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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Daniel Flynn</title>
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		<title>The Summer of Americans&#8217; Discontent with Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/daniel-flynn/the-summer-of-americans-discontent-with-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-summer-of-americans-discontent-with-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Aug 2013 04:23:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[approval]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200642</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Big government has rarely looked so vulnerable.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/071913-politics-barack-obama-550x309.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200643" alt="071913-politics-barack-obama-550x309" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/071913-politics-barack-obama-550x309.jpg" width="262" height="212" /></a>Barack Obama isn’t very popular anymore. Gallup pegged his job approval rating over the weekend at 41 percent, twenty-seven points below his Inauguration Day numbers. It’s not Obama’s approval nadir—he dipped below 40 percent several times last year—but one can’t help but notice the downward trajectory. If Obama were a stock, America would be short selling.</p>
<p>Why doesn’t Obama provoke the thrill up the leg that he once did?</p>
<p>The answer can be found in a new book, <i>Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Be Stopped?</i>, by James Antle. Therein, Antle, a veteran reporter who serves as an editor for the <i>Daily Caller</i>, chronicles the expansion of the federal government during the Obama presidency. “Big government has never looked so invincible,” he contends. But as the summer approaches its end one might revise: big government has rarely looked so vulnerable. At least that’s true for the once-formidable political figure who personifies big government. Obama isn’t popular because his animating philosophy doesn’t work.</p>
<p>The president has grown the state. The economy? Not so much. And as the previous successful Democratic presidential candidate reminded itself, “It’s the economy, stupid.”</p>
<p>On the economy, Obama launched his presidency by signing the largest spending bill in human history into law. The stimulus worked as a sleeping pill.</p>
<p>The president’s health care law, has similarly unleashed unintended consequences. Examples include employers reducing worker hours to avoid paying for their medical coverage and insurance rates that “could double or even triple” for healthy people who buy plans on their own, according to Louise Radnofsky of the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>. The Affordable Care Act makes care less affordable.</p>
<p>The administration’s fetishization of public “investment” in private projects has harmed both sectors. Green jobs have been a boondoggle for crony capitalists, perverting entrepreneurship toward pleasing the bureaucracy instead of the market. To put the federal government’s foray into auto manufacturing in perspective, Antle points out that Ford sold ten times as many Edsals as General Motors has sold of its Volt. For whatever reason, Edsal is a punch line and Volts still roll off assembly lines.</p>
<p>Such failures often prompt Washington to double down when they should fold. “Big government is the only institution that is touted as the solution to its own failures,” <i>Devouring Freedom</i> explains. “If there is a major national security breach because some government agency didn’t do its job, the immediate response is to give the agency more power. It’s as if, at the height of the Enron scandals, people concluded that the problem was that Ken Lay didn’t have enough authority.”</p>
<p>The effects on the economy, health care, and the cars driving on the roads weren’t what the administration hoped for. Neither was the effect on the deficit, which has skyrocketed from under $11 trillion to almost $17 trillion during the Obama presidency.</p>
<p>The president, who brought a wealth of experience in government and the classroom to his office, never worked in private enterprise. Not familiar with what it takes to create a job, Obama unsurprisingly appears obtuse to the concerns of job creators. With unemployment at 8 percent or more for in excess of three years of his presidency, Obama oversaw the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression. The gross domestic product expanded at 1.7 percent for the second quarter after growing by an anemic 1.1 percent during the first three months of 2013. Stocks approach record highs. So do the number of young people living at home. If Obama were a Republican, this would be an opposition talking point. He’s a Democrat, so it remains an unspoken irony.</p>
<p>At various times during his tenure, the president has blamed his predecessor, amorphous “headwinds,” the Arab Spring, European instability, the Japanese tsunami, and Republicans in Congress for the stalled economy. The man historian Michael Beschloss labels the “smartest guy ever to become president” surely isn’t the most introspective person to hold the office. Considering whether his policies cause his, and the country’s, problems seems beyond him. The pivot never comes for those stuck in their ways.</p>
<p>That’s why the morass in which Obama finds himself, much like the morass in which many Americans find themselves, may be the new normal—at least until a change of administrations. Surely the president isn’t about to change his mind on the virtues of an activist state. “As government grows beyond its constitutional boundaries,” Antle concludes, “it really does devour freedom.” It eventually devours job approval numbers, too.</p>
<p><i>Daniel J. Flynn is the author of</i> The War on Football: Saving America’s Game <i>(Regnery, 2013)</i>.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Through Oliver Stone’s Looking Glass</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=through-oliver-stones-looking-glass</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Dec 2012 04:33:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=170621</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Showtime morbid fantasy world on Roosevelt, Truman, &#038; Wallace.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/roosevelt/" rel="attachment wp-att-170748"><img class="size-full wp-image-170748 alignleft" title="Roosevelt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Roosevelt.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="229" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the second installment of a series of articles Frontpage will be running in the days ahead in response to Oliver Stone’s neo-Communist documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States,” currently airing Mondays on Showtime. Frontpage will be reviewing each episode of the Stone series, exposing the leftist hateful lies about America and setting the record straight. Below is a review of Part 2 of Stone’s series.<br />
</em></p>
<p>Oliver Stone talks of the Soviet Union “liberating” nations during World War II in his new history series. But Joseph Stalin didn’t free any nations. He conquered them, just as his erstwhile ally Adolf Hitler had done. The lion that has scared the hyena away from your body hasn’t liberated you. He’s freed himself to feast on you alone. Surely the Czech or Polish people didn’t view Stalin as their liberator. But pay-cable viewers seven decades removed from the fact learn that he was.</p>
<p>Showtime claims that its ten-part Oliver Stone documentary <em>The Untold History of the United States</em> “demands to be watched again and again.” The question is: how should it be “watched again and again”? From the inside of a barbed-wire enclosed campground? Strapped into a Ludovico technique apparatus? On a state television loop?</p>
<p>In the series’ second installment, “Roosevelt, Truman, &amp; Wallace,” Stone alleges a grand conspiracy to deny Henry Wallace a second term as ailing Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president. Forgetting that the American people largely agreed with Wallace’s predecessor’s assessment (“not worth a bucket of warm piss”) of the office, Stone depicts the replacement of Wallace on the ticket with Missouri Senator Harry Truman as a subversion of the democratic process. But neither the democrats, nor the Democrats, cared at the time as much as Stone does now. In judging the ticket switching consequential, Stone surely isn’t in crackpot territory. Within six months of 1944’s election, President Roosevelt would be dead. Wallace, whose “dear guru” letters to a cult leader, employment of Alger Hiss and other Communists at the Agriculture Adjustment Administration, and pursuit of wholesale pig slaughter and crop destruction to inflate farm prices all pegged him as a flake, would have made a frightening commander in chief (and not just to farm animals). But Stone thinks otherwise.</p>
<p>The documentary posits that Wallace was Roosevelt’s true heir, and his replacement on the ticket with the rube from Missouri perverted the course that the 32<sup>nd</sup> president intended for America. If Wallace had remained vice president, then the Cold War, the Korean War, and much unpleasantness would have been avoided. Counterfactual history seduces so thoroughly because it proves impenetrable to counterfactuals. It’s easier to defend what we wished happened than what did happen.</p>
<p>Since Roosevelt, unlike Wallace, was an actual rather than a pretend president, Stone spends much time defending many of the least defensible aspects of his twelve-year reign. “In truth,” Stone claims about the Big Three negotiations, “the United States and Britain had lost their leverage by failing to open up a second front until very late in the war. So at the end of the day FDR didn’t give anything at Yalta that Stalin didn’t already have.” He judges Roosevelt as “unfairly attacked for capitulating to Stalin.” He never mentions the Stalinists advising Roosevelt to capitulate to Stalin in the shaping of the postwar world. Such influence is incomprehensible to Stone, despite the filmmaker’s insistence that ravenous advisors, rather than the sick and weary president, were to blame for decisions such as ditching Wallace from the presidential ticket.</p>
<p>Stone imagines the cabal behind jettisoning Wallace as behind the bellicose policy toward the USSR that emerged following the war. “It is important to note that many of the most vociferous critics of the Soviet Union shared a similar class background and a deep hatred of anything that smacked of socialism,” Stone asserts as a grainy graphic displays aristocrats dancing many decades earlier. He notes that Averell Harriman was the “son of a railroad tycoon,” James Forrestal “made a fortune on Wall Street,” and Edward Stettinius was “chairman of the board of the nation’s largest cooperation.” Stone ominously claims that the trio joined in a conspiracy with “wealthy international bankers” to derail socialism. The film notes that Truman inherited these men from Roosevelt’s cabinet, an inconvenient truth dismissed with the assertion that the 32<sup>nd</sup> president didn’t pay any mind to the men whom he casts as controlling Truman’s mind.</p>
<p>Heroic music rings in the background when Franklin Roosevelt appears. The music turns dark and ominous when the discussion turns to Harry Truman. The filmmakers intend these sonic cues to induce the audience to think Truman=bad, Roosevelt=good. Instead, they make us judge the filmmakers as crude propagandists. Watching a documentary about the 1940s doesn’t require us to adopt the age’s political naivety.</p>
<p>The documentary cites everything from Truman’s height to his poor eyesight to explain his antipathy to Communism. It contends that “Truman did not seem capable of comprehending the pain and suffering of the Soviet people or their motives.” But it’s the documentarian who seems incapable of comprehending this. Nowhere in part two of Stone’s documentary—I have not watched the rest—does he mention Stalin’s Show Trials, the famine he manufactured in the Ukraine, or even the Gulag. No doubt the Missouri haberdasher had these cruelties in mind when he sought to stop Communist expansion. Truman, like all Cold War presidents who followed, also discerned the difference between the Communist ruling class and the “Soviet people” that Stone strangely credits for the expansionary policies of one Soviet person, Stalin. Certainly “the motives” of an ordinary Russian and the bloodthirsty Georgian differed greatly. But Stone speaks of national motives as if they encompassed the people outside of the Politburo, as well.</p>
<p><em>The Untold History of the United States</em> is a misnomer. This history of the United States has been told again and again—<em>in Russian</em>.</p>
<p><strong>Related articles on Stone’s series:</strong></p>
<p>1. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/">Bruce Thornton’s introduction</a> to this Frontpage series.</p>
<p>2. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/">Matthew Vadum&#8217;s review</a> of Stone&#8217;s first episode.</p>
<p>3. Daniel Greenfield’s <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-atom-bomb-and-the-truth-bomb/">review of “The Bomb,”</a> the third episode.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.<br />
</strong></p>
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		<title>End Times for Michigan&#8217;s Big Labor Racket</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/end-times-for-michigans-big-labor-racket/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=end-times-for-michigans-big-labor-racket</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Dec 2012 04:45:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Bill]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dues]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[force]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Michigan]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[right to work]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=169162</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A sign of hope for the beleaguered Wolverine State? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/end-times-for-michigans-big-labor-racket/righttoworksnyder_605/" rel="attachment wp-att-169172"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-169172" title="righttoworksnyder_605" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/righttoworksnyder_605.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="193" /></a>“If you seek a pleasant peninsula,” Michigan’s state motto informs, “look about you.” This may have rung true when the state’s founding fathers settled on these words 177 years ago. It doesn’t now.</p>
<p>The Mayan 2012 prophecy came true for labor bosses Tuesday night. Rick Snyder, the governor of a state known for its powerful industrial trade unions, signed right-to-work legislation into law. The Wolverine state becomes the twenty-fourth in the union to bar compulsory unionization. The overtones of such a labor stronghold adopting right-to-work rules—the symbolic equivalent of Mississippi codifying gay marriage or Texas banning firearms—wasn’t lost on either side of the for-now-settled debate. The two new laws allow private- and public-sector workers to hold jobs without union honchos automatically siphoning off a portion of their paychecks.</p>
<p>The union honchos are not happy.</p>
<p>Frustrate a racket at the risk of inflaming the racketeers. Thousands of workers skipped work, including hooky-playing public school teachers whose absence closed several schools, to demonstrate against the legislation. Their behavior proved a fairly accurate reflection of the law they fought to keep on the books. The protestors relied on force in an attempt to intimidate politicians into imposing a law that compels workers to join a union as a condition of employment. But strong-arm tactics failed to hold up a strong-arm rule. They only illustrated the injustice of force over freedom.</p>
<p>“We’re going to pass something that will undo a hundred years of labor relations,” state representative Douglas Geiss warned. “And there will be blood. There will be repercussions.”</p>
<p>This was less prophecy than observation. On the grounds of the same state house where the representative made his banana-republic utterance, the like-minded simple-minded went on a rampage. Protestors punched Fox News contributor Steven Crowder in the face. Knife-wielding union supporters slashed a tent legally permitted for Americans for Prosperity’s Michigan branch and then trampled on the fallen tarp with people still under it. Police arrested two men trying to force their way into a building that houses offices for the state’s governor. Another demonstrator assaulted a state policewoman. Protestors chanted, “No justice! No peace!”</p>
<p>“I really wish we had not gone here,” representative Geiss further opined. “It is the leadership in this house that has led us here. The same leadership that tried to throw a bomb right on Election Day, leading to a member switching parties, and came in at the eleventh hour with a gotcha bill. For that, I do not see solace, I do not see peace.” Could he have been looking out a window when he said this?</p>
<p>The new laws don’t prevent any of the thousands of union members demonstrating at the state capitol from remaining union members back at the job site. They just prevent unions from forcing workers to pay dues to organization to which they don’t wish to belong. The degree to which this proves an Armageddon to organized labor will demonstrate the degree to which organized labor remains popular with individual laborers.</p>
<p>Surely organized labor remains popular with Democratic Party politicians. “These so-called ‘right to work’ laws, they don’t have to do with economics; they have everything to do with politics,” President Obama, a beneficiary of union campaign volunteers and union donations, declared at a car factory in Redford, Michigan on Monday. “What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money.” The president’s spokesman declined to condemn the violence in Lansing, claiming ignorance, for instance, of Representative Geiss’s provocative remarks. “I haven’t seen those comments,” Jay Carney explained in a Tuesday briefing, “and I’m not sure they mean what someone interprets them to mean,”</p>
<p>Surly the union bosses preaching doomsday misinterpreted the eschatological signs. The endtimes weren’t in the state capital of Lansing, where a businessman politician affixed his signature to legislation inviting business back into Michigan, but in postapocalyptic Detroit, a union bastion where illegitimate births approach 90 percent, adult illiteracy nears 50 percent, the median home price remains the lowest of any of America’s big cities at $86,000, and half the city’s population fled in the last half century. There is power in a union.</p>
<p>Michigan’s right-to-work law may prove cataclysmic for union coffers. But the governor only signed it long after unions proved cataclysmic for Michigan’s coffers.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Democrats’ Desired Deal Is No Deal</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Dec 2012 04:24:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why Obama is willing to go over the cliff.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/the-democrats-desired-deal-is-no-deal/fiscal-cliff/" rel="attachment wp-att-168126"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-168126" title="fiscal-cliff" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/fiscal-cliff.jpeg" alt="" width="238" height="179" /></a>President Barack Obama Tuesday indicated an unwillingness to strike a deal with Republicans to avoid tax increases and spending cuts—dubbed the “fiscal cliff” by Ben Bernanke—unless the opposition agrees to raise taxes on the wealthy. “We’re going to have to see the rates on the top two percent go up and we’re not going to be able to get a deal without it,” he explained to cable’s Bloomberg channel in his first television interview since the election.</p>
<p>The hard line, following a bizarre proposal to include additional “stimulus” spending as part of the deficit-reduction plan and vest unilateral power in the president to raise the debt ceiling, has convinced many that the president wishes to drive off the fiscal cliff with his foot firmly on the gas pedal. Reporting within the left-wing press supports the idea that the president isn’t averse to walking away from the bargaining table. “What has changed is the president’s hand,” David Corn of <em>Mother Jones</em> reports. “According to senior administration officials, Obama is not eager to go over the cliff, but he is willing. If no deal is reached by the end of the month, all the Bush tax cuts—for the rich and not rich—will evaporate.”</p>
<p>Certainly the president’s left-wing considers no deal the most desirable deal.</p>
<p>Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, appearing on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC program last week, called the fiscal cliff “the best deal progressive Democrats are going to get.” Why? “One, we get the Clinton tax rates on everybody. Will it cause a problem? Yes. There will be a short recession and it will be painful. But two, we get defense cuts. Republicans are never going to agree to that. And three, there are some human services cuts which we`re not going to like, but it’s the least possible damage.”</p>
<p>When asked if going off the fiscal cliff were the best option, liberal economist Dean Baker told <em>The Progressive</em> “Absolutely.” The Center for Economic and Policy Research director explained, “The do-nothing outcome is the one [Obama] campaigned on.” Without a deal, the president gets steep defense reductions and gets to “raise taxes on the richest 2 percent, which is what he wanted.”</p>
<p>Radio host Thom Hartmann finds “an incredible opportunity” in the fiscal cliff. “I think it’s time to drive off the so-called fiscal cliff,” he explained to followers, calling the deadline to avert tax hikes and spending cuts “nothing but a speed bump.” Hartmann articulated three reasons progressives should support leaping off the fiscal cliff. First, though “it goes nowhere as far as it should, which would be to roll back the Reagan tax cuts, it’s a start on moving America in a more egalitarian direction.” Second, “most of those cuts to the Pentagon budget are good things.” And third, it will put Republicans on record as hating the poor and aged by endorsing cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.</p>
<p>To be sure, a few right-of center scribes, including <em>The Daily Caller</em>’s Tucker Carlson and <em>The Daily Beast</em>’s Megan McArdle, have similarly written of going off the fiscal cliff as a favorable outcome. But the sentiment’s popularity among the president’s base, coupled with the president’s my-way-or-the-highway proposals, hints that the Obama already has most of what he wants through last year’s delayed deficit-reduction agreement that has become known as the fiscal cliff.</p>
<p>Speaker of the House John Boehner may lament the bargaining position in which he finds himself. But he shouldn’t forget that he put himself there. When the Speaker of the House held the cards during the summer of 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations, he traded Republican votes supporting an increased debt-ceiling for a deficit-reduction plan that relied primarily on tax hikes and defense cuts. Put another way, he agreed to give the president what he wanted (the power to borrow more money) in exchange for more of what the president wanted (defense cuts and tax hikes). Boehner’s adversary has the cards because he handed them to him.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>ObamaCare Leaves Restauranteurs with a Bad Taste</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/obamacare-leaves-restaurateurs-with-a-bad-taste/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacare-leaves-restaurateurs-with-a-bad-taste</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Nov 2012 04:30:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Darden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[full time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Insurance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jimmy John's]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[restaurants]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[workers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=167400</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The full consequences of the law on low-wage workers are bubbling to the surface.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/obamacare-leaves-restaurateurs-with-a-bad-taste/jimmy-johns-16x9/" rel="attachment wp-att-167404"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-167404" title="jimmy-johns-16x9" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/jimmy-johns-16x9.jpg" alt="" width="256" height="185" /></a>Stiffed waitresses know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. They may soon learn there’s no such thing as free health care, either.</p>
<p>It’s newsworthy that ObamaCare proponents find a businessman’s proclamation that he intends to comply with the law newsworthy. Dean Hodges, the owner of 18 Jimmy John’s franchises West of the Mississippi, emailed the <em>Huffington Post</em> that he will seek to provide insurance to his uncovered full-time employees. “I’m trying to save for it and plan for it so I can comply with the government, provide health care, and still pay for it,” the sandwich shop proprietor wrote.</p>
<p>Doesn’t highlighting this man-bites-dog story paradoxically affirm that businessmen regard the signature legislation of the present administration as hostile to their livelihood? Restaurant proprietors, whose slim profit margins often revolve around such seemingly petty matters as napkins used and ketchup consumed, have reacted negatively to the increased overhead of insuring employees who work 30 or more hours a week that the Affordable Care Act mandates. Despite its name, the food service industry isn’t finding the law very affordable.</p>
<p>Darden Restaurants, the largest U.S.-based restaurateur, has begun experimenting with limits on employee hours in four markets. The owner-operators of Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, and Red Lobster released a statement to the <em>Orlando Sentinel</em> affirming that limiting employee hours is “just one of the many things we are evaluating to help us address the cost implications health care reform will have on our business. There are still many unanswered questions regarding the health care regulations and we simply do not have enough information to make any decisions at this time.”</p>
<p>John Metz, owner of dozens of Denny’s, Dairy Queen, and Hurricane Grill &amp; Wings franchises, discussed imposing an ObamaCare surcharge on meals to defray costs—and to not hide them within the bill.  He points out that “to pay $5,000 per employee would cost us $175,000 per restaurant, and unfortunately, most of our restaurants don’t make $175,000 a year. I can’t afford it.” To avoid the added burden of ObamaCare insurance dictates on employers regarding full-time employees, Metz plans to cut back on hours. “It’s ridiculous that the maximum hours we can give people is 28 hours a week instead of 40,” Metz told the <em>Huffington Post</em>. “It’s going to force my employees to go out and get a second job.”</p>
<p>Zane Tankel, CEO of Apple-Metro, said on the Fox Business Network that under a best-case scenario he would have to engage in minimal layoffs at his 40 Applebees franchises in New York because of the health-care overhaul. “We’ve calculated it will be some millions of dollars across our system,” Tankel explained. “So what does that say? That says we won’t build more restaurants. We won’t hire more people—exactly the opposite of what the president says.”</p>
<p>Even Dean Hodges of Jimmy John’s concedes that conforming to the law’s provisions won’t be easy. Hodges notes that just 38 of his 550 employees currently receive health-insurance benefits. He estimates that ObamaCare will compel him to insure another 150. “If I add 150 people to the same plan, we’re talking over $500,000 in premiums. Ten of my 18 stores would become unprofitable&#8230;. if I’m unprofitable I can’t go on, I can’t exist, and I can’t employ anyone.”</p>
<p>And unemployment, which has been the nagging concern of millions of Americans during Obama’s first term, figures to get worse in the second administration because of the implementation of the health-care legislation. The unemployment rate exceeded eight percent for 43 months during Obama’s first administration. It exceeded eight percent for just 39 months during the previous 60 years. Put another way, the total amount of time the unemployment rate stayed above eight percent under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II doesn’t rise to the amount of time it spent above that mark during President Obama’s first term.</p>
<p>Like the infinite extension of unemployment insurance and the various stimulus boondoggles, ObamaCare offers perverse incentives regarding employment that planners overlooked. Because the Obama Administration didn’t plan for it, business owners, like Dean Hodges of Jimmy John’s, have to.</p>
<p>Will forcing health-care costs on sub shops inflate the cost of a sandwich? Depress the wage of a sandwich maker? Knock workers off the payroll and onto the dole? Put taxpayers on the hook for the health care of the unemployed? Turn the franchise owners’ profits into losses?</p>
<p>The questions weren’t asked when bureaucrats formulated the legislation. They will be answered once they implement it.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama’s Fifth Column in the Fourth Estate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/obamas-fifth-column-in-the-fourth-estate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-fifth-column-in-the-fourth-estate</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 21 Nov 2012 04:35:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A damning indictment of the media from the Pew Research Center. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/obamas-fifth-column-in-the-fourth-estate/20120820-hero/" rel="attachment wp-att-166087"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-166087" title="20120820-hero" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20120820-hero.jpg" alt="" width="309" height="239" /></a>MSNBC didn’t run a single negative story on Barack Obama during the final week of the presidential campaign. MSNBC didn’t run a single positive story on Mitt Romney during the final week of the presidential campaign.</p>
<p>Bias? What bias?</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/final_weeks_mainstream_press">study</a> by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that news outlets increased their coverage of the president in the campaign’s final week—and increased the favorability of that coverage. At the same time, the negative tone in stories on the Republican nominee increased sharply. When the going gets tough, Andrea Mitchell, Anderson Cooper, and George Stephanopoulos get going to their favored candidate’s rescue.</p>
<p>During the presidential race’s last week, Obama enjoyed positive reports for 29 percent of stories and negative ones for 19 percent. Pew deemed the remainder neutral or balanced. Mitt Romney endured negative stories for 33 percent of reports and positive ones for 16 percent of reports. In other words, in the immediate lead up to Election Day Obama’s coverage tended to be more positive than negative and Romney’s coverage tended to be more negative than positive.</p>
<p>The Pew analysis follows a Gallup survey from earlier this fall that found the public’s trust in the media at an all-time low. Gallup reported that six in ten Americans put “little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.” Since the polling organization began surveying on that issue in the 1990s, Americans have never been more down on the media than now. The current gap between those who trust and don’t trust journalists is the largest “by far,” according to Gallup. The political breakdown among respondents itself supports claims of bias: Most Democrats retain faith in the Fourth Estate to report “fully, accurately, and fairly”; most Republicans do not.</p>
<p>Conditioned by a steady stream of campaign coverage anecdotes, political observers—particularly conservative ones who harbor a grudge against the press—may not find Pew’s findings surprising. This is an administration, after all, that plucked <em>Time</em> magazine’s Washington bureau chief to serve as its mouthpiece. And election season revealed any number of newsmen willing to serve in that role without pay or title. People who matter-of-factly refer to the “lamestream media” didn’t need a study to tell them the Washington press corps roots for the Democrats. But the Pew account nevertheless puts the imprimatur of a respected research organization on a phenomenon ridiculed as more phantom than fact, the sour grapes of ideologues who demand journalistic reinforcement of their beliefs.</p>
<p>This is certainly the outlook of <em>New York Times</em> media writer David Carr. “Many Republicans see bias lurking in every live shot, but the growing hegemony of conservative voices makes manufacturing a partisan conspiracy a practical impossibility,” Carr maintained in an October 1 piece. Though Carr allowed that not everyone crying bias “needs to be fitted for a tinfoil helmet”—a comforting observation, since Gallup contends that <em>most</em> Americans believe that journalists don’t play it fair—he held that “the trope is losing traction, partly because there are many robust champions of the right, which gives conservatives the means to project their message far beyond the choir.”<strong> </strong>Americans distrust journalists. Journalists, working in a profession known to attract skeptics, ridicule the public’s distrust of them.</p>
<p>Though Candy Crowley’s transformation from moderator to advocate during the second presidential debate may be the most glaring instance of the partiality of a journalist during the race for the White House, it’s not the most egregious malefaction. Like Crowley, so many of the scribes and anchors who succumbed to a crusading style did so in covering the murders of U.S. ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. When journalists talked about Benghazi, they often did so to dismiss it or simply to reinforce the administration’s tenuous narrative. <em>Time</em>’s Joe Klein opined that the attack on the U.S. consulate “really isn’t an issue.” Thomas Friedman of the <em>New York Times</em> dubbed Libya an “utterly contrived story.” ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos called the Obama administration “relatively transparent” in its handling of the attacks. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews maintained of the killings, “Everybody knows it’s about the video. It’s all about the video.”</p>
<p>Never have so many in a profession that prides itself on speaking truth to power so sucked up to power. For the same reasons they expect blind faith from listeners, watchers, and readers, ideologue journalists display it towards the administration: their ideas are too noble to partake in deception so ignoble. Take it from the press. You can trust them on that. Or not.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama Doubles Down on His First Term</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/obama-doubles-down-on-his-first-term/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-doubles-down-on-his-first-term</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Nov 2012 04:35:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=165473</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president is as arrogant and ambitious as ever. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/obama-doubles-down-on-his-first-term/barack-obama-18/" rel="attachment wp-att-165475"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-165475" title="barack-obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/barack-obama-450x340.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="238" /></a>“I hope and intend to be an even better president in the second term than I was in the first,” Barack Obama announced on Wednesday. The provocative statement presumed something about his first term that his election-day margin of victory—lower than all but one reelected president in U.S. history—contradicts. <em>Even better</em>, huh? If the president’s adversaries had hoped for a fresh start in the wake of November 6’s status quo election, Wednesday’s press conference—the first since March—provided little to buttress their optimism. The president’s attack on moderate GOP Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain for criticizing UN ambassador Susan Rice, and insistence on $1.6 trillion in new taxes, suggests an emboldened president doubling down on his first term.</p>
<p>Meet the new Barack. Same as the old Barack. The arrogance, the imperious take-it-or-leave-it propositions, the feigned indignation that members of the opposing party would dare criticize his administration—it was all there at the rare press conference. And if the brickbat didn’t become an olive branch after his mid-term “shellacking,” the president’s combative performance before a pliant press shows that it’s certainly not going to do so in the wake of his triumph.</p>
<p>But it’s never the same the second time around. Presidents gleeful with reelection soon become glum with torpor, scandal, and worse. Monicagate resulted in President Clinton’s impeachment. Iran-Contra bogged down Ronald Reagan. Watergate stopped the Nixon presidency. Franklin Roosevelt’s initial reelection preceded a disastrous court-packing scheme and the economy dipping back into depression. And we all know how terribly Abraham Lincoln’s second term started—<em>and ended</em>.</p>
<p>Milton Friedman wrote a book, <em>The Tyranny of the Status Quo</em>, which tackled the question of political inertia. The Nobel Prize winner surmised that “a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity. Further changes come slowly or not at all, and counterattacks develop against the initial changes. The temporarily routed political forces regroup, and they tend to mobilize everyone who was adversely affected by the changes, while the proponents of the changes tend to relax after their initial victories.” In other words, get what you want done immediately or not at all.</p>
<p>Second-term presidents certainly have achieved foreign policy successes and stamped their imprint on the courts. But second-term legislative successes have rarely come through ultimatums and strong-arm tactics, particularly when the opposing party controls one half of Congress and the president increasingly gets seen as a lame duck. President Reagan’s simplification of the tax code in 1986 that closed loopholes and brought top rates down from 50 to 28 percent won passage through the sponsorship of Democrats Dick Gephardt in the House of Representatives and Bill Bradley in the Senate. Bill Clinton presiding over the first budget surpluses in three decades stemmed in large part from a Republican Congress’s refusal to support dramatic spending increases. It took the two parties, and the two political branches of government, to bring the budget to balance.</p>
<p>Truly ambitious programs without appeal to the opposition tend to fair poorly during second terms. George W. Bush, who believed his reelection granted him political “capital” to spend, tried doing so on an overhaul of Social Security that would have permitted more options for younger citizens. In a Congress more favorable to him that the current one is to President Obama, President Bush’s proposal was dead on arrival. Should Barack Obama proceed in as uncompromising a manner during his second term as he did during his first, he may find far fewer legislative victories. Presidential power tends to erode rather than strengthen over time.</p>
<p>Alas, history hasn’t always provided precedent for anticipating the political career of Barack Obama. He is just one of three presidents to arrive at the office directly from the Senate. The first black president’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, won passage outside of that six-to-nine month window that Friedman outlined. Obama became the first president since FDR reelected with unemployment above 7.5 percent and one of two presidential victors since the dawn of exit polling who won the White House but lost independents. As stock brokers remind, past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Election Epiphany</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/election-epiphany/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=election-epiphany</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 08 Nov 2012 04:50:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=164440</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The electorate has changed -- but where do we go from here? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/election-epiphany/romney_concession_rect-460x307/" rel="attachment wp-att-164476"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-164476" title="romney_concession_rect-460x307" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/romney_concession_rect-460x307-450x300.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="210" /></a>“Many times, I step out of my room, I go down to Polk Street, I feel like an immigrant who just arrived in a foreign country,” Eric Hoffer, a San Franciscan since the early 1940s, confessed to Eric Sevareid on CBS in the late 1960s. “And it’s a helluva job to immigrate at sixty-seven.” The longshoreman philosopher complained of the noise of his newcomer neighbors and his inability to determine the sex of passersby on the street. San Francisco, once a heavily Catholic blue-collar city, had morphed into a dropout destination for those who had left their morals at home.</p>
<p>Supporters of Mitt Romney feel a lot like Hoffer right now. Millions of voters who have resided in America their whole lives have immigrated without moving an inch. They don’t live in the country of their birth even if they’ve never travelled outside its borders. This is not your father’s America. It’s not even your older brother’s.</p>
<p>The electorate that voted Ronald Reagan into the presidency in 1980 was 88 percent white, ten percent black, and two percent Hispanic. The body politic that reelected Barack Obama in 2012 was 72 percent white, thirteen percent black, ten percent Hispanic, three percent Asian, and two percent “other.” If Mitt Romney had Ronald Reagan’s electorate, he wins in a landslide. If landslide winner Reagan had Romney’s, does he even win?</p>
<p>The changing complexion of America may be the most superficial of the major demographic shifts. Getting married and bringing children into the world are less popular now than at any point in U.S. history. In 1980, just 18 percent of births occurred to women not married to their child’s father. Now, that figure exceeds 40 percent. Without a daddy in their house, many single mothers look for a daddy in the White House.</p>
<p>In God Americans don’t trust—at least not as much as they once did. In 1980, fewer than ten percent of respondents cited “no religion” as their affiliation to the Pew Research Center. Today, that figure reaches twenty percent. Tuesday’s exit polls showed only a minority of voters attending religious services regularly. The exit polls clearly showed that the less one attended religious services the more one tended to vote for Obama.</p>
<p>So many Americans now depend on government for food, shelter, retirement, education, health care, and even jobs that the party of government almost guarantees itself a majority long before the campaign has started. Consider that in 1980 slightly more than twenty million Americans received food stamps. In 2012, the number approaches fifty million. From bailed-out Toledo autoworkers to the comfortably unemployed approaching 99 weeks of benefits in Detroit to Georgetown co-eds desiring free birth control, the Democrat constituency is the coalition of the bought. For Ronald Reagan government was the problem, not the solution. Tuesday’s electorate, even though a slight majority told exit pollsters that government does too much, voted for government as the solution rather than the problem.</p>
<p>The more likely a voter is to marry, visit a house of worship, or demonstrate economic self-sufficiency, the more likely that voter will cast a Republican ballot. Demographics, including Tuesday’s exit polls, show that the typical American voter resembles the typical Republican voter a lot less than thirty-two years ago.</p>
<p>Republicans Tuesday suddenly came to grips with the changes that have been slowly transforming the United States of America. The election acted as the epiphany. There has been a revolution within the form. The nation’s name remains the same. Its habits, and inhabitants, have changed beyond recognition.</p>
<p>“It makes me wonder who my fellow citizens are,” Bostonian Marianne Doherty poignantly told the <em>Washington Examiner</em>’s Byron York on election night. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel like I’ve lost touch with what the identity of America is right now. I really do.” This bewilderment, surely different from the intense alienation often experienced by partisans in the wake of election-night disappointment, ensnares many Americans. The electorate more so than the elected inflicts the sense of loss. There’s no time machine waiting to transport us back to 1980.</p>
<p>During a decade of dramatic change, Eric Hoffer, later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, thought and wrote about how societies, like teenagers, endure rapid transformation as a traumatic experience. Hoffer wrote in 1967 that “it is becoming evident that, no matter how desirable, drastic change is the most difficult and dangerous experience mankind has undergone. We are discovering that broken habits can be more painful and crippling than broken bones.” Forty-five years later, the wisdom rings true for those dealing with a loss whose seeds were sown amid the changes that Hoffer fixated upon so many decades ago.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Why Romney May Win</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/why-romney-may-win/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-romney-may-win</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Nov 2012 04:50:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The president is in more trouble than Democratic-slanted polls let on. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/why-romney-may-win/040412romney_obama_dngnk/" rel="attachment wp-att-163690"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163690" title="040412romney_obama_dngnk" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/040412romney_obama_dngnk.gif" alt="" width="315" height="227" /></a>Most polls tell us about the opinions of voters. A few tell us about the opinions of pollsters.</p>
<p>The most recent <em>Investor’s Business Daily</em>/TIPP poll, at least as of this writing, shows Barack Obama with a 45-44 lead over Mitt Romney. The internals of the poll show that the pollster favors Democrats, too. A full 38 percent of those included in the survey identified as Democrats, while just 31 percent identified as Republicans. Though the researchers may not have been deliberately aiming for such an overwhelming Democratic advantage, the demographic assumptions they made predetermined which party would enjoy favoritism. This seven-point differential matches the Democrat’s party-identification advantage for 2008, when African Americans turned out in record numbers and young people opted for the Democratic candidate over the Republican by a record margin. Historic elections by definition don’t happen every four years. Counting on maximum-level support, and among the groups traditionally among those least reliable when it comes to voting, seems wishful thinking. But the <em>Investor’s Business Daily</em>/TIPP count, like the Obama campaign itself, supposes another Democrat “perfect storm” in 2012.</p>
<p>The pro-Obama bias runs deeper within the various polls of contested battleground states. In 2008, Democrats constituted 29 percent of the New Hampshire electorate according to exit polls. The latest University of New Hampshire poll, which shows the president comfortably ahead by nine points in the state, assumes a 46 percent turnout among Democrats in the Granite State in 2012. In Florida, the CBS/<em>New York Times</em>/Quinnipiac poll, which claims a one-point advantage for Obama over Romney, assumes that the Democrat party-identification advantage will increase from 2008’s +3 to +7 in 2012. In Colorado, the partisan PPP poll depicts a 51-47 Obama advantage. The survey anticipates that Democratic voters in Colorado will rise from 30 percent of the electorate to 37 percent. These polls seem more geared toward influencing voter opinion than reflecting it.</p>
<p>But even the most slanted polls aren’t totally useless. The percentage of independents that they survey differs. The attitude of the independents they survey remains consistent. In poll after poll, independent voters support Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. The Republican leads Obama 51-39 among independents in both the National Public Radio and CBS/<em>New York Times</em>/Quinnipiac polls. In the <em>Investor’s Business Daily</em>/TIPP poll, Romney’s lead among independents is 46-38. No Democrat has won the presidency during the last half century without also winning independent voters. The irony of the bitter red-blue divide is that the few “purple” voters immune to the polarization increasingly decide elections.</p>
<p>If this race is about, as Obama’s leading campaign surrogate once believed, “the economy, stupid,” then the contest favors Romney. In the NBC/<em>Wall Street Journal</em>/Marist poll, which featured a sampling bias in favor of the Democrats, respondents nevertheless favored Romney on the economy. When asked, “Who do you think is better prepared to create jobs and improve the economy over the next four years?” the polled chose Romney by 45-41. Other polls have also shown a Romney advantage on the question of the economy.</p>
<p>Ironically, the people pollsters have been polling are not the people most likely to show up at polling places. When CBS/<em>New York Times</em>/Quinnipiac most recently queried likely voters about their enthusiasm for their chosen candidate, 68 percent of Romney supporters said they were “very” enthusiastic to just 59 percent for Obama voters. In NPR’s poll, 76 percent of Republicans rated the election a “10” in terms of importance versus just 66 percent of Democrats. While the enthusiasm edge may seem marginal, so is the percentage differential between the candidates in most national polls.</p>
<p>So what catalyzed independents to abandon the president and catalyzed Republicans to so enthusiastically oppose him?</p>
<p>A political obituary, should the president lose on Tuesday, might note that he couldn’t run the country like he could run for president. He mistook the gas for the brake pedal when voters rebuked him first in Massachusetts and then nationwide in 2010. He promised change and delivered more of the same.</p>
<p>A candidate running on change always risks disappointment catching up to him.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Let Detroit Go Bankrupt? It Already Has</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/let-detroit-go-bankrupt-it-already-has/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=let-detroit-go-bankrupt-it-already-has</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Oct 2012 04:40:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Detroit]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=159767</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Left destroyed one of America's greatest cities. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/let-detroit-go-bankrupt-it-already-has/help-detroit1/" rel="attachment wp-att-159782"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-159782" title="help-detroit1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/help-detroit1.gif" alt="" width="315" height="232" /></a>“I’m a son of Detroit,” Mitt Romney confessed during Monday’s presidential debate. “I was born in Detroit. My dad was head of a car company. I like American cars. And I would do nothing to hurt the U.S. auto industry.” But like so many Detroiters, Mitt Romney left before the capital of the U.S. auto industry could hurt him. Detroit is scary.</p>
<p>Detroit has just been named the most dangerous city in America. This is the fourth consecutive year that <em>Forbes</em> has bestowed the dishonor upon the Motor City. A few years back, the Bay Area Center for Voting Research named Detroit the most liberal city in America. If you believe the two listings are mere coincidence, I have a domed stadium in Pontiac to sell you.</p>
<p>Detroit proves that liberalism is hazardous to your health.</p>
<p>America’s most dangerous city hasn’t been governed by a Republican for a half century. Yet, on November 6, the city’s residents will again take out their anger on a Republican—this time one of the city’s sons—at the polls. The worse the performance of Detroit’s hard-left officeholders paradoxically means the greater the punishment for the party that opposes them. When the largest employer in a city is the city itself, urging the cut backs necessary to attract employers is seen as an attack on employment.</p>
<p>Detroit’s violent crime rate, more than five times the national average, is shocking only when glimpsed outside the context of the city’s other depressing social trends. The illegitimacy rate is 85 percent.  Two thirds of the city’s children live in poverty. Less than a third of ninth graders graduate from high school within four years. Just 53 percent of the adults are functionally literate. The people are as bleak as the decrepit concrete landscape.</p>
<p>So is the government. The city has closed half of its schools during the past decade, hasn’t fixed the 40 percent of its street lights that remain broken, and has decided to divert a huge chunk of its 911 calls to a telephonic queue. “It’s giving criminals the wrong idea,” Tony Wright, a retired Detroit homicide detective featured on A&amp;E’s <em>The First 48</em>, explained. “If you want to do something, do it in Detroit. The police won’t show up.”</p>
<p>Like Mitt Romney, most people born in Detroit no longer live in Detroit. In 1950, 1.85 million people lived there. Detroit, which lost 200,000 people during the last decade, now hosts about 710,000. Motown Records has rebuffed Michigan for Manhattan. Eminem has extracted himself from 8 Mile and moved to Rochester Hills. Even the Motor City Madman isn’t crazy enough to live in Detroit.</p>
<p>It’s not that there aren’t inducements to moving there. The median home on the market sells for $86,000—$13,000 less than the city with the second lowest housing prices. Buyers looking for a fixer-upper can find listings for gutted 3-bedroom homes for as low as $500. But when your neighbors are a pack of feral cats, a crack dealer, and a jungle of weedy overgrowth, even $500 is too expensive.</p>
<p>No group surveys the American city that most closely resembles 1980s Beirut or postwar Dresden. If one did, Detroit would be its place. Detroit is number one in chlamydia. But its baseball team is in the World Series. So it’s a wash, right?</p>
<p>Sixty years ago, Detroit was the wealthiest city in the United States. Today, it is by far America’s poorest big city. There is a cautionary tale here for the U.S.: things fall apart—<em>fast</em>. America may not go from riches to rags. But the mighty do fall. Because America is the most powerful nation today doesn’t necessarily follow that it will be the most powerful nation tomorrow. In Detroit, corruption, lavish government sinecures, muddleheaded social policies, horrible schools, greedy unions, overbearing taxes, gutter morality, and too many eggs in one industrial basket combined to make the first the worst. To the extent that America follows the policies embraced by Detroit, America will not, as Mitt Romney worried in Monday night’s debate, follow the road to Greece but instead will follow the one that leads back to Mitt Romney’s birthplace.</p>
<p>It is strangely fitting that the presidential candidates fixated on Detroit during a foreign policy debate. Policies have certainly made Detroit very foreign to anyone familiar with “the Paris of the Midwest.” The city that gave the world Henry Ford and Berry Gordy now gives us the likes of jailed mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and disgraced police chief Ralph Godbee, Jr. “Governor,” President Obama remarked Monday night, “the people in Detroit don’t forget.” If this is true, memory may be a more painful blow than the crime, illegitimacy, and poverty they currently experience. Not long ago, Detroit was one of the  most thriving cities on Earth. The Paris of the Midwest has become the Basketcase of the Midwest.</p>
<p>Let Detroit go bankrupt? It already has. The $16 trillion question for the presidential candidates is whether they will let America go Detroit.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Fact Checking the Fact Checkers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fact-checking-the-fact-checkers</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Oct 2012 04:45:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=148822</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Debunking the bogus claims of the self-appointed truth keepers. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/fact/" rel="attachment wp-att-148892"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-148892" title="fact" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/fact-450x292.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="175" /></a>Early and often in Tuesday’s debate Barack Obama accused Mitt Romney of misrepresenting the facts. “Very little of what Governor Romney said is true,” the president declared in response to his opponent’s answer on a question on oil. Even the moderator got into the act of fact-checking the Republican nominee. CNN reporter Candy Crowley took Obama’s side on the administration’s immediate characterization of the attack on the Benghazi consulate—which the president connected to a YouTube video six times in a United Nations speech—as terrorism.</p>
<p>But on Libya, as on Obama’s seemingly benign fib “I was raised by a single mom,” the truth lost Tuesday’s debate.</p>
<p>Reality Check: <em>Production of oil on federal lands is up under the Obama administration</em></p>
<p>When Mitt Romney charged that Barack Obama had slashed federal permits for oil exploration and that drilling on federal lands had declined, the president responded: “It’s just not true.” But according to the administration’s own figures, the amount of oil extracted from federal lands decreased 14 percent last year—just as the former Massachusetts governor claims. From year one of the Obama administration, oil recovered from federal lands has declined by 6 million barrels even as the nation’s appetite for oil has increased. Poliifact rated Romney’s air-tight claim a half-truth: “there’s nuance in the number. Production under Obama was hobbled due to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.” But no matter the reason, oil production on federal lands is undeniably down.</p>
<p>Reality Check: <em>Obama’s efforts have curtailed illegal immigration</em></p>
<p>“The flow of people across the border is the lowest it’s been in 40 years,” Obama proudly claimed Tuesday night. But with border apprehensions at one-sixth of its 2000 peak, this has less to do the president’s immigration policies than it does with his economic policies. “After four decades that brought 12 million current immigrants—most of whom came illegally—the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed,” the Pew Hispanic Center reported earlier this year. What changed? The U.S. has become a less attractive destination point for immigrants because of the struggling economy. In other words, for the first time in history, the U.S.-Mexican border experiences more southward than northward traffic.</p>
<p>Reality Check: <em>Gas prices have increased because the economy has improved</em></p>
<p>Perhaps the most bizarre claim in Tuesday’s debate was Obama’s contention that Americans benefitted from low gas prices upon his ascension to the presidency “because the economy was on the verge of collapse, because we were about to go through the worst recession since the Great Depression.” Gas prices have more than doubled during Obama’s presidency. The president didn’t explain the correlation between high gas prices and a booming economy (doesn’t the gas-price juxtaposition of the struggling seventies with the booming eighties rebut this?). Neither FactCheck.com nor Politifact grappled with Obama’s weird claim. But the former organization remarkably took issue with Romney’s assertion that under Obama Americans have seen “incomes go down $4,300 a family, even as gasoline prices have gone up $2,000.” FactCheck.com noted that “Romney made the misleading claim that ‘gasoline prices have gone up $2,000.’ He’s making a claim about the average price of gasoline per year per household, not per vehicle.” Yes, Romney prefaced his remarks by referencing families, not vehicles. The watchdog/lapdog further stated that “the $2,000 figure is greatly inflated because gasoline prices were much higher during most of 2008 than they were at the moment Obama was sworn in.” <em>USA Today</em>’s “debate fact check” provided similar excuses, noting that gas prices were “going through a period of exceptional volatility when Obama took office” and that “prices are still 34 cents below their all-time high during the Bush administration.” What does any of this have to do with Romney’s solid claim that families have experienced a $2,000 boost at the pump under Obama?</p>
<p>Reality Check: <em>President Obama immediately labeled the Benghazi attacks terrorism</em></p>
<p>Following the Benghazi attacks, the president vaguely declared in the Rose Garden: “No acts of terror will ever shake the great resolve of this nation.” That he did so immediately after a discussion of the 9/11 anniversary left observers to wonder if the word “terror” referenced the 9/11 attacks or to the attack on the Benghazi consulate. Perhaps the amorphousness of the statement is the point. The president wanted to claim that he had labeled the attacks terrorism without actually doing so. In fact, during that same Rose Garden speech, the president called the Benghazi attacks “senseless violence”—the very opposite of violence employed for a religious, political, or ideological purpose (i.e., terrorism).  “While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” the president said, “we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.”</p>
<p>Fact checkers, like candidates, have axes to grind. They are in the fray rather than above it. There is something fundamentally dishonest about a group of people awarding themselves fundamental honesty. The fact checkers need a reality check.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Mythologizing Cesar Chavez</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/mythologizing-cesar-chavez/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mythologizing-cesar-chavez</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Oct 2012 04:40:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Left's selective honoring of the labor activist.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/mythologizing-cesar-chavez/0330-cesar-chavez-jpg_full_600/" rel="attachment wp-att-147598"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-147598" title="0330-cesar-chavez.jpg_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/0330-cesar-chavez.jpg_full_600.gif" alt="" width="315" height="243" /></a>President Barack Obama declared 105 of the 187 acres of Cesar Chavez’s union headquarters a National Monument this Columbus Day under 1906’s Antiquities Act. Last year the president named a cargo ship after the organizer who had spent two miserable years in the Navy. The body of the United Farm Workers (UFW) leader rests at the newly nationalized Keene, California compound.</p>
<p>“César Chávez gave a voice to poor and disenfranchised workers everywhere,” President Obama said at Monday’s dedication ceremony. “La Paz was at the center of some of the most significant civil rights moments in our nation’s history, and by designating it a national monument, Chávez’s legacy will be preserved and shared to inspire generations to come.”</p>
<p>Like the president who praises him, Chavez traces his activism ancestry to the Saul Alinsky family tree. And like the Chicago neighborhoods that Obama organized, the unskilled farm workers that Chavez unionized aren’t much better off today than when the organizer first encountered them. The “Si, se puede” rallying cry isn’t the pair’s only common denominator.</p>
<p>The views of the two Alinskyite organizers diverge as much as they converge. As Chavez has moved from man to icon, substance has yielded to symbolism. The parts of the organizer’s outlook that inconvenience his present-day admirers have been left in the past. In Cesar Chavez the monument, we lose Cesar Chavez the man.</p>
<p>The real Chavez regarded illegal aliens as strikebreakers who drove down the wages of American workers. He found the emergence of “brown power” groups problematic. “That’s why today we oppose some of this La Raza business so much,” Chavez explained to his biographer Jacques Levy. “We know what it does. When La Raza means or implies racism, we don’t support it. But if it means our struggle, our dignity, or our cultural roots, then we’re for it. I guess many times people don’t know what they mean by La Raza, but we can’t be against racism on the one hand and for it on the other.”</p>
<p>In pandering for votes, Obama played up Chavez’s role as a union leader and as an icon for Hispanic Americans. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, reported: “Though White House officials said it was a process long in the making, the formal dedication came as Obama’s campaign shifts toward a more intensive get-out-the-vote phase of its operation, one that includes a major focus on the Latino vote and will be augmented by labor muscle.”</p>
<p>But Chavez’s faith, more than his ethnicity or his labor affiliations, informed his activism. Inspired by Christ’s example, Chavez became famous through fasting (and through boycotts of grapes). He held religious masses at the California state capitol in Sacramento. He even once used his union connections to keep a plane grounded so that he could make his flight to see the pope. Chavez told his biographer in the mid 1970s that “my need for religion has deepened. Today I don’t think that I could base my will to struggle on cold economics or on some political doctrine. I don’t think there would be enough to sustain me. For me the base must be faith.”</p>
<p>Fittingly, UFW’s headquarters bears a religious name. The president referred to Chavez’s Central Valley sanctuary as “La Paz.” Its full name is Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz—Our Lady Queen of Peace. In making a national monument of a religious retreat named in honor of Jesus’s mother, the president risks irritating one constituency as he courts another. Surely the American Civil Liberties Union can’t be thrilled with a mystical Catholic, and his outpost named for Mary, receiving official recognition from the U.S. government.</p>
<p>Alas, there is an election to win. Disrupting the president’s fragile coalition over principles normally fiercely fought for on matters as unobtrusive as nondenominational graduation prayers and Christmastime nativity scenes just won’t do when it comes to nationalizing a religious leader’s religious retreat named for a religious saint. Here, activists, normally incapable of looking the other way, mute their objections.</p>
<p>“Cesar feels that liberals are liberal right up to the steps of the Catholic church,” explained Dorothy Huerta, co-founder of the UFW, during Chavez’s ’70s heyday. “Guys can be liberal about homosexuality, about dope, about capital punishment, about everything but the Catholic church. There the liberalism ends.”</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Will the First Obama-Romney Showdown Impact Voters?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/will-the-first-obama-romney-showdown-impact-voters/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=will-the-first-obama-romney-showdown-impact-voters</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Oct 2012 04:50:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Even at their most memorable, presidential debates don't live up to the hype. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/628x471-2.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-146810" title="628x471-(2)" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/628x471-2.gif" alt="" width="375" height="259" /></a>Mitt Romney and Barack Obama talked in Denver on Wednesday night. The American people listened. What did the electorate discover?</p>
<p>The Republican articulated an opposition to “trickle-down government” and support for the idea that “the private market and individual responsibility always works best.” The Democrat held that the “government has the capacity—federal government has the capacity—to open up opportunities” and that there are “some things that we do better together.”</p>
<p>In other words, candidates repeated the themes they have stressed on the campaign trail. For a voter that hasn’t been paying attention, the debate may have proved instructive. And for the challenger, merely standing on the same platform with the president certainly proved beneficial. But for educated voters—i.e., the ones watching the 90-minute discussion instead of <em>Here Comes Honey Boo Boo</em>—the debate offered little new in the way of substance.</p>
<p>In terms of style, viewers learned much. A sunny Romney smiled and engaged his opponent. A grim-faced Obama rarely even looked at his opponent. He displayed his teeth only with a testy smile, with his happy mouth disagreeing with his angry eyes. The former wanted to be there; the latter seemed bothered by the perfunctory affair.</p>
<p>The clear debate victory on substance but especially on style is good news for Romney. As much as we imagine debates as intellectual forums, the electorate always awards more points for style than for substance.</p>
<p>In the twenty-four presidential debates in American history, what the politicians have said has paled in importance to how they appeared when they said it. The events have proved less cerebral give-and-takes than showcases for candidates to emotionally connect (or not) with voters. Wednesday night conformed to this pattern. The president’s sour mood seeping through his seething smile seemed likely to repulse and not attract voters. The former governor’s warm and engaging personality dispelled notions of him as an out-of-touch millionaire.</p>
<p>Determining who won and who lost presidential debates has always been more about the candidates’ manner than their words. In 1960, a tanned and vibrant John Kennedy cut a contrast to a pale and sickly Richard Nixon sporting a five-o’clock shadow even on black-and-white television. In 1992, George H.W. Bush reinforced a perception of an aloof chief executive by checking his watch. In 2000, Al Gore’s repeated interrupting sighs and invasion of George W. Bush’s personal space conveyed arrogance and awkwardness.</p>
<p>Even when candidates most memorably harmed themselves with their own words, the way they said it rather than what they said hurt most. Gerald Ford’s infamous 1976 gaffe denying Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was compounded by the Manchurian Candidate manner of his remarks. When CNN anchor Bernard Shaw threw high-heat at Michael Dukakis by asking him if he would favor the death penalty if his wife Kitty were raped and murdered, the Massachusetts governor reinforced his reputation as a wooden policy-wonk by answering the emotion-laden question in a stoic manner.</p>
<p>The debates have left us with memorable one-liners and lingering catch phrases: “There you go again,” “fuzzy math,” “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience,” and, most recently, “trickle-down government.” But they haven’t given voters anything they haven’t already heard during the lengthy campaigns that preceded them.</p>
<p>The candidates debate foreign, economic, and social policy. The only topic beyond debate is the debates themselves. Do they really matter as an intellectual exercise? For the first 42 presidential elections, Americans chose a president without a staged conversation between the aspirants. The connection between winning a debate and presiding over the federal government wasn’t apparent to voters until very recently. Sixteen years after the first presidential debate in 1960, such forums became obligatory for the nominees of the two major parties.</p>
<p>After last night’s drubbing, the president may be wishing debates weren’t required affairs. One senses that the bothered Barack had this feeling even before the action started.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Polling Shenanigans</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/polling-shenanigans/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=polling-shenanigans</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/polling-shenanigans/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Sep 2012 04:50:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[2008]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[enthusiasm]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Polling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Romney]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=146038</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Mainstream pollsters predict greater Democratic turnout than the historic 2008 election. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/2012-04-16t214536z_1_cbre83f1og300_rtroptp_3_usa-campaign-poll.grid-6x21.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-146046" title="2012-04-16t214536z_1_cbre83f1og300_rtroptp_3_usa-campaign-poll.grid-6x2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/2012-04-16t214536z_1_cbre83f1og300_rtroptp_3_usa-campaign-poll.grid-6x21.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a>Mitt Romney is down in the polls. Mitt Romney’s supporters are down on the polls.</p>
<p>Rush Limbaugh dubbed two outlier polls favorable to the president as “bogus” and “irresponsible.” Dick Morris regards this year’s surveys as “unusually inaccurate.” He explains, “Most pollsters are weighting their data on the assumption that the 2012 electorate will turn out in the same proportion as the 2008 voters did. But polling indicates a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the president among his core constituency.” Breitbart.com’s John Nolte points out that in Florida, where Democrats enjoyed a 3-point advantage four years ago, CBS News/<em>New York Times</em>/Quinnipiac envisions Democrats reaping a 9-point advantage on Election Day. In the rustbelt states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, the CBS News/<em>New York Times</em>/Quinnipiac survey also expects Democrats to vote in heavier numbers than they did in 2008. Nolte explains that “polls are not only telling us that Romney is losing OH, PA, and FL by insurmountable margins; these polls are also telling us that Democrat turnout is projected to blow away every modern record.”</p>
<p>Consider the contrast. In Ohio, Romney either trails by 1 point (Rasmussen Reports) or by 10 (CBS News/<em>New York Times</em>/Quinnipiac). In Iowa, the president leads by 8 (NBC News/<em>Wall Street Journal</em>/Marist) and trails by 3 (Rasmussen Reports). In Pennsylvania, a <em>Philadelphia Inquirer</em> count put Obama 11 ahead; the <em>Pittsburgh Tribune Review</em> placed Romney two behind. To borrow industry jargon, the polls are not within the margin of error.</p>
<p>Susquehanna Polling &amp; Research, which conducted the much-maligned <em>Pittsburgh Tribune Review</em> poll showing the Keystone State a neck-and-neck race, defended their methodology by noting the 6-point advantage it awarded Democrats within their current Pennsylvania poll, which is down just 1 point from the Democrats’ Election Day take in 2008. The polling group suggests that “perhaps the Phil Inquirer poll showing Obama winning by a bigger margin than he won by four years ago is the real outlier.”</p>
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		<title>Only Journalists Offended by Romney&#8217;s &#8220;47 Percent&#8221; Remarks</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/only-journalists-offended-by-romney-47-percent-remarks/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=only-journalists-offended-by-romney-47-percent-remarks</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/only-journalists-offended-by-romney-47-percent-remarks/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Sep 2012 04:45:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[47 Percent]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fundraiser]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mother jones]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Secret]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tape]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=144747</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Who is it really that's out of touch? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/romney-2012.jpeg81-460x307.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-144817" title="romney-2012.jpeg81-460x307" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/romney-2012.jpeg81-460x307.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a>EBT Nation has spoken. Its citizens, the ones who will bother to show up to the polls on November 6, have decided to vote themselves more of Mitt Romney’s money. The inhabitants of Section 8ville second the motion.</p>
<p>The Republican nominee may be aghast that so many strangers enjoy so much of his money. Why are the sponging strangers, and the class-war Hessians of the Fourth Estate, so shocked that Romney has written off their votes?</p>
<p>“There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president, no matter what,” an out-of-focus Mitt Romney says on a four-month-old surreptitiously-obtained grainy video. “All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement, and the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.” The presidential candidate tells donors that his job is to convince the unbribed undecideds to cast their ballots for him.</p>
<p>Obama campaign manager Jim Messina found Romney’s comments “shocking.” He shouldn’t have. With more flash, makers-versus-takers rhetoric has been a staple of Republican presidential stump speeches for several generations. Why the feigned outrage over something so pedestrian?</p>
<p>In 1976, Ronald Reagan colorfully invoked a Cadillac-driving Chicago woman receiving food stamps, relying on Medicaid, and collecting more than six-figures in welfare money under her numerous aliases. Buffalo congressman Jack Kemp, a candidate for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, repeatedly warned that the social safety net had become a hammock. Texas Senator Phil Gramm ran for president eight years later incessantly reminding voters, when he wasn’t invoking the ink-stained fingers of his printer friend Dickey Flatt, that there were more people riding in the wagon than pulling the wagon.</p>
<p>They weren’t wrong, just premature.</p>
<p>A record-high 89 million Americans do not participate in the labor force, with the three percent drop under the Obama administration nudging the rate—63.5 percent—to its lowest level since the Great Depression. People who have given up on work haven’t given up on a paycheck. A record 46 million Americans rely on food stamps, up 44 percent since the president took office. The 8.8 million Americans accepting Social Security disability checks, spiking nearly 1.5 million since inauguration day, is also a record.</p>
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		<title>Arab Spring’s Bitter Fruits</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/arab-spring%e2%80%99s-bitter-fruits/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=arab-spring%25e2%2580%2599s-bitter-fruits</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/arab-spring%e2%80%99s-bitter-fruits/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Sep 2012 04:44:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ambassador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chris Stevens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Embassy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Libya]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=143877</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This is what Libyan democracy looks like. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/libya-embassy-attack.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-144040" title="libya-embassy-attack" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/libya-embassy-attack.gif" alt="" width="375" height="261" /></a>“As-Salamu Alaykum. My name is Chris Stevens, and I am the new U.S. ambassador to Libya. I had the honor to serve as the U.S. envoy to the Libyan opposition during the revolution, and I was thrilled to watch the Libyan people stand up and demand their rights. Now I’m excited to return to Libya to continue the great work we’ve started.”</p>
<p>Thus begins a State Department propaganda video, complete with Middle Eastern music and Arabic subtitles, aimed at establishing that the U.S. government holds a friendly disposition toward the Libyan people. The feeling isn’t mutual.</p>
<p>Tuesday, on the 11<sup>th</sup> anniversary of 9/11, Middle Easterners outraged by the existence of an obscure anti-Islamic film called “Innocence of Muslims,” stormed the American embassy in Cairo and the consulate in Benghazi. The man behind the movie, identifying himself as Sam Bacile, told the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> that he hoped his film would show “Islam as a hateful religion.” Muslims rebutted this portrayal by attacking foreigners who had nothing to do with the motion picture. In Libya, a mob armed with guns but not a sense of self-irony killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, an idealistic Berkeley grad who fell in love with North Africa after an ’80s stint in the Peace Corps. The Barbary Coast-barbarians parading the American ambassador’s corpse around like a trophy are the people the American government aided to overthrow their government.</p>
<p>This is what democracy looks like?</p>
<p>In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy isn’t necessarily our friend. But the State Department occasionally regards the enemy of our allies as our friends. As the Ayatollah Khomeini engineered the ouster of the Shah in the late 1970s, the U.S. ambassador to Iran helped the unholy man’s ascension, which Jimmy Carter reflected bitterly upon in his memoirs. William Sullivan, hired by Carter after showing insolence to the Johnson administration as ambassador to Laos during the Vietnam War, apparently surprised the president by treating him as he had treated his Democratic predecessor. The 39<sup>th</sup> president noted that Ambassador Sullivan “had been carrying out some of my directives half-heartedly, if at all,” and that “Sullivan thought we should not oppose Khomeini’s take-over because his rule would lead to democracy.” More than three decades after the Islamic Revolution dashed the hopes of Western leftists such as Sullivan, a similar mindset, immersed in the hype and hope of the Arab Spring, swept the Obama administration, which apparently left the outposts in Cairo and Benghazi lightly defended.</p>
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		<title>Pod Person Party Platform</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/pod-person-party-platform/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pod-person-party-platform</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/pod-person-party-platform/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Sep 2012 04:46:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Abortion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[collectivist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Nation Convention]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[platform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Romney]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=142894</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Alien sentiments from the Democrats’ Mothership.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/AP336006561037_620x350.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-142929" title="AP336006561037_620x350" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/AP336006561037_620x350.gif" alt="" width="375" height="240" /></a>Democrats gathering in Charlotte may have initially neglected to mention God in their platform. They didn’t forget to include the devil. The document namedrops Mitt Romney 22 times. His demonic sponsors—the “rich,” the “wealthy,” the “millionaires,” and the “billionaires”—also get 22 mentions. When you don’t have anything to run on, run down the opposition.</p>
<p>Democrats grasp what they stand against. Knowing, or at least letting everyone else know, what they support is more complicated. The point of an election is to attract votes, after all, not scare them away.</p>
<p>Take President Barack Obama’s signature accomplishment, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The muted mentions of ObamaCare in the document suggest that the Charlotte party goers understand that America doesn’t care for the legislation the way Obama does. So the platform declares that “Democrats stand willing to work with anyone to improve the law where necessary.” They concede, “No law is perfect.” Can anyone imagine Franklin Roosevelt shying away from the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson censoring mentions of Great Society, or Ronald Reagan running from his tax cuts in such a cowardly fashion? The centerpiece of Obama’s legislative program is not the centerpiece of his reelection platform.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, the platform advertises the out-of-this-world alienation. America just isn’t interested in the ideas with which Democrats are obsessed. Reiterating support for the ancient Equal Rights Amendment—Why not bimetallism or the single tax?—making an obligatory condemnation of African warlord Joseph Kony, and including language on LGBT youth seems the rote stuff of nonbinding student senate resolutions, not of a national political party outlining what policies it realistically seeks to pursue. What stirs the passions at the convention is at the periphery outside of it.</p>
<p>The platform boasts that Obama’s “State Department is funding a program that finances gay rights organizations to combat discrimination, violence, and other abuses.” It reaffirms the party’s support for DC statehood—and the two extra Democratic Senators that will come with it. The platform holds, “The American citizens who live in Washington, DC, like the citizens of the 50 states, should have full and equal congressional rights and the right to have the laws and budget of their government respected without congressional interference.”</p>
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		<title>Obama: The Great Divider</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/obama-the-great-divider/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-the-great-divider</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/obama-the-great-divider/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 30 Aug 2012 04:39:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bipartisan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mitt romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Ryan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[polarizing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=142110</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The President has spent more time talking about bipartisanship than actually pursuing it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/obama_economy_onpage.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-142171" title="obama_economy_onpage" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/obama_economy_onpage.gif" alt="" width="375" height="252" /></a>Supporters of Barack Obama hailed their candidate’s ascension to America’s highest political office as ushering in a “post-partisan presidency.” The reasoning behind this wasn’t without reason. After all, Obama had announced at his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America,” and had promised upon his inauguration “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” But almost four years into his presidency, Barack Obama presides over a more polarized America than any the Pew Research Center has polled in its quarter century of surveying political division on 48 separate issues.</p>
<p>President Obama failed to convince a single Republican to vote for his signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, and garnered just a handful of GOP supporters for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. As former Democratic Congressman Artur Davis told the Republicans gathered in Tampa Tuesday night, “Bill Clinton, Jack Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson reached out across the aisle and said meet me in the middle. But [Democrats] rammed through a healthcare bill that took over one-sixth of our economy, without accepting a single Republican idea, without winning a single vote in either house from a party whose constituents make up about 50 percent of the country.”</p>
<p>On day three of the Obama presidency, the post-partisan president had entered the post-post-partisan stage of his administration. “Elections have consequences,” he told Eric Cantor upon hearing ideas from the then-House Minority Leader, “and, Eric, I won.” Not until more than two years into his administration did Barack Obama hold a one-on-one meeting with the Republican leader of the House or Senate. He routinely submits budgets not to win passage but to enhance his bona fides with the liberal base. When the democratic process rebuked his arrogance in the fall of 2010 he arrogantly rebuked the democratic process. Going to war in Libya after consulting the United Nations but not Congress, slipping carbon limits into Environmental Protection Agency regulations that had failed to pass muster with Congress, and placing controversial end-of-life-counseling into the Federal Register after Congress had explicitly rejected it substantively sums up the my-way-or-the-highway approach. His ongoing “We Can’t Wait” initiative symbolically sums it up.</p>
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		<title>If Joe Biden Had an &#8216;R&#8217; Next to His Name&#8230;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/if-joe-biden-had-an-r-next-to-his-name/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=if-joe-biden-had-an-r-next-to-his-name</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Aug 2012 04:23:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gaffe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joe Biden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[plagiarize]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sarah Palin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stupid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vice president]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=141141</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Being a Democrat means never having to say you’re stupid.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/vice-president-joe-biden.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-141196" title="vice-president-joe-biden" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/vice-president-joe-biden.gif" alt="" width="375" height="243" /></a>“If you were truly smart, you’d know that you are dumb,” explains the family patriarch to his ranch-hand son played by Will Ferrell in <em>Casa de Mi Padre</em>. If only Joe Biden’s dad had engineered such a head-to-head talk, America might not have to worry about a denizen of the left side of the bell curve serving as right-hand man to the president.</p>
<p>“I think I have a much higher IQ than you do,” Biden taunted a voter on the presidential campaign trail in 1987. Smart people don’t say things so stupid. Vain people, the kind who get hair plugs and fabricate academic honors, do. Like an honors student making it up as he goes along on an essay question, politicians can bluster and BS their way to brilliance.</p>
<p>Last week, after informing a Virginia audience that “with you we can win North Carolina again,” the vice president told a predominantly black audience that the Republicans plan to “put y’all back in chains.” The former served as 2012’s “Hello, Cleveland” <em>Spinal Tap</em> moment; the latter; its Ross Perot “You people” gaffe. By reaffirming Joe Biden’s place on the ticket, Barack Obama has doubled down on dumb.</p>
<p>Barack Obama’s first presidential decision foreshadowed subsequent presidential decisions. Selecting Biden, who ventured into politics directly from law school, demonstrated a lack of self-awareness from a presidential candidate whose paucity of real world experience rivals his runningmate’s. Biden claimed during his run for the 1988 presidential nomination, “I participated in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses.” But he didn’t. Professors caught him plagiarizing in law school in the 1960s and the public caught him plagiarizing in politics in the 1980s. British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, former vice president Hubert Humphrey, slain New York Senator Robert Kennedy, and even an obscure legal scholar weren’t safe from his verbal larcenies.</p>
<p>“If I had intended to cheat,” he pleaded with the Syracuse law professors considering his expulsion, “would I have been so stupid?” The question may not be as self-serving as it initially appeared. Joe Biden makes Dan Quayle look like Albert Einstein.</p>
<p>America has become accustomed to the teetotaling vice president’s ongoing imitation of a wet-brained blowhard. “Stand up, Chuck, let ‘em see ya,” Biden implored a paralyzed politician at a 2008 rally. That same year, Biden told an Ohio audience that the top issue facing most voters was “a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs.” He told Katie Couric, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn&#8217;t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.” FDR wasn’t, you know, president when the stock market crashed, and television signals would not be picked up in American homes for years.</p>
<p>If Joe Biden had an “R” next to his name, pundits would be calling him “stupid,” an “idiot,” and a “retard.” We know this because that’s what they continue to call the last Republican vice presidential nominee for gaffes far less egregious than Biden’s.</p>
<p>“Sarah Palin is a f—ing retard,” Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert opined. “I’d like to see her on just a couple of episodes of <em>Celeberity Jeopardy!</em>,” Chris Matthews quipped on <em>Hardball</em>, “to just see if she knows anything.” Palin perhaps experienced schadenfreude when the TV talker placed last on <em>Celebrity Jeopardy!</em> earlier this year. Last month, CNN played P!nk’s “Stupid Girls” to introduce a segment on John McCain’s runningmate. Even something that a Palin impersonator said—“I can see Russia from my house”—gets carted out periodically to prove how doltish the former Alaska governor truly is.</p>
<p>The magic “D” next to the vice president’s name adds twenty points to his IQ. The best way to appear smart to journalists, academics, and entertainers is to tell them what they want to hear. Joe Biden is more effective at doing this than is Sarah Palin, so he isn’t considered a vacant-eyed dummy. Politicians who reflect the intelligentsia’s politics get the favor returned when the intelligentsia projects its intelligence upon the politician.</p>
<p>The stupidest thing about smart people is their unintelligent overemphasis on intelligence. The Marine Corps 14 Leadership Traits—Justice, Judgment, Dependability, Initiative, Decisiveness, Tact, Integrity, Enthusiasm, Bearing, Unselfishness, Courage, Knowledge, Loyalty, and Endurance—omits intelligence because, duh, it isn’t one of the fourteen most important leadership traits. Brain matter matters but it’s not the only quality that matters.</p>
<p>In the vice president’s defense, it may be that rather than intelligence, he more accurately lacks judgment, tact, integrity, and bearing. The people who possess intelligence often misgauge it as a catch-all category encompassing traits related and unrelated.</p>
<p>Biden is certainly bright enough for the vice presidency, just not for the presidency. In other words, he’s fit for neither office, a concept that Biden may have a tough time wrapping his brain around.</p>
<p>There are worse things than stupid. Joe Biden isn’t corrupt like Spiro Agnew or a mush-headed fellow traveler like Henry Wallace. He’s just imprudent, unwise, dishonest, and thickheaded. But don’t mention that last part to liberals, who take acceptance of their ideology as the clearest indicator of genius. Being a Democrat means never having to say you’re stupid.</p>
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		<title>Rand vs. Ryan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/rand-vs-ryan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rand-vs-ryan</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 17 Aug 2012 04:40:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ayn rand]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Libertarian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Objectivist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Ryan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vice president]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Why media scaremongering over the Russian novelist misrepresents the congressman.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/rob_ryan_ayn_81512.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-140776" title="rob_ryan_ayn_81512" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/rob_ryan_ayn_81512.gif" alt="" width="375" height="244" /></a>Mitt Romney named Ayn Rand as his runningmate last weekend—at least that’s the way numerous scribes see it.</p>
<p>In a piece called “Ayn Rand Joins the Ticket,” the <em>New Yorker</em>’s Jane Mayer argues that by naming Paul Ryan his runningmate, Romney adds “the ghostly presence of the controversial Russian Émigré philosopher and writer Ayn Rand.” “Ryan’s devotion to Rand is yet another Republican insult and injury to classic American ideas of fairness, squareness, and civic-mindedness,” writes Jamie Stiehm at USNews.com. “In fact, the Ryan-authored House Republican budget document, which cuts the heart out of our body politic, ripping social services and Medicare to shreds, is a pledge to the Rand coat of arms, standing against people who need a little help from other people.” The <em>Christian Science Monitor</em>’s Husna Haq calls Ryan “an ardent Randian.”</p>
<p>But “an ardent Randian” fakes a Russian accent, chain smokes Tareytons, and extols the Partridge Family’s “C’mon, Get Happy” while condemning Beethoven. Even Rand recognized the fanaticism she inspired. “Do not underestimate the admirers of <em>The Fountainhead</em>,” she told a Warner Bros. producer. “[They are] becoming a kind of cult.” Paul Ryan’s chiseled physique may recall the shirtless Howard Roark smashing rocks in a quarry. But for ways better and worse, Mitt Romney’s runningmate is no Randian.</p>
<p>Certainly Ryan told the Atlas Society in 2005 that “the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” He has also boasted of requiring his interns to read Rand’s magnum opus, 1957’s <em>Atlas Shrugged</em>, and of giving the dystopian book as a Christmas present (Rand, incidentally, was an enthusiast of neither Christ nor handouts). But the Wisconsin representative also supported both the banker and automotive bailouts, and consistently casts pro-life votes in Congress. The puppeteer disapproving of the marionette’s words and deeds suggests that she’s not the one pulling the strings.</p>
<p>Consider the differences between Ryan’s reaction, and Rand’s anticipation, of President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” scolding of businessmen. “If you have a small business—you did build that,” Ryan remarked at his coming-out party last weekend. “We Americans look at one another’s success with pride, not resentment, because we know, as more Americans work hard, take risks, and succeed, more people will prosper, our communities will benefit, and individual lives will be improved and uplifted.” Rand, by way of comparison, writes in <em>The Fountainhead</em>, that “Roger Enright had started life as a coal miner in Pennsylvania. On his way to the millions he now owned, no one had ever helped him.” The congressman’s positive remarks mesh with common sense. The novelist’s depiction of a social-atom businessman seems as divorced from reality as President Obama’s flipside fantasy of entrepreneurs as creations of the state.</p>
<p>What the Wisconsin congressman and the Russian refugee share in common is the contempt of the Left. Where they differ is in their reactions to that venom.</p>
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