The Obama legacy

What will these Dirtbags on the left do between now and inauguration?

Nothing sums up the Obama legacy better than this quote from Edward Luce of the Financial Times:

It will be as if Mr Obama was never here.

Can there be a more concise judgment?

History will remember Barack Obama as the first black president.  Beyond that, what else?  His attempt to transform the nation worsened economic and social conditions.  He transformed his own party to the point where it may not survive.

Mr. Luce explained what will occur domestically:

The Obama erasure will go far deeper than undoing domestic laws, or foreign deals. Mr Trump will repeal Obamacare, or alter it beyond recognition. He will “keep an open mind” about whether to pull the US out of the Paris agreement on climate change and quite probably blow up the US-Iran nuclear deal.

The American people demanded the destruction of Obamaism.  In order to survive, the Democratic Party will disown their Pied Piper, eventually abhorring his policies more than conservatives.

Despite his overall judgment, Mr. Luce's assessment of Barack Obama is more positive and gracious than mine:

Here was a highly intelligent leader, and a fundamentally decent one, who strived to make the case for international co-operation to a world that was not really listening.

… But the world’s attention has wandered. People are highly fearful — and rightly so.

Such an assessment is flattering and fawning in these respects:

1. The "highly intelligent leader" might be described as painfully ignorant of how the world works or a committed ideologue to a system that always fails.  Given Obama's educational opportunities, stupidity rather than ignorance seems appropriate.
2. The "fundamentally decent one" routinely lied to the American people in order to pass harmful policies.  He illegally utilized the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes and engaged in cover-ups (gun-running to Mexico, Benghazi, etc.) to protect himself.
3. Obama's approach to governance was dictatorial.  He went around Congress with executive orders, many of which were overturned by the courts.  He famously terminated at least one discussion with: "I won, you lost."

If Obama is to be more than a William Henry Harrison footnote in history, it will be as a result of future events.

Foreign Policy

Mr Luce states:

The global role that Mr Obama inherited – and tried, to some degree, to uphold – is now in tatters.

If legacies can be achieved via future disasters, Mr. Obama still has a chance.  His feckless "lead from behind" foreign policy leaves the world vulnerable to conflict.  Like his domestic policies, most international agreements were made without congressional approval.

If the world unravels, Mr. Obama has the potential to become history's next Sir Edward Grey.  

Post-Presidency

Obama is young for an ex-president.  What he does with this time will influence history's assessment.  That may not be a positive. 

Obama's narcissism and need for attention will make it difficult to leave the stage.  As a media favorite, he will always have a platform.  As an ex-president, even a failed one, he may make positive contributions.  These should be welcomed.

If Obama's need for the stage outweighs his positive contributions, he will become a public nuisance.  Past behavior suggests that this should be expected.  Obama is likely to try to become the Community Organizer of The World.  History is unlikely to look kindly on such an effort.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/the_obama_legacy.html

https://steemit.com/pizzagate/@ausbitbank/andrew-breitbart-was-he-murdered-for-investigating-pizzagate-back-in-2012-compilation-in-progress

Fear the Voting Dead

President-elect Donald J. Trump has been mocked for his tweeted claim that if it were not for illegal aliens voting, he might very well have won the popular as well as the electoral vote. Is his claim less credible than the one put forth by some of Trump’s opponents that Russian hackers got into voting machines that aren’t even connected to the Internet to switch votes around? 

Trump puts the number at several million. Certainly the number is higher than one, considering the loosening of voting restrictions in recent years, from motor voter laws to same-day registration to handing out drivers licenses to illegal aliens. It is in no way implausible to picture an illegal alien getting his driver’s license and then marching to the polls to vote against a candidate who opposes such actions by government,

I would argue that in this context the efforts by Democrats to fight voting integrity efforts such as Voter ID requirements and purging the rolls of dead voters is designed to rig the system, as Trump might say, in their favor. As Investors Business Daily noted in 2014, dead voters casting votes, illegal aliens voting, and people being registered to vote in multiple states is a common and documented occurrence:

The fact that many people will do anything to get out of jury duty has exposed massive fraudulent voting in Frederick County, Md., that may have been going on for years…

The Virginia Voters Alliance (VVA) cross-checked jury duty forms with individual voting records and found that hundreds of voters in that one Maryland county cast votes after reporting they were noncitizens. One in seven Maryland residents are noncitizens, so extrapolating the number of possibly illegal votes cast in recent elections over the entire state hints at possible election-changing fraud.

Maryland is one of many states that in the process of making it easier to vote has also made vote fraud easier to commit. Maryland both issues driver's licenses to illegal aliens and has a Motor Voter law that allows that license to be used to register and vote.

The VVA filed suit Friday in U.S. District Court in Maryland asserting that individuals who opted out of jury duty as noncitizens have been able to cast votes in at least three Maryland elections.

Based on the number of these unqualified voters in Frederick County, it is estimated that up to 7% of Maryland's registered voters could be illegal immigrants, enough to swing elections.

Despite the fact that there is no evidence that requiring a Voter ID suppresses voter turnout among minorities, it has been used by the feds to prevent states like the battleground state of North Carolina from working to heighten voting integrity. In another 2014 editorial, IBD noted the fraud that goes on that Democrats ignore:

People move from state to state and voters die, but voting records are not often updated in a timely fashion to reflect those facts, leaving an abundance of seemingly valid voter registrations that can be used to skew the results of close elections. Only recently has cross-checking between states been done.

As Fox News has reported, a law passed last year by the North Carolina legislature required election staff to check information for North Carolina's more than 6.5 million voters against a database containing information for 101 million voters in 28 other states.

That cross-check found listings for 35,570 North Carolina voters whose first names, last names and dates of birth match those of voters who voted in other states.

North Carolina is also one of the states that Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice have sued over a series of laws to ensure fair and honest elections, including one requiring voter ID.

 "We will show that they were discriminatory in both intent and in impact," he said in announcing the North Carolina suit, arguing that "concern of voter fraud is something that is made up" to justify the laws.

Yet he does not explain the support for voter ID by Nelson Mandela in his campaign to end apartheid in South Africa and bring democracy to that country. At one rally, Mandela wore a T-shirt that read: "Get an ID. Register. Vote." In recent Afghan elections, voters proudly displayed their voter ID cards.

A paper in the scholarly journal Electoral Studies suggests that as many as 2.8 million illegal aliens voted  in the 2008 election:

How many non-citizen votes were likely cast in 2008? Taking the most conservative estimate (those who both said they voted and cast a verified vote) yields a confidence interval based on sampling error between 0.2% and 2.8% for the portion of non-citizens participating in elections.

Taking the least conservative measure e at least one indicator showed that the respondent voted yields an estimate that between 7.9% and 14.7% percent of non-citizens voted in 2008.

Since the adult noncitizen population of the United States was roughly 19.4 million (CPS, 2011), the number of non-citizen voters (including both uncertainty based on normally distributed sampling error, and the various combinations of verified and reported voting) could range from just over 38,000 at the very minimum to nearly 2.8 million at the maximum”…

As Team Clinton joins the effort by left-wing nut Jill Stein to question the integrity of the 2016 votes, we might consider Democratic efforts over the years to undermine our electoral process. In addition to securing the borders and vetting refugees, it might be time to secure our polling places and do some “extreme vetting” of the voters who enter them.

  http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/11/fear_the_voting_dead.html

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/begging_for_voter_fraud.html

Why the Democrats Can't Stop Calling the GOP Racists

President Obama, Democrat politicians and the mainstream media are still calling Trump KKK.  They’re tarring his team as anti-Semites and racists.  The electoral map would stop any normal politicians in their tracks, but Democrat hate speech is only getting louder and more hysterical.  A major course correction is not going to happen for three reasons:

1. Democrat leadership;

2. Democrat donors;

3.  Democrat voting blocks. 

There is no force in the party that wants to change.

Democrats don’t debate Trump on the issues, because their agenda is a turn-off.  Under the leadership of Alinskyite Barack Obama, the Democratic Party has degenerated from liberalism to progressivism.  It has not been pretty.   A focus on preferential treatment for blacks has given way to a war on cops.  Caring about Hispanic Americans suddenly means America shouldn’t have borders and should have sanctuary for rapists and killers -- as long as they are here illegally. 

Browbeating college kids by empowerring feminists and black activists with Title IX money has turned college campuses against freedom of thought and speech.  Women’s issues have bizarrely turned into a war on masculinity.  Gay rights has morphed into men in women’s bathrooms.  Pro-choice turned into third-trimester infanticide and lawsuits against the Little Sisters of the Poor.  Physical violence against Republicans is encouraged by President Obama and Clinton under the euphemism ‘protest.’

Democrat progressive politics is weird and ugly and dangerous, and people across the country have recoiled from it.  As Marc Thiessen says with his usual eloquence, “You can drive some 3,000 miles across the entire continental United States — from sea to shining sea — without driving through a single county that voted for Hillary Clinton.”

Yet Democrats continue to think they can win by disrespecting the white working class and religious Americans, because “demographics are on our side,” as Obama stated defiantly after Trump’s electoral college blow-out.  The wealthy coastal liberals and brown-skinned America are the only ones who count in Obama’s calculus.  The map above strikes no chord in his heart.

Progressives want to rule all those red counties in perpetuity: a one-party state, based on racial voting.  They look forward to a colonial society with the liberal elite ruling a continent from their isolated blue enclaves.

Obama remains triumphalist about his version of the Democrat party based on race.  He told David Remnick:

“Democrats are well positioned to keep winning Presidential elections just by appealing to the base. And, each year, the demographic improves.”

His interviewer Remnick spells out what Obama means by improved demographics:

To put it more bluntly than Obama did, the nonwhite percentage of the population will continue to increase.

The Democrats have paid a high price for their campaign of progressive identity politics.  The Obama impact on statehouses and state governors is far more devastating than the loss of one Presidential election. 

“Under our current leadership, Democrats have been reduced to our smallest congressional minority since 1929. . . . We have the fewest Democrats in state and federal offices since Reconstruction.” – Rep. Tim Ryan, challenger to Nancy Pelosi for House Minority Leader

Yet the Democrat voices calling for a return to something resembling the Bill Clinton mainstream are few indeed – some lesser known journalists, oneacademic, Bill Maher, one or two Congressman from districts that voted Trump.  It is not enough.

Obama so far has miraculously stood apart from the destruction he has wrought.  He still aims to build a revolutionary cultural movement aiming at the “fundamental transformation of America.”  Obama has no intention of retiring from politics as every President since George Washington has done. 

Our outgoing President’s thoughts on the Trump victory: he and Michelle will get busy “creating… the next generation of leadership,” a new America where work and success are “disconnected.” Obama wants an America “in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense.”  His groupie interviewer,  David Remnick, summarizes: Obama “seemed to be returning to the days when he was a community organizer in the Atgeld Gardens housing project, on the South Side of Chicago.”

In the immediate future, not insignificantly, there is a lot of radical leftist and racialist dirt about to be uncovered by Jeff Sessions at Obama’s DOJ, including the funneling of half a billion dollars to left-wing activist groups.  That’s one reason Obama is leading the Democrats in a mad rush to delegitimize the new AG Jeff Sessions as a Klan supporter. 

Obama’s race-based progressivism is shared by the leaders of the Democratic Party.  The next DNC chair is likely to be the  loathsome Keith Ellison, who is backed by Sanders, Warren, Schumer and Reid.  Why?  He is black and he is Muslim, perfect for attacking the Trump administration as racist and Islamophobic.

The structural damage to the Democratic machine has clearly been done, and the party seems incapable of realizing its own political mistakes. The influence of heavyweight progressive-movement donors continues to bind the party to its losing left-wing identity.

The most important voters in the Democrat base are sadly, our very ill served black community.   Democrats are nothing without black block voting, which they curry not by helping blacks, but by hurting them with the big lie that white America is racist.

In a post-election New Yorker interview, Obama libels his own white working class voters, describing them as “people who may, nevertheless, have … biases about African-Americans or Latinos or women or gays.”  Obama explained the Trump victory to his daughters as a “flare-up of bigotry.”

This is why, more than ever since the election, the Democratic Party’s organizing principle is calling Republicans racists.

Yet regardless of the facts, most liberals and their friends in the media continue to view Mr. Trump’s victory through a self-serving racial lens. Today, race is the Democratic Party’s organizing principle. Group identity is a doctrine and group grievances are to be nurtured and exploited politically no matter the damage to civil discourse.

Ugly identity politics meets the emotional needs of the Democrats’ main voting blocks and promotes the special interests of their progressive donor class.  Democrat politicians at the state and county level are collateral damage.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/11/why_the_democrats_cant_stop_calling_the_gop_racists.html

UNREAL: Obama admits he could’ve been really great, if ONLY…

Again this idiot is blaming Fox news for there loss. What a Delusional Jackass!

President Obama spent the first several years of his presidency blaming his predecessor, George W. Bush, for anything and everything that went wrong. Now, eight years later, on his way out of office, perhaps even Obama understands it’s a bridge too far to try to blame Bush for his own failures.

But never fear, the man who takes responsibility for nothing — even after trying to exert the power of his “pen and phone) over just about everything — has another scapegoat at the ready.

Fox News.

Via The Daily Caller:

What do you get when a failed president sits down with a rape-hoaxer? You get some very satisfying schadenfreude, that’s what. Absolutely delicious.

President Barack Hussein Obama, the second most powerful human being in the world, has just 50 days left in office. He’s getting ready to turn over the White House to a man he clearly despises. He just watched the voters reject everything he stands for. They’re finally getting back at him for everything he’s done to them over the past eight years. His precious legacy lays before him in ruins.

What better way to wallow in his misery than to sit down with the disgraced publisher of the discredited Rolling Stone magazine?

You can read the entire interview, if you think that’s a good use of your time. But the following is all you really need to know about the impenetrable bubble of delusion these guys live in:

You think it’s still a progressive country?

I think that nothing is determined, but that the number of people who have a strong belief in a fair, just, equal, inclusive America is the majority and is growing.

And part of the challenge, though, that we do have, and this is something that I’ve been chewing on for a while now, is that there is a cohort of working-class white voters that voted for me in sizable numbers, but that we’ve had trouble getting to vote for Democrats in midterm elections. In this election, [they] turned out in huge numbers for Trump. And I think that part of it has to do with our inability, our failure, to reach those voters effectively. Part of it is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country, but part of it is also Democrats not working at a grassroots level, being in there, showing up, making arguments.

That’s right, Barry. None of what’s happening has anything to do with you. It’s not about anything you’ve said or done. It’s that damn Fox News. It’s all those meanies in “big chunks of the country.” Why, they refuse to walk into a bar or restaurant that’s not playing Fox News! They’re the ones who did this to you.

As Jay Caruso notes:

If Fox News had the level of power President Obama claims, he wouldn’t have been elected, let alone re-elected.

Well, it’s not about what’s true. It’s about what makes Obama feel better about himself.

And as Stephen Miller (the blogger, not the Trump operative) points out:

“I lost because all those stupid voters decided how to manage their own remote control” is a great way to go out.

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) November 30, 2016

“You didn’t build that.. Oh and by the way, what you put on your TV is the reason I’ve decimated the Democrat party”

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) November 30, 2016

Media obsessed with fact checking Trump all of the sudden won’t ask Obama the last time he was in a bar where Fox News was on a television.

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) November 30, 2016

When’s the last time you saw Fox News on in a restaurant, bar or at the airport?

Once again, President Obama demonstrates he lives in his own delusional little bubble, crafting stories designed to protect his ego from the brutal truth — reality be damned.

Anyone else see the irony of the president sitting down with none other than one of the greatest shining examples in recent history of literal fake news — Rolling Stone — to decry the role of Fox News (what libs love to call “Faux News”) in getting in the way of his own “greatness”?

http://www.allenbwest.com/michellejesse/ha-obama-admits-great

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/11/30/obama_complains_about_fake_news_to_magazine_that_prints_fake_news

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/12/01/obama_blames_me_and_fox_news_to_deflect_from_america_s_rejection_of_him

Wisconsin Insider on Recount: Expect MASSIVE DNC Voter Fraud to be Exposed

Reliable story? It will be interesting if this is true.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission set a timetable Monday for a recount of the presidential election but rejected a request for a hand recount. The commission is made up of three Democrats and three Republicans. It adopted the recount plans unanimously.

Meanwhile a Wisconsin insider on 4Chan said to expect the recount to expose massive DNC fraud.

The Anonymous “insider” says the recount will reveal people out of state voting, non citizens voting, people voting numerous times, and nursing home violations.

Be ready for Trump to improve his margin of victory.

Trump won Wisconsin by 27,506 votes.
Via Micro Santa on Twitter:

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/11/wisconsin-insider-recount-expect-massive-dnc-voter-fraud-exposed/

Morning Joe Calls Out Media Re: Recount "You keep getting it wrong"

Even the Douche bags at Msnbc thinks that this recount is nuts and not accepting the final outcome of the Election

NOPE! Black Lives DON’T Matter when they are Muslim terrorists

This shows the true Colors of the BLM Bowel Movement. They are the Human Garbage of this Country

But Black Lives Matter thinks they do and consider a white police officer killing a black Somali Muslim terrorist during his attempt to slaughter innocent Americans  “a racist killing.”

   

http://www.barenakedislam.com/2016/11/30/nope-black-lives-dont-matter-when-they-are-muslim-terrorists/

http://www.barenakedislam.com/2016/11/29/far-left-loons-blame-donald-trump-for-leaving-the-somali-muslim-community-in-america-vulnerable-to-hate/

The Last Ride Of The Unemployment Rate

It’s easy to set aside the nostalgia, so to speak, since this is likely the last Christmas holiday season to be talked about in the media in the positively glowing terms of the unemployment rate. Ever since the “recovery” began, each and every year the internet and TV channels are filled with stories about how strong the consumer is and therefore how great the economy must be. This tendency is greatly amplified as the holidays roll in, as it is the Christmas season where all of this is given its rightful importance.

This year is already no different; almost all of the content generated for the mainstream is downright giddy. Such as:

Shoppers lined up at stores and flocked to their computer screens in search of bargains on Black Friday, putting the retail industry on track for what it hopes will become a record sales weekend.

Shoppers appeared ready to open their wallets, buoyed by a generally strong economy and rising stock market. And major store chains did their part, offering dramatic discounts on their traffic-building “doorbuster” opening specials.

Those paragraphs were written under a headline of Retailers Aim To Smash Four-Day Weekend Sales Records as if the narrative of the past almost eight years weren’t perfectly clear by now. Retailers have been “smashing” all sorts of things during that time, but it was more likely in frustration and anger than in what was described by “reporters.”

The National Retail Federation got into the act, as is its custom. NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay was quoted in his organization’s official press release trying his best:

It was a strong weekend for retailers, but an even better weekend for consumers, who took advantage of some really incredible deals. In fact, over one third of shoppers said 100% of their purchases were on sale.

That is actually a very bad sign for retailers as well as about consumers. While you will hear any number of stories about the huge growth in online sales, the truth is a bit darker since consumers are taking their shopping virtual out of necessity. As the quote above shows, they will shop in the real world only when the price is there.

In the federation’s shopper survey, more than a third of respondents (36 percent) said that 100 percent of what they bought over the weekend was on sale. That compares with 11 percent who said they only purchased discounted merchandise last year.

According to the NRF and others, spending overall is suspect yet again for Black Friday weekend regardless of where the sale was made – at an actual cash register or an internet one. The Federation estimates that total net spending for the four days through yesterday $289.19 per person this year, down from $299.60 last year. In terms of total spending for the whole weekend, the NRF figures $310.86 per person in 2016 as compared to $319.64 in 2015, and $407.02 in 2013. Again, these totals include whatever was purchased wherever it was purchased.

That’s a 24% drop in just three years. Some of the decline is the dispersal of Christmas spending away from just Black Friday alone, as the weekend itself is stripped of some of its marginal importance, but that is the part always left out of the media reports. Americans have become far more frugal out of continuing necessity no matter what the unemployment rate says. That has been especially true of the past several years.

According to the mainstream, wages are rising as is employment, yet there isn’t any detectable effects in the actual numbers, just the commentary meant to frame them in a certain optimistic way. Black Friday in 2014, for example, was a disaster, presaging what was supposed to be “impossible”, which is why everyone wrote it all off as these same shifts in consumer preferences. I wrote just about two years ago that economists and policymakers should have been paying much more attention to that Black Friday message than the unemployment rate that represented a much smaller fraction of America:

There is an undoubted shift in the behavior of consumers, including and especially during the peak retail season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. However, to say that is the sole reason for the decline in actual sales volume is to stretch that truth into (in many cases intentional) utter misdirection. The initial indications from the retail outlets are so far beyond bad, worse than even last year’s decline…

In simply holiday sales alone, what happened during Black Friday was not anomalous at all, but rather all too representative of what was to come. It is simply too much to suggest both a growing decline and the timing of it as largely innocuous spending patterns inside an otherwise very healthy economy. There is nothing healthy about this, especially as it captures the movement of spending online.

In other words, Black Friday 2014 was a harbinger of the actual economy that would unfold under the “rising dollar.” Janet Yellen saw GDP was 4% and the unemployment rate falling more quickly than economists had modeled even for a QE3 economy, so her view prevailed despite overwhelming evidence right at that time it was beyond flawed. The economic weakness that developed to start 2015 was never “unexpected”, it was simply rewritten by the media that wanted Janet Yellen to be right.

What is relevant to the economy of 2016 is that Black Friday sales have never recovered since 2014. For the second year since, it seems that holiday spending will remain subdued, perfectly fitting the depression cycle pattern that shows the economy being getting knocked down further by monetary events and never getting back up. That will in all likelihood translate into a sales record as overall Christmas holiday sales will rise slightly from last year, but it is a hollow one because the total gain is likely to be harmfully, painfully small for still another year.

The media being what it is, this will very likely be the last time the data so diverges from the narrative. I have little doubt that next year under a President Trump things will be different; by that I don’t necessarily mean the economy, though there is the smallest hope, I suppose, that a new Trump Presidency gets the one thing right the world needs someone to someday get right (“dollars”). Rather, I strongly suspect that if holiday sales or any sales continue to be subdued during his term that they will actually be described that way.

After eight years of trying to see recovery where there was none, the constant spin of sunshine will very likely disappear on January 20. It is ironic in one sense since it is this very disparity between mainstream “reporting” and actual economic conditions that contributed to the Trump victory in the first place. As Black Fridays for years now, but especially 2014, a great many people were fed up with hearing how wonderful the economy was when they had to scrimp and save and cut back at each and every one. For the last several years, all that has mattered in the media has been the unemployment rate no matter how many times it was shown in the real economy that the statistic was misleading or even invalid.

This is the last holiday where mainstream deference to the employment numbers will be so absurdly absolute. Several years too late, realistic descriptions are set to return to the legacy media.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-30/last-ride-unemployment-rate                                              

www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-30/tale-two-job-markets