The Obama Depression Is like the Great Depression

Mortimer Zuckerman on How We Can End Our Modern-Day Depression in US News: "We must increase investment in education and infrastructure, and enact tax reform":

If you went out this morning and saw hundreds of people lining up at soup kitchens, you'd think you were in a time machine, transported back to the Great Depression of the '30s, or the victim of a hallucination incubated by powerful images of those times. In fact, it is the absence of such images that is the illusion. We believe we live in more normal times—and we do not. Millions of people today are experiencing exactly the same struggle as the millions did in the Great Depression. They can't find work. They depend on government and philanthropy. They live on hope denied.

The big difference: Today millions are assisted by checks from Social Security and by food stamps. Food-stamp enrollment has been rising at the rate of 400,000 per month. More than 47 million Americans now depend on that program, an almost incredible record, for it is 15 percent of the population compared with the 7.9 percent who received food stamps from 1970 to 2000. Meanwhile, nearly 11 million Americans are now collecting federal disability checks from Social Security, and half have signed on since President Obama came to office. In 1992, there was one person on disability for every 35 workers. Today it is one for every 16. Such an increase simply cannot have been caused by direct disability experienced during employment. This is in effect another unemployment program, one without end. Many of the people on disability would normally be considered unemployed.

The reality is, we are experiencing a modern-day Depression. It is harder to find work than it has been in any previous economic recovery period. Typically, it takes 25 months to close the employment gap from the employment peak near the start of a downturn. But this time around, five years after employment peaked in January 2008, non-farm employment is still roughly 4 million below where it started. Never before has the job level not been at a record high during the fourth year into a business cycle.

In fact, 4.5 million fewer Americans are working today than when the recession started, and fewer are working today than in the year 2000, despite the fact that our population has grown by 31 million and our labor force by 11.4 million. Though the White House forecast four years ago that, with its stimulus policies, the jobless rate would be down to 5.2 percent by now, the real unemployment rate is 14.4 percent.

The Pew Research Center reports that for the first time in the post-World War II era, middle-class families finished the decade significantly poorer in terms of household net worth—which is down almost 40 percent since 2007—and with lower incomes than a decade earlier. This has hit the middle class harder than any other group. According to Pew, one third of Americans now identify themselves as lower class or lower middle class, a deterioration since 2008 when one quarter identified themselves that way.

The outlook is no better. Job seekers are only one third as likely to find a job now as they were in 2006. A record number of households have at least one member looking for a job. Some 40 percent of the people who are unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, which means we've got 4.8 million who are described as "long-term" unemployed. Employers are shortening the work week or asking employees to take unpaid leave in unprecedented numbers. Those taking unpaid leave are not included in the unemployment count.

Indeed, the recession has shown employers that they can make do with fewer workers. Now over 20 percent of companies say that employment in their firms will not return to pre-recession levels.

Older Americans, whose net worth has taken a huge hit (75 percent of it due to a decline in their home equity), can't afford to quit. Since the recession began, employment in that age group of 55 and older is up by over 3 million, in contrast to total employment, which is down by 5 million. The baby boomers are quite simply postponing their exit from the workforce. This has created a huge bottleneck for the nation's youth, who now face double-digit unemployment.

Now Is the Time for the GOP to Destroy Obama

The American are media coming out, revealing their bias.

CBS News' Political Director John Dickerson had this advice for Obama's second inaugural address on the leftist online magazine Slate in January:

The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat...

Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition’s most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.

Obama, he said, must declare war on the Republican Party.

Breitbart commented on that:

What is worthy of note, though, is that a CBS News' political director is now comfortable openly calling for the destruction of the Republican Party. He obviously fears no admonitions from his colleagues or his employer...

You lump all of this with CNN chief Jeff Zucker applauding Piers Morgan's shameless feasting off the dead children of Sandy Hook for ratings and attention, and what you have is a media that's finally … coming out.

And yet, even as they do, even as they openly celebrate their left-wing biases out of one side of their mouth, out the other, they will claim they remain objective and unbiased.

And now the blog Flopping Aces has turned the threat upside down:

We are in a depression. The Obama depression...

But it IS a list of accomplishments he [Obama] is after. He pushed through a stimulus, a health care abomination and wants to push through amnesty and suffocate us with “climate change” legislation without any of them needing to be successful. The economy should be Job One, but it still sucks and shows no inclination to improve.

Enough. The GOP should destroy Obama and they can absolutely do it. The tools are in their hands right now.

Obama wants a deal- he wants to raise taxes and put the sequester cuts off until….well, sometime....

John Boehner should just say no. McConnell should say no.

There are a couple of possible outcomes. The economy suffers a little initially and then improves because of debt reduction. The second is that the economy does not improve. Then again, it is not improving now. Obama is treading water and he knows it. That’s why he is asking gently for a deal instead of demanding one.

This is the time to destroy him. Deny him the opportunity to put off responsibility. Deny him the chance to kick the can down the road again.

Michael Coren and Diana West on Lars Hedigaard's Attempted Assassination

Michael Coren here in superb form, commenting on yesterday's attempted assassination of Lars Hedigaard, a well-known Danish historian, defender of free speech and Islam critic by a likely "religious Muslim".

The mainstream media tend to be silent about this kind of news, but this is the new world we live in. Freedom of speech is a thing of the past in the West as well now, our political leaders do nothing to protect it from Muslims wanting to impose sharia law.

These are the new enemies, not the ones we believed in the past to be enemies. I've woken up to the new realities, and I hope that you will too.

The brilliant author of Why Catholics Are Right and TV presenter Michael Coren says on Canada's Sun News (above video) about the mainstream's media scant coverage of this assassination attempt: "Imagine if some critic of abortion had gone to the door of an abortionist and tried to shoot them dead? That would be on the front page of every newspaper. That seems to be a bit of a double standard".

Gavin Boby of Mosquebusters with Brian Lilley of Sun News

The British Gavin Boby, who specializes in planning law and is successfully stopping mosque construction in the UK by demonstrating to local councils that the building of a mosque or an Islamic center is actually in violation of British law, with Brian Lilley of Sun News.

Muslim Illegal Immigrant Arrested for Raping Dog in Italy

Another case of a Muslim raping animals.

In Spain a few months ago a Muslim had killed a horse by anally raping him, and now in Italy an illegal immigrant, an unemployed Moroccan has been arrested for repeatedly raping a dog on a farm in Sicily.

The 32-year-old-man was caught in the act by CCTV cameras.

He had previously spread panic in the countryside near the town of Ragusa by committing two arsons, the second of which on Boxing Day, causing damage for tens of thousands of euros to two local farms, by the use of a lighter.

But that's not enough. He was responsible for the theft of electrical appliances, farm equipment, clothes and food.

In Muslim countries the practice of having sex with and raping animals is much more common than we think.

In Pakistan, a donkey was honour killed after being raped, a treatment ususally reserved to Muslim women. From Wikipedia:

Karo-kari is part of cultural tradition in Pakistan and is a compound word literally meaning “black male” (Karo) and “black female (Kari), in metaphoric terms for adulterer and adulteress. Once labeled as a Kari, male family members get the self-authorized justification to kill her and the co-accused Karo to restore family honor, although in the majority of cases the victim is female, while the murderers are male.

Sorry, Gays, Equality Is a Different Thing

The TV news channel Russia Today's CrossTalk programme for once had a debate (in the above video) I am glad to report on.

"Unimarriage?", on the subject of gay marriage, was a discussion among the UK's prominent gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, UK Independence Party's Member of the European Parliament Godfrey Bloom and Thomas Peters of the USA's National Organization for Marriage who works in Washington DC.

It was introduced thus:

Should same-sex marriages be accepted? What's driving the change in the institution of marriage? Are equal marriage rights democratic? Why aren't civil unions enough for gay couples? And if marriage is about love and the emotional needs of adults, then what about their children?

The programme was also exceptional in that the supposedly "moderator" Peter Lavelle did not intervene with opinions of his own.

One of the recurring claims of the conversation was Peter Tatchell's insistence that the right to marry is one of the human rights recognized by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to deny it to homosexuals violates a principle of equality for all individuals.

But is it true that opposing gay marriage means discriminating and denying equal rights to homosexuals?

Tatchell confuses equal rights with equal treatment. Equality for individuals who are different results in different treatment.

Peter Singer, a moral and political philosopher much respected by the Left and certainly one of the thinkers of our time who will be included in future history of philosophy books, begins his classic work Animal Liberation with a comparison between the objections usually raised against the case for moral equality of animals to humans and the derisive attacks that greeted the publication of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the late 18th-century.

One of the most frequent of those criticisms was to highlight the factual differences between men and women (analogous to the possible use of the differences between human and nonhuman animals to counter Singer's argument).

Singer responds to both in the same way: equal consideration of interests (the utilitarian Singer does not use the terminology of "rights") does not require equal treatment. The treatment for different sentient beings, the moral objects, will be different if their interests are given equal consideration (if they have equal rights).

The Australian philosopher says that equality does not entail that dogs have the right to vote because humans do and men have the right to abortion on demand if women do.

The incongruity of the idea that equality requires non-differential treatment in all cases can be seen if we think of, for instance, children not being allowed to drive a car or vote, even if they wanted to: developing the logic of Tatchell's argument to its full consequences would require giving children all the rights that adults have, including, for instance, driving and voting.

In the specific case of marriage, children, close blood relatives, threesomes are not allowed to marry, even if they so wished: are all those persons discriminated against? Most reasonable people would not think so.

This is probably why the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Thatchell invokes in his support does not include sexual orientation among the characteristics that should not limit the right to marry. It says:

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.

Virtually nothing of what Peter Tatchell said throughout the debate had a leg to stand on.

His assertion that polls show that a majority favours same-sex marriage was dismantled with ease by Thomas Peters of the National Organization for Marriage. He explained that in 30 out of the 34 times when people were given the possibility to vote on this they voted against gay marriage. Polls on this subject are not reliable because people tend to say they are favourable to it even when they are not, since they think it makes them look good.

In these Orwellian times when accusation of "homophobia" are thrown so liberally (pun half-intended) it seems a highly plausible explanation.

In addition, "polls claiming a majority support redefining marriage offer those they poll a false binary choice between redefining marriage and no legal recognition whatsoever".

In the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron has been accused by the polling company ComRes to misrepresent its polling data in order to claim popular support for redefining marriage:

Andrew Hawkins, Chairman of the polling company, wrote to David Cameron to “put the record straight” about the number of people who are in favour of the Government’s plans to redefine marriage.

The Prime Minister had responded to a letter from MP Cheryl Gillan, in which she criticised the proposals. He said that more Tory-leaning voters were in favour of same-sex marriage than were put off by it.

Support

But Andrew Hawkins said his polling showed that redefining marriage was unlikely to win back support from disillusioned voters.

He also said it was “simply not the case” that all the published polls show more voters are in favour of same-sex marriage, something the Prime Minister asserted as fact in his letter.

Mr Hawkins said the level of agreement that marriage should stay as it is, varies between 55% and over 70%.

Ignore

He said that taking the polling as a whole, it is hard for David Cameron to ignore the fact there is less support for gay marriage than he makes out.

He said “the policy is likely to make it harder to retrieve many former Conservative supporters” and the issue is having a “detrimental effect on local Associations.”

Andrew Hawkins referred to a recent ComRes poll which showed that six out of ten Conservative Party chairmen believed the policy would lose the party more votes than it would gain.

Election

Earlier this week, Chancellor George Osborne said that gay marriage would win the party the next election, a claim quickly refuted by the Coalition for Marriage.

C4M Director Colin Hart said: “Yet again the Government’s spin doctors are trying to claim that redefining marriage is a vote winner. Quite the opposite is true.”

More than 610,000 people have signed the Coalition for Marriage petition to keep marriage as it is.

Tatchell's presentation of his battle for gay rights as a lonely one could have been realistic a few decades ago, but these days everybody knows that it cannot be delivered with a straight face. Peters pointed out that the three main associations for same-sex marriage in Washington receive many times the money his small organization gets, not to mention Obama's support and the Decmocratic Party's inclusion of legalization of gay marriage in its manifesto. Peters also said he receives death threats.

UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom argued that the gay claims, with which he used to agree, have now gone too far, and threaten other people's liberty, as in the case of Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife B&B owners who were successfully sued by a gay couple for offering them two rooms rather than one.

Peters summed up some of the reasons to keep marriage between a man and a woman:

There's an awful lot of civil society -- churches, communities, government -- that is all built to support marriage because marriage isn't easy. It's not easy to get men and women to commit to raising the children they make with their bodies. But that's what civil society has been doing and a healthy society does that. It is difficult and gay marriage makes it difficult for all of civil society to enshrine that value that children deserve a mom and a dad, and that men and women should stick around and love and raise the children they make with their bodies, and the distraction of gay marriage has made it impossible for things like the Catholic Church, for things like political/civil government to give that message and so when you say "gay marriage won't hurt anyone" it already has because now when I try to say "a child deserves both mom and a dad" you jump in and say "that's against equality!" and so you can actually see already that the more gay marriage becomes accepted and enshrined in law the more difficult it will become for the rest of us to communicate this life-saving propagating message for the next generation.

We must also not forget how the redefinition of marriage could pave the way to allowing for Islamic polygamy to become acceptable:

Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

Post-Election Obama Administration's Iran and Israel Policies

Moshe Phillips, member of the executive committee of the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans for a Safe Israel / AFSI, writing for Voice of the Copts says that Democratic Senator John Kerry as the next Secretary of State is a much bigger problem for Israel than Republican former Senator Chuck Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense, despite the American Jewish establishment's vehement protesting the latter but not the former.

The role of the Secretary of State, much more than the Secretary of Defense, is "a position to effect policy as it impacts Israel, set an overall tone for US in the Middle East and be a key player in future negotations".

Kerry thinks that the settlements are the main problem, adopted the Arab view that Jerusalem is one of “the big three issues" and believes that Israel and the Palestinian Arabs equally share blame for the continuation of a decades old conflict.

Kerry’s words show that he will be hostile to the very existence of Israeli towns in the suburbs of Jerusalem. Democrats consider these “settlements” to be part of the “Occupied West Bank”and he will label them as such.

John Kerry’s leadership at State will be the beginning of a new effort by the Obama Administration to pressure Israel to surrender territory to the Palestinian Authority, deny Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem, negotiate with Hamas and accept a hostile Palestinian State along its vulnerable borders.

Israel and its American supporters are in for a very tough time with Kerry and they seem to have no idea.

Hagel is not spared either. In another article in Voice of the Copts by Heritage Foundation senior fellow and former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Brookes, Hagel is criticized for his soft stance on Iran ("Hagel has pushed for direct talks, while pushing against economic sanctions and force"), his comments in favour of cutting the Defense budget, and his underestimation of North Korea. Brookes concludes:

The concern, of course, is that Hagel — like Kerry — will push US foreign and defense policy violently Left, more in line with Obama’s real sentiments.

I end with a quotation from a third article from the same high-quality publication, about Obama's policy of appeasement towards Iran, poorly camouflaged as Iranian Nuclear Containment. The article is by Mark Langfan, who has created an original educational 3d Topographic Map System of Israel to facilitate clear understanding of the dangers facing Israel and its water supply, which has been studied by US lawmakers:

And just like a nuclear-armed Hitler and/ or Togo would have found a "rational" use of a nuclear bomb in World War II, had he owned one, the Iranians will figure out a "rational" use of a nuclear bomb which will destroy the United States in the coming World War III.

Whether it is an Iranian EMP attack on Saudi Arabia, thereby gaining Iran sole control of 60 percent of the world's oil supply, or an Iranian untraceable nuclear suicide terror attack against Manhattan, it doesn't matter. The Iranian Islamic Regime is a talented, resourceful, and driven cabal of very rational people who are determined to rule the world, and impose their Shia Islam on every human on the planet.

The only person who is not "rational" in this drama is US President Obama, and neither is his merry band of sycophantic echo-chamber yes-men, who irrationally believe Israeli settlements are a greater threat to world peace than Iranian nuclear weapons.

Yes, elections have consequences, sometimes, irreparably catastrophic consequences. And, the horrific irreparable consequence of a 51 percent to 49 percent 2012 US Election is that the United States elected a President who has been, who is, and who will continue to be an Appeaser-in-Chief of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Had the world allowed Hitler or Togo's Japan to gain a nuclear bomb before World War II, there wouldn't be a free-world today. Unfortunately, Obama's containment policy will enable Iran to gain a nuclear weapons' arsenal which will bring the entire world into a dark ages from which the free-world will never return.