Posted on By: Fred

Hey, remember this guy?

With all eyes on the Republicans and their presidential-nomination donnybrook, behind the scenes President Obama is still busy with the “fundamental transformation” of the US that he promised during the 2008 campaign.

While analysts have been chewing over Rick Santorum’s surprise near-victory over front-runner Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses last week, the real action has been going on under the media radar in Washington, where:

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/hey_remember_this_guy_L7HnrH4rTOZHgR4vwjCrYI#ixzz1isd3LUid

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Posted on By: Fred

Don’t be afraid to say it: ‘We are the 1 percent’

It is time to stand up and be counted. I am the 1 percent. Let’s be plain about this. Though I have a good job and a good paycheck, I have virtually no wealth, no savings and no need for tax shelters. I have substantial debt. My family owns three vehicles, the newest of which is a 1999 Ford Windstar worth about $2,000. That’s our “good” car. If it breaks down, we would have to go further into debt to fix it or replace it. I cannot afford to put my three children — the oldest of whom is in high school, the youngest in diapers — through college. We vacation 20 miles away in Whitefish because we can’t afford airfare or gas for a long trip. We live in a hundred-year-old house without central heating and we are happy to have it. Sometimes we do look with envy at a our neighbors’ houses that have modern plumbing and electric systems that don’t short out when you run the pancake griddle and the space heater at the same time, and sometimes we do wonder why we can’t own a brand-new SUV like so many other families do. But envy is cheap; SUVs are not.

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Posted on By: Fred

The Player and the President

Anyone watching Sunday’s women’s final at the U.S. Open tennis tournament was treated to an appalling display of temper on the part of Serena Williams. At the beginning of the second set, Williams was judged to have hindered her opponent by shouting “come on” in the course of play. The point, and, as it turned out, the game, was awarded to Williams’s opponent, Samantha Stosur, who went on to win the match quite convincingly.

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Posted on By: Fred

The Wacky World of Liberal Fundamentalism

The candidacies of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, Bible-affirming Christians, predictably have ignited the liberal media’s zeal for exposing their allegedly odd if not wacko religious beliefs (see here). Support for some version of creationism, a faith in the efficacy of prayer, and actual belief in scriptural condemnation of homosexuality (among other religious views) are taken as prima facie evidence of presidential unsuitability. To be sure, millions of Americans (assumed to be ill-educated trailer-court denizens with rotting teeth and beer guts) may share these odd inclinations, but, at least according to liberal pundits, holding them betrays a lack of intellectual sophistication plus an aversion to modern science. Such antediluvian fundamentalism should, say the experts, have gone extinct with the Scopes Monkey Trials.

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Posted on By: Fred

Obama’s worst nightmare

President Obama can see the writing on the wall: His days in the White House are numbered. This is the real meaning of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s entry into the Republican presidential race. The GOP now has a candidate who can not only defeat Mr. Obama, but crush him.

For months, the mainstream media anointed Mitt Romney as the presumptive front-runner. The former Massachusetts governor is their ideal GOP candidate – a moderate technocrat from the Northeast, who flip-flopped on abortion and gay rights and enacted universal health care in his state. He is a Rockefeller Republican wolf in Reaganite clothing. His strongest asset is his business background. In a moribund economy, Mr. Romney came across as the only competent, experienced nominee who could kick-start the private sector. No longer.

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Posted on By: Fred

Home Depot Co-Founder: Obama Is Choking Recovery

Bernie Marcus co-founded Home Depot (HD) in 1978 and brought it public in 1981 as the U.S. was suffering from the worst recession and unemployment in 40 years. The company thrived, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and redefining home improvement retailing.

But Marcus says Home Depot “would never have succeeded” if it launched today due to onerous regulation. He recently helped launch the Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit of CEOs and entrepreneurs dedicated to preserving the free enterprise system. IBD recently spoke to him about jobs and the economy.

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Posted on By: Fred

Are Jews Permitted to Doubt The New York Times?

Courage comes in many forms. But the rarest form of courage, it seems to me, is for a true addict to give up his (or her) New York Times. That seems to go double or triple for the NYT’s Jewish readers, who cling to its daily prophetic utterances with truly Biblical fervor: “absolute truth.”

My sample is biased, obviously, since I hang around with conservatives and such (yech!), but I can think of only one Jewish friend who has ever confessed to dumping All the News You Are Fit to Read.

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