Barry Blowhard takes a bow

President Obama, with characteristic modesty, is giving himself credit for saving America from another Depression.
Sorry, but I think George Bush is the hero.
Obama has made a career out of blaming Bush for the world's woes but in this case the facts show that Bush has a better claim.
The government says the 18-month recession ended in June 2009.
That was six months after Obama took office, and long before any of his misguided policies took place.
You can't take credit for ending a recession when all you've done is make speeches blaming your predecessor for creating it.
In truth, government action usually is too little, too late, in affecting recessions as the accompanying chart shows. They are a natural phenomena and self-correcting. Generally, the government just prolongs them, or turns them into a depression.

Crunch time

Nov. 2 offers a golden opportunity, but if you want to put the nation back on track you have to vote.
Dims will be out in force, protecting the socialist agenda. Look for 100 percent turnout from the cemeteries and millions of votes by citizens of other countries, even as they try to prevent members of the U.S. armed forces from voting. The latter is a tactic they employed in 2000 while trying to steal the election in Florida.
Pundits and pollsters say conservatives will win back Congress, or at least the House. But it can't and won't happen unless every conservative casts a vote.
Anyone who was part of the Mistake in '08 also can help, and without anyone knowing. We still have a secret ballot, at least for now. To ensure it stays that way, Congress must be changed.
Once that's done, we can look ahead to 2012 and hope for change.

Sociable security

Once again, desperate Democrats are bringing out the Social Security bogeyman.
Many people don't understand how Social Security works. The government forcibly takes money from a worker's paycheck and gives it to someone who has retired. If there is any left, the politicians spend it on whatever nutty fad is dominant at the moment. They promise to put the money back in the system, someday. The only way they can get that money is to take it from someone else when the time comes.
It is the greatest Ponzi scheme in history. It worked fine when 13 people were paying for every one taking out, but today with two workers sharing their paychecks with one retiree, it isn't such a good deal.
Conservatives propose making it a rational, workable system by allowing people a choice. Stick with this, and get low returns, or invest the money and get tangible returns.
When the British were offered this choice during one of Britain's occasional bouts with reality, many Brits chose the private investment route. When liberals took over again, they shut down the option.
For liberals, the problem is that investing the money in the private sector does not give them a chance to get their hands on it, and the taxpayer is not beholden to politicians for his retirement.
So, liberals refer to honest reform and offering a choice as "taking away Social Security."
Well, did you expect them to tell the truth?

1960

Reporters on one local paper are writing about events than happened 50 years ago, before most of them were born. They say reporters for the paper were told not to cover an event that happened downtown.
I was a reporter. No one told me not to cover the event. I was there.
It was a day when a number of black citizens decided to demonstrate downtown against segregation. Some chose to "sit in" at the lunch counter at Woolworth's, next to Penney's department store west of Hemming Park, in the block where the federal courthouse is now.
This was a tactic being used all around the nation by civil rights activists.
I was a general assignment reporter for the Jacksonville Journal.
I was told to go to the scene and report what I saw. Other reporters were told to do the same.
What I saw was:
A crowd of white men, most carrying wooden ax handles, cornered a black man in the north doorway of Penney's and hit him several times. I was carrying a camera and shot several pictures but was not able to get close enough for a good shot. One of the men edged up to me and suggested that I should take my camera and leave. It was in a friendly tone but he was not kidding.
I went to the south side of the block and saw two white men stop a young (about 14) black boy who was riding his bike. One of them punched him. They told him to leave. I didn't take a picture. I could have but probably would have had my camera destroyed.
I went over to the park, where there were two or three brief clashes between white and black men. At Laura and Monroe one man was hit on the head with an ax handle and blood was streaming down his shirt. I took pictures, as unobtrusively as possible.
I telephoned the information about what I had seen to the office and a rewrite man fashioned a store that included my information and what he got from other reporters. I don't honestly remember what the published story said.
What I was told was that the paper did not plan to give the story big play because the executive editor was worried about inciting more violence.
Life magazine asked to see my pictures and I sent them my roll of film but they used photos someone else had taken.
Compared to cities in places like Alabama and Mississippi, the violence in Jacksonville was mild.
There was another occasion later, however, when a house in Lackawanna was bombed. It resulted in my first scoop.
I had become police reporter and an FBI agent called to tell me, right on deadline, that the bomber had been arrested after a nationwide hunt. I got the story in time.
There were a few people who opposed integration strenuously but as I remember it, most people in Jacksonville were like me and thought it was time for black citizens to be on an equal footing. One legitimate viewpoint was that it could be handled in each state individually better than being imposed by force at the federal level. It might have taken longer but it surely would have resulted in less violence.
On the other hand, black citizens justifiably were not inclined to wait and were willing to risk the violence.

Stealth jihad

Those defending the Ground Zero mosque on First Amendment grounds might want to contemplate this, from Andrew McCarthy:
"Islam is a comprehensive political, social, and economic system with its own authoritarian legal framework, sharia, which aspires to govern all aspects of life."
In other words, it is not just a religion, entitled to religious freedom.
The imam promoting the mosque also has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded in 1928 and now worldwide.
Its aims?
Wikipedia says the Muslim Brotherhood's "General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America" makes the objectives clear: "The process of settlement is a 'Civilization-Jihadist Process' with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
If those promoting the mosque were "moderate" and sincere, they would accept offers of another site. But the real purpose is to have a symbol for all radical Islamofascists that they have conquered the site where the symbols of capitalism were destroyed.
It was to be called the Cordoba mosque, in fact, a clear reference to the area of Spain where a Christian church was turned into a grand mosque after it was conquered by Muslims in the eighth century.
When people tell you in advance they plan to destroy you from within and you aid them, you have no one to blame but yourselves.

The numbers game

Within a few years, it will take all taxpayers can give just to pay for Medicare and interest on the national debt.
Yet, the liberals claim Medicare is in great shape.
Last week, they produced a report purporting to support that notion.
However, Robert Foster, Medicare's chief actuary, cautioned that "financial projections shown in this report for Medicare do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range ... or the long range."
In other words, the report is baloney.
Obamacare claims to save Medicare by making cuts but as any number of experts have shown, they are spending the same dollars twice, and no one believes such cuts will be made anyway.
This is the government liberals promised would be the most honest ever.

Our Muslim president

Just when you thought he couldn't get any more outrageous, President Obama declares it a First Amendment right for Muslims to build a mosque at Ground Zero.
Absolute nonsense. Nothing in the constitution gives the First Baptist Church or anyone else a right to build a church anywhere it wants to.
The only reason to build the mosque there is to provoke the America people, and to send a signal to Islamofascists worldwide: We tore down the symbols of capitalism and replaced them with a symbol of Islam.
In addition, the government-owned company AIG is now investing in enterprises that funnel money to terrorists. In effect, American taxpayers are financing the assaults upon them that have been under way nearly 20 years now.
Meanwhile, practitioners of the religion of peace plan to brutally stone another young woman to death after torturing a confession out of her and a Texas Muslim father has shot his two daughters to death for dating non-Muslims. You can listen to one of them calling 9-1-1 and screaming, "My father shot me and I'm dying!"
Gradually, efforts to subvert the U.S. judicial system and replace it with sharia law continue. France already has lost this battle and England is losing as well. Democracy is dying.
Obama clearly supports this trend and is working to advance it on every front.