Current Events - July 29, 2013

Obama Vineyard vacation at $7.6m private resort, over 75 rooms booked for staff

The Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, the exclusive playground for presidents and their families, is about to get its annual summer infusion of cash and attention as President Obama and his family prepare to arrive August 10 for an eight-day vacation.

Local reports indicate that the first family will likely be staying at a $7.6 million resort home on southern edge of the island in the town of Chilmark where homes feature water access to Chilmark Pond, tennis courts and swimming pools.

Staying at the home of Chicago corporate finance manager David Schulte is a break from past Obama vacations because the $21 million home they've rented, Blue Heron Farm, isn't available. Schulte's summer home sits on nine and a half acres, has ocean views and a basketball court.

It was renovated 10 years ago by Rick Sundberg/Olson Kundig Architects, which is bragging about the Obama visit on the company's website.

While the president typically keeps to himself and carries with him only a handful of staffers to Martha's Vineyard, security will be tight. As in the past, the Wesley Hotel in Oak Bluffs will house security and communications officials. The owner told the Vineyard Gazette that the Secret Service has booked 70 rooms and another five have been reserved for the Transportation Security Agency. Rates at the hotel run from $225-$345.

Also, telephone and communications lines are being installed on the island for the president's use.

It's unclear why the president is returning home on August 18, though the school where his daughter's attend, Sidwell Friends, said that is when practice for winter sports begins. Both Malia and Sasha play basketball just like their dad.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-vineyard-vacation-at-7.6m-private-resort-over-75-rooms-booked-for-staff/article/2533598

Still No WH Tours, but Parade of Special Visitors Continues

The White House continues to bar average Americans from touring “The People House” but nevertheless lavishes spending on all sorts of special invitees – from diners at last week’s Iftar dinner breaking the Muslim fast to sports teams and foreign diplomats.

Soon after the outcry over the cancellation of tours due to the sequester, the White House promised to see what could be done to allow some visits to resume. But nothing was done and no one can visit – unless President Obama finds you useful or amusing.

Favored guest have poured in this month, even though Obama was traveling in Africa for part of it.

Last week’s glittering Iftar dinner featured about 130 guests treated to remarks by Obama and bread breaking with senior aide Valerie Jarrett and National Security advisor Susan Rice.

Obama held a mass reception for the entire diplomatic corps July 19. He hosted the  2013 NCAA Men’s Basketball Champion Louisville Cardinals July 23 and will gather with the World Series Champion San Francisco Giants today.

He even found room in the White House for a team that hasn’t won a game in 50 years - the 1963 Loyola University of Chicago Ramblers championship basketball team.

Meanwhile, he had some old buddies in for a July Fourth celebration. And Michelle staged a “Kids’ State Dinner” with dozens of children and their parents to promote her healthy eating initiative.

June’s events included a raucous celebration of LGBT Pride Month, a special movie screening in the White House theater, and visits by the WNBA Champion Indiana Fever and Super Bowl winning Baltimore Ravens and Division III Women’s Basketball Champion DePauw University Tigers.

http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2013/07/29/wh-tours-parade-special-visitors-continues/

Whites below poverty line at 41%, twice number of poor blacks...

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.

As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused - on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."

"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."

While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government's poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.

The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as experiencing unemployment at some point in their working lives, or a year or more of reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.

Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.

"It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.

"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.

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Nationwide, the count of America's poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.

More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.

Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.

Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation's most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.

More than 90 percent of Buchanan County's inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.

Salyers' daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend's disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn't even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.

Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to "buy the kids everything they need."

"It's pretty hard," she said. "Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name."

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Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they're only a temporary snapshot that doesn't capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.

In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person's lifetime risk, a much higher number - 4 in 10 adults - falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.

The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.

Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.

By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.

By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.

"Poverty is no longer an issue of `them', it's an issue of `us'," says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need."

The numbers come from Rank's analysis being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented with interviews and figures provided to the AP by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.

Among the findings:

-For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.

-Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.

-The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods - those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more 

- has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school.  Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.

The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38 percent to 39 percent.

-Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.

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Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.

The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse.

Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites - defined as those lacking a college degree - remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.

Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.

Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. "In 2016 GOP messaging will be far more focused on expressing concern for `the middle class' and `average Americans,'" Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in The New Republic.

"They don't trust big government, but it doesn't mean they want no government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.

"They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them," Goeas said.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_POVERTY_STRUGGLING_WHITES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-07-29-03-59-28

Fact-Free ‘Middle-Out Economics’

It’s a new term for the old leftist dream of redistribution over wealth creation.

President Obama has finally stopped blaming George W. Bush for America’s current economic mess. Now it’s Ronald Reagan’s fault. 

Obama didn’t use those exact words or make that explicit claim in his Knox College speech last week, but that’s the gist of it. The Great Recession and its slow-growth, high-unemployment aftermath are really just the culmination of three decades of pro-market economic policies that favored the rich at the expense of the middle class.

Here’s how Obama rewrites economic history: The shared national purpose of World War II was followed by a golden age of shared prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s. Unions were strong, taxes high, pension benefits guaranteed — thanks to a grand egalitarian bargain between Big Government, Big Business, and Big Labor. “But over time, that bargain began to fray,” Obama said. “Technology made some jobs obsolete. Global competition sent a lot of jobs overseas. It became harder for unions to fight for the middle class. Washington doled out bigger tax cuts to the very wealthy and smaller minimum-wage increases for the working poor.” And with the recession and financial crisis, Obama concluded, “the decades-long . . . erosion of middle-class security was suddenly laid bare for everybody to see.” 

In other words, according to Obama, the only lasting effects of the Reagan “neoliberal” revolution are stagnant middle-class wages, extreme income inequality, and reduced income mobility. And with those claims, Obama is using the bully pulpit to propagate the leftist story that after 30 years of failed supply-side, “trickle-down” economics, America needs a dose of “middle-out” economics. That phrase, “middle-out,” was coined by Clinton speechwriter Eric Liu and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, who argue in a new Democracy magazine essay, “We have 30 years of terrible policy to undo.”

Time for a fact check:

1. The U.S. economy in the 1950s and 1960s benefited greatly from its temporary postwar position as the world’s dominant industrial producer. That, along with a constrained labor supply from the 1930s baby bust and from war casualties, produced huge income gains for workers. But both factors were fleeting, of course. Our competitors rebuilt their industrial capacity, and all those returning soldiers started families. What’s more, research from economist Alexander Field finds that the basis for much of the productivity boom of those decades was built on technological advances of the 1930s.

2. With their postwar recoveries fully in place, our competitors began to catch up to U.S. levels of wealth — until the 1980s. At the exact moment that Obama and the middle-outers contend the U.S. economy went off track, it began once again to pull away from Europe. French per capita GDP, for instance, went from 64 percent of U.S. per capita GDP in 1960 to 82 percent in 1980. But when America decided to re-embrace market economics, France sniffed at it. France’s per-person wealth is now back down to 73 percent of America’s.

3. Echoing the claims of the middle-outers, Obama said, “The income of the top 1 percent nearly quadrupled from 1979 to 2007, while the typical family’s barely budged.” That’s not right. The economic consensus is that real median market household income — inflation-adjusted income before taxes, government transfers such as Social Security and the Earned Income Tax credit, and health-care benefits — actually rose more like 20 percent over that period. And once you adjust for taxes, transfers, and benefits — median incomes are up 40 percent.

4. Obama also claimed the “link between higher productivity and people’s wages and salaries” was severed during the past three decades, with workers no longer enjoying the fruits of their labors. The gains all flowed to the wealthy. But research from both the Heritage Foundation and liberal economist and productivity expert Robert Gordon of Northwestern University finds only a small gap between middle-class incomes and productivity.

5. While high-end income has risen dramatically since the 1970s, it doesn’t seem to have affected economic mobility. Research from Brookings scholar Scott Winship found that men experienced, at most, only a bit less ability to climb the economic ladder than did their counterparts born in the early 1950s.

To believe the middle-out view of economic history, one also has to believe that beleaguered middle-class voters from 1981 through 2008 voted time and again against their own economic interests by electing conservative Republican presidents and a Democratic one who slashed investment taxes and signed a massive free-trade agreement. When it comes down to it, “middle-out” economics seems little more than a mildly clever rebranding of pre-Clinton, Democratic economics: high taxes, protectionism, and industrial policy all held together by boomer nostalgia for the ’50s and ’60s. It’s the familiar leftist dream of redistribution over wealth creation. Dealing with America’s economic woes will take fact-based, data-driven analysis of its problems and an accurate appraisal of how we got here. Obama and the middle-outers are apparently uninterested is doing either.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/354626/fact-free-middle-out-economics-james-pethokoukis

The Economic Lesson Obama Needs to Learn

Freedom, not regulation, is what the U.S. needs right now

President Obama is again turning his attention to the elusive economic recovery. His “pivot” will be for naught, however, as long as he continues to ignore two important points: first, government is a major squanderer of scarce resources, and second, its regulations are impediments to saving and investment.

We live in a world of scarcity. At any given time our ends outnumber the means to achieve them. Hence we economize so that we can achieve as many of our ends as possible. Resources, labor, and time devoted to one purpose can’t also be used for other purposes, and the alternative forgone is the true cost of any action. We individually choose among competing ends after assessing the trade-offs, because we don’t want inadvertently to give up something we prefer in exchange for something we don’t value as much.

The marketplace, when it’s free of government privilege and regulation, lets us accomplish this to a remarkable degree. In doing so, it raises our living standards and creates an orderly environment, thanks to the price system, which coordinates and facilitates our plans.

Government throws this process out of whack. When politicians forcibly extract resources from us (through taxation) and borrow, they leave us less with which we can improve our lives through entrepreneurship, business formation, and the like. But, you may ask, aren’t the politicians’ projects worthwhile? Actually, many government projects are of zero value or worse. The costly global empire is beyond useless: it endangers us. Other projects might be useful, but — and this is key — we can’t be sure, because they are not subject to the market test.

If a private entrepreneur acquires resources in a quest for profit, she must create value for consumers or she will fail. The market’s profit-and-loss test will see to that. That test is administered by countless millions of consumers who are free to take or leave what the entrepreneur offers. This test is relayed back to the investors who lend money to entrepreneurs for productive ventures. They know that if the entrepreneur fails, they will also suffer losses. So they must scrutinize projects in terms of their potential, ultimately, to please free consumers.

The upshot is that consumers’ uncoerced actions signal (through prices and profit/loss) what pleases them and what does not. Suppliers must pay heed or face bankruptcy. This explains why markets, when not burdened by government privileges and arbitrary rules, work so well to raise living standards.

Note how government projects differ essentially from market projects. Politicians and bureaucrats obtain their money through force, not consensual mutual exchange. (What happens if you tell the IRS you don’t want to purchase its “services”?) Even the money obtained through voluntary loans is expected to be repaid with the taxpayers’ money. It’s taxation all the way down.

Moreover, government “services” are not offered in a competitive market where consumers are free to take them or leave them. Since we’re forced to pay a monopoly provider regardless of whether we want the “services,” at the point of delivery they appear to be free. You can’t opt out of paying for “free public schools” even if you don’t want to use them. Everyone pays into Social Security, a (meager) pension plan, under threat of force. In other words, government services are not true services in the market sense because they face no market test from consumers free to withhold their money without penalty.

The market test assures that bad trade-offs are avoided, or at least quickly corrected if they are made. If steel is being used to make one product when consumers are demanding something else, the competitive entrepreneurial process sees to it that steel will be redirected.

No corresponding process exists in the political realm. It contains no incentives to look out for the consumers’ welfare. Instead, we have political theater and value destruction.

This would be bad enough, but it’s actually worse. What government does with the stolen resources typically makes it harder for us to use the remaining resources productively. Uncertainty about future taxation and regulation, for example, increases the risk of investment and hence reduces it.

An indispensable prerequisite of economic well-being is humility on the part of politicians. How about it, President Obama?

http://reason.com/archives/2013/07/28/the-economic-lesson-obama-needs-to-learn

Obama’s doomed attempt to save his legacy

The White House adopts a strategy of deception by distraction

President Obama’s approval ratings are falling faster than skydiver Felix Baumgartner during his record-setting jump from outer space.

In a desperate move to salvage his second term, Mr. Obama threw out his top liberal agenda items — immigration, gun control and race relations — and pivoted to the economy. The problem is that the only one to blame for the five-year malaise is the current resident of the Oval Office.

The president fueled up Air Force One on Wednesday to fly to the heartland for two stops in an attempt to physically distance himself from Washington.
“It may seem hard right now, but if we’re willing to take a few bold steps — if Washington will just shake off its complacency, set aside the kind of slash-and-burn partisanship that we’ve seen over the past few years — I promise you, our economy will be stronger a year from now,” Mr. Obama said at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg.

The president acts like he just arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue last week. He’s had four years, yet his policies have failed to create jobs and restore economic growth.

“There are days I think he forgets that he is actually president,” Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me Thursday. “He wants to blame everyone but himself and his failure to join bipartisan efforts to create jobs, like the Keystone pipeline, is the reason we are not in a better place.”

The economy has never grown much more than by minuscule amounts during the Obama administration. Gross domestic product has grown at an anemic pace since he’s been in the White House, barely sputtering at 1.8 percent in the first quarter of 2013. Unemployment under Mr. Obama has averaged a discouraging 8.8 percent and still tops out at 7.6 percent.

Gas prices are rising again, but Mr. Obama spent a long stretch of these speeches touting the doubling of “clean energy” production on his watch. He claimed to have “saved the auto industry,” but didn’t mention that Detroit has gone bankrupt.

Most absurdly, he cited as a point of pride that “our deficits are falling at the fastest rate in 60 years.” He left out two key points: The congressional Republicans demanded spending cuts for increasing the debt ceiling, and the rate of decrease is high because the deficits themselves have been the largest red ink in U.S. history. Spending was $1.4 trillion more than revenue in 2009 and $1 trillion more in 2012.

The Congressional Budget Office projects a $642 billion deficit for this fiscal year, but that’s mostly because Mr. Obama hiked taxes on Jan. 1 to pay for his spending habits.

The president takes almost as little responsibility for his own actions as Anthony D. Weiner, the disgraced sexting addict and former congressman running for New York City mayor.

“With this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball. And I am here to say this needs to stop,” the president said in a 64-minute speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. “Our focus has to be on the basic economic issues that matter most to you, the people we represent.”

By “phony scandals,” Mr. Obama is referring to the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservatives and then concealing the evidence and refusing to provide testimony to a congressional committee. He is also referring to his Justice Department sneaking into the emails and phone calls of reporters who don’t support the Obama administration’s agenda.

The president’s “endless parade of distractions” would also include exposing the National Security Agency’s secret Prism program that has been spying on innocent Americans’ Internet searches, phone calls and emails.
It has also been distracting to have Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. launch an investigation into whether George Zimmerman broke federal racial discrimination laws when he killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense.

The scandals have given the American public Obama fatigue.

According to a new McClatchy-Marist poll, the president has the lowest approval ratings in nearly two years, at just 41 percent, down a whopping 9 percent just since April. Mr. Obama’s political calculation to pivot to fiscal issues must be a reaction to the survey showing that 56 percent of the country disapproves of how he is handling the economy.

Mr. Obama’s political career has been based on his skill in convincing people to judge him on the things he says, rather than his actions. This ability is effective for a campaign but a disaster for governing.

The president now wants to play the innocent outsider taking on the Washington political establishment. No one should fall for it.

 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/26/obamas-doomed-attempt-to-save-his-legacy/#ixzz2aRjxtsyB

The Stunning Failures of Obama's Mortgage Program

 Way back in 2009, President Obama's Treasury Department launched the Home Affordable Modification Program, a massive authorization to help homeowners struggling with their mortgages in the wake of the financial crisis. 1.2 milllion people participated in the program at a cost to taxpayers of $4.4 billion. 

A report [pdf] dropped this week from the Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP) that HAMP has a stunning failure rate. Of the 1.2 million HAMP participants, 306,000 have re-defaulted on their mortgages, at an additional cost to taxpayers of $815 million. What's more, another 88,000 homeowners in the HAMP program have missed payments and are at risk to re-default.

Twenty-two percent of homeowners who have redefaulted on their HAMP permanent mortgage modifications have moved into the foreclosure process. The Administration’s stated goal for the housing initiative was “to help as many as three to four million financially struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure by modifying loans to a level that is affordable for borrowers now and sustainable over the long term.” However, since 2009, during each year of the program, an increased number of homeowners redefaulted on HAMP permanent mortgage modifications. Redefault rates of the oldest 2009 HAMP permanent mortgage modifications have continued to increase as they age at a redefault rate of 46%. The 2010 HAMP permanent mortgage modifications are redefaulting at a rate of 38%. Treasury’s data continue to demonstrate that the longer homeowners remain in HAMP, the greater the chance that they will redefault on their permanent modification and fall out of the TARP program. For the substantial number of homeowners who redefault, their modification was not sustainable. It is crucial that Treasury recognize this problem and take proactive steps to ensure that HAMP lives up to its promise and potential.

HAMP has been re-authorized to be in effect through 2015. An aggressive housing policy would have and could still be a very effective economic program to help America's still-struggling economy - but it's important to recognize the risk of having the government takeover some of the riskiest loans. There are important policies that could be pursued, though. As I described earlier this year, a HAMP reform focused on principal forgiveness could save the government money, help the housing market and boost the economy. 

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/kevinglass/2013/07/28/stunning-failures-of-obamas-mortgage-program-n1649982 

Another unintended consequence of Obamacare

Federal subsidies for Obamacare insurance policies are mandated spending. That means that anyone who applies for the subsidy - anyone - and if they qualify, will receive it.

But what happens if dozens of cities, towns, and some states, push their retired workers from seriously underfunded health insurance plans on to the subsidized federal plan?

You get a massive explosion in costs to the American taxpayer.

New York Times:

Unfunded retiree health care costs loom larger than ever for localities across the country, and the health law's guarantee of federal subsidies to help people with modest incomes afford coverage has made the new insurance markets tantalizing for local governments. A study issued this year by the Pew Charitable Trusts found 61 of the nation's major cities wrestling with $126 billion in retiree health costs, all but 6 percent of that unfunded.
"The Affordable Care Act does change the possibilities here dramatically," said Neil Bomberg, a program director at the National League of Cities. "It offers a very high-quality, potentially very affordable way to get people into health care without the burden falling back onto the city and town."
But if large numbers of localities follow that course, it could amount to a significant cost shift to the federal government. Authors of the health care law expected at least some shifting of retirees into the new insurance exchanges, said Timothy S. Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University who closely follows the law. "But if a lot of them do, especially big state and local programs," he said, "that's going to be a huge cost for the United States government, and it's mandatory spending."
Many cities are also wrestling with unfunded pension programs for retirees. But health care has become an easier target for cuts, in part because of generally stronger legal protections for pensions. Still, changes to retiree health care are playing out in courtrooms. The suit Mr. Underwood joined, filed last week in Chicago, claims that the health care benefits were also protected.
The Chicago plan, announced in May, would phase some of the city's 11,800 retirees and their family members not eligible for Medicare out of city coverage by 2017. While some may seek insurance through new employers or through their spouses' workplaces, others will probably be shifted to the insurance exchanges. Much of the plan for the next few years is in flux, but the changes are expected to contribute to a larger effort to save Chicago $155 million to $175 million a year in retiree health care costs by 2017.

Should the authors of Obamacare foreseen this situation? Even if they did, there is precious little they could do about it. Detroit's bankruptcy has spooked many cities and states, exposing their vulnerability to the skyrocketing costs of health care for retired public workers. There isn't much that cities can do to change pension plans unilaterally. They need to go back to the negotiating table where unions across the country are digging in to protect benefits.
But health care is a different story and it appears that dozens of big cities will take advantage of federal subsidies for insurance to throw their retirees on to the state exchanges - to be paid for by the rest of us.


http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/07/another_unintended_consequence_of_obamacare.html#ixzz2aRraKDLv

What the "War" on Whatever is Really About

Every time our culture passes gas sideways, liberals love to trot out the theory of “income inequality” as the culprit behind it.

From the modern theory of “bullying,” to global warming, to breast cancer, to riots in Sweden, France, or the disappearance of the arctic ice shelf, income inequality looms large in liberal cosmology. 

At a time when more people in the history of world have become upwardly-mobile, solid members of the middle-class, liberals believe that they must stop the natural process by which people are moved out of poverty in favor of some sort of state-sponsored program that ensures “fairness.”
 
From the Huffington Post:

Participants in the annual World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland are citing worldwide income inequality as a problem that needs immediate attention, according to multiple reports. The political, cultural and business leaders convening in Switzerland this week are the latest group to express pointed concern over the growing gulf between the planet's richest and poorest citizens. 

Several of the wealthiest Davos attendees have told the press that they believe the current lopsided distribution of wealth is unsustainable -- that the "global social-economic order will change, if we want it or not," in the words of one industrialist quoted in Bloomberg.

It's not just them. The Forum's annual Global Risks report names "severe income disparity" as the issue most likely to affect the world over the next 10 years. And a poll of Davos participants conducted by Bloomberg News found that more than half believe income inequality is bad for economic growth -- a conclusion also reached by the International Monetary Fund last year.

About two-thirds believe governments should take active steps to address the issue, the survey also found.

The Davos summit, taking place this week, comes after nearly a year of international protests inspired by a lack of economic opportunities, from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, and on the heels of numerous studies showing much of the world's population struggling with deprivation. 

So to sum: 

1)  Income Inequality is “settled” science.
2)  The world will end if we don’t address it.
3)  Rich people and government types- our betters- agree on this.
4)  We must do something about it immediately.

And whatever else they are saying, they mean for you to pay for it.


Obama even had the "audacity" to suggest to young Africans that they can't aspire to have big homes, cars or even air conditioning. 

"Ultimately you think you about all the youth that everybody’s mentioned here in Africa," Obama wagged while in Africa, "if everybody’s raising living standards to the point where everybody’s got a car, and everybody’s got air conditioning, and everybody’s got a big house the planet will boil over." 
You see, “Income inequality” means something different in Egypt than it does in Sweden or the U.S, even though liberals would have what happened in Tahrir Square versus what happened in Zuccotti Park was part of the same phenomenon.

Much of the hype about income inequality in the Western world is more about the changing dynamics of society and the make-up of households than it is about income.

The Pew Trust recently released a report that shows that one of the prime movers behind income inequality, isn’t income at all, but the growing number of single mother household, which have rocketed from 7.3 percent of all households to 25.3 percent of all households since 1960.

While noting that 40 percent of all households now have either a woman earning more than a man or a woman as sole provider, the study also says there is a huge difference between married households and single mother households.

“The income gap between the two groups is quite large,” says Pew. “The median total family income of married mothers who earn more than their husbands was nearly $80,000 in 2011, well above the national median of $57,100 for all families with children, and nearly four times the $23,000 median for families led by a single mother.”

So, in other words, traditionally married couples, with moms as breadwinners, enjoy a household income that is 40 percent higher than the national average and nearly 400 percent higher than single moms.
The only people surprised by the finding are liberals. 

As our contributor at Political Calculations wrote back in October of 2011:

[I]f people with very high income earning potential join together to form families and households, and increasingly do so over time, perhaps because such people might have things in common that make forming themselves into families and households an attractive proposition, then income inequality among families and households will increase.

The same holds true for the opposite end of the income earning spectrum. If people with really low income earning potential join together to form families and households, or perhaps if they choose to split apart, and increasingly do so over time, then the resulting low income family and household will also make income inequality among families and households rise, even though there has been no real change in the amount of actual income inequality among individuals.

Liberals are getting wise to the argument that maybe people who get married and stay married do better than ones who don’t. And it worries them. This is just the type of argument that conservatives will use to bolster the traditional family unit that has been around for 7,000 years of recorded history. 

So to combat this kind of nonsense progressives trot out their old standby, a liberal academic expert in some new science, to lets us know that all is not as it seems: “Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College,” reports NPR, “says women know they'll be better off if they marry a man who earns a good wage, but they may not have that option.”

NPR doesn’t even bother to cite any statistics beside professor Coontz assertion that high school graduates make $4.00 per hour less in constant dollars than they did in 1979- a statement for which I can find no evidence.  

"In many low-income communities, there are not many men like that available," says Coontz of good wage-earning men. "Poverty is as often a cause of unwed motherhood as it is a result."

So now it’s poverty that’s stopping people from being married, not a liberal ideology that is hostile to marriage in general. What are you gonna believe? 7,000 years of use and tradition, or Ms. Coontz and her liberal betters who teach modified home economics on the side? 

“Whenever someone expresses moral disapproval in a legal context,” says U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan in regards to the only type of marriage liberals approve of- that is gay marriage- “the red flag of discrimination goes up for me.”

So as Father Robert Barron observes, Kagan has an ethical objection to those of us who might have an ethical objection to the state of marriage in the U.S. But somehow Kagan’s ethical objection is morally superior to anyone else's. Ethical objections put forward by liberals somehow defy the moral relativism that supposed to apply to the rest of us knuckle-draggers who cling to our guns and religion.  

But here is the punchline that liberals are getting at: People who stay married- presumably to spouses of the opposite gender- and reap the benefits of their commitment need to pay for those who can’t or won’t.
“US children in single mother families have a poverty rate of 63 percent when only parental earnings are considered,” says the Nation, “comparable to the 61 percent average for children in single mother families in other high-income countries. But when transfer payments are included—such as a government child allowance, unemployment insurance and other assistance programs—the US rate only declines to 51 percent, while the peer countries average poverty rate falls all the way down to 27 percent.”

See it’s your fault that single mothers are poor. And your fault that Africans can't have air conditioning.
We need, it seems, to follow the European model, because, yeah, that’s working out so well right now.
Just ask Ms. Coontz. She has a Masters in European History. 

Her class American Families: Historical and Sociological Perspectives studies “the gender and sexual norms of the 19th century, including variation by race and class, then examine the changes pioneered in the early 20th century. We discuss the rise of the 1950s male breadwinner family and then follow its demise from the 1960s through the 1980s. We end the quarter by discussing new patterns of partnering and parenting in the past 30 years.”

The class runs from 9 AM to 5 PM on Saturdays. It is offered for part-time credit only, because, yeah, it seems like it’s working out real well right now. 

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2013/07/29/what-the-war-on-whatever-is-really-about-n1651115/page/full

Obama's HUD to Expand Middle Class

How? Just move people from low income neighborhoods into middle class neighborhoods.

This brilliant stratagem is being promoted by Shaun Donovan, Obama's newly appointed head of HUD.

According to Donovan, the middle class is the middle class because they have all the advantages of living in middle class neighborhoods. After all, middle class neighborhoods have better  "schools, jobs, transportation, and other important neighborhood resources that can play a role in helping people move into the middle class."

Move people from low income neighborhoods with poor "assets" into neighborhoods with good "assets" and presto  they will have middle class jobs and all the other "assets" of being in the middle class.

Not only is this economically sound, it follows from the moral principle that every American has  the right "to choose to live in a community they feel proud of."

That being the case, not only is it immoral to discriminate on the housing front on the basis of ethnicity and sexuality, it is equally immoral to discriminate on the basis of ability to pay. Under HUD"s  new "Fair Housing" plan, HUD, one way or another, will make sure taxpayers eat the tab for this brilliant piece of social engineering..  Unlike the old failed  Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program,  this one under HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan  is going to work because Donovan is going to use "21st Century methods":

This proposed rule represents a 21st century approach to fair housing, a step forward to ensuring that every American is able to choose to live in a community they feel proud of - where they have a fair shot at reaching their full potential in life. For the first time ever, HUD will provide data for every neighborhood in the country, detailing the access African American, Latino, Asian, and other communities have to local assets, including schools, jobs, transportation, and other important neighborhood resources that can play a role in helping people move into the middle class. Long-term solutions will involve various strategies, such as helping people gain access to different neighborhoods and channeling investments into underserved areas.

"Channeling investments" - that's Obamacode for "extorting more money from the tax paying public for the High Church  of Social Justice." HUD, under Donovan, is going to use  more money and strong-arm methods ("mixed-finance tools") to right social injustice. The HUD.GUV site profiling Donovan claims:

He has launched new initiatives like Choice Neighborhoods, which will enable distressed communities to use proven mixed-use, mixed-finance tools to transform not just federally-assisted housing, but the neighborhoods around that housing.

Let's see. I get to choose to live in a community I can feel proud of? And Donovan is going to use "mixed-finance tools" to ensure someone else picks up the tab?
I don't know about you, but I'm shooting for Trump Towers.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/07/obamas_hud_to_expand_middle_class.html#ixzz2aRpJ9bCH

Obama Treasury Secretary Dodges Questions on IRS Targeting Scandal

 Nothing to see here, folks.  It's nothing more than an Obama cabinet secretary repeatedly declining to describe the role William Wilkins -- one of the president's two political appointees at the IRS -- played in the agency's targeting of conservative groups between 2010 and 2012.  Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace phrased and re-phrased the question, but Jack Lew wasn't about to detour from his scripted talking points.

Lew insists that "no evidence" exists that any political appointees were involved, and there's "no suggestion" that Wilkins was in the planning loop.  The IRS has lots of lawyers, after all.  Wallace asks if Lew -- as Wilkins' boss -- ever asked his subordinate about the latter's level of involvement  in, or knowledge of, the IRS' abusive actions.  That wouldn't be "appropriate" for some reason, Lew responds, adding that he's happy to leave the investigating to the investigators.  Which investigators?  Lew really can't say, but he assures Wallace that "a lot of questions" have been asked of "a lot of people."  Carol marvels at Lew's "dazzling" lack of curiosity. Two reminders: (1) Senior Treasury Department officials were made aware of the brewing targeting firestorm back in June of 2012 -- at the latest.  That's six months prior to the presidential election, and nearly year before the scandal went public.  (2) According to the Inspector General's timeline, Wilkins found out about IRS targeting practices as early as 2011.  Between 2011 and 2012, he would have had several opportunities to brief the president or his team about what was happening.  Did he?  If not, why not?  In addition to the targeting malfeasance, the IRS has been accused of throwing lavish, wasteful, taxpayer-funded conferences for its employees (and "misplacing" their receipts), as well as leaking private tax information of conservative groups, political donors, and candidates.  Even in a case about which the IG determined the privacy breach of a major donor or candidate was "willful," Eric Holder's Justice Department hasn't pursued any legal action against the responsible parties.  Just a bevy of non-controversies related to a "phony" scandal.  

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/07/29/video-obama-treasury-secretary-dodges-questions-on-irs-targeting-scandal-n1651047 

Obama's Fed Circus

Democrats put on a spectacle of Wall Street and gender politics.

The Federal Reserve chairman is the world's most important economic official, especially with today's weak U.S. Treasury. So how embarrassing for American economic leadership to see the choice of Ben Bernanke's successor devolve into a brawl between the Democratic Party's gender liberals and its Wall Street wing. If only the two sides disagreed on the conduct of monetary policy.

President Obama opened the circus in June when he signaled to PBS's Charlie Rose that Mr. Bernanke had "already stayed a lot longer than he wanted or he was supposed to." A more managerially competent President would have quietly advised Mr. Bernanke about his intentions and let the Fed chairman announce his departure on his own terms after eight years. 

Mr. Bernanke would have been treated with more respect. And the President could have given himself more flexibility in vetting a replacement and avoiding what is now a very public scramble for the job.

Janet Yellen, the current Fed vice chairman, has emerged as the favorite of the Democratic left. As an economist with long experience at the Fed, she doesn't lack for professional credentials. But her cause has been taken up by the liberal diversity police as a gender issue because she'd be the first female Fed chairman.

Nancy Pelosi has bellowed her support, and Christina Romer, who was chief White House economist for the first two years of Mr. Obama's Presidency, has all but said it would be a defeat for women if Ms. Yellen doesn't get the Fed job. That led our friends at the New York Sun to wonder if they had somehow missed the creation of "the female dollar" given that they thought the Fed's main task is to preserve the value of the currency.

Ms. Yellen is also seen, in and outside the Fed, as a leading monetary dove. That isn't limited to her backing for Mr. Bernanke's monetary interventions since the 2008 panic. We've followed Ms. Yellen for 20 years and can't recall a key juncture when her default policy wasn't to keep spiking the punchbowl. Many Democrats think the Fed needs to keep interest rates at near zero through the 2016 election, and Ms. Yellen is their woman.

The gender bender is compounded because White House aides are leaking that Ms. Yellen's main competitor is none other than economist Lawrence Summers. Aficionados of diversity politics will recall that Mr. Summers was run out of the Harvard presidency by the faculty after he observed that women may have "different availability of aptitude at the high end" in the hard sciences. He was merely musing aloud trying to explain the relative dearth of tenured women professors in the sciences, but at Harvard this is like insulting Muhammad in Mecca. 

Mr. Summers also worked in the Obama White House in the first term and repeatedly clashed with Ms. Romer. Among Democratic feminists, for Ms. Yellen to lose out to a man would be bad enough. To have her trumped by Larry Summers would be like losing to Phyllis Schlafly.

Mr. Summers, who was Bill Clinton's last Treasury secretary, is also being pushed by his patrons on Wall Street and the other Robert Rubin protégés who populate the Obama Administration. They include Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, chief White House economic aide Gene Sperling and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman. They want one of their own at the Fed, as well as someone who would have more immediate credibility in financial markets.

The political problem is that Wall Street ties aren't as golden as they once were among Democrats. Mr. Summers has in particular been part of the Democratic revolving door at Citigroup, C -1.32% which has been saved by the feds no fewer than three times, most recently in 2008-2009. Citi runs a best-in-class program for Democrats in between big political jobs, such as Mr. Lew, Mr. Froman and currently Peter Orszag, the former Obama budget director and architect of ObamaCare.

Mr. Summers has been a consultant to Citigroup since 2012, the year after he left the White House. A Citi spokesman says that "In addition to speaking at internal meetings, we engage Mr. Summers for small Private Bank client and institutional client meetings, where he provides insight on a broad range of topics including the global and domestic economy." Neither Mr. Summers nor the bank will disclose his compensation.
Whatever it is, Citibankers will consider it a bargain if their man ends up running the agency with primary responsibility for regulating Citigroup. In the Dodd-Frank world, too-big-to-fail banks are public utilities that resist regulatory advice at their peril. If he returns to the heights of financial political power, Mr. Summers wouldn't forget who helped him build a comfortable nest egg.

***

This political Big Top has everything—except a debate over what the Fed actually does. Mr. Summers has recently been quoted as saying the benefits of the Bernanke-Yellen quantitative easing are exaggerated, but that hasn't been a major theme of his public writing since he left the White House.
We wonder if this isn't merely a come-lately attempt to sound more hawkish than Ms. Yellen. Mr. Summers is above all a Democratic Party loyalist and would do whatever he thought necessary to help elect Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The real problem is that neither Ms. Yellen nor Mr. Summers seems likely to do what should be the next chairman's priority—restoring the Fed's independence by ending its post-crisis political interventions and focusing above all on maintaining price stability.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324809004578633922341613866.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Textbook Praises Islam, Denigrates Christianity

 A world history book used in an Advanced Placement class is under review by a Florida school board over allegations it favors Islam at the expense of Christianity and Judaism.

State Rep. Ritch Workman told Fox News the Prentice World History textbook rewrites Islamic history and presents a biased version of the Muslim faith.

“The book has a 36-page chapter on Islam but no chapters on Christianity or Judaism,” Workman said. “It’s remarkably one-sided.”

The textbook is being used in an Advanced Placement class in Brevard County schools. The book is on a state-approved list and has been used in the school system for the past three years without any complaints.
Workman said he received a copy of the book and he said it’s clear the authors “make a very obvious attempt not to insult Islam by reshaping history.”

“If you don’t see it from the eyes of a parent, kids are going to take this book as gospel and believe that Christians and Jews were murderous barbarians and thank God the Muslims came along and the world is great,” he said. 

For example, Workman said a reference to Mohammed and his armies taking over Medina states, “people happily accepted Islam as their way of life.”

“It leaves out that tens of thousands of Jews and non-believers were massacred by Mohammed’s armies,” he said. “It’s a blatant deception.”

The book indicates that Jesus proclaimed himself to be the Messiah while stating as fact that Mohammed is a prophet, Workman said. Students are also given lessons on the Koran and the five pillars of Islam. The
“They don’t do that for Christianity,” he said. “That is offensive to me.”

School board member Amy Kneessy told Fox News she has similar concerns. 

“Some of the descriptions of the battles use the word ‘massacre’ when it’s a Christian battle and ‘takeover’ when it’s a Muslim battle,” she said. “In young minds, massacre paints a very different visual picture than a takeover or occupation – when in fact both battles were very bloody.”

Kneessy said she’s also concerned that the book devotes an entire chapter to Islam.

“I don’t want revisionist history,” she said. “History is history.”

Pearson, the publisher of the textbook, confirmed there is a chapter titled, “Muslim Civilizations.”

“Pearson and its authors adhere to the highest editorial standards when creating course materials, which undergo a rigorous review process,” Pearson spokeswoman Susan Aspey told Fox News. “A review of the book shows there is balanced attention given to the beliefs of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.”

However, Workman said that statement is “patently unfair and untrue.”

“They hired a Muslim cleric to write the Muslim section,” he said. “The publisher told me.”
Aspey said that’s not correct.

She said “academic experts did review the content, but they did not write it or edit it.”

http://townhall.com/columnists/toddstarnes/2013/07/29/textbook-praises-islam-denigrates-christianity-n1651503

Hey Cowards, Let's Have a Conversation

 I have worked with many couples in distress.  Initially, the work involves preventing conversation until the rhetoric of the relationship can be improved.  Happy couples mainly talk about their lives; unhappy couples mainly talk about each other.  In doomed relationships, couples use words to humiliate each other.  And as the doomed relationship collapses, the partners become more desperate to spew insults and make the other hear them.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder stand their ground together upon a framing of race so false and degrading that it would inevitably tear the American people apart.  Attorney General Holder used an utmost humiliating term in calling Americans cowards.  He did this with the approval of President Obama, who fully stands by his man each time Holder's wrecking ball takes a swing at the Constitution.  Holder's purpose in shaming Americans was to demonstrate his power as untouchable.  But Holder's abusive language, and the contempt it shows, bore within it the seeds of doom for blame-and-shame race rhetoric.

Social science research uses a model called frame analysis to understand social movements:

"Framing is a process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner. Frames operate in four key ways: they define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments and suggest remedies. Frames are often found within a narrative account of an issue or event, and are generally the central organizing idea."
- Jim A. Kuypers, Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action

Since the end of legalized racial segregation in the 1960s, the central organizing idea of race relations in America has been that white people are still racist and black people are still victims.  This rhetorical frame operates as follows:

1) The problem: the greatest problem in America is that black Americans have lower incomes and poorer health, and are generally less successful than white people.

2) The cause: white racism, which is the primary moral evil in America.  All white people enjoy white privilege, and all black people are victims of white racism, regardless of individual circumstances.

3) Moral judgment: black Americans are not morally responsible for their generally lower achievements and drastically higher criminality because these problems can be traced to white racism.

4) The remedies: keep the focus on white racism; maintain permanent special rights, including affirmative action, racial preferences, and lowered performance standards.  Accept that white racism causes disproportionately high numbers of black people to depend on the government for basic necessities such as food and medical care.  Maintain a "national conversation" about white racism.

The Obama administration exists because of this framing.  No one suggests that Barack Obama would have been nominated by the Democratic Party for the presidency based on his record alone if he had been white.  But still, the framing of race rhetoric that the government advances is breaking down from the weight of its own falseness.

On February 26, 2012, a wannabe cop and a wannabe gangsta interacted on a sidewalk for a few minutes. The Hispanic wannabe cop suspected the other man as being up to no good and called the police.  The wannabe gangsta responded by breaking the other man's nose and smashing his head into the sidewalk.  The victim of the beating shot and killed the black teenager, and was subsequently found by a jury not guilty on the basis of self-defense. Nevertheless, President Obama psychologically projected himself into the incident in an emotional manner.  He framed the event as a result of white racism, ignoring the assault committed by the black teenager and the teenager's history of violence and drug use. 

The president displayed victimization envy when he breathlessly confided to America, "It could have been me."  Imagining oneself as the victim of racism is taking on an almost erotic quality.  Maybe it will spawn a new genre of fantasy porn, where rich, privileged black people get to dress up as crime victims and be abused by white racist archetypes. (They can hire the videographer who "caused" Benghazi if he ever gets out of jail). In fact, racial profiling brought Barack Obama this world's highest opportunities that he did not earn, honors that he did not deserve, and power that he cannot handle.  But the point is that in the president's moral universe, being suspicious of a black stranger in your neighborhood is morally worse than slamming someone's head into concrete.

Now comes the calls for "conversation."  For the left wing, conversation serves both practical and philosophical purposes.  Liberals virtually never make any personal sacrifices for their causes.  They prefer chin music to breaking a sweat.  Philosophically, liberal conversation-addiction descends from Jacques Derrida and deconstructionism.  Rejecting the search for objective right and wrong in favor of the supremacy of personal "text" elevates egoistic conversation into sacred scripture.  But on the deepest level, Derrida's work is just claptrap cover-up for narcissistic humanists, who pervert every experience into feeling good about themselves.  In such a world, it does not matter whether or not the Zimmerman-Martin case was factually about racism.  If you feel that it was about racism, then it was.  And communicating that feeling as conversational "text" satisfies the liberal sense of justice.  If destroying George Zimmerman and his family is a syntonic theme of their personal narrative, any moral qualms about that destruction can be neutralized through more conversation.

With no doubt of their superior subtlety of mind, the most rabidly pro-abortion people are now heating up their keyboards with swellers about the value of precious black life.  On July 30, Nancy Pelosi is hosting a "Conversation on Race" in which shame-and-blame phraseologists will get a chance to fascinate each other at taxpayer expense.  No one else is listening anymore.  The epidemic of black-on-black murder, child-killings, flash mobs, and horrors like the killing of baby Santiago, combined with travesties like the racist dereliction of Holder, are imploding the liberal rhetorical frame.

On July 22, 2013, Bill O'Reilly used his huge platform to initiate what social scientists call "interpretive frame transformation."  Frame transformation occurs when an interpretive frame no longer resonates with everyday experience.  A skilled conversation preventionist, O'Reilly told the race grievance establishment that it is time to cut the crap.  Guilt has been called the only wholly artificial emotion, entirely concocted and serving no survival purpose.  Besides, you can't guilt all of the people all of the time.

O'Reilly reframed the problem as being one of black criminality and irresponsibility.  The causes are the breakdown of the black family, out-of-wedlock birth, and vile black popular culture.  Immoral behavior committed by African-Americans is their own responsibility. The remedy is that black Americans need to stop having babies out of wedlock, whom they don't raise properly.

It is said that only equals can be friends.  Similarly, you can't have a productive conversation with somebody who calls you names.

 http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/hey_cowards_lets_have_a_conversation.html#ixzz2aRtVcJvn

Top 5 Hillary Gaffes You Won't See in Upcoming Clinton Miniseries

NBC will produce a miniseries based on the political career of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a project sure to polish her 2016 presidential aspirations. NBC's programming is consistently left of center, and Bob Greenblatt, NBC Entertainment chairman, donated thousands to Clinton's failed 2008 presidential bid.

Just casting the gorgeous Diane Lane in the lead role is bias enough.

The project will likely sugarcoat the Whitewater investigation, HillaryCare and TravelGate, but here's betting the following five moments get left on the cutting room floor.

• Those Imaginary chats with Eleanor Roosevelt - This one seems like a visual slam dunk, the sight of the First Lady having tea with a former First Lady--in her mind, at least. Imaginary conversations wouldn't help Clinton's image, so these chit-chats will have to go.
• The Reset Button - The so-called smartest politician in the world reached out to Russia with a gimmick so silly Carrot Top would hurl it back into his prop trunk. She brought a red "reset" button to her meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as a way to distance herself from past negative vibes. Too bad she didn't bring her English to Russian dictionary along since she bungled the translation. The moment wasn't just embarrassing on the surface. Her button malfunction also signaled how she would undercut our allies in the region. 
• "Under Sniper Fire" - Clinton tried to burnish her tough gal image with a fictitious story in which she was in danger from sniper fire during a 1996 trip to Bosnia. Clinton repeated the tale several times before admitting her landing reception wasn't quite so deadly. 
• "What Difference ... Does It Make?" - Clinton's infamous reaction to a line of questioning regarding the death of four Americans in Benghazi is a portrait of clinical indifference, and a quote that would haunt the rest of her political career had a Republican uttered it in that context.
• "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" - Clinton uttered this defense of her philandering husband, President Bill Clinton, as the Monica Lewinksy scandal was finding its legs. She blamed the rumor of her husband's unfaithfulness on his political enemies, the so-called "vast right wing conspiracy" committed to ruining his career. This moment might make the final cut, if only put in the context of Republicans using her husband's infidelities as a weapon against him. As if Democrats would do no such thing.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2013/07/28/top-5-hillary-gaffes-new-movie

See the Offensive Map the Palestinian Negotiator Meeting with John Kerry this Week Has on His Facebook Page

 In her statement announcing the resumption of peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians this week, State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Sunday said that the Palestinians will be represented by Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat and Mohammad Shtayyeh.

Middle East analyst Oren Kessler noticed something interesting about Shtayyeh’s Facebook page; that is, that the Palestinian negotiator displays a map of the entire State of Israel – including its internationally recognized borders, plus Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) plus Gaza – emblazoned with the Arabic letters for “Palestine.”

Whether by intention or not, the map is also shaded in green, a color traditionally associated with Islam.

Also on his Facebook profile, Shtayyeh displays a photograph of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock which sits above the Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism.

The Palestinian Authority – which Shtayyeh is representing in the talks Kerry is hosting this week — and the majority Fatah ruling party are considered by the U.S. and European community to constitute the more moderate leadership as compared with Hamas which states flat out that its goal is to destroy the Jewish state.

Shtayyeh’s Facebook profile images include a map of the entire State of Israel emblazoned with the Arabic script for “Palestine.” (Screenshot: Facebook)

Writer Aussie Dave from the pro-Israel blog Israelly Cool captures how the map is being perceived among many Israelis:

Yeah, that’s the entire map of Israel covered in the Arabic for “Palestine” (Filastin). In other words [...] “We will pretend to negotiate for peace, but only as a means to an end. The end being the destruction of Israel and, in its place, a palestinian state in the entire land.”

So the situation is even worse than we thought. Not only have we agreed to kick-start peace negotiations by releasing over 100 murderous, unrepentant terrorists, but we will be negotiating with someone who is not even hiding his true aim: Israel’s destruction.

And the world won’t even blink.

Raheem Kassam on Trending Central writes: “Such backhanded tactics are well known within Palestinian circles, and the recognition of the State of Israel is a rarity in the region.”

Kerry in his invitation to the peace talks noted the “the courage shown by Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas” in agreeing to restart talks. “Both leaders have demonstrated a willingness to make difficult decisions that have been instrumental in getting to this point. We are grateful for their leadership,” Kerry said.

“It seems for one of Abbas’s negotiators however, the recognition of the State of Israel is one step too far, and reveals how these peace talks are more than likely to be completely in vain,” Kassam adds.

As TheBlaze reported last week, Palestinian Authority Minister of Religious Affairs Mahmoud Al-Habbash was caught on tape earlier this month hinting that any future peace deal with Israel would secretly be only a short-term arrangement, comparing it to a truce the Muslim prophet Mohammed negotiated only to break two years later.

That statement is but the latest example of Palestinian Authority officials hinting they might not be bound by the terms of any agreement requiring them to give up the hopes of one day securing more territory from Israel.

TheBlaze’s coverage of the Israeli government’s controversial decision to release 104 Palestinian prisoners from jail, many convicted murderers, can be seen here.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/29/see-the-offensive-map-the-palestinian-negotiator-meeting-with-john-kerry-this-week-has-on-his-facebook-page/