You Don't Want to Go There, Barack

Obama is once again raising issues he should think twice about – I don’t think he really wants to go there, and will regret it.  Lately he’s been attacking Romney because some of the companies Bain saved did some outsourcing (the cherry-picked exception rather than the rule).  Of course there’s the dispute over whether Romney should have that imputed to him during the period (2000-2002) when he was running the Olympics full-time, and only on the Bain roster in name.  But even giving them that, we now realize that (as even Chuck Schumer acknowledges) apparently 79% of the Obama stimulus (nearly a trillion dollars, I believe) went to outsourcing companies (or countries) like GE, less than half of whose employees work in the US, and who paid zero corporate tax in 2010.  In other words a much larger number of outsourced jobs, and for a much lower ROI (return on investment).  Obama has a near-zero net job creation (flat unemployment), whereas Romney & Bain had a huge net job & wealth creation.

And speaking of the miniscule number of jobs Obama claims to have created (at a net cost of some $400,000 per job), in the last 6 months Obama’s held no jobs council.  But he’s made plenty of time and travel for over 100 campaign fundraisers.  Obviously more concerned about his own job than anyone else’s. 

It has now been four years since Barack Obama called it "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic" of Bush to add $4 trillion to the national debt (over 8 years, and much of it in the last 2 years under the Democrat-controlled Congress).  If adding $4 trillion were irresponsible, what would Obama say to the $5 trillion he has added in less than four years? The irony isn't lost on us.

Coming up short in defending his own record, and having to stretch to attack Romney’s, Obama continues the “elite” and “out of touch” charge, including the bourgeois use of a jet-ski at the Romney family vacation (shoot, even middle-class people in our stake have them & we use them on Scout outings).  Ann Romney for her equestrian/dressage MS therapy.  So much for Obama’s insistence in the last election that family should be off-limits.  Apparently the Obama campaign belatedly realized their error (only after public outcry) and retracted such attacks, or at least that one.  But in an ABC interview, Ann got off a shot of her own, saying not only that her husband is perfectly suited to help create jobs, but that she thinks voters will “fire the coach.”

And Mitt’s been going more on the offensive lately.  A widely acknowledged great speech on foreign policy was given at the VFW convention.  Here’s a link if you missed it:  http://thepage.time.com/2012/07/24/video-romneys-vfw-speech/?iid=sl-article-arenapage

No doubt reflecting on his bad polls lately, and obviously convinced he’s doing things right (the heck with results), Obama mused recently that the biggest mistake he’s made is not telling the story well -- spin.  As Jimmy Fallon noted, “yeah, that’s great, but getting the economy going would be nice, too.”

Late Night Political Jokes

That was a segway into a little switch this time from political cartoons to some political jokes by late-night TV comedians/talk show hosts.  I don’t stay up that late, but someone passed them on.

The Economy & Jobs

• Jay Leno -- Guantanamo Bay is now undergoing millions of dollars worth of renovations, including a new soccer field, cable TV, and better housing. Which is kind of ironic. The only people who say they’re better off today than they were four years ago are the inmates at Guantanamo Bay.

• Conan --  President Obama is coming to Chicago this weekend. Obama is introducing his new economic plan as part of the Just For Laughs Festival. 

• Jimmy Fallon -- Today President Obama gave a major speech where he defended his handling of the economy. And there were tons of people in the audience, you know, since nobody had to be at work.

• Jimmy Kimmel -- For the first time in history, the number of Asian immigrants coming into America is larger than the number of Hispanic immigrants. Now even our immigrants are being made in China.

• Craig Ferguson -- It’s a great day for our president. He’s down in Mexico for the G-20 Summit. Today he met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He said “I think your communist policies are a danger to the world.” There’s no word on how Obama responded.

• Craig Ferguson -- The original “Dallas” series started in 1978. Back then, America was very different. We had an ineffective, one-term president. Gas prices were through the roof. We were in a stand-off with Iran. I’m glad those dark days are over.

• Leno -- CNBC is reporting that America lost 129,000 millionaires last year. Or as Mitt Romney calls them, “an endangered species we have to protect.”

• Leno -- In Chicago some anti-Mitt Romney protesters told reporters they’re being paid to protest. They said they’re being paid by Democrats to stand outside and chant anti-Romney slogans. Well, who says President Obama isn’t creating any new jobs?

• Leno -- For the first time ever, Asians are immigrating to this country more than any other minority group. But unlike other groups, Asian immigrants are just here to do the jobs Americans aren’t smart enough to do.

Debt

• Leno -- According to federal reports filed yesterday, the Obama campaign spent more money than they raised in the month of May. They spent more money than they raised? Well, that’s called being a Democrat

• Leno -- Our space probe, Voyager 1, launched back in 1977, is 11 billion miles in space. It’s on the verge of leaving our solar system on its mission to find other civilizations to try and borrow money from.

• Jimmy Fallon -- Yesterday, President Obama played his 100th round of golf since taking office. You could tell it was Obama, because he finished about 14 trillion over par.

Obama’s Campaign & Character

• Leno -- There is a record heat wave back east, close to 100 degrees in New York City. The temperatures are higher than President Obama was in high school.

• Leno -- President Obama spent about four hours on Father’s Day playing golf at a country club in Chicago. It was his 100th round of golf since taking office. He’s played more golf than Tiger Woods in the last four years.

• Leno -- Actually, Obama’s staff is a little concerned. They’re concerned all this golf is cutting into his fund-raising.

• Conan -- Mitt Romney has accused President Obama of pandering to the Latino community. The president said he’s too busy to comment because he’s watching Telemundo and eating chalupas.

“If You’ve Got a Business, You Didn’t Build That”

In “The ‘Giving Back’ Distraction,” Thomas Sowell (a conservative Black intellectual much smarter than Obama) writes,

“Barack Obama’s great rhetorical gifts include the ability to make the absurd sound not only plausible, but inspiring and profound.

His latest verbal triumph was to say on July 13, “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.” As an example, “Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Let’s stop and think, even though the whole purpose of much political rhetoric is to keep us from thinking and stir our emotions instead.

Even if we were to assume, just for the sake of argument, that 90 percent of what a successful person has achieved was due to the government, what follows from that? That politicians will make better decisions than individual citizens, that politicians will spend the wealth of the country better than those who created it? That doesn’t follow logically — and certainly not empirically.

Does anyone doubt that most people owe a lot to the parents who raised them? But what follows from that? That they should never become adults who make their own decisions?

The whole point of the collectivist mindset is to concentrate power in the hands of the collectivists — which is to say, to take away our freedom. They do this in stages, starting with some group that others envy or resent — Jews in Nazi Germany, capitalists in the Soviet Union, foreign investors in Third World countries (where the government confiscates investments and call this theft “nationalization”).

Freedom is seldom destroyed all at once. More often it is eroded, bit by bit, until it is gone. This can happen so gradually that there is no sudden change that would alert people to the danger. By the time everybody realizes what has happened, it can be too late, because their freedom is gone.

All the high-flown talk about how people who are successful in business should “give back” to the community that created the things that facilitated their success is, again, something that sounds plausible to people who do not stop and think through what is being said. After years of dumbed-down education, that apparently includes a lot of people.

Take Obama’s example of the business that benefits from being able to ship its products on roads that the government built. How does that create a need to “give back”?

Did the taxpayers, including business taxpayers, not pay for that road when it was built? Why should they have to pay for it twice?

What about the workers businesses hire, who have usually received an education from government-financed schools? The government doesn’t have any wealth of its own, except what it takes from taxpayers, whether individuals or businesses. They have already paid for that education. It is not a gift that they have to “give back” by letting politicians take more of their money and freedom.

When businesses hire highly educated people, such as chemists or engineers, competition in the labor market forces them to pay higher salaries for people with longer years of valuable education. That education is not a government gift to the employers. It is paid for while it is being created in schools and universities, and it is paid for in higher salaries when highly educated people are hired.

One of the tricks of professional magicians is to distract the audience’s attention from what they are doing while they are creating an illusion of magic. Pious talk about “giving back” distracts our attention from the cold fact that politicians are taking away more and more of our money and our freedom.

Even the envy that politicians stir up against “the rich” is highly focused on those particular high-income earners whose decisions the politicians want to take over. Others in sports or entertainment can make far more money than the highest-paid corporate executive, but there is no way that politicians can take over the roles of Roger Federer or Oprah Winfrey, so highly paid sports stars or entertainers are hardly ever accused of “greed.”

If we are so easily distracted by self-serving political rhetoric, we are going to see not only our money but our freedom increasingly taken away from us by slick-talking politicians, including our current slick-talker-in-chief in the White House.