Obama’s foreign donors

By Dick Morris - 10/09/12

In September, the Obama campaign got 1.8 million donations from small contributors who did not break the $200 threshold requiring that their information be reported to the Federal Election Commission. They gave the campaign 98 percent of the $181 million it raised that month, a figure vastly higher than its take in any previous month.

Is the Obama campaign financing itself through foreign money funneled in through a website owned by a private businessman, living in China, that uses the name Obama.com?

In 1997, we learned — too late — that the Clinton campaign had relied heavily on thinly disguised Chinese government money for much of its early blitz of issue ads in the 1996 election. The early intimations of funding fraud in the campaign (Al Gore’s exploits with the Buddhist monks) shaved off half of Clinton’s margin, cutting his lead from 14 to 7 points in the weeks before the election. But the full dimensions of the scandal were not apparent until then-Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) held hearings the following year revealing the depth of the campaign’s reliance on foreign money.

Now, in the last month of the 2012 race, Newsweek magazine has raised serious questions about Obama’s fundraising and its possible reliance on foreign donors and outright fraud to generate its funding.

Newsweek raises questions, in particular, about Robert W. Roche, the co-founder and chairman of the board of Acorn International Inc., a media and branding direct-sales company based in Shanghai. He also owns the Obama.com website, which appears on the Internet throughout the world. Roche’s site links to Barackobama.com, the official campaign site, where it invites people to donate to the campaign. Obama.com gets 2,000 visits a day, two-thirds of which are from foreigners. Is it a giant money-laundering operation to feed foreign money into the Obama campaign?

Despite the disclaimer on the campaign site stating that foreign nationals cannot donate to Obama, the suspicion remains that Roche’s vigilance in assuring that Obama.com is on the Internet throughout the world has led to a significant influx of foreign cash into the coffers of the president’s reelection effort.

It will be too late to wait until 2013 to find out. The House Oversight Committee should immediately investigate, using its subpoena power, to see if there is, indeed, a flow of foreign money, via Obama.com, into the president’s campaign.

Roche, by the way, has visited the White House 11 times during Obama’s tenure, according to the visitor log.

These questions arise because the Obama campaign, unlike Romney’s or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton’s in 2008, refuses to ask donors for their CVV number (the number on your credit card that one is often asked for after giving one’s name and expiration date). The CVV is designed to assure that the donor is actually physically holding the card.

The Obama campaign is no stranger to fraudulent donations funneled in through phony names. In 2008, The Washington Post reported that Mary Biskup was reported to have donated more than $170,000 to the Obama campaign in small donations. But Biskup says she never gave any money to the campaign. Some other donor must have given the money in her name.

Given these past problems and the Obama campaign’s sudden influx of small donors, Newsweek wonders why the campaign does not require CVV numbers to minimize the chances of fraud.

The magazine noted that the campaign’s past scandals “make it all the more surprising that the Obama campaign does not use … the card verification value [system].” The magazine added that “the Romney campaign, by contrast, does use the CVV — as has almost every other candidate who has run for president in recent years.”

Let’s find out the facts before the election. If a president who promised ethical transparency is using small donations — too small to trigger the federal reporting requirement — to funnel in foreign donations, we need to know. Before Election Day.

Morris, a former adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Clinton, is the author of Outrage, Fleeced, Catastrophe and 2010: Take Back America — A Battle Plan.


Obama admits some ads go 'overboard'

Published September 24, 2012
FoxNews.com

In a set of dueling interviews aired Sunday night, President Obama conceded his "biggest disappointment" is that he hasn't significantly changed the tone in Washington since taking office -- and acknowledged sometimes his campaign ads go "overboard" and contain "mistakes."

Mitt Romney, meanwhile, touted his campaign's competitiveness as he emerged from a rocky week. "We've got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent president to the United States," Romney told CBS' "60 Minutes."

The Republican presidential nominee said his campaign, despite heat from the media and grumbling from some conservatives, "doesn't need a turnaround." Romney expressed confidence he's "going to win this thing."

The interviews aired as both candidates were launching a new wave of campaigning. Romney arrived in Colorado Sunday for the start of a weeklong tour through battleground states. Obama's campaign on Monday launched a new offensive with a TV ad blasting Romney for criticizing Americans who don't pay income taxes without having "come clean" about his own.

At the same time, Obama told CBS that his ads are not always 100 percent accurate.
"Do we see sometimes us going overboard in our campaign, are there mistakes that are made, areas where there is no doubt that somebody could dispute how we are presenting things? You know, that happens in politics," Obama said, arguing that the "vigorous debate" helps better define each candidate's vision. The exchange was not aired on television but was posted online .

Amid the sustained toughness of the campaign trail tone, Obama conceded to "60 Minutes" that the tone in Washington remains more caustic than he'd like.

"Change has happened and positive change for the American people," Obama said, adding: "I'm the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted, where we weren't constantly in a political slugfest but were focused more on problem solving that, you know, I haven't fully accomplished that."
Obama said he hasn't "even come close in some cases."

"And, you know, if you ask me what's my biggest disappointment is that we haven't changed the tone in Washington as much as I would have liked," the president said, adding that "as president I bear responsibility for everything, to some degree."

Obama also defended his foreign policy record amid anti-American rage in the Muslim world, firing back at suggestions from Romney that the president has been weak with allies and enemies alike.

In the interview Sunday night the president said, "If Gov. Romney is suggesting that we should start another war, he should say so."

In the companion interview to Obama's appearance on CBS' "60 Minutes," Romney broadened his reproach to include Israel, criticizing Obama's failure to meet with the U.S. ally's head of state, Benjamin Netanyahu, during the annual U.N. gathering. Romney called it a mistake that "sends a message throughout the Middle East that somehow we distance ourselves from our friends."

The White House has said scheduling precluded a meeting between the two leaders, who won't be in New York at the same time. With the final six weeks of a hard-fought election hanging over the U.N. summit, Obama has opted out of face-to-face meetings with any of his counterparts -- not just Netanyahu -- during his compressed U.N. visit.
But Obama pushed back on the notion that he feels pressure from Netanyahu, dismissing as noise the Israeli leader's calls for the U.S. to lay out a "red line" that Iran's nuclear program mustn't cross to avoid American military intervention.

"When it comes to our national security decisions, any pressure that I feel is simply to do what's right for the American people," Obama said. "And I am going to block out any noise that's out there."

In a wide-ranging interview conducted the day after U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was killed in an attack on Benghazi, Obama defended his foreign policy successes, noting he'd followed through on a commitment to end the war in Iraq and had nabbed Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden.

He also waxed optimistic that winning a second term would give him a mandate to overcome obstructionism from congressional Republicans whose No. 1 goal, he said, has been to prevent his re-election.

"My expectation is, my hope is that that's no longer their number one priority," Obama said. "I'm hoping that after the smoke clears and the election season's over that that spirit of cooperation comes more to the fore."

Romney, in an interview conducted last week, sought to deflect attention from his running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, over their differences in Medicare policy: "I'm the guy running for president, not him."

While reaffirming his commitment to lowering all income tax rates by 20 percent, Romney expressed no unease about his refusal to offer specifics, such as which loopholes and deductions he'd eliminate to pay for the cuts.

"The devil's in the details. The angel is in the policy, which is creating more jobs," Romney said, adding that he doesn't want to see overall government revenue reduced.

The "60 Minutes" interviews came as Romney's campaign strove to turn the page after a secretly recorded video showed Romney writing off his prospects for winning over the almost half of Americans who he said pay no taxes, are dependent upon government and see themselves as victims. Ahead of an evening campaign stop at a Denver-area high school Sunday, Romney huddled with senior advisers in Los Angeles to rehearse for the three upcoming presidential debates, which his aides see as the best opportunity to get his campaign and its message back on track.

Amid mounting pressure to spend less time raising money and more time explaining his plans to voters, Romney was refocusing his schedule on the most competitive states. After Colorado, Romney was to begin a three-day bus tour in Ohio on Monday followed by a stop in Virginia -- states that Obama won in 2008 but that Republicans claimed four years earlier.

While national polls remain tight, polls in several of the most closely watched states, including Colorado, suggest Obama has opened narrow leads. Obama won Colorado by 9 points four years ago, but the state went to a Republican in the previous three presidential elections.


Obama, allies exploiting Americans' tax ignorance

What standard of fairness dictates that the top 10 percent of income earners pay 71 percent of the federal income tax burden while 47 percent of Americans pay absolutely nothing?

Posted: September 2, 2012
By Walter Williams

If you listen to America’s political hacks, mainstream media talking heads and their socialist allies, you can’t help but reach the conclusion the nation’s tax burden is borne by the poor and middle-class while the rich get off scot-free.

Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal, and I’m proud to say former GMU economics student, wrote “The U.S. Tax System: Who Really Pays?” in the Manhattan Institute’s August 12 issue. Let’s see whether the rich are paying their “fair” share.

According to IRS 2007 data, the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 22 percent of national personal income but paid 40 percent of all personal income taxes.
The top 5 percent earned 37 percent and paid 61 percent of personal income tax.

The top 10 percent earned 48 percent and paid 71 percent of all personal income taxes.

The bottom 50 percent earned 12 percent of personal income but paid just 3 percent of income tax revenues.

Some argue these observations are misleading because there are other federal taxes the bottom 50 percenters pay such as Social Security and excise taxes.

Moore presents data from the Tax Policy Center, run by the liberal Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, that takes into account payroll and income taxes paid by different income groups.

Because of the earned income tax credit, most of America’s poor pay little or nothing. What the Tax Policy Center calls working class pay 3 percent of all federal taxes, middle class 11 percent, upper middle class 19 percent and wealthy 67 percent.

President Obama and the Democratic Party harp about tax fairness.

Here’s my fairness question to you: What standard of fairness dictates the top 10 percent of income earners pay 71 percent of the federal income tax burden while 47 percent of Americans pay absolutely nothing?

President Obama and his political allies are fully aware of IRS data that shows who pays what.

Their tax demagoguery knowingly exploits American ignorance about taxes.

A complicit news media is only happy to assist.

We might ask ourselves what’s to be said about the decency of people who knowingly mislead the public about taxes.

Of course, I might be all wrong, and true tax fairness dictates the top 10 percent pay all federal income taxes.

Aside from the fairness issue, 47 percent of taxpayers having no federal income tax liability is dangerous for our nation.

These people become natural constituents for big-spending, budget-wrecking, debt-creating politicians.

After all, if you have no income tax liability, what do you care about either raising or lowering taxes?

That might explain why the so-called Bush tax cuts were not more popular.

If you’re not paying income taxes, why should you be happy about an income tax cut?

Instead, you might view tax cuts as a threat to various handout programs that nearly 50 percent of Americans enjoy.

Tax demagoguery is useful for politicians who prey on the politics of envy to get re-elected, but is it good for Americans?

We’re witnessing the disastrous effects of massive spending in Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and other European countries where a greater number of people live off of government welfare programs than pay taxes.

Government debt in Greece is 160 percent of gross domestic product, 120 percent in Italy, 104 in Ireland and 106 in Portugal.

Here’s the question for us: Is the U.S. moving toward or away from the troubled EU nations?

It turns out our national debt to GDP ratio in the 1970s was 35 percent; now it’s 106 percent of GDP.

If you think we’re immune from the economic chaos in some of the EU countries, you’re whistling Dixie.

And when economic chaos comes, whom do you think will be more affected by it: rich people or poor people?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS is a professor of economics at George Mason University.


The Most Divisive Campaign in American History
SUNDAY, 12 AUGUST 2012 07:19
DANIEL GREENFIELD

In 1980, when President Reagan asked Americans, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago", it was still possible to campaign on a theme as simple as the job performance of the other guy. But now, 32 years later, the campaign hinges on a much more fundamental split among the voting population.

Romney appeals to voters who are dissatisfied with the last four years. Obama appeals to voters who are dissatisfied with America.

This basic gap was obscured in the 2008 campaign by the window trappings of inspiration. Among all the plastic pillars and stolen quotes from poets who stole them from sermons, it was harder to see that the underlying theme of the campaign was dissatisfaction with America. But in 2012, Obama can no longer run as a reformer or an optimist.

The coalition that he committed to last year is a coalition of those who are unhappy with America, not in the last four years, but in the last two-hundred years. Its core is composed of groups that fear democracy and distrust the will of the people. There is no optimism here, but a deeply rooted pessimism about human nature and the country as a whole. It is the Democratic Party's coalition against democracy.

After 2010, the numbers were crunched, and it was clear that Obama and the Democrats could not win a mainstream campaign. Instead, they targeted narrow groups, stirred up conflicts over issues aimed at that group, whether it was union pensions, racism or birth control. There was no more pretense of a national election, only a frenzied rush to polarize as many groups as possible and join them together into an acrimonious coalition, not so much for anything, as against Republicans.

There isn't any inspiration here. Just paranoia over everything from gay marriage to abortion to racial profiling to illegal immigration. A dozen illegal benefits being handed out with the explicit threat that they will be lost if Romney wins. A dozen mini-civil wars being stirred up to divide Americans and set them at each other's throats for the benefit of the Obama campaign.

From Occupy Wall Street to Wisconsin, from Trayvon Martin to Chick-fil-A, the goal of these manufactured conflicts has been to divide and conquer the electorate by emphasizing group rights over individual economic welfare.

Obama can't win on the economy. He can't win on foreign policy. He can't win on any aspect of his administration. All he can do is stir up violence and then promise to heal the country in his second term while winking to all the representatives of the grievance groups. It's not a new game, but the Democratic Party has never played it quite this baldly in a national election. And if it succeeds, then national politics will have finally been reduced to the level of a Chicago election.

We were expected to believe that the typical Obama voter in 2008 was hoping for a better country, but in 2012 there is no more hope, only hate and fear. The typical Obama voter is not acting as an American, but as a representative of an entitled group looking to secure and expand those entitlements at the expense and the detriment of the country at large.

To vote for Obama after years of grotesque economic mismanagement that has no precedent in history, that exceeds the worst actions of Andrew Jackson or Ulysses S. Grant, is not the instinct of an American, but a selfish greedy looter scrambling to grab a few dinner rolls off the tray while the ship is going down. There is no policy justification for voting for a man with the worst economic and foreign policy record in the country's history. There is no American justification for voting for him. Only the UnAmerican motivation of carving up a dying country into group fiefdoms privileging identity politics over the common good.

This is an UnAmerican campaign. It is an Anti-American campaign. It is a campaign by those who hate and fear what America was and who resent having to care about anyone outside their own group. Its group jingoism, its dog whistles and special privileges are repulsive and cynical, treating the people of a great nation like a warren of rats eager to sell each other out for a prize from the Cracker Jack box of identity politics entitlements.

There is not a single Obama voter anywhere in the land who believes that another four years of him will make this country better. Not a single one from coast to coast. No, what they believe is that he will make the country a worse place for those people that they hate. That he will have four more years to sink their ideas deeper in the earth, regardless of how many families go hungry and how many fathers kill themselves because they can no longer take care of their families. What they believe is that Obama will grant their group more special privileges and the rest of the country can go to hell.

In his DNC keynote address in 2004, Obama said, "There is no Black America or White America or Latino America or Asian America, there is just the United States of America." And now he has completely disavowed it. He isn't campaigning to lead the United States of America, instead he is running for the presidency of a dozen little Americas, Trayvon Martin America, Abortion America, Illegal Alien America, Sharia America, Gay Marriage America, Starbucks America and any others you can think of. And if he can collect enough of these little Americas together, then he may get the privilege of running the United States of America into the ground for another four years.

Obama has never been the President of the United States of America. He has been the president of Washington D.C., of Wall Street and of Solyndra. He has been the President of Green America and of Chicago. He has been the President of Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bill Gates, Penny Pritzker and James Crown. He is the President of George Clooney, Harvey Weinstein and Anne Hathaway. And now, facing disaster, he still isn't running to be President of a country, but of a dozen little countries with money from freshly bailed out Green America and Wall Street, not to mention Hollywood.

The Obama campaign is not accidentally divisive. It did not stumble into divisiveness. It is not even divisive as a byproduct of its real aims. Divisiveness is its aim. Divisiveness is the only way that a divisive administration can hold on to power. The anger and the violence are not an accident, they are the whole point. Set one group against another, feed the hate, massage the grievances and very soon there is no longer a nation but a handful of quarreling groups being roped into a mutual alliance to reelect their lord protector whose appeal is that of the outsider becoming the insider.

Bain is a metaphor whose details don't truly matter. The target audience for that swill doesn't really care where Romney was when a steel plant was shut down. It doesn't care that like so many private equity bigwigs, the man who actually was in charge is one of Obama's bundlers. This isn't about truth, it's about menace. The Bain message is that Romney is a man who takes things away. That is the  image that the UnAmerican alliance is meant to take away. The ominous sense that Obama's era of giving them things is about to come to a close and Romney's era of taking away things will begin.

It doesn't take much prompting for the UnAmericans to come to this conclusion. Thieves are always looking over their shoulders. They always expect to have their ill-gotten gains taken away from them. And that is Obama's true achievement. Like Tammany Hall, he has corrupted a massive section of the population and made it complicit in his criminality. What the old political machines did to cities or small groups of vested interests, the Zero has done to tens of millions, if not a hundred million people, who want him in power not because they think he's the best man for the job, but because he's their crook. The middle man for a crime ring that begins with him and ends with them.

The true insidious evil of the man is that he is the face of a machine of power and privilege that turns Americans into UnAmericans, that corrupts and degrades every ideal and principle, suborns every office and picks every pocket, while wrapping that thievery in the flag and every bit of history that it can filch. The Hussein Way is the clearest expression of the rot at the heart of the Democratic Party, the marriage of leftist agitation and powermongering with the old urban political machines for a level of abuse usually seen only in banana republics.

The abomination in Washington is a welfare-state technocracy that mixes crony capitalism with radical social policy. It steals from everyone and gives back to some. It plays the game of divide and conquer with the panache of marketing executives knowing that the worse the economy is, the more likely everyone is to look in everyone else's mouth. Its worst aspect is its insistence on cloaking its cynicism as righteousness, wrapping every ugly means in the glorious flag of the ends when the truth is that its means are its ends.

Divide and conquer isn't just a means to the greater end of giving Zero Hussein another four years. And perhaps another four years after that. It's also the end. Every tyrant from Joseph Stalin to Saddam Hussein knew that a divided people are easier to rule. The more you divide them, the less likely they are to give you any trouble when you're raiding their last pennies to pay for the latest Green gimmick that your billionaire backers have thrown up all over Wall Street.

Obama is the ultimate Post-American figure passing himself off as the embodiment of all that is truly American. But the UnAmericans got the real message in 2008 and in 2012 there is no other message. There is no more hope and faith, and the ones who have been waiting for are the UnAmericans who think that they are about to come into their own, when they are little more than pawns being used to rob and destroy a great nation.

This is the Post-American, Anti-American and UnAmerican campaign to divide up, carve up and toss aside the laws and traditions of the United States and replace them with the power of arrogance. It is the last stand of a beleaguered nation facing barbarians inside its gate. Every previous election was a contest between two American candidates who wanted to preside over the United States.

This is an election contest between the United States and an emerging Post-American order. That entity will be an American EU run by unelected bureaucrats, governed by politically correct technocrats and upheld by corrupt financial pirates disguising the collective bankruptcy with numbers games so elaborate that they make every billion-dollar con game and pyramid scheme that has come before seem as simple as child's play.

The entity is already here. Its czars are running things in D.C., and its judges are dismantling both constitutional government and democratic elections. It creates a crisis and then makes sure that it doesn't go to waste. It has excellent design skills and terrible planning skills. It has all the money in the world and none at all. It is the Post-American America, and 2012 is its big referendum. The one that will decide whether this Post-American America, this horrid graft of E.U. governance and Mussolini economics, Soviet propaganda and FDR volunteerism, Tammany populist criminality and U.N. foreign policy will be permitted to devour the United States of America.

Obama cannot win an American election. But he isn't running in an American election. He's running in a Post-American election


Young Voters Pay A High Price For Being Attracted To President Obama's "Coolness"

August 9, 2012
Forbes

According to a recent USA Today/Gallup poll, Americans under the age of 30 favor Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by almost a two-to-one margin. This is a startling statistic. What explains the lopsided support for Obama among younger Americans?
I think the two main reasons are ideological and personal.


It’s no revelation to say that young people tend to be more liberal about issues like the redistribution of wealth. You may have heard the old adage, “Anyone who is not a socialist when he is 20, has no heart; anyone who is still a socialist when he is 30, has no mind.” I lived that adage. I was a young socialist 40 years ago who voted for the likable-but-too-conservative George McGovern. Then, after emerging from the collegiate cocoon, weaning myself from financial dependency on others, and seeing the real-world devastation wrought by socialism, I embraced capitalism.

The fact of the matter is that our intellect develops more slowly than our feelings. In my case, my youthful concern for the poor never left me. I simply recognized that free markets, however imperfect, are far more effective at reducing poverty than government programs and socialist dystopias. Likewise, today’s youth generally have good intentions; they just don’t always perceive the optimal means to attain their goals. When you combine that intellectual immaturity with the barrage of leftist indoctrination that many colleges inflict on them, it is no wonder that the under-30 segment of our population favors Obama.

As significant as the ideological factor is for explaining the millennials’ support for Obama, the president’s personal attractiveness to them looms equally large. Indeed, the young are not unique in voting in response to a presidential candidate’s likability. We have known at least since the Kennedy-Nixon race (JFK’s fresh-faced handsomeness contrasted with Nixon’s off-putting jowly, 5 o’clock shadow during their televised debates) that many Americans vote for a president on the basis of the wrapping rather than the contents of the package—the triumph of image over substance. This may not speak well for our country’s political maturity, or perhaps even for democracy itself, but personality often trumps policy.

I have spoken to several under-30s recently, and I was struck by how often they referred to Obama as cool or “hip.” Indeed, Obama can be very winsome. He has that charismatic, incandescent smile; the ability to project gravitas and dignity in one moment and then to be disarmingly informal and down-home normal in the next; the talent for delivering a text in tones that are alternately inspiring, warm, soothing, or fired with passion; and a knack for coming across as level-headed, genuine, reasonable, quietly confident, and so very accessible in his well-crafted television commercials.

If young Americans want to vote for Obama because he is cooler than Romney, that is their right and privilege. It is sad, though, that they seem oblivious to the high price they are paying for “coolness.” Underneath the hip, attractive surface is a president who says many of the “right” things about helping America move forward, and then cynically acts in ways that hamper progress. Many young Americans (and not a few older ones) who find Obama attractive have a hard time connecting the dots and comprehending just how disastrous his policies have been for young Americans.

Do the under-30s really want a president who has tried and succeeded in raising the price of electricity and gasoline; who has hastened the day of Social Security’s insolvency by cutting the revenues to that program; who has raised future taxes on young Americans through the reckless addition of trillions of dollars to the national debt; whose policies have pushed food prices higher; who has tried to keep home prices from falling to levels that would make them affordable to younger Americans?

Do they want four more years of an aggressively anti-business, hyper-regulatory administration that has squelched job growth and employment opportunities?

Do they want to continue down the path to a European-style welfare state like Spain, where close to half of young adults are unemployed?



I think not, but that is the kind of country they may vote for. Too many young Americans don’t connect the current economic stagnation with Obama’s policies. They are charmed by the president’s personality while being harmed by his policies. Obama is like the Pied Piper, wooing, attracting, and seducing the young, who merrily and blindly follow his bewitching tune along a path that leads to a tragic end.

Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.


Obama's desperate 2012 reelection strategy

By Frank Donatelli
Published July 18, 2012
FoxNews.com

What to do if you’re an incumbent president running for reelection with no accomplishments to your name? You’re presiding over the most anemic economic recovery in 70 years. Unemployment is still above 8% three years after the recession supposedly ended. Your signature stimulus and health care bills are massively unpopular, and your approval rating hasn’t broken 50% in months.

That’s the task facing President Obama as he campaigns for another four year term. Gone is the “hope and change” rhetoric or the pledge to “change the way that we do business in Washington.” 

Gone indeed is any attempt by the incumbent to offer a strategy to improve our common economic circumstances and prospects. In its place, Obama is attempting to assemble support with parochial appeals to separate pieces of the electorate, hoping he can tape together an electoral majority. He has overladen this approach with a healthy dose of cynicism and class warfare rhetoric designed to focus the public’s anger on other Americans – anyone besides the man in charge.

I cannot help but call this President Obama's Humpty Dumpty reelection strategy. Just who are the specific targets of the Humpty Dumpty strategy? Here's my list:

Liberals. Start with President Obama’s relentless focus on the “1%” of wealthy Americans who he constantly attacks and, worse, implies are responsible for our poor economic circumstances. Never mind that the 1% already pay approximately 37% of all federal income taxes. Never mind that his plan to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and implement the so-called “Buffet rule” would have virtually no impact on our long term deficit picture or create one single new job. The ploy here is purely political, designed to pin the economic blame elsewhere through class warfare and fire up far-left liberals who favor economic redistributionist policies.

Women. There has been a gender gap in America for years so it must be because Republicans are waging a “war on women.” Obama’s weapons here focus heavily on yet more federal laws supposedly mandating equal pay for “similar” positions. (Note:  Equal pay has been the law of the land for many years.) He is also placing heavy emphasis on free contraception and access to abortion drugs, going so far as to require every health plan to cover these costs. Obama is even willing to throw the Catholic Church and the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom under the bus in pursuit of another wedge issue.

African Americans. At the recent NAACP convention, Vice President Biden renewed a 25 year old feud with retired Judge Robert Bork, who currently serves as co-chair of Governor Mitt Romney’s justice task force, attacking Bork for wanting to roll back civil rights in America. In 1987, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a budding presidential candidate, Biden attempted to ride to the White House with attacks on Bork’s judicial record. He succeeded in defeating Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, but his presidential aspirations were cut short when he was caught plagiarizing his speeches from a British politician and quickly dropped out of the race.  At the same NAACP convention last week, Attorney General Eric Holder lashed out at GOP-inspired state voter registration laws requiring individuals to show an ID before voting, arguing that such laws would be harmful to minority voters. Though Democrats are skilled at playing the race card, the dance is more complicated this year since, for political reasons, Obama will have to utilize surrogates like Biden and Holder to handle this grubby business.

Hispanics. Having done nothing for four years to effectively reform immigration, Obama issued an executive order this year suspending arrests of certain categories of illegal aliens. Obama also sued Arizona over a state law that essentially requires the state to help enforce federal immigration law, something the feds have refused to do themselves. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law’s centerpiece and rejected Obama’s position.

Gays. In 2008, Obama made a big deal of his “opposition” to gay marriage. Most everyone suspected he didn’t mean it, and indeed after “careful consideration,” he now supports gay marriage just in time for this election. Most Americans rightly see this as a purely political conversion. He was against it before he was for it. Obama’s views even on issues of this magnitude are disposable and interchangeable.

The common denominator with all of these piecemeal campaign strategies is that they form no coherent whole, no larger vision for America. All are primarily designed to enhance DNC and Obama Campaign talking points and contribute very little toward solving the major problems we face. Worse, they divide Americans because their primary purpose is to focus blame on anyone and everyone but President Obama.  

Politics is a rough and tumble business, and thankfully, Americans tune out most politicians and political promises. But any Obama victory based on this Humpty Dumpty strategy would be achieved at a high price.

His divisive platform would have no mandate for anything positive, allowing the country’s downward drift to worsen while he scrambles to address the great economic crises we face. Bipartisan cooperation would be difficult to achieve, and the 2012 election would have provided little focus or clarification for any way forward.

This year, the only thing worse for Obama than losing this election might be winning.

Frank Donatelli is chairman of GOPAC, an organization dedicated to educating and training the next generation of Republican leaders. He served in the Reagan administration as Assistant to President Ronald Reagan for Political and Intergovernmental Affairs.   



Uniter Obama's Divisive Campaign Wages War On Women

By THOMAS SOWELL
June 6, 2012
Investor’s Business Daily

Among the people who are disappointed with President Obama, none has more reason to be disappointed than those who thought he was going to be "a uniter, rather than a divider" and that he would "bring us all together."

It was a noble hope, but one with no factual foundation. Barack Obama had been a divider all his adult life, especially as a community organizer, and he had repeatedly sought out and allied himself with other dividers, the most blatant of whom was the man whose church he attended for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.

Now, with his presidency on the line and the polls looking dicey, Obama's re-election campaign has become more openly divisive than ever.

He has embraced the strident "Occupy Wall Street" movement, with its ridiculous claim of representing the 99% against the 1%. Obama's Department of Justice has been spreading the hysteria that states requiring photo identification for voting are trying to keep minorities from voting, and using the prevention of voter fraud as a pretext.

But anyone who doubts the existence of voter fraud should read John Fund's book, "Stealing Elections" or J. Christian Adams's book, "Injustice," which deals specifically with the Obama Justice Department's overlooking voter fraud when those involved are black Democrats.

Not content with dividing classes and races, the Obama campaign is now seeking to divide the sexes by declaring that women are being paid less than men, as part of a "war on women" conducted by villains, from whom Obama and company will protect the women — and, not incidentally, expect to receive their votes this November.

The old — and repeatedly discredited — game of citing women's incomes as some percentage of men's incomes is being played once again, as part of the "war on women" theme.

Since women average fewer hours of work per year, and fewer years of consecutive full-time employment than men, among other differences, comparisons of male and female annual earnings are comparisons of apples and oranges, as various female economists have pointed out. Read Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute or Professor Claudia Goldin of Harvard, for example.

When you compare women and men in the same occupations with the same skills, education, hours of work, and many other factors that go into determining pay, the differences in incomes shrink to the vanishing point — and, in some cases, the women earn more than comparable men.

But why let mere facts spoil the emotional rhetoric or the political ploys to drum up hysteria and collect votes?

The farcical nature of these ploys came out after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi declared that Congress needed to pass the Fair Pay Act, because women average 23% lower incomes than men.

A reporter from The Daily Caller then pointed out that the women on Nancy Pelosi's own staff average 27% lower incomes than the men on her staff. Does that show that Pelosi herself is guilty of discrimination against women? Or does it show that such simple-minded statistics are grossly misleading?

The so-called Fair Pay Act has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with election-year politics. No one in his right mind expects that bill to become law. It was blocked Tuesday by Senate Republicans and has no chance whatever of getting past in the House of Representatives.

The whole point of this political exercise is to get Republicans on record voting against "fairness" for women, as part of the Democrats' campaign strategy to claim that there is a "war on women."

If you are looking for a real war on women, you might look at the practice of aborting girl babies after an ultrasound picture shows that they are girls.

These abortions are the most basic kind of discrimination, and their consequences have already been demonstrated in countries like China and India, where sexually discriminatory abortions and female infanticide have produced an imbalance in the number of adult males and females.

A bill to outlaw sexually and racially discriminatory abortions has been opposed and defeated by House Democrats.


Obama Used Church for Political Gain

Friday, May 18, 2012
CBN News

During a recorded interview, President Obama's former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright said the Obamas used church to gain voter support, saying that "church was not their thing."

Wright made the comments during an interview with author Edward Klein for his new book, The Amateur.

The Blaze has just released audio clips of the interview between Klein and Wright.

Earlier this week, Klein released the three-hour recording to Fox News' Sean Hannity of his interview with the man known for his inflammatory rhetoric. The Blaze posted portions of the audio clips on Thursday.

In them Wright is heard recounting to Klein his personal experiences with the president during the past few years and his sadness over their deteriorated relationship.

Wright also addressed some of his own controversial sermons, the alleged political payoff of a fellow preacher by the Obama camp, as well as the president and first lady's church backgrounds.

"We know it wasn't his, but she was not the kind of black woman whose momma made her go to church, made her go to Sunday school," Wright says. "She wasn't raised in that kind of environment so the church was not an integral part of their lives before they got married, after they got married."

A Republican super PAC is deciding whether or not to use the comments in an ad campaign against Obama.

GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney has decided to stay away from the issue and focus his campaign on the economy rather than character assassinations.


AdWatch: Obama highlights Romney, Bain Capital
By BETH FOUHY, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — TITLE: "Steel"

LENGTH: Two minutes and six minutes.

AIRING: Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia

KEY IMAGES: The Obama campaign ad features interviews with several former employees of GST Steel, a Kansas City, Mo.- based company bought in 1993 by Bain Capital, the private equity firm Republican Mitt Romney co-founded and was running at the time of the purchase. The workers describe GST before Bain as a robust employer of several thousand people who received good wages and benefits. "That stopped with the sale of the plant to Bain Capital," one steelworker says, over images of Romney on the campaign trail saying "I know how business works."

The workers and a union representative who handled negotiations for the workers then describe how Bain's management reaped profits as they drove GST into bankruptcy, forcing the plant to close and lay off 750 workers. "It was like a vampire came in and sucked the life out of us," a worker says, over images of the abandoned plant and newspaper accounts of the layoffs.
"We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer," said one worker. Another said: "If he's going to run the country the way he ran our business I wouldn't want him in there. He'd be so out of touch with the average person in this country."

ANALYSIS: The hard-hitting ad aims to undermine the central premise of Romney's candidacy: that his experience in the business world gives him the knowledge and tools necessary to create jobs and revive the economy. The former Massachusetts governor claims to have created 100,000 jobs through Bain-backed businesses.

By airing an unusually long ad in swing states less than six months before the election, the Obama campaign is clearly eager to define Romney for voters before he is able to do so himself.

It fails to mention the overall decline in the steel industry during the 1990s and the fact that Romney had left Bain two years before GST's bankruptcy in 2001.

Private equity firms like Bain buy companies with loads of debt, cut costs and do other things to make them more efficient. They then cash out by taking the companies public on a stock exchange or, recently, selling them to other buyout firms.

The business model thrived for years, leading to the creation of more buyout firms and more bids for companies.

Obama's deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, said Monday that "no one is questioning the private equity industry as a whole." But by using GST as an example, the campaign argues that Romney's years at Bain were spent maximizing profits for himself and other investors rather than creating middle-class jobs. Using unemployed steel workers to tell their personal stories, the ad packs considerable emotional heft and illustrates the human costs that come with a company's failure.

Romney's tenure at Bain became an issue during the Republican nominating contest when Texas Gov. Rick Perry labeled Romney a "vulture capitalist" and brought up GST's closure as an illustration. A super PAC backing Newt Gingrich ran a 28-minute film blaming Bain for the demise of several companies. But that video was riddled with so many inaccuracies that even Gingrich distanced himself from it.

The Obama campaign ad is on safer ground by focusing on a single company and highlighting specific ways Bain's management affected workers, such as cutting their pensions and health care benefits as the company faltered.

But Bain's management was not the only reason GST suffered. The availability of alternative materials and huge wave of imported steel, particularly from Asia, cut U.S. steel production during the 1990s and led to a string of bankruptcies of steel-related companies.

The ad also neglects to mention that GST's bankruptcy took place in 2001, two years after Romney had relinquished day-to-day management of Bain in order to head up the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. Cutter insisted that Romney "set this in motion" and noted he was still earning investment income from Bain at the time despite his hiatus from full-time involvement.
___
Associated Press writer Bernard Condon and AP News Researcher Julie Reed contributed to this report.


Obama's Shameless Electioneering

by FRED BARNES
NPR
May 7, 2012

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

President Obama is breaking new ground in his campaign for re-election. He is going where incumbent presidents have never gone before. He is doing things for which President George W. Bush would have been pilloried. And Obama is doing all this in plain view.

Yet the media have rarely found the new ploys and gambits of Obama's campaign worth mentioning, much less spotlighting. For instance, in his address at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, Obama treated his agenda and Jesus Christ's as one and the same. Since the media didn't raise any flags, one might have concluded a comment such as Obama's was normal for that event. It wasn't.

Obama offered his own version of the WWJD question — what would Jesus do? — on the issue of raising taxes on the rich. Obama wants to, arguing that seniors, young people, and the middle class shouldn't be forced to "shoulder the burden alone."

Instead, "I think to myself, if I'm willing to give something up as somebody who's been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that's going to make economic sense," he said. "But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus' teaching that 'for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.' "

Linking his tax plan to Jesus was anything but routine. Presidents have been speaking to the prayer breakfast, a Christian-sponsored event, since the 1950s. Their talks have tended to be mildly Christian, not at all political, and never exploited as a vehicle to claim Christ's endorsement of their policies.

Obama, however, got off without so much as a slap on the wrist from the press. There's a double standard here. Had Bush linked his tax policy to Christ, the media would have not only reported it, but no doubt assailed him for breaching the wall between church and state.

Obama, by the way, also said his plan to tax the rich "mirrors the Islamic belief that those who've been blessed have an obligation to use those blessings to help others, or the Jewish doctrine of moderation and consideration for others."

In April, speaking to newspaper editors in Washington, D.C., the president took a unique approach to the 2013 budget passed by the House. "I want to actually go through what it would mean for our country if these [spending] cuts were to be spread out evenly," he said. "So bear with me."

The editors and the media covering the speech did just that. From all appearances, they accepted the spread-the-cuts-evenly tactic as perfectly legitimate. It wasn't. It was neither honest nor fair.

The GOP budget, which would increase the national debt by $3 trillion over 10 years, distributed cuts quite unevenly. That's the way budgets are put together: Some programs are cut, others have their spending increased. In both cases, changes are imposed from a higher spending base, reflecting inflation and expected growth in programs.

That didn't stop Obama. He insisted college students would lose $1,000 in aid, 1,600 medical grants to research Alzheimer's, cancer, and AIDS would disappear, and two million mothers and babies would be dropped from a program that "gives them access to healthy food."

That's not all. Weather forecasts would be less accurate because fewer satellites would be launched. There would be flight cancellations, plus shutdowns of air traffic control systems at some airports.

"This is math," Obama said. Only it wasn't. It was make-believe. "This is not conjecture," he said. "I am not exaggerating. These are facts." In truth, they were facts based on a false premise. Which means they were fiction.

Another departure by Obama began last September when he summoned a joint session of Congress to unveil his new "jobs bill." This has two twists. It was crafted to be rejected by Republicans in hopes of creating the impression of a "do-nothing Congress." To make sure Republicans wouldn't seek a compromise, Obama said he wouldn't negotiate. It was take it or leave it. The media barely blinked.

The president devoted weeks to traveling the country and demanding that Congress "pass this bill." Indeed, Majority Leader Harry Reid could have brought it to the Senate floor for a vote. And if Obama had wanted him to, he would have. But Obama's urgent-sounding plea was a sham. There was no vote, though several individual parts of the bill were passed later.

Obama has used similar fakery again and again. He's relentless in touting the Buffett Rule, despite zero chance of its passage. It would require those making more than a million dollars to pay at least 30 percent of their annual earnings in federal income taxes. He's threatened to veto a Republican bill to prevent a doubling of the interest rate on college loans on trumped-up grounds, hoping to tag them as opposed to the popular aid program.

And last month, the White House spread the word about its need for executive action to govern, as the New York Times put it, "in the face of Congressional obstructionism." This is a straw man. Obama is eager to create the illusion he's been forced to rely on executive orders because Republicans are blocking his agenda.

But it's the Senate, controlled by Democrats, that has become the graveyard of legislation. It has refused to pass a budget for the third straight year, and Reid has said he'll call as few votes as possible this year. Rather than a do-nothing Congress — in other words, Republicans — there's a do-nothing Senate, led by Democrats.

In running for re-election, Obama has already set records. As of March 6, he's held more fundraising events (104) than the previous five presidents combined (94). And I suspect Obama has set the record for blaming his predecessor for his own troubles. If he hasn't, there's still time. The election is six months away.


What's Hidden in Obama's 'Julia' Campaign
May 4, 2012
U.S. News & World Report

The Obama campaign has launched a webpage called "The Life of Julia," about a fictional woman who benefits from Obama-supported government programs all her life.

The fact that the Obama campaign chose to tell her story in highly stylized graphics—not with live actors, "Harry and Louise" style—was a deliberate choice. It allows the campaign to convey much more partisan information than a 30-second ad, it appeals to younger women, and it looks hip. (Even the New York Times called it "slick.") The campaign also made an intentional choice to make the story fictional, presumably because the campaign couldn't find enough actual women who are willing to say they depend on government programs for everything they need in life. In fact, had they gone looking, they might have learned that many of us find the notion of women needing so much help to be insulting.

So what we know about Julia: She is a college grad who benefits from Pell grants and tax credits and student loans; a surgery patient who stays on her parents' health insurance; a Web designer who sues for equal pay and gets free birth control; a single mother whose son has great teachers thanks to President Obama; a small business owner who hires employees thanks to an Small Business Administration loan; a Social Security and Medicare recipient who gets affordable healthcare and monthly benefits. But let's look at what Julia is not.

First of all, she's not a man. Because she's a woman, the message becomes one of a benign, paternal state taking care of vulnerable women. It's far less threatening than if we were watching an able-bodied man sliding into increasing dependency on the welfare state over the course of his life. Plus the Obama campaign knows that Romney has been consistently leading among male voters in the polls. He may have the upper hand with women voters, but what no one talks about is Obama's gender gap among men. Very few men would identify with Julia's life, and the campaign knows that.

Second, she's not a taxpayer. There is no mention of her paying for the cost of any programs she's benefited from, other than repaying her student loans. It's clear the campaign is purposely putting Julia squarely in the near-majority of Americans who no longer pay any federal income taxes, emphasizing an entitlement mentality at the expense of hard-working taxpayers who have to pay for it all. If the choice is between working people who pay taxes and those who rely on government assistance, the Obama campaign is not going with the taxpayers.\

She's not a minority or an immigrant. There's a reason the campaign chose the generic name "Julia." Can you imagine the outrage if the character was called "Juanita" or had been drawn to look African-American? The disapproval would be off the charts, because it would imply that black or Latina women in particular are unable of succeeding without government handouts. Despite the fact that Obama has double-digit leads among African-Americans and Hispanics, the campaign knew better than to portray the beneficiary of so much government money as a minority woman.

She's not married, she doesn't do anything that reveals she's religious, and she's not a homeowner. There's a reason for all those, too—because poll after poll shows that Obama doesn't do as well with married women; he's more popular with single women and college grads. The National Association of Realtors reports that the vast majority of homeowners are married couples, not single women; again, most married couples vote GOP.  When it comes to religion, Pew Research shows that Democrats have a two-to-one lead among those who say they are "unaffiliated" with a church. Hence, Julia doesn't go to church, doesn't pay a mortgage, and isn't married. The campaign knows exactly who it wants to see this—and if those voters could send it to their girlfriends via Facebook, that would be even better.

And finally, we don't know what happens to Julia between ages 42 and 65, her prime earning years. At 42, she's dressed for casual Friday as she starts her own business; by 65 she's in granny glasses and her hair in a bun, looking for her Medicare check. What happened in those 23 years, and how many other government handouts did she get thanks to Obama—99 weeks of unemployment benefits? Food stamps? Welfare? Public housing? Was Medicaid still solvent enough to send her a check?

Here's a thought. Maybe those 23 years are missing from "The Life of Julia" for a reason. Perhaps her small business became wildly successful—so she started paying taxes, got concerned about the debt crisis facing our nation, and started voting Republican. If that's the case, there might be a happy ending to this story after all—one that the Obama campaign couldn't bear to tell.


Obama ad uses conservative church

Joel Gehrke | Published: March 9, 2012
Washington Examiner

President Obama's campaign recently launched an outreach group, African Americans for Obama. But the church he depicts in the ad when appealing to Christians to support his campaign is actually a conservative Virginia church. Its website contains a "pro-life info" section, and its pastor told The Washington Examiner that he will not allow Obama or any other candidate to set up a "congregational captain" among their faithful.

The campaign ad includes video footage of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Manassas (Va.) while Obama, speaking over the video, asks people to rally supporters in their "faith community."

"We don't do an official endorsement of any political campaign," the Rev. Dr. William Allen Church, pastor of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Manassas, said. "But because of our conservative theology, biblical points of view -- for instance, we're pro-life and that sort of thing -- so the practical implications of that come into play when people go cast their ballot," he said. "But I do not give a precise endorsement, whatsoever."

The pastor noted that historically African-American churches exist in the neighborhood, but his church does not identify as such. "We are multi-racial, but we don't describe ourselves according to race," he said. Church also said that -- with respect to political allegiances -- the congregation is mostly composed of Republicans and independents, with "maybe some Democrats.

"The political differences between Obama and the church are fairly apparent even on the church website, which features a "pro-life info" page that explains why the congregation believes that abortion is unbiblical and directs women to a local crisis pregnancy center. "In the future, they might want to do more careful research for that sort of thing," Church suggested.
The church did not know the building would be depicted in the ad before seeing it in Obama's video. The pastor said they have no relationship with the campaign. "The only relationship is that we do pray for all of our civil authorities," the pastor said.

Rev. Pat Mahoney, whose ordination ceremony took place in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Manassas, said that the use of the video reflects Obama's insensitivity to Christian communities. It shows how the Obama administration treats faith as an absolute commodity," Mahoney, head of the Christian Defense Coalition, said. "They just wanted what they thought was a pleasant-looking church."

Church agreed that his church was featured "more for convenience" than any other reason, but was not as offended as Mahoney. "It's amusing more than it was offensive," he said, but allowed that "it would have been a totally different issue if the president had stood in front of the church or had the church been depicted throughout most of his presentation."

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