Social Economics 101

Thought for Today

"There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one's self on lies and fables."

~~~~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (presciently writing about Obama?)

Guest post from Mark West of the Chattanooga Tea Party.

When Evil Visited Our City

It was another quiet, sunny day in beautiful Chattanooga, affectionally known as “Scenic City” Tennessee.  Just a few weeks earlier our city with such charm and character was voted “Best Town Ever” by hundreds of thousands of Americans.  And yet, on the morning of July 16 at 10:45  the peace in our city was tragically shattered in a sudden and violent manner.  In the moments that followed, our city was drawn into a worldwide battle between good and evil.  Previous to July 16, our sleepy neighborhoods, bustling shops, busy ballfields and overflowing restaurants seemed to insulate us from this enemy, which to date had been advancing in their one-sided war, with very little opposition.  

Our leaders, entrusted with the security of the world’s sole superpower, like too many Americans, have wished this evil away.  Many of our leaders at all levels, both federal and state, have refused to acknowledge the truth of the ideology known as “radical islam” or “islamic terrorism.” 

Ignoring a deadly virus in one’s body does not eliminate the certain death that virus will cause. Likewise, refusing to mouth the words “islamic terrorist” does not insulate innocent citizens from the evil that most certainly awaits them. 

Unfortunately my fellow Chattanoogans and I know the truth of this evil ideology.  We have seen it first hand.  We have witnessed the physical effects.  And tragically, there are four families whose lives have been forever changed with the reality that their beloved Marine will never return home.   

But, did this have to happen?  Could this virus evil have been stopped?  As importantly, will our state and national leaders once and for all place the lives of their citizens above their stubbornness and political correctness? 

We all know the story of the boy who cried wolf for some time to a point that folks around him stopped listening to him so that when the wolf finally showed up, there was no one to kill the wolf and save the boy. 

For many years now there have been many in our nation crying wolf.  The wolf is radical islam.  Here in Chattanooga our organization has been warning our community of this evil for years.  And our movement across Tennessee has been expressing a dire warning to our political leaders, both in Nashville as well as Washington.   

In 2013 a group of over 500 concerned Tennesseans met US Attorney Bill Killian in Manchester, TN to express our opposition to his veiled threat that if citizens expressed an “inappropriate” negative sentiment towards Islam that they could be charged and prosecuted.  For many of us, the extent of our comments was to assert that Islam is not a religion of peace, in opposition to what we’ve heard regurgitated since a few days after 9/11.  Truthfully, our assertion is backed up with irrefutable evidence at infinitum.  The meeting with Killian was a volatile gathering because of Killian’s antagonistic attitude towards citizens who, while perhaps unruly at times, believed that their cry of “wolf” was unquestionably justified. 

Fast forward to yesterday and we heard from the same US Attorney Bill Killian at a news conference in Chattanooga just a few hours after 4 marines were killed.  Ironically, or perhaps sadly, the warning by hundreds of citizens who cried “wolf” about the threat of radical islam was tragically validated when Killian admitted that Chattanooga was struck by domestic terrorism.  

There’s no jubilation in being right about a tragedy.  In fact, there is sadness, frustration and anger.  Too many of us are experiencing these emotions because once again the policies of our nation, guided by men like Killian, Governors, Congress and the Commander in Chief continue to result in dead Americans.  

Whether it’s the fourteen murdered and twenty-nine wounded by Nidal Hasan (which was falsely documented as “workplace violence”) or now our own four tragic deaths and several wounded in Chattanooga, these senseless deaths might have been prevented if we merely had a Commander in Chief and many other elected officials who would speak truth.  

Wishing a war or an enemy away will not cause them to dissipate.  Rather, such behavior only emboldens and enables terrorists like Abdulazeez.  Only an aggressive pursuit of our enemy with the intent of total victory will insure their destruction and secure the lives of our citizens. 

So, will this happen?  I can see only one way this will occur.  You and I must recommit ourselves to never, ever allow this to occur again.  We must remember the ache within our soul on July 16 at 10:45am.  We must never allow that pain to diminish or depart.  And with that understanding that this threat continues, we must step up today, tomorrow and the next day to demand truthfulness by our leaders in identifying our enemy and action by the same in pursuing those enemies to the gates of hell to defeat them… or else, evil will once again visit our community, our state, our nation.  

But then, it will be too late. 

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Mark West

Thought for Today

"A lot of people are realizing they had the wool pulled over their eyes by Obama."

~~~~~ Clint Eastwood

Thought for Today

"President Obama's biggest weakness is weakness."

~~~~~ Niall Ferguson

Thought for Today

"What time he can spare from the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties."

~~~~~ Prof. William Hepworth Thompson (1810-1886)

Prof. Thompson was describing a colleague at Cambridge, but could just as easily have been describing Obama.

Thought for Today

John Greenleaf Whittier on Barack Hussein Obama:

"When faith is lost, when honor dies, the man is dead."

Thought for Today

"There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one's self on lies and fables."

~~~~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (expressing his opinion of Obama?)

Erin Bonsteel's Take on Last Night's Debate

Thought for Today

"You lie; you always were a liar, and you always will be a liar."

~~~~~ H. Rider Haggard (1884 – in anticipation of Barack Hussein Obama)

The Obama Video: The Smoking Gun

Earlier this evening, watching the newly released Obama video on Hannity, I was struck by the contrast between Obama's relaxed eloquence despite the absence of notes or teleprompter and his more recent public speeches. There he was standing in the middle of a small crowd of students without even so much as a portable lectern in front of him, yet his words flowed smoothly and freely.

Contrast that with his well-known tendency to hesitate, stumble, mispronounce common words, blurt out ridiculous nonsense, and even lapse into total incoherence whenever, as candidate or President, he attempts to go off the 'prompter and speak extemporaneously. By now, we are no longer surprised to see Obama depending on his ever-present teleprompter even in such unlikely settings as a grade-school classroom or an athletic field. He (or, more likely, his handlers) realizes that especially in the age of YouTube, he can no longer afford to take the chance of generating fresh examples of Obamateurisms which can be endlessly replayed in the upcoming campaign.

I drew one inescapable, alarming but not surprising conclusion: the words Obama was so effortlessly speaking in that video represented what he really, honestly, deep-down believes. In essence, he has provided yet another demonstration of the essential truth of this Bible verse:

"O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh."
~~~~~ Matthew 12:34 (KJV)

That, to me, is the real smoking gun.

Thought for Today

Longfellow on Obama:

"Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit."

~~~~~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Deliberate or Inadvertent?

Six of the nine justices of the Supreme Court are Roman Catholic, including Obama's appointee Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In addition to Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Sonia Sotomayor all are Catholic. Particularly considering that the Supreme Court is presently deciding the constitutionality of ObamaCare, I've been wondering whether Obama's thumb in the eye to all Catholics, obviously including those six Justices, was deliberate or inadvertent.

I'm inclined to think Obama knew exactly what he was doing. After all, he deliberately insulted the Supreme Court right to its members' faces during last year's State of the Union address. Consider, too, that in implementing this new policy, he disregarded the advice of Vice President Joe Biden and former White House Chief of Staff Bill Dailey, both Catholics, then coldly put Catholic HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius out front to announce it – much as the Nazis put the Jewish kapos in charge of loading the rest of the Jews into the cattle cars.

This summer, when the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of ObamaCare, let's hope they remember this egregious insult and return the favor in kind.

Thought(s) for Today

"The chief executive who knows his strengths and weaknesses as a leader is likely to be far more effective than the one who remains blind to them."

~~~~~ John Adair

"As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president – with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln – just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history."

~~~~~ Barack Hussein Obama

Thought for Today

"The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it."

~~~~~ T. S. Eliot

(It appears that Obama is no exception.)

Minnesota Majority: Obama TRAPPED in Keynesian Twilight Zone

The Real Reason?

Turns out that the bust of Churchill that Obama so disdainfully returned to the British was sculptured by Sir Jacob Epstein – a Jew. So perhaps there was more to the Putz-in-Chief's actions than sympathy with his Mau-Mau grandfather who was arrested and interrogated by the British.

Suggestion: whichever Republican candidate wins the Presidency should ask the Brits if he (or she) could please borrow the bust for the length of his term so that it could be restored to its place of honor in the Oval Office. Each successor President should then renew the request before taking office.

GUEST POST: Schechter Sez – An Open Letter to My Fellow Jews and to All Americans

An Open Letter to My Fellow Jews and to All Americans

by Harvey B. Schechter

05/27/2011 11:20 PM 

During my 41-year career as a member of the Anti-Defamation League's professional staff and from the day I retired in 1993 to this very moment, I operated on a simple, fundamental principle, namely, if anywhere in the world a Jew is persecuted solely becase he or she is a Jew, it automatically becomes my personal problem because there but for the grace of God go I.

To the best of my knowledge, none of my relatives were victims of the Holocaust, but I am the beneficiary of decisions made by my grandparents in the 1890's to flee Eastern Europe and come to the United States.

This issue of SSEZ is directed not so much at President Barack Obama from whom I never expected anything good, particularly with respect to the Nation of Israel and the five-and-a-half million Jews who live there, it is directed primarily at America's Jews, an estimated seventy-eight percent of whom voted for Obama in 2008.  I also firmly believe Obama will get the lion's share of votes Jews will cast in the 2012 presidential election.  Maybe not 78%, but more than 50%.

There's an old political saying that Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.  This saying has an East Coast flavor and would now be stated as "...vote like Latinos and African-Americans," given the changes in the American political profile.  This attachment to the Democratic Party traces back to the passionate love America's Jews developed for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 because of the liberal things he said and did during the Great Depression and his vigorous opposition to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and  Imperial Japan.  Before 1932, large numbers of Jews voted Socialist and even Republican, the party of Abraham Lincoln, because in New York where more than a million Jews lived, the Democrats were under the control of corrupt Tammany Hall.  That changed with Roosevelt's victory in 1932.

Right now there is great turmoil in the American Jewish community and especially in Israel because of the speech President Obama delivered at the State Department a few days ago when he made reference to the 1967 borders as the starting point for land swaps between Israel and the Palestinians.   As Rabbi Shmuley Boteach just wrote, ". . . the president's claims to naivete are ridiculous.  To his detractors Obama is many things, but he is no fool.  He knew full well that to publicly call for a return to the '67 lines was a bomb waiting to detonate.  Obama knew the demand to return to the pre-Six Day War borders spoke directly to the Palestinian narrative."  I agree completely with Rabbi Boteach.

Come back with me to election night, 2008.  As the results poured in from around the nation clearly indicating the Democrats would win the White House and both Houses of Congress, I spoke with a long time personal friend, a very important and influential Congressman who was smiling with each new vote posting.  I told him his smiles would turn to tears when Obama shafts Israel. (I was more blunt than "shafts.")  He asked, "what if you are wrong?"  I said I would apologize in writing, but I knew I would not be wrong.

When Obama did his 1967 shtick, Mort Zuckerman, publisher of U.S. News & World Report, angrily accused Obama of "betraying Israel." Former Democratic Congressman and famous New York City former Mayor  Ed Koch said he will not vote for Obama in 2012.  Of course, November 2012 is almost eighteen months away and anything can happen.

If you watched Obama's face and body language when Israel's Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu spoke at the White House when Obama had to listen to a lecture about the realities in the Middle East, he was obviously boiling mad as Netanyahu in essence told him he didn't know what he is talking about.  As I watched Obama, it seemed to me that Obama was thinking about how he could get back at Netanyahu and at Israel for having had to suffer before the entire nation like a school boy being lectured to by his teacher.

Several liberal commentators and columnists were outraged and said that Netanyahu was ungracious and inappropriate for delivering those comments in a public setting.  It must also have been very painful for Obama even though he was in England to hear about the brilliant, passionate, and informative speech Netanyahu delivered to a joint meeting of the Congress to genuine thunderous applause and getting about twenty-five standing ovations from Democrats and Republicans alike.

And good old Hillary Clinton, our esteemed Secretary of State, looks like an absolute fool have said a week or so ago that Bashar Assad, the murdering, brutal dictator of Syra is a "reformer."  Yes, she called Assad a "reformer."  How can anyone ever believe them?

When Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spoke to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), he was magnificent.  I never thought I would say this about Senator Reid, but he was outstanding in his understanding of what is at stake in the Middle East between Israel and her Arab Neighbors, and he said it forcefully and convincingly.  Maybe the man in the White House ought to sit down with his Senate Majority Leader and have him explain the situation between Israel and the Arabs.

Again and again, we Jews are asked to explain the devotion of so many Jews to the Democratic Party which has paid and still pays homage to the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who in my opinion are enemies of the Jewish people and of Israel.  Would they be so tolerant of the equivalent of Jackson and Sharpton in the Republican party?  Of course not. Our Liberalism came to us with our mother's milk.  For most American Jews, their synagoguee is the Democratic party;  their faith is Liberalism;  and their Moses is Obama.

TO MY FELLOW AMERICANS:  Please know that the hatred of Israel in the Arab world is equaled only by their hatred of you and of America.  The Jews may be their first target, but all of us are on their hit list.  The 9/11 attack was an attack on America!

For the record, Israel gave up land for peace.  It gave back the Sinai Peninsula.  Now there is the possibility of serious threats from the Sinai.  What did Egypt's President Anwar Sadat get for signing a peace treaty with Israel?  He got back the Sinai Peninsula, a Nobel Prize for Peace, and deadly bullets from members of his own army.

Israel gave Gaza to the Palestinians.  What did it get in return?  Thousands of deadly rockets raining down on its citizens.  If President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority repudiates his alliance with Hamas, he knows he will suffer Sadat's fate – a hail of bullets.

Israel also gave back territory in Southern Lebanon.  What did it get in return?  Thousands of deadly rockets fired by Hezbollah on Israel.

Dear Friends:  How long would we sit quietly while thousands of rockets poured down on us from Mexico and from Canada? Now you know what Israel is living with.

A friend sent me a marvelous cartoon of Obama meeting with the Queen of England who says to him, "I believe the borders of Britain and the U.S. should be based on the pre-1776 lines with mutually agreed swaps."  One picture is sure worth a thousand words.

                          Remember:  Be Well Because All Else Is Bubkiss

                Harvey B Schechter, 433 No. Palm Drive, #304, Beverly Hills, CA 90210

                PH:(310) 550-7332; FAX (310) 550-7364; harvespie@sbcglobal.net

Thought for Today

"In general President Obama's policies have been very, very skewed and very, very extreme. Like on healthcare for example, I don't think that trying to ram healthcare through was a smart idea politically, because he wasted a lot of capital and now he doesn't have any of that same capital with even his own party that he used to have."

~~~~~ Jonathan Krohn

The Damage Obama Has Done

A few hours ago, a friend emailed me this chart summarizing the damage Obama has done through February 2011. As anyone who buys gas has noticed, since the end of February the oil and gas metrics have rapidly worsened.

(Click chart to enlarge.)

For a printable copy of the chart in PDF format, click here.