How does that old proverb go? Watch what you ask for – you just may get it!

Americans voted in 2012 for the party of big government – and by extension the party of big deficits and big taxes to fund their big government fiction!

And so here we are, ready to go over the so-called cliff as we enter 2012. But what really is the cliff?

Well, it’s a paltry ~$109B or so in mandatory spending cuts, which won’t even put a dent in the annual deficit now running around ~$1.4 trillion a year. That can’t be what all the caterwauling is about.

This kind of spending cut can easily be absorbed, so what is all the hand wringing about? This man:

What the Democrats and media are all exercised about is a return to the tax rates of Bill Clinton and Al Gore! See here for one of their latest Drama Queen moments:

As President Barack Obama cut short a Christmas vacation to resume talks to avoid the “fiscal cliff” of automatic year-end tax hikes and spending cuts, the White House on Wednesday called on congressional Republicans not to stand in the way of a resolution in the U.S. Congress.

“It’s up to the Senate Minority Leader not to block a vote, and it’s up the House Republican leader, the Speaker of the House … to allow a vote,” a senior administration official told reporters traveling with the president.

I say block everything and anything from this lame duck Congress. Don’t give the new Congress an inch of cover. They were elected, let them work their wonders.

The media loves to complain about the “Bush era Tax Cuts” – but from what did President George W Bush actually ‘cut‘?

From the Bill Clinton tax rates of course! So please, let’s bring back the Bill Clinton tax rates, which should generate about $600B in new revenues, cutting our deficit nearly in half and extending the time before we hit the debt limit! And let’s bring them back for everyone – especially those who voted for more Democrat leadership.

Tis the season of the Democrats! Embrace the economic ignorance and naivete!

Update: Seems the House will be in session Sunday -not good. Unless they can get more cuts than in the current sequestration trigger I would not make any deal with the Dems.

Boehner better not bumble this with backroom boobery. He would be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Tags: Clinton Tax Rates, Fiscal Cliff

Merry Christmas to all from the Strata-Sphere

We hope everyone has a joyous and wonderful Christmas, and we thank you for all the time you spend visiting and sharing your thoughts with us.

This political cartoon is all the GOP, Tea Party and Libertarian need to understand to carry the day in DC and build a new political force in the nation that will take on ALL the special interests in DC [H/T Hotair].

It sums up the biggest threat to our children and grandchildren: that being our greedy, wimpy selves. This is the rallying point, where the people take on the DC and Media political industrial complex.

this is THE reason the Tea Party members in the House will not allow another round of kick-the-problem-down-the-road.  They now demand FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE leadership – which is not the same as political leadership.

What we get from the left is naive and immature dogma that is costing us nearly twice our revenue capacity,  and which is actually a cover for a bunch of elites getting rich on the backs of hard working Main Street (see Solandra, etc for examples).  Walls Street and E Street aren’t suffering at all while the nation is in the throws of the worst economic down turn in nearly a century. So we see how government trickle down works – it doesn’t.

Boehner’s blunder was in going to the old pol trick of trying to protect everyone from reality. Which is just another dumb-ass variant on the liberal fiction that government can protect everybody from reality – and their own bad choices.  This ‘oh protect us great leaders‘ schtick is getting old, and the voters would prefer some clear-eyed solutions to the main problem: how we are enslaving our children to pay for our excesses.

As I noted in the prior post, someone at The Weekly Standard nailed the political priority of our times. The author highlighted the core issue:

It should be a matter of acute national embarrassment that our leaders can pretend to be redistributing from wealthy to average citizens when, in fact, they are redistributing in far greater measure from the young and unborn.

…

Whatever the future may hold, it will certainly be populated by many people who are not voters today—the younger generation and the yet unborn. Today’s debts will be repaid by some or all of them, in one way or another—through higher taxes or lower benefits to accommodate payments on the loans, or through loan defaults, or through the partial default of inflation.

If this generation, as we seem wont to do, fails to pay its own bills (and those graciously passed on from the previous generations of freeloaders) we will so burden our children and grandchildren that they will never be able to deal with their challenges in their time and also pay for our own selfishness. This is how grotesque the two national parties have become:

The future is also, in the progressive American mind, a more prosperous and untroubled place—especially if we can just get ourselves through today’s pressing exigencies. This manner of thinking tended to dissolve the distinction between investing for the future and borrowing from the future.

The GOP is just as DC brain-washed as the Dems, as the article points out:

Nevertheless, tax cutting and “no new taxes” became increasingly embedded in Republican electoral strategy. As they did, they took leave of supply-side economics just as completely as demand stimulus had taken leave of its Keynesian origins. Indeed, tax reductions for the masses (but not for the wealthy and corporations) became a matter of bipartisan consensus and competition.

Both parties now assume – from the outset – we cannot pay for our spending and must reach fiscal Nirvana before we can behave responsibly.

What a childish and moronic train of thought! A train of thought that is making everything worse, and harder to undo.

We can and should live within our means. And I think that is the heart-and-soul message/mantra of the Tea Party movement. We have ‘leaders’ in DC spending our children’s futures into oblivion without our consent. And it must end! It will end!

And the path to end this useless and damaging spending is obvious to everyone who lives on Main Street [and who live within their means and understand a wonderful life exists beyond the consumption addiction pushed by the political and media elites]:

I was working at the White House and OMB in those years, and was party to many a late-night argument over two divergent strategies. “Starve the Beast” held that the public would tolerate only so much deficit spending—so cutting taxes would at some point restrain spending as well. “Serve the Check” held that the only way to limit spending was to charge its full price at retail: Set taxes at an average of 20 percent of individual incomes and we would discover whether the public really wanted federal spending of 20 percent of national income.

We now know “Starve the Beast” does not work. Special interests guard their section of the federal trough to the bitter end [see union thuggary in Wisconsin and Michigan], while voters cannot wrap their mind around the size of the hole we have dug ourselves. Not to mention the Pols are scared to death to be bold and honest. So we know the current GOP approach is a failure (even if the GOP leaders refuse to wake up and smell the deficit).

This must end, and that is why Main Street is willing to lead (with higher taxes) IF -and this is a huge ‘if’ – the elite pay as well. And this is not th e’tax the rich’ myth of the liberals. This means cut off the special interests, cut the cost of government and shrink government down to the bare essentials (which is a lot more bare than many realize).

First off, let the tax rates rise on EVERYONE. Bring back the Clinton tax levels – give up on the Bush tax cuts. Then let the miniscule spending cuts hit. Let a peak of reality in.

Then – tax the rich! And I mean the ridiculously rich. Bring on the millionaire tax increases, but do  it by cutting deductions for them so they cannot hide their income and pretend they need government incentives. Cap the mortgage deduction on loans greater than $1,000,000. Cap charitable deductions on incomes over $1,000,000 per year. Remove EVERY SINGLE tax break for the rich – because they can clearly afford to pay full fair. Just stop giving the rich handouts.

Then cut the President’s salary and limit his life time pay. Give Pols 10 years after leaving office to invest and set up their nest eggs, and then pull the plug. Sink or swim. Same for Congressional pay when out of office.

Cut all elected and political appointee salaries [don’t go after the career workers yet]. Cut Congressional staff budgets. Make Senators pay for their portion of international trips out of pocket. If they want to see the world, they pay airfare, hotel and meals for themselves. Their staff the taxpayer can cover.

If the Middle Class can sacrifice, so can those same damn leaders who spent us into this mess.

Finally, everyone pays. I don’t care if it is $100 a year – everyone pays.

Then finally look at wasteful spending where we are losing money and/or making no progress.

As noted above, people will then decide if they want to have runaway spending – since  THEY will have to shoulder the cost. No more borrowing from future generations. Time to Serve The Check!

Tags: Fiscal Cliff

Update:  This is well said and to the point [H/T Powerline]:

But all concerned are working within a fiscal system that has become seriously pathological. The cliff is the latest expression of that pathology.

….

It should be a matter of acute national embarrassment that our leaders can pretend to be redistributing from wealthy to average citizens when, in fact, they are redistributing in far greater measure from the young and unborn.

Finally, someone gets it. – end update

You know, the people inside the Congressional Bubble have truly lost lock on reality. All the high drama over the House’s unwillingness to kick-the-can-down-the-road anymore with the Democrats is pathetic:

“I don’t want to talk to the people who ruined this, at least right now,” a retiring House member told me. “They don’t get it.” Another senior member told me that Boehner was always going to struggle with the whip count since most House conservatives have little interest in seeing the speaker strike any kind of deal. “Boehner was trying to play chess and the caucus was playing checkers,” he said, sighing. “Boehner is willing to lose a pawn for a queen. I’m not sure about the rest.”

These old GOP House dogs are still playing the tired game of do nothing now and promise to behave better sometime in the future. Damn glad they are retiring. The Tea Party/Libertarians are so done with this crap. The only reason to negotiate is pretend they are doing something, because they sure as hell weren’t going to get anything real in return. The best we can hope for is what is built into the current ‘fiscal’ (read ‘legislative’) cliff.

Supposedly the GOP is now at a disadvantage because everyone will have to pay Bill Clinton level taxes.  So what? The average American is going to have to stop pretending government has a bottomless purse and infinite wisdom. In fact, the government is in short supply of both right now.

Boehner and his allies want to carve out “something” and call it progress. But why? We get spending cuts and tax increases to offset the spending spree of Obama and the Dems. What kind of moron is incapable of presenting this to the American people and winning the argument? If you can’t win this simple point you should not be leading the GOP.

This incompetence, this inability to stop playing games and stand on principle WITHOUT LOSING the PR fight is why we are where we are. If Boehner and his team decide to go with some BS compromise by going with Democrat votes on this front, then they damn well better step aside. And they damn well better understand they will have destroyed the GOP in the process. If the GOP does not stand for fiscal sanity and tough financial love, then it stands for nothing.

This ‘buy’ time crap with incentives, and tax breaks and all manner of special interest paths to the federal trough has to end. Stop being pols and start being adults. Our kids are sacrificing life and limb for this nation, and these fools on The Hill cannot even risk a drop in the polls to hold the line on spending. If the Dems want to spend, then we raise taxes on EVERYONE until we balance. That is the only way to make people realize there is no free ride for Democrat nonsense.  I say raise taxes on everyone to get financially right! Once those hit you will see a cry for spending cuts like never before.

Because the truth is we are not paying our way. To me, these mammoth deficits are worse than any marginal tax rate – because they flow down to the backs of the following generations. We are stealing their futures and it needs to end. Bring on the Cliff, bring on the Debt Ceiling. This is a problem with spending, not run away taxes (or runaway tax cuts).

I bet within 2 months everyone will be singing Bush’s praise and lamenting the return of the Obama/Clinton tax rates….

Addendum: You know what all the shock and disturbed reactions mean? It means for once the House is beginning to break out of its usual pattern of kick-the-can-down-the-road.  The unease is the lack of familiarity with the old ways. to me, when I read stuff like this I can only smile:

Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, a conservative with libertarian leanings, was stunned. As he walked back to his office, he said the episode was unfortunate, even though he was planning to vote against the measure. For the past month, since House leaders booted him off the budget committee, he has been railing against Boehner for his management style. But even Amash wondered whether the House GOP was making the right move. “Too many people in there were arguing that this thing is a tax increase, and I don’t think that’s what Boehner was trying to do,” he said. As much as he disagrees with Boehner’s approach, even he regretted how the speaker’s plan was killed.

It had to die. The GOP can no longer be complacent in the DC two-step. It is bankrupting our kids and grand kids. If WE can’t afford to pay our way, what makes anyone think the next generation can take care of their problems AND deal with the bill we left them for our problems? The unease of he unexplored country is a good sign. I just wish these ‘leaders’ had the backbone to see it through with a little more mettle and spine.

Tags: Fiscal Cliff

I am barely holding out hope the House GOP can grow a backbone and provide the nation a much needed fiscal wake up call come January 1. In other words, I hope the House lets the sequestration [a.k.a. part of the fiscal cliff] take hold. Because to be honest, the wired in spending cuts are miniscule – as explained here:

The cuts, which are projected to total $1.2 trillion, are scheduled to begin in 2013 and end in 2021, evenly divided over the nine-year period. The cuts are also evenly split between defense spending — with spending on wars exempt — and discretionary domestic spending, which exempts most spending on entitlements like Social Security and Medicaid, as the Bipartisan Policy Center explains. The total cuts for 2013 will be $109 billion, according to the new White House report.

We ran up ~$1.3 TRILLION in deficit spending last year ALONE. These automatic cuts over 9 years won’t stop the financial bleeding, won’t even really slow it down much. Mainly because the federal government spends and wastes too much money each year on socialist BS and is strangling the private sector into oblivion. The coming cuts next year are not even 10% of the annual deficit, let alone a significant cut in overall spending each year.

On the tax side, it is much more painful because of all the taxes that will rise in tandem to the cuts – that is the painful part:

The challenge is complicated by the fact that the Bush tax cuts, the payroll tax, unemployment benefits and a host of other tax breaks are all scheduled to expire Dec. 31. The cumulative impact of all of these scheduled cuts and changes is what’s popularly known as the fiscal cliff.

What will the effect of all these increased taxes have on the deficit? Not much – but probably more than the sequestration cuts. The point is, it is drop in the ocean of red ink.

So when the bills come due  come January 1 (cuts in funding along with rising taxes), the end result will be brutally obvious. We are in debt so deep right now even this much ‘pain’ is not enough to turn it around.

And that is something that needs to be understood at a visceral level across all aspects of American society. Too many people must learn that the free ride is over and the nation will have to focus its support on just the most needy. It is time to wake those foolish enough to think the government has an endless supply of hard working families’ money to throw around. Time for a cold slap in the face.

I say bring on the full package of the fiscal cliff, feel the pain for a while, and wake up to the big train wreck we are heading for if we don’t start changing course. Don’t hide or protect anyone Mister Speaker. We are all in this slow moving disaster together, and it is time everyone understand what is at stake and sacrifice some. Either we pay some now, or we pay a whole helluva lot more in ten years time when our economy goes Greek on us. I say, take some tough love now. Let the polls go south for a while, they will return after the dust settles.

Tags: Fiscal Cliff

You have to be a brain dead idiot to make a threat against a child as if it is some form of ‘political dialogue’:

LANSING — A speaker at a union protest against right-to-work legislation said if Gov. Rick Snyder signed the bill he would get “no rest” and that protesters would be at his “daughter’s soccer game.” …

Which of course, this week, leads to images like this coming to mind:

Many states have right-to-work laws, and both union and non-union workers live well there and peacefully raise their families – like here in VA.

Unions need to learn to compete, instead of complain. And one thing they better end soon is their physical thuggery and threats. Unions may think they can intimidate, but calm peace loving citizens are more often than not peace loving because of their strength – not because they are wilting flowers who can be bullied.

As of now, I would say ban unions if their answer to scrutiny and democracy is threatening children. At that point, they have become all threat and no benefit. And that goes for threatening citizens as well. If Unions want to survive, they better grow up and behave.

I was able to catch a bit of Rush Limbaugh yesterday and the short section I heard resonated with me. It also kicked off some thoughts on how the GOP is mishandling the fiscal cliff, and how to do it right.

What the GOP is doing wrong is pretending they can get something out of any negotiations. They cannot. The cliff represents the best they could achieve in terms of spending cuts – so PROTECT THESE.

As Rush said, taxes are going to rise on ‘the rich’ (and everyone else) after Obama won the election. Assuming otherwise is foolish. And the GOP has wasted their time trying to avoid the tax hikes on ‘the rich’. The rich will survive and the small businesses will hunker down. Stop trying to halt this from happening. It is a lose-lose approach. I for one will not trade lower taxes for more spending. That is lose-lose fiscally.

Worse, there will be no real spending cuts in any negotiation with the Dems. We saw this in 2011 after the GOP landslide mid term (and what more than anything else killed their 2012 hopes). No real cuts. All that will occur through negotiation is the spending cuts now pending under sequestration will be made impotent through delay and promises to spend wiser later (same thing we have seen for decades).

So how should the GOP approach the fiscal cliff under this kind of reality?

You apply political jujitsu and you embrace the cliff!

Obama and the dems are leaning forward – way forward – on their tax & spend madness at the moment.

Jujitsu is the art of using your opponents momentum against them. Now is a perfect time for the GOP to pivot and do two key things:

1. Accept all the tax increases as necessary medicine for the debt situation (don’t protect Wall Street). Let the private sector adjust. DO NOT discuss phasing the cuts in, because it only adds to the debt. Play it as though the ‘the rich’ must pay their fair share, as should everyone else. The country will adapt – it has through much worse.
2. Accept the Defense cuts as another aspect of everyone must have skin in the game. The DoD actually can propose balancing the cuts across their entire domain so as to protect some areas and sacrifice others. Let them prioritize inside the DoD. This way, the cuts to domestic programs must also be retained. Again, DO NOT negotiate delays. That only invites wasting time and more deficit spending.

The GOP is supposed to be the party of fiscal sanity, including the near term pain that comes with ensuring any long term health of the country. Stop trying to avoid the medicine. Embrace the cliff that you resisted in the past, so as not to be seen as being against the little guy but on their side. Exploit this new found progressiveness. Just don’t negotiate.

Let the Dems deal with the pain on the middle class and entitlements. The GOP will be doing the right thing by not attempting to save ‘the rich’ and the DoD.

Besides, its not like there won’t be tax hikes – there will. And the only thing you can negotiate away are spending cuts – which are now wired into the cliff! Don’t lose what we have.

The country is need of a wake up call. A brutal, ice-bucket-in-the-face, wake up call.

The country needs to hit the fiscal cliff – which is just a way of facing the fact we need to deal with our out-of-control spending and the cost to all of us on getting right.

I have not been posting much because we have to see how this fiscal-cliff stuff all plays out before there is much to post about. If we continue on with business-as-usual, then we will slowly over the next 4 years slip into a “Greece-like” economic state.

If, on the other hand, we embrace the cliff we will begin to adopt what DC has avoided for decades – fiscal sanity.

Yes, it will be painful. Yes, it will be abrupt (as opposed to phasing in the cuts through attrition and controlled shrinking of government). But since the powers-that-be in DC have resisted a controlled correction for so long, we are left with an abrupt pull out of our dive. Take your pick: pull out with some injury or pile into a really brutal conclusion.

One thing not so obvious to everyone is that we need to understand we actually hit the cliff in 2007.  It’s not like it is still in front of us an avoidable. 2007 is when the nonsense of liberal economic social engineering imploded because of the left’s dumb experiment with “affordable” housing. By removing all financial requirements from select home buyers (those who could not qualify financially) they created the fiscal disaster that hit us all in 2007. This experiment wiped out home and real estate values, which then rippled into all the other investment mechanisms that were riding on that faux bubble of wealth.

This is what we call an “economic correction“. This is what happens when Centralized Command-Economies finally hit the wall and reality strikes. And we have many more of these in front of us as we pay the piper for decades of fiscal irresponsibility in DC from ALL parties.

Don’t believe it? Look at the US workforce and how it has shrunk dramatically in the last decade [click to enlarge]:

The US Workforce has shrunk back to 1980 levels!

This is nothing to ignore. Our population has been growing over that very same time period, but the portion of that population gainfully employed has shrunk. By this brutal measure, today’s economy is the same size as the US economy in 1980, which means the economy is smaller as a measure of the population today. The pie has shrunk, so each person gets less than in 1980. Thus the economic pain.

Update: Ed Morrissey weighs in on the latest job numbers:

However, the seasonally-adjusted labor force dropped by 350,000, and the civilian labor force participation rate also dropped two-tenths of a point to 63.6%, almost at the 31-year low hit in August. The employment-population ratio dropped by one-tenth of a percent to 58.7%.

In other words, America isn’t going back to work. Americans are still dropping out of the work force.

End Update

Unless of course your career exists on Wall Street or amongst the DC Political Industrial Complex (which includes the news media folks). If you live in the bubbles of Wall Street and DC, you are financially immune to this chronic and painful situation.

So we must embrace the cliff, since the people in the bubbles are ignorant of what they have done. We must begin to pull out of our compliance with DC irresponsibility. Time to pull out of the dive. We had plenty of chances to fix all thus smoothly. But powers that be living off the federal revenue trough refused behave responsibly, and now we get to do it the hard way. So be it.

Update: Good Lord, this really is scary:

Enter the platinum coins. Under current law, the Treasury is technically allowed to mint as many coins made of platinum as it wants and can assign them whatever value it pleases.

Under this scenario, the U.S. Mint would make a pair of trillion-dollar platinum coins. The president orders the coins to be deposited at the Federal Reserve. The Fed moves this money into Treasury’s accounts. And just like that, Treasury suddenly has an extra $2 trillion to pay off its obligations for the next two years — without needing to issue new debt. The ceiling is no longer an issue.

…

There’s nothing obviously problematic about it, except for the fact that we’re going to devalue world’s baseline currency by about two trillion dollars.  How exactly can that avoid stoking inflation?  It creates money that hasn’t been in circulation before, and it spends it almost immediately based on the completely artificial valuation of a couple of coins in a vault.

Amateurs can create massive pain and suffering. I’ll take the cliff over this stupendously stupid idea. – end update

Tags: Economic Correction, Fiscal Cliff, National Debt, Sequestration, Work Force

So, AJStrata is not posting as much as he used to. Why? What’s he up to? What’s happened to the Strata Sphere?

Where’s AJStrata?

To be honest, he is (I am) very busy with Holiday activities with the family (preparation & celebration), end of year activities for the business, a new phase on an ongoing project, etc.  So many real world activities politics is now very low on the priority list.

Besides – the big issue before us is Sequestration and the supposed “cliff” facing the country. And until we see which path we are on, not much can be said about anything. One thing is for sure, the President is busy trying on different fig leaves in terms of vacuous and stupid proposals that don’t deal with the cancer destroying our economy:

Out Of Control Federal $pending

We are racking up $1.3-1.4 Trillion dollars in deficits each and every year (looks like this “$1,350,000,000,000” in real numbers). If we tax the economy to pay for this, it will falter.  But if we continue to add $4,500 in debt to each person in the country each year, the current~$50,000 owed per person with expand to $68,000 per person after 4 more years of liberal spending. That means each family of four will owe the government $272,000.

We cannot sustain this kind of spending. The $200,000 owed per family right now is unbearable, foolish and short sighted. There is no chance a family of four can pay this debt off in a life time and pay on a house, cars, durable goods, college education(s), etc. It is like owning two homes, neither of which is generating income.

So let’s be clear about another reality:  the poor won’t pay, the rich will hide their wealth from taxes, which will leave the burden on the middle class to pay all this off. And as we remove people from the requirement to pay back their safety-net handouts, we double or triple the per person debt on those stuck with the bill.

Therefore, I still say it is better to go through Sequestration now, with funding cuts and tax increases, than pretend even one more year there is a painless way out of our current mess. I think this nation, its leaders and its wealthy need a wake up call. I think the middle class needs a huge tax increase, so they understand what they are doing to their own children.

I think we need to hit the cliff, so we wake up out of this mindless, socialist stupor we are still in.

Until we decide to (a) slowly spend ourselves to death or (b) start taking our fiscal medicine, there really is nothing to discuss. I can only hope the GOP House holds the line and doesn’t wimp out again, as they did in 2011. Of course, if they do, that will be the end of the GOP Party as we know it.

The 9-11 Terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya – which resulted in the murder of our Ambassador and the death of some of his security attachment – are the roots of the unrest we now see in the Palestinian areas surrounding Israel, in Syria and in Egypt. And expect this unrest to expand since the Islamo-Fascist smell blood in this incompetent administration.

Only an incompetent administration not only fails to beef up security at this exposed and previously attacked location, they actually reduce security leading to 9-11. That is a sign of criminal ignorance in my opinion, since the result was 4 dead Americans. It was an avoidable result running up to 9-11. It was an avoidable result during the attack, as nearby forces were told to stand down and not intervene. As we learn more, the missteps and mistakes are stunning.

The cover up afterwards was nothing more than a desperate attempt to hold onto power prior to national elections. It is obvious that Obama political appointees wrote over (and therefore attempted to hide) the  after-action assessment of career warriors who have spent years focused on defending this nation and its people, at home and abroad. So obvious:

According to CBS News, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) head James Clapper will take that hit.

Granted, the CBS report doesn’t pin the blame directly upon Clapper himself, but only locates the edits in his “office”. Yet since his subordinate, former CIA Director General David Petraeus, recently testified before a congressional intelligence committee that his agency knew terrorists were responsible from the very beginning, he can hardly plead ignorance of that same information.

If this administration is trying to hide behind ‘the office’ – as if the head of that office has zero responsibility – you can tell how panicked they were right after the coordinated and planned attack on our consulate. Some may bite on this, but it is clear the effort was not on the threat of attack, but threat of political fall out.

As for plausible deniability, the CBS report is clear that the White House and State Department did not make those changes.  However, for all practical purposes, James Clapper is every bit as much a part of the White House staff as the president’s national security advisor. He attends Oval Office meetings, and is very aware of wishes held by the president and senior staff.  His DNI serves to centralize authority over all intelligence organizations. Ambassador Rice would be privy to that classified information because it is shared at the Cabinet level.

Yes, a stupid, bush-league cover up.

Which the Islamo-Fascists also notice with glee. Since they also know their attack was planned, coordinated and successful, they realized what the White House response implied. Unlike either George Bush or Ronald Reagon, the panicked focus on PR by the White House was an inviting signal. It meant this White House was impotent. Something we knew when it took three tries and a near act of treason to take out Bin Laden once his whereabouts were established. It meant this White House would not condemn or attack those who attacked the US or its allies, it would only spin madly.

So this leads any half-wit, Islamo-Fascist in Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya or Palestine to realize Israel and the other centrist nations (Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Iraq) are vulnerable. If all this White House will do is throw top generals under the bus when attacked, then obviously they have 4 years to take action and try and gain ground.

Obama is the modern Neville Chamberlain – the man who let Hitler out of his box to pillage and kill. So far the response to the escalation in the Middle East has been tepid at best. I know much of this goes through private channels, but the public signals seem weak. Sooner or later we (America) either send a signal to stop, or we find ourselves facing a mid- East meltdown.