture capital.

A third factor, and one that ensured the boom would continue, was a law passed in 1980. Sponsored by Sens. Birch Bayh of Indiana and Bob Dole of Kansas, the measure clarified murky intellectual property rights so that universities and professors, especially, knew they owned their own ideas and could sell them. That knowledge gave professors and lab teams an enormous incentive to put to commercial use plans and ideas for inventions that they had long ago shelved in their minds and offices.

The obscure pair of wonks who were hired for summer jobs as teenagers by the fledgling Hewlett/Packard were now set to fly on their own. The two Steves, showman Jobs and geek Wozniak, launched their company from the family garage in 1977, I believe, and virtually invented the prototype PC on their own. But showman Gates and his buddy were also tinkering and were suckling at the teat of IBM & snatching concepts like GUIs from smarter dudes like Jobs and some geeks at Xerox. The stage was set and the Super Bowl ad in 1984 with the sledgehammer being thrown into Big Brother's face on the big screen was the beginning of a new era:

To these three advantages one might add a fourth. The advantage of a disadvantage: the poor performance and reduced expectations of the 1970s. New technology (telephones that showed the face of the person you were calling, linked networks of computers) had been around for years, but they languished in those university offices or in museum displays.

The demand for this new technology, frustrated as it was, built and built. It meant that when someone like Jobs finally did deliver a gizmo, his market was a whole impatient generation of would-be gadget handlers, people who were delighted to have new technology and delighted to find new applications for it.

"Personal Computers are Becoming More Useful to Many Investors," wrote Journal editors in wonderment in 1980. It's not inconceivable that similar changes in policy today might yield a similar boom. When it comes to taxes, the 1970s takeaway is that taxes on capital should always be lowered, and dramatically. Cutting a rich man's tax can serve the lowliest citizens.

The second takeaway is that an administration's choices matter when editing, interpreting or enforcing statutes and regulation. The Erisas of today are Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley; subtle clarifications in their rules can affect the overall gross domestic product. A third is that property rights matter; today's Bayh-Dole should be patent reform.

But last of all there's the silver lining to our current cloud. It is that the economic mediocrity of the recent years constitutes someone's advantage. And that someone is young innovators. All this time, demand has once again been building. As soon as the economy feels reliable, people will go out and make the 2015 equivalent of the early PC.

Amity Schlaes should have got the Nobel Prize that the impostor Krugman got just as Obama snatched one for being a good Uncle Tom in the DNC plantation.

"Occupy Wall Street" Protestor Paid $22/hr plus Overtime!

"The sad-sad Schmuck says his "benefactors" are "getting their money's worth" in the paycheck this sandwich-board for Obamacare and Soros-type Communism picks up daily for slacking with anti-bank and anti-WS signs at a bus stop.

Could it be more of Obunglere's "stimulus" funds funneled through a crooked union gang of thugs? Yesterday, commissar-for-BS Pelosi again accused the Tea Party protesters of "spitting on members of Congress" after this botox-queen paraded across Capitol Hill two years ago carrying an outsized gavel.

Now the lamestream MSM blames the GOP for not passing O'Bozo's jobs bill that he wants "NOW, RIGHT NOW" while stutter step Harry Reid mumbles on about no more filibusters. When the GOP sweeps the Senate in Nov. 2012, this BS machine will have to eat his own product. Obungler can't even get the Demonrat Senate to pass his jobs bill, but the gutless spineless half-breed blames the GOP.

JD Samsom's Fine Whine About Occupying Wall Street

The NROnline has an excellent article that says what I've been saying in my blogs for a long time, that the entire Californification of the USA, about which read Cong. McClintock here, rests on Nietzsche's concept of Ressentiment which NRO defines thusly:

The great, and probably terminal, flaw of the Left’s various grievance-group “isms” is that they implicitly rely on a world in which trade-offs have been abolished. It isn’t just that Samsom should be free to move to New York and consecrate herself to her “art.” It’s that she should be free to do that while enjoying all the benefits of her choice and suffering none of the consequences. What she wants is not the freedom to choose but the freedom from having to choose.

What sort of worldview makes this fantasy conceivable? Well, if I had to pick just one French term of art popularized by a 19th-century German philologist to describe the Occupy Wall Street set and its attendants, it would be Nietzsche’s Ressentiment. Why does good old English “resentment” not suffice? Why is the extra ‘s’ and fancy French pronunciation required? Well, resentment is about begrudging the success of your betters as a way to avoid reflection on your own failures. The Nietzsche scholar Robert Solomon described resentment as an “impotence self-righteousness” directed at your superiors, and contrasted it with anger (directed at your equals) and contempt (directed at your inferiors). But ressentiment is what happens when you take that impotent self-righteousness and define a whole morality of good and evil in terms of it, build a whole belief system out of it, build an ideology, a political movement — an occupation.

Nietzsche’s work is highly problematic, and has of course been misappropriated and abused for a hundred years, but I think he got this much right on. He was also correct to point out that out that the leaders of men, the successful few — you might even call them the one percent — are too busy acting, doing, and accomplishing to complain about their “emotional crises.” Contrast with the likes of Samsom, who in a stream of consciousness puts all her resentment on paper — writes it all down for the world to see — drawing a line — a squiggly, irrational line, but a line nonetheless — from her insecurity about not being able to make coffee or wait tables or draw a steady paycheck, to the demonization of Wall Street. Seriously, the first paragraph of her piece is all about how ill-equipped and incompetent she is (I didn’t say it, she did!) and the clarion cry at the end is that all this constitutes “Another reason to come together. Another reason to occupy Wall Street. Another reason for change.”

If this is how the other 99 percent think — or rather, don’t — we’re done for.

JD Samsom's moronic rant is on HuffPo, which I rarely like to link to. But surprisingly, The Atlantic Monthly has an interesting piece by a shrink who thinks her age-cohort is ruining the younger generations by abolishing competition in team sports and generally mollycoddling their youngsters never to feel failure or any kind of pain whatsoever.

Occasionally, besides Megan McArdle, The Atlantic has articles that DO make sense. I swiped it from a doctor's office.

Solyndra Mess Smells as Bad as Fast and Furious

MessNBC notes that a big Obama fund-bundler named Spinner pushed for a big loan despite publicly "recusing" himself because his wife's law firm

represented the company, newly released emails show.
The emails show that Steve Spinner, a former Obama fundraiser who helped monitor a clean energy loan guarantee program, was more actively involved in a loan for Solyndra LLC than administration officials have acknowledged.
Also revealed in the emails: A top Treasury Department official complained that the Energy Department was keeping her agency in the dark about Solyndra's precarious financial situation.
The emails, released by the administration in response to congressional investigators, show that Spinner was actively involved in a planned September 2009 trip by Vice President Joe Biden to Solyndra's Fremont, Calif., headquarters for a groundbreaking ceremony. Biden did not go on the trip but spoke via satellite. Solyndra declared bankruptcy last month after receiving a $528 million federal loan.
In the emails, Spinner, who founded a sports fitness company, repeatedly pushed Energy Department and White House budget officials to ensure that the loan was finalized before Biden's planned trip. The loan closing was announced at the groundbreaking ceremony on Sept. 4, 2009.
"How — hard is this? What is he waiting for?" Spinner wrote in an Aug, 28, 2009 email to a DOE official. "I have the OVP (Office of the Vice President) and WH (the White House) breathing down my neck on this. They are getting itchy to get involved."
Later that day, Spinner asked the same DOE official to "walk over there and force him to give you the answer.'
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The emails refer to a DOE loan guarantee official who was evaluating the Solyndra loan.
A White House official declined to comment when asked if Spinner's conduct was appropriate.
The Obama administration allowed news organizations to read the emails on Friday as it prepared to send them to investigators for the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The panel has been looking into the Solyndra and more broadly at the $38 billion loan guarantee program.
Spinner, who served as an adviser to Energy Secretary Steven Chu from April 2009 to September 2010, pledged in writing not to have "active participation" in any solicitation, due diligence or negotiation related to the Solyndra loan, which has become an embarrassment for the White House and a rallying cry for GOP critics of Obama's clean energy program.
Other political news of note

Spinner's wife, Allison Berry Spinner, is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a firm in Palo Alto, Calif., that represented Solyndra on the DOE loan. Federal records show the firm received at least $2.4 million in legal fees related to the loan.
In one email, Spinner asks a DOE official whether the White House budget office has completed its review of the Solyndra loan.
"Any word on OMB? Solyndra's getting nervous," he wrote, four minutes after receiving an email from Solyndra.
Official in charge of energy loans resigns
Energy Department spokesman Damien LaVera said Spinner acted as a liaison for the loan program under the economic stimulus law, but that he played no role in evaluating individual loan applications.
"Because his wife agreed not to participate in or receive any financial compensation from her law firm's work on behalf of any loan program applicant, Mr. Spinner was authorized to oversee and monitor the progress of applications, ensure that the program met its deadlines and milestones, and coordinate possible public announcements," LaVera said in an email Friday.
Spinner "was not allowed to make decisions on the terms or conditions of any particular loan guarantee or decide whether a particular transaction was approved," LaVera said, adding that the arrangement was approved by the Energy Department's ethics officer.
Spinner now is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank closely identified with the Obama administration, where he focuses on energy policy.
A biography on the CAP website says Spinner "helped oversee the more than $100 billion of loan guarantee and direct lending authority for the Title XVII Loan Guarantee Program and the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing loan program."

An administration official, speaking on condition that he not be identified because of the congressional investigation, said Friday that Spinner "clearly was actively involved in facilitating between DOE and OMB," the White House budget office, but said his main focus was the planned Biden trip for the Solyndra groundbreaking.
Administration officials cited an August 2009 email from Aditya Kumar, an aide to former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, now Chicago mayor. Kumar asks Spinner who are Solyndra's major investors and receives a detailed answer.
The White House "doesn't even know the names of the (Solyndra) investors," said the official, refuting oft-repeated claims by some GOP lawmakers that the Solyndra deal was approved to benefit Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser, a Solyndra investor and Obama fundraiser.
The emails also show that Mary Miller, Treasury's assistant secretary for financial markets, contacted the White House budget director in August with her concerns only two weeks before Solyndra filed for bankruptcy and was raided by the FBI.
When the company ran out of cash, the Energy Department agreed in February to a plan to restructure its debt. In that restructuring, some $75 million in private investment was ranked ahead of the government in the event of bankruptcy. That private fund was backed by a prominent Obama fundraiser.

Fast and Furious resulted in the deaths of two American government agents----wonder if Solyndra and F&F together can destroy this Demonrat RICO conglomerate of anarchists occupying Wall Street, SEIU union thugs and goons, victims of academicide, Hollyweirdos and trial lawyers?

Oops, almost left out the lamestream MSM---the NYT & all its pilot fish like NBC, CBS, ABC & Communist News Network.

Herman Cain Warmly Received At Values Voter Summit, Says Perry-Backer Calling Mormonism 'A Cult' Is Not Appropriate

The more I see of Herman Cain, the more I like about him. Not an ounce of affirmativ­e action fake elitist tone that Obamarx reeks of. The guy started from nowhere, was a math whiz and ballistics officer who started his own SUCCESSFUL business, was CHAIRMAN of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank and knows more about economics both on the ground and theoretica­lly than the phony mulatto now sitting in the Oval Office. I don't see color, I see quality, and Cain is certainly more genuine than Romney, more rational than Perry and more electable than Bachmann. I think he and Marco Rubio as VP candidate would knock Obungler's socks off in 2012, despite the elitist media/acad­emicide/Ho­llyweird mafiosi and the union thugs and goons being all for Obungler's privatist socialism and gigantic government by regulation­s and rules and insane lez-bean queens.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Fast and Furious: The Crimes Continue with the Cover-Up

Eric Holder has been lying to Congress in the fiasco that saw a decorated US border agent killed with guns allowed to "walk" into Mexico. The POTUS and liar-in-chief says he supports Holder. A US Immigration Officer in Mexico was also killed with an F&F gun. Eleven other crimes in the US have been involved with the F&F arsenal that the ATF "lost track of" in another example of the criminal incompetence of this regime.

Watergate didn't result in the deaths of American agents, as Fast and Furious has. Obama & Holder have blood on their hands. No "Inspector General" will find anything and it will be another whitewash by the RICO thugs that comprise the DNC & SEIU international crime ring. When the fox is inspecting the chicken coop, don't expect to solve your problems.

Words of wisdom from Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh contends that President Barack Obama is "setting up riots" through the Occupy Wall Street protests that are spreading across the country.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the White House is behind this,” he said. “Obama is setting up riots. He is fanning the flames.”

The “anarchists” and “union thugs” who are rallying against corporate greed are Obama’s constituents, Limbaugh said.

“Occupy Wall Street is his base,” he said. “Those are his foot soldiers.”

Calling Obama’s news conference about the American Jobs Act this morning “incompetence on parade,” Limbaugh said the nearly $450 billion spending package has no chance of curing the economic ills.

“Somebody explain to me how spending $450 billion is going to get every bridge repaired, every school repaired, every road repaired,” he said. “This is utter foolishness.”

Obama is “trying to sell the notion that this bill . . . is a magic elixir,” Limbaugh said.

“He’s the one screwing everybody,” he said. “He’s the one happily managing the decline of the United States of America.”

Read more on Newsmax.com: Rush Limbaugh: Obama 'Setting Up Riots' With Occupy Wall Street
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!

George Soros: Criminally Guilty of Insider Trading

Soros, the Nazi-loving Hungarian Jew who made a billion dollars shorting the pound lost his appeal of an insider-trading conviction in France in 2002.

The French criminal case hinged on trades that the Hungary-born investor had executed 14 years earlier in the stock of Société Générale that reaped his hedge fund, the Quantum Fund, $2.9m in profits.
Mr Soros was found by the court in 2002 to have had inside knowledge about the intentions of a group of super-wealthy French investors – the “golden granddads” – to bid for the bank.
Although the bid failed, Mr Soros’s fund profited by buying shares before – and selling after – the group’s intentions became public and resulted in a spike in SocGen’s share price.
Mr Soros was fined €2.2m (£1.9m), later reduced to €940,507 on appeal.
At the time, Mr Soros described the guilty verdict as a “gift to my enemies”.
He is now left with one final, unlikely, chance to rid himself of his conviction: an appeal to the grand chamber of the ECHR. Such appeals are only heard on an “exceptional basis”, according to the court’s rules.

This criminal Soros is, of course, one of the prime movers along with the lame stream MSM and POTUS O'Bozo insurrectionary "Occupy Wall Street" anarchy that demonstrates that when you have no policy or intelligence, rousing up the rabble is about the last best hope a criminal administration and its criminal supporters have left to rely on.

Only in America: Homecoming Queen Kicks Winning Field Goal over Arch-Rival after Half-time Crowning

Brianna Amat made the New York Times in spectacular fashion:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — In his 18 years at Pinckney Community High School, Jim Darga, the principal, said, the homecoming queen had always been crowned at halftime of the school’s football game. Never before, though, had she had to be summoned from the team’s locker room.

Brianna Amat, the first girl to make the Pinckney varsity football team, said her teammates had “been so accepting of me.”
And that was just the beginning of Brianna Amat’s big night.

If being named homecoming queen is a lifetime memory for a high school student, so, too, is kicking a winning field goal. For Amat, 18, they happened within an hour of each other.

On Friday, with Pinckney leading powerful Michigan rival Grand Blanc, 6-0, at the half, Amat, the first girl to play football for the school’s varsity, was asked to return to the field. When she arrived, she was told that her fellow students had voted her queen. When the tiara was placed on her head, she was wearing not a dress, like the other girls in the homecoming court, but her No. 12 uniform, pads and all.

A short while later, with five minutes to play in the third quarter, Amat was called to the same field to attempt a 31-yard field goal. She split the uprights.

The kick proved decisive as Pinckney held on for a 9-7 victory against a Grand Blanc team that had come into the game ranked seventh in the state in its division. It also earned Amat the nickname the Kicking Queen.

The twin accomplishments were still sinking in Monday, said Amat, a senior who has played soccer since she was 3 but who tried out for the football team only last spring, at her soccer coach’s suggestion.

“It’s just starting to hit me today,” she said in a telephone interview. “The guys were congratulating me, but without them, I wouldn’t even have gotten close” to making the kick.

“It was pretty special,” said Darga, who watched Amat win her crown and the game and called her an “accomplished athlete.”

Before Friday, Darga said, Amat was known primarily as a student with a perfect 4.0 grade average who was involved in student government, serving as treasurer.

Although the high school has had a female player on its junior varsity team, Amat is the first girl to make the main squad in Pinckney, a village of 2,000 17 miles from Ann Arbor. The school, which draws from several rural communities, has 1,440 students.

Amat’s prowess as a defender on the school’s girl’s soccer team led to the invitation to try out as a football kicker. She competed against two male students, including one who wound up as the team’s punter.

“She won the position on her own merit,” Darga said. “She won it outright.”

Amat had no previous football experience before joining the team in summer training. But she spent hours kicking balls in a field to her father, Ronaldo, a window and door salesman, and her brother Brandon, a University of Michigan student.

Amat said her father and mother, Nanci, who works at the high school, approved of her playing.

“They’ve been really supportive of everything I do,” she said.

Amat made her debut during the Pirates’ first game this season, when she was called in to kick an extra point after a touchdown.

“The whole warm-up, I was nervous,” she said.

She said she stayed calm during the kick but that afterward, “my heart was beating in my ears from the adrenaline.”

Amat said she had not needed much adjustment to become Pinckney’s first female varsity football player. She was surprised at how quickly she was made to feel like one of the guys.

“They’ve been so accepting of me, it’s as if I’ve always been their teammate,” she said.

The main drawback has been the separate locker room provided by the school, which keeps her apart from the male players.

“After the games, they’re celebrating in their locker room and I’m by myself in my locker room,” she said.

On Friday night, Amat said she had an extra incentive to make her third-quarter field goal. She had missed an extra-point attempt in the first half, leaving Pinckney ahead by 6-0.

“I put pressure on myself to make it,” Amat said. “I wanted to apologize to the team.”

She added that the miss also distracted from the homecoming ceremony.

“I don’t think I went into homecoming mode,” she said. “I just wanted to get back into the locker room and be with the team.”

At Pinckney, students vote for a homecoming court made up of one male and one female student from the freshman, sophomore and junior classes, and three boys and three girls from the senior class. The king and queen are elected in a schoolwide vote.

In the locker room at halftime, Amat and a male teammate were told they were part of the court, and went out in their gear. (Had she not been playing, Amat said, she would have worn “a nice dress, a long dress, what the other girls had on.”)

She was met by her brother, her kick retriever, who had given up tickets to the Michigan-Minnesota football game the next day so that he could watch her play and, ultimately, to serve as her homecoming escort.

There was no time to relish the victories, said Amat, who went straight home to bed. As student treasurer, she had to rise early Saturday to help with decorations for the homecoming dance. She wore a black and silver dress to the event, which she attended with a group of friends.

Winning kick and coronation behind her, Amat said she was now concentrating on winning acceptance to Western Michigan, where she applied in September.

Amat plans to set sports aside to concentrate on a degree in business advertising. But she said she might reconsider if offered an athletic scholarship.

The attention, from classmates and the news media, has been a surprise to the kicking queen.

“For the longest time, I was the shyest kid ever, and now everybody knows my name,” she said. “It’s a totally different experience.”

Hans Christian Andersen couldn't have scripted it better. Sounds like it's ready for the big screen, but having her brother as her homecoming escort probably ruins the love-interest.

Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski Debate Rick Perry N-Word Controversy (VIDEO)

I think for once Mika beats Meathead Joe, the RINO phony on the importance of the issues. Invading Mexico is actually major-leag­ue crazy compared with some hunting camp. Joe has an obvious animus against Perry, so Mika wins the award for which issue has JOURNALIST­IC importance­. Joe just loves them gotcha' games, I guess.



I worked with Mika's father at CSIS and like the guy, who's an open-minde­d guy who's often wrong, but will consider other points of view. I also was at CSIS with Henry the K, who believed he could turn water into wine and then walk on it. All my colleagues who worked closely with both gave Zbig thumbs up and Henry the Italian salute....­behind his back.



Sadly, Morning Joe is the best of a bad lot on morning news shows, and the quality of journalism over the last couple of decades on air and in the print press---ex­cept for the WSJ which is now the most widely read American daily----c­ontinues to decline precipitou­sly. I'd say we're gonna have Euro-style street riots pretty soon---no dialogue going on with Obamarx & his buddies blaming everything but their own improviden­t "stimulus" spending for our economic bad times.



All the pols are so compromise­d that Herman Cain, who chaired the KC Fed and started and succeeded on his own in an HONEST [sorry, Mitt] business, is beginning to look like the best of a bad lot.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Garofalo & Company make huge fools of selves

Herman Cain is now a new indicator that a person is a "racist" if one supports Cain:

Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. If you reject the policies of President Obama, you’re a racist. If you support the policies of Herman Cain, you’re a racist. What’s a “white” person to do?

As soon as someone plays the race card, you know that they lost the debate. It’s a 5th-grader’s playground trump card to win an argument he just lost in front of his friends. He got stomped, so he yells out, “Your mother wears army boots!” Liberalism can’t stand facts, and they can’t believe that opposition or support of a candidate is based on policy considerations. Sure, there are bigots out there . . . in both parties. Keep in mind that it was the Democrats that supported Jim Crow laws in the South. Following the logic of today’s race baiters, when Democrats began to reject these laws, they were racists.

The white queen of hate, illogic, and stupidity, Janeane Garofalo, said this about Republicans who support Herman Cain for president in 2012.

People like Karl Rove liked to keep the racism very covert. And so Herman Cain provides this great opportunity say you can say ‘Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look we have a black man.

Karl Rove? Once again, it’s “everything is Bush’s fault” syndrome. In case you don’t know, Mr. Cain “is a businessman, a talk show host, a former executive of several multi-billion dollar companies. . . . He has for the last several years been a mainstay at Tea Party rallies all across the country and draws big, enthusiastic crowds among these conservative activists. He’s a powerful speaker and really knows how to wind up an audience. Lately he’s won several straw polls and is ranked no less than the number 3 candidate to take the Republican nomination. He is also black.”

Black comedian D.L. “Doc” Hughley has made similar comments about Cain.

Apparently, Herman Cain’s victory in the GOP Florida straw poll was too much for the liberal-minded Hughley to bear. On September 27, Hughley launched into a stream of demeaning, racially charged tweets about Cain on his Twitter account @RealDLHughley, which his loyal followers responded to in kind. You may remember Hughley’s fleeting CNN talk show was cancelled in 2009 because he said during an interview with former RNC Chairman Michael Steele “the Republican National Convention literally looks like Nazi Germany.”

Typical of liberal-minded, tolerant Democrats, there was a stream of bigoted comments to follow. Cain was compared to the “original Cream of Wheat,” “Stepin Fetchit” and the “butler in Gone with the Wind.” Do you remember when Michael Steele was running for the Senate in Maryland? They pelted him with Oreo cookies to identify him as “black on the outside and white on the inside.” Here’s how the Washington Times reported the story:

Black Democratic leaders in Maryland say that racially tinged attacks against Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele in his bid for the U.S. Senate are fair because he is a conservative Republican.

Such attacks against the first black man to win a statewide election in Maryland include pelting him with Oreo cookies during a campaign appearance, calling him an “Uncle Tom” and depicting him as a black-faced minstrel on a liberal Web log.

Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat, said Mr. Steele invites comparisons to a slave who loves his cruel master or a cookie that is black on the outside and white inside because his conservative political philosophy is, in her view, anti-black.

“Because he is a conservative, he is different than most public blacks, and he is different than most people in our community,” she said. “His politics are not in the best interest of the masses of black people.”

So who’s really on the Plantation? Who’s beholden to their “masters”? Those who support the Democrat Party. If a black man attempts to escape and head for freedom, he or she will be dragged back and told to vote for their masters or else. It’s no wonder that Herman Cain said that Blacks “have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view,” especially since Democrat policies have kept so many blacks in poverty as well as a lot of poor whites for more than four decades.

And Remember that Eric Holder believes that the "NEW" Black Panthers have a right to carry automatic weapons in full view around voting booths in black precincts. The Demonrats are the real fascist slaveholders and project their own hatred and impotence onto tax-paying Tea Party members, whose ancestors made America the greatest country in the world.