U.S. Foreign Policy

The Democratic Platform (That They Won't Tell You)

Obama and Democrats Want to CONQUER America, Not Unite It!

By Michael Goodwin

Published September 10, 2012

New York Post

The system is rigged. America is unjust. Opportunity is dead. You didn’t build that.

Dammit, where’s mine?

Oh, and Republicans are the people who rigged the system. They’re trying to take away your rights to vote, to health care, to education, to housing. They hate women, gays and immigrants. They don’t pay their fair share and they’re un-American.

Barack Obama lights candles, Mitt Romney spreads darkness, and Usama bin Laden is dead.

There, I saved you the time of watching the Democratic convention. For three grating days, demands for more government spending were coupled with sweeping character assassinations of Romney. The GOP is not just wrong; it is immoral.

Don’t agree? You’re not patriotic.

It turns out that the party that left God out of its platform has a religious zeal for its leader. “We believe in Barack Obama,” Sen. John Kerry thundered, to uproarious applause.

Something shocking is happening to the Democratic Party. Its committed adherents are whipping themselves into a frenzy of grievance that justifies seeing their fellow Americans as both evil and a free-cash machine.

Folks, we’ve entered Dear Leader territory.

The wild, outlandish claims that America is corrupt, Republicans are super-villains and Obama is a super-hero were made by every speaker over three raucous nights. A president, a first lady, a former president, a sitting vice president, top members of Congress, labor leaders, celebrities, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, blacks, whites, Latinos — all stayed on the scorched-earth message softened only by homilies to Obama.

Obama did not singlehandedly create this mad orgy, but he lit the match and shows the way. On this, he is a true leader, a transformative one. His invocation of FDR is not unwarranted, even as his channeling of Lincoln’s pain smacked of cheesy self-reverence.

When he says voters “will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation,” he understates the fact. The two paths are a twain that shall never meet.

His rhetorical skills, uncompromising ambition and 1,000-watt smile were on full display last night, unfortunately in service to a vision that would surely bankrupt America.

Instead of a guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, our culture would be reshaped by a growing collectivist power, vested in the state, that would command ever more resources and control. The claim of “leveling the playing field” is, in reality, a plan to control the outcome.

As famously promised, the financial crisis has not been wasted. The recession lingers for many families. 

Unemployment remains stuck at a destructive level. The deficit soars — we borrow nearly $3 billion a day, $20 billion a week, $1 trillion a year.

These are serious problems to most mortals, but for him, they are rich opportunities to expand the reach of Washington. The soaring debt is not soaring enough, so more treasure must be thrown into the bonfire of his vanities. It is a fire consuming the future under the guise of fairness.

This is not mere class warfare. That’s just a tactic. The goal, as it always has been for his kind throughout history, is to accumulate power that the elite can wield without accountability or checks and balances.

Give the man his due. We have not seen his like in our times. His charisma and political skills are unmatched. If only they were admirably used.

Obama promised to unite the country and, his lie exposed, is now determined to win re-election by any means necessary. He may succeed.

Beware, America. The wraps have come off.

Obama is unbound and the delegates in the convention hall went home in full revolutionary spirit. They don’t want to unite America. They want to conquer it.

Barack Obama did build that.

Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist.

President and Congress Create Economic Catastrophe

Our economy is sinking because of Team Obama's missteps

By Peter Morici

Published September 11, 2012

FoxNews.com

Thursday, the Federal Reserve monetary policy committee will discuss further measures to boost the economy.  The US economy is skidding as a result of Obama administration missteps, but the Fed can do little more to compensate for its errors.

The economy is growing at less than 2 percent. Unemployment has fallen to 8.1 percent, largely because so many folks have quit looking for work and are no longer counted in the official tally of joblessness.

Consumer spending and business investment have slowed, because Americans are pessimistic that President Obama’s policies will fix the economy and are hunkering down for a long siege. Mitt Romney has not convinced voters he offers potentially effective alternatives, and despite a growing public wariness about the economy, the former Massachusetts governor lags in the polls.

In August, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee stated it “will closely monitor incoming information on economic and financial developments and will provide additional accommodation as needed to promote a stronger economic recovery and sustained improvement in labor market conditions…”

Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve has already pulled all the levers that might make a difference.  Short-term interest rates—such as the overnight bank borrowing rate and one-month and one- year Treasury Bill rates—are already close to zero.

When the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee met in August more bond purchases to push down long-term Treasury and mortgage rates were already on the table. 

However, over the last several months, investors have moved cash from risky European government and corporate securities to U.S. bonds. The 30-year Treasury and mortgage rates are now near record lows, preempting the effectiveness of any additional Fed measures.

A statement that the Fed intends to keep short rates near zero beyond 2014 would have little impact on investor and home buyer psychology—already, few expect the Fed to push up interest rates in the foreseeable future.

Similarly, cutting interest rates on the deposits commercial banks keep at the Fed to encourage more banking lending won’t help. At 0.25 percent, that rate is already close enough to zero to not matter very much at all.

Central bank policy can help dampen inflation when the economy overheats and lift borrowing and home sales a bit when it falters, but it can’t instigate faster growth when the President and Congress fail to address structural problems.

Demand for US products is burdened by huge trade deficits on oil and consumer goods with China. Both result from government inaction.  

President Obama has significantly curtailed production of oil offshore and in Alaska, and refused calls from economists across the ideological spectrum to force China to stop manipulating its currency. Together, reversing those actions would create at least five million jobs.

Now conditions in Europe threaten to pull down an economic recovery, made needlessly fragile by policy missteps beyond the purview of the Federal Reserve.

Lacking better policies from the Oval Office, there is little the Federal Reserve can do.

Peter Morici is an economist and professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, and widely published columnist.

Terrorists: Coming To A Neighborhood Near You

Iran's Hezbollah Creeping Toward Our Doorstep

Posted 09/07/2012

IBD Editorial 

National Security: With America's focus turned to elections, enemies are not resting idle. Well beneath the radar, terrorists such as Hezbollah and their anti-U.S. allies are creeping toward our border.

National Security: With U.S. focus on elections, America's enemies are not resting idle. South of our border, Marxist-Islamofascist activity is surging. From beneath the radar, the war on terror is creeping toward our border. A first clue that all is not quiet on the southern front can be found in the latest news:

— U.S. Marines are reportedly hunting for Los Zetas cartel members in south Guatemala in "Operation Martillo."

— Two CIA employees were accidentally shot by Mexican Federales at a checkpoint ahead of a drug training session in Mexico.

— Navy SEALs are reportedly on a mission to hunt down Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Chapo Guzman, who may be hiding out in Mexico, northern Honduras or the tri-corner area of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.

These are not ordinary law enforcement operations, like the large-scale Drug Enforcement Administration task force that destroyed Colombia's Medellin Cartel in 1993.

They are national security operations, led by the Departments of State and Defense, whose strategic statements say their first mission is to defend the U.S. and its interests.

The operations seem to have the appearance of hunting for drugs. But their real mission is to end the threat of cartels that are not only menacing small Central American states, but also acting as critical intermediaries for terror groups such as Hezbollah.

The Iranian-linked terror organization uses cartels to run arms into the U.S. and draws backing from de facto state sponsors of terror such as Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, creating an unholy triangle. In testimony to Congress last year, Gen. Douglas Fraser noted that the Southern Command was watching for "the implications of activities of nations such as Iran in our area of responsibility."

According to Jon Perdue, author of a new book, "The War of All The People," these anti-American states, the drug cartels and Islamofascist terrorists have now forged an alliance not seen since the '70s or '80s.

"Three impending events — the Venezuelan elections in October, the U.S. elections in November and what Israel discerns as the closing window of opportunity in which a strike on Iran would have a reasonable chance of success — are all increasing the pressure to know what's going on south of our border," Perdue told IBD.

"Iran's proxies have been in the region for enough time to pose a cross-border threat to the U.S. in retaliation for any Israeli strike."

U.S. officials in far-flung places are sounding the same warning of possible attacks:

"We are increasingly concerned about Hezbollah's activities on a number of fronts, including their stepped-up terrorism campaign around the world with their members' and supporters' growing involvement in large-scale, international criminal activity," said an anonymous U.S. diplomatic source in an interview last month with Lebanon Now.

"Our assessment is that Hezbollah and Iran will both continue to maintain a heightened level of terrorist activity and operations in the near future."

That makes the recent news from Israeli Radio that Iran has set up and supplied a Hezbollah training camp for 30 terrorists in Nicaragua near the Honduran border all the more significant. The base serves as a "meeting point for drug cartels" to acquire weapons and launder money, Israeli Radio says.

Incredibly, it's not the first such base in our hemisphere. Iran already has a forward operating base in north Venezuela, where a hostile, anti-American regime is a magnet for terror and drug groups.

Eighty percent of Colombian cocaine is shipped through the country, presumably with help from the Venezuelan military. The U.S. lists Venezuela's defense minister, Henry Rangel Silva, as a drug kingpin with ties to Hezbollah and FARC.

As a result, national security agencies are involved in an improbable surge of drug operations at least partly fueled by Iran's terror presence. As defense agencies move into drug cases, DEA drug ops are morphing into national security cases as well.

"Last month," according to DEA administrator Michele M. Leonhart, "DEA seized $150 million from the Lebanese-Canadian Bank after gathering evidence that the bank laundered Venezuelan- and Colombian-origin drug money on behalf of Los Zetas and Hezbollah." The bank "played a key role in facilitating money laundering for Hezbollah controlled organizations around the globe."

DEA also thwarted a plot by Iranian state agents who conspired with Los Zetas — again — to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington, D.C., in October 2011.

"Hezbollah are absolute masters at forming close relationships with existing crime groups around the world that helps them facilitate what they need to do to move their agenda forward," Michael Braun, former DEA chief of operations, told CNS News last February. "I don't want to sound too crude, but I think there's going to be hell to pay in the not-too-distant future."

This is worth noting, because the U.S. has been caught off guard in the past. The Obama administration has already cut the military budget for these operations and is reluctant to confront Hezbollah's sponsors such as Venezuela even when the evidence of its complicity is obvious. Venezuela, President Obama has said, "is not a threat." He also leaves our border unguarded.

Iran, however, seems to be looking for a way to a wedge to project power. The mounting evidence is that as we sleep, it has found one through the rogue states and drug cartels of Latin America.

Government Created 2008 Financial Meltdown

Below is much of the TRUE story (that virtually nobody knows) of how your government caused the 2008 financial meltdown that is still with us today. 

Housing Arsonist Clinton Now Portrayed As Heroic Firefighter

Posted 09/07/2012

IBD Editorial

Former President Clinton was in familiar form Wednesday night in Charlotte, N.C. Getty Images

History has rarely seen anything as surreal as former President Clinton riding into Charlotte as a hero rescuing America and President Obama from failed Republican economic policies.

Clinton was the architect of the financial crisis, yet he was able to use the Democratic National Convention to polish his phony credentials as economic genius.

He brazenly warned that GOP challengers Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would wreck the economy by going back to "the same old policies that got us in trouble in the first place."

"They want to cut taxes for high-income Americans even more than President Bush did. They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit federal bailouts."

This may be Clinton's biggest whopper yet. Truth is, it was his own reckless housing policies that wrecked the economy.

Compared to his plan to nationalize the health care system, his housing policy seemed a small and rather innocuous plank in his domestic agenda, and few paid it much mind. But under his National Homeownership Strategy, Clinton took more than 100 executive actions to pry bank lending windows wide open.

First, using his executive order powers, he marshaled 10 federal agencies under the little-known Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending to enforce new "flexible" mortgage underwriting guidelines to combat "lending discrimination in any form."

For the first time, banks were ordered to qualify low-income minorities with spotty credit.

The 1994 policy planted the seeds of the mortgage crisis, as lenders abandoned prudent underwriting standards altogether.

The next year, Clinton set numerical targets for lending in predominantly minority census tracts under a revised Community Reinvestment Act, and added several hundred bank examiners to enforce the tougher CRA rules. Banks that failed had their expansion plans put on hold, a slow death sentence in an era of bank mergers and acquisitions.

For the first time, CRA ratings were made public, egging on Acorn and other radical inner-city groups, who used the reports to extort banks for more than $6 trillion in subprime and other loan set-asides by 2008.

When bankers resisted being saddled with so many additional risky loans, Clinton tapped Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take them off their books, while freeing bankers to originate more of the political loans. He directed HUD to hike Fannie's and Freddie's goals for underwriting affordable loans, which remained in force throughout the 2000s.

When the mortgage giants pushed back, complaining it would be hard to meet the higher targets, Clinton pushed them to load up on subprime loans.

He also authorized Fannie and Freddie for the first time to buy subprime securities to earn credits against the HUD goals. The mortgage giants jumped at the chance, since it allowed them to meet the onerous new goals.

A 2005 HUD report attributed the explosion in subprime securities between 2001 and 2004 to HUD's tougher goals, along with tougher CRA enforcement. Between 2004 and 2006, the mortgage giants bought $613 billion, or 20%, of the private-market securities created to meet their demand under HUD rules.

For good measure, Clinton late in his second term installed several of his cronies, including Franklin Raines, on the inside of Fannie and Freddie. They in turn bought loans from Countrywide and other subprime lenders, who signed "fair lending" contracts with HUD obligating them to meet lending quotas.

Thus the government created a feeding frenzy for subprime loans by putting Fannie and Freddie and private lenders in competition through quota systems enforced by HUD and Treasury.

At the same time, Clinton enlisted prosecutors to sue banks and lenders for allegedly discriminating against minority borrowers, driving banks and subprime lenders deeper into risky areas.

Clinton's policies for the first time threw millions of previously unqualified buyers into the mortgage mix, many of whom later refinanced into even riskier adjustable-term subprime loans which defaulted in droves before the crisis.

Clinton's easy-credit orgy fed a historic bubble that began in 1997 and finally burst in 2007.

Like an arsonist-turned-firefighter, Clinton now deigns to want to save a housing industry he torched during his presidency, while fingering others for the financial crime.

November 6th -- Think About It!

Lawyers and Democrats

The Lawyers' Party

By Bruce Walker

The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama is a lawyer.  Michelle Obama is a lawyer.  Hillary Clinton is a lawyer.  Bill Clinton is a lawyer.  John Edwards is a lawyer.  Elizabeth Edwards is a lawyer.  Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate).  Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school.  Look at leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: Harry Reid is a lawyer.  Nancy Pelosi is a lawyer.

The Republican Party is different.  President Bush is a businessman. Vice President Cheney is a businessman. The leaders of the Republican Revolution: Newt Gingrich was a history professor. Tom Delay was an exterminator.  Dick Armey was an economist.  House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer.  The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.  Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford left office 31 years ago and barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976.

The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers. The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick, like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history, like Gingrich.  The Lawyers’ Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America.  And, so we have seen the procession of official enemies, in the eyes of the Lawyers’ Party, grow. Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? -- Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.

This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients: in this case, the American people.  Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side. Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation.

When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming. Some Americans become adverse parties of our very own government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.

Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big.

When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing. We cannot expect the Lawyers’ Party to provide real change, real reform or real hope in America.

Most Americans know that a republic in which every major government action must be blessed by nine unelected judges is not what Washington intended in 1789.  Most Americans grasp that we cannot fight a war when ACLU lawsuits snap at the heels of our defenders.  Most Americans intuit that more lawyers and judges will not restore declining moral values or spark the spirit of enterprise in our economy.  Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate to American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.

The United States has 5%of the world's population and 66% of the world's lawyers! Tort (Legal) reform legislation has been introduced in congress several times in the last several years to limit punitive damages in ridiculous lawsuits such as spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing the establishment that sold it to you and also to limit punitive damages in huge medical malpractice lawsuits. This legislation has continually been blocked from even being voted on by the Democrat Party. 

When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association goes to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high!