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President Obama, Ben Bernanke and Warn Buffett declared “war on the economy.” The economy is losing. It is simply not possible for the Fed to borrow trillions of dollars, driving interest rates up, simultaneously printing trillions to push rates back down to the .25% target, without diluting the cash savings of individuals and inflating the prices of everything else. Yet, in the trenches, life goes on. The troops follow old routines as if nothing has changed.

Investors are sitting on cash as a defensive strategy, just like they have always done, unaware that the forces unleashed by Obama’s “war on the economy” are bound to reduce the value of cash on hand. As the newly minted money trickles down from the political classes, through their Wall Street buddies, to main street, there will be twice as many pieces of paper chasing the same assets. Shouldn’t we all be buying assets now, before the wave of Bernanke dollars washes ashore? Read more >

Every page of Barack Hussein Obama’s life contains links to militant Muslims, hard core communists, virulent Antisemites, terrorist enablers and good old fashioned crooks. Liberals may argue that each of these relationships does not reflect Obama’s “real thinking”, but only the incurably insane would hold that as a package they do not mirror his ideology and illuminate his character.

Not counting the communist professors he sought out in college and his Stalinist wife, the people Obama admires and hopes to emulate are his father (posthumously), his pastor, and his friend, the terrorist.

OBAMA HID HIS FATHER’S COMMUNIST ANTI-WESTERN CONVICTIONS

There’s a big mystery at the heart of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. What was Barack Obama doing seeking out Marxist professors in college? Why did Obama choose a Communist Party USA member as his socio- political counselor in high school? Why was he spending his time studying neocolonialism and the writings of Frantz Fanon, the pro-violence author of “the Communist Manifesto of neocolonialsm”, in college? Why did he take time out from his studies at Columbia to attend socialist conferences at Cooper Union?

And there is more mystery in the book. Why does Obama consider working in a consulting house for international business like being “a spy behind enemy lines?” Why does he repeatedly find it so hard to explain his political views to others? Why was he driven to become a left-aligned political organizer? It’s a question Obama again and again can’t seem to answer to the satisfaction of the interlocutors in his own memoir.

If there is a mystery at the heart of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, one thing is not left a mystery, the fact that Barack Obama organized his life on the ideals given to him by his Kenyan father. Obama tells us, “All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I .. tried to take as my own.” (p. 220) And what was that image? It was “the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals ..” (p. 278) What is more, Obama tells us that, “It was into my father’s image .. that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.” And also that, “I did feel that there was something to prove .. to my father” in his efforts at political organizing. (p. 230)

So we know that his father’s ideals were a driving force in his life, but the one thing that Obama does not give us are the contents of those ideals. The closest he comes is when he tells us that his father lost his position in the government when he came into conflict with Jomo Kenyatte, the President of Kenya sometime in the mid 1960s; when he tells us that his father was imprisoned for his political views by the government just prior to the end of colonial rule; and when he tells us that the attributes of W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela were the ones he associated with his father and also the ones that he sought to instill in himself. (p. 220) This last group is a hodge podge, perhaps concealing as much as it reveals, in that it contains a socialist black nationalist, a Muslim black nationalist, a civil rights leader, and (at the time indicated in the memoir) an imprisoned armed revolutionary.
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A funny thing happened to Hugo Chavez on the way to unlimited perpetual power. The wannabe dictator of Venezuela made the mistake of asking the people … and the people said NO. The vote was close, 51% – 49% against forfeiting individual liberties. Still, it was a setback to the power hungry madman. Unfortunately, he can hold another referendum next year and the year after that, until he wins.

The New York Sun reports that Chavez was defeated in bid to expand power.

Humbled by his first electoral defeat ever, President Chavez said today he may have been too ambitious in asking voters to let him stand indefinitely for re-election and endorse a huge leap to a socialist state.

“I understand and accept that the proposal I made was quite profound and intense,” he said after voters narrowly rejected the sweeping constitutional reforms by 51% to 49%.

Opposition activists were ecstatic as the results were announced shortly after midnight — with 88% of the vote counted, the trend was declared irreversible by an elections council chief, Tibisay Lucena.

Some shed tears. Others began chanting: “And now he’s going away!”

Without the overhaul, Mr. Chavez will be barred from running again in 2012.

The BBC has the same story with a headline Chavez defeated over reform vote. Reform?