Christian Arabs Targeted Throughout the Middle East

By Alan Caruba

The nations of the Middle East have been steadily forcing out Christian Arabs that have lived there for centuries, often in the most brutal fashion. This is the hallmark of Islam that has no tolerance for any other religion. Islam is a cult that has been at war with all religions, using terror, intimidation, and deception to achieve its goal.

The process has a long history. A recent Wall Street Journal commentary, “When the Arab Jews Fled”, tells a story rarely told; the story of how an estimated 850,000 Jews living in Arab nations, many of whose families had lived in Middle Eastern nations for centuries, were forced to leave. What happened to them after Israel declared its sovereignty in 1948 is now occurring again, but for Christians in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, the ascendency of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the militancy of al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Cynically, Arab nations have pointed to the Palestinians as an example of people made refugees by the creation of Israel but, generally unknown to most Americans and others has been the role of the United Nations in maintaining the myth of refugees via its Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), established to aid Palestinians in the wake of the 1948 war on Israel.

As Middle East experts, Steven J. Rosen and Daniel Pipes, pointed out in a Jerusalem Post article on July 10, 2012, “UNRWA’s most consequential problem is its mission. Over 63 years, it has become an agency that perpetuates the refugee problem rather than contributing to its resolution.

URNWA does not work to settle refugees; instead by registering each day ever more grandchildren and great-grandchildren who have never been displaced from their homes or employment, artificially adding them to the tally of ‘refugees’. It adds to the number of refugees said to be aggrieved by Israel. By now, those descendants comprise over 90 percent of UNRWA refugees.”

This presupposes that there is or ever was a state of “Palestine”, but that is a name given the region by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to replace the name of Israel. It was unsuccessful but centuries later was incorporated into the Palestinian Mandate given England to administer following WWI. In point of fact, Palestine was never a state, has no borders, has no capitol city, has no currency, and was declared by Yassir Arafat as a means to wage war on Israel. Today, this so-called state is divided into two separate entities; the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. They cordially hate one another.

After 1948, the Wall Street Journal article noted, “Jews began fleeing—to Israel, of course, but also to France, England, Canada, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S.” Yemen had been home to more than 55,000 Jews’ in Aden, (where) scores were killed in a vicious program in 1947. An airlift dubbed ‘Operation Magic Carpet’ relocated most Yemenite Jews to Israel. In Libya, once home to 38,000 Jews, the community was subjected to many brutal attacks over the years.”

“In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jews continued to pour out of the Muslim countries. The Six-Day War of June 1967 brought some of the most violent anti-Jewish eruptions.

UNRWA, however, was only concerned with the so-called Palestinian Arabs. “The number of UNRWA refugees has steadily grown since 1949, from 750,000 to almost five million. At this rate,” wrote Rosen and Pipes, “UNRWA refugees will exceed 8 million by 2030 and 20 million by 2060.” This is, of course, absurd. The “Palestinians” are now the world’s oldest “refugee” population.

In addition to the obstinence of UNRWA, its existence has been an obstruction to a resolution of the conflict between the “Palestinians” and Israel. This is a violation of the UN Refugee Convention. In a January 16, 2012 article by Anne Bayefsky in The Jerusalem Post, noted that “Years of UN-driven anti-Semitism have clearly deadened the nerve-endings of democracies…”

The UN General Assembly has annually sponsored a Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, followed by the usual anti-Israel agenda items.

“By the end of a year of double-standards, discrimination and hate-mongering eighty percent of all 2010 General Assembly resolutions criticizing specific countries for human rights violations were directed at the Jewish state alone. Only six of the remaining 191 UN member states face human rights criticism at all, one of which was the United States.” The United States!

Will the UN declare its solidarity with the Arab Christians now under siege throughout the Middle East and across northern Africa? Don’t count on it.

The world, worried about the spread of war in the Middle East as the result of the Syrian conflict, is not paying much attention to the plight of the millions of Arab Christians being driven from their homes. It is a tragedy of immense proportions and it is one that is entirely the result of the inherent hatred by Islam for all other faiths.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Cartoon Round Up

The Son of John Adams

By Alan Caruba

I often wondered what it must have been like to have been the son of George H.W. Bush, the 41^st President. The man had so many accomplishments in life that it must have been both inspiring and daunting, especially if you were George W., a free spirit and perhaps the one whom observers might think would be the least likely to follow in his father’s footsteps. Like brother Jeb who was a Governor of Florida, politics and public service is the family business.

This brings to mind the sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams. His father, John Adams, the second President, had already made a lot of history as one of the Founding Fathers. Imagine having to follow George Washington into the presidency? Whew!

And then imagine following your father, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe in the most critical years of a young nation that needed a navy, indeed, an entire military to protect its interests and citizens. John Quincy knew them all. To be surrounded by such genius would have been daunting, but John Quincy possessed a mighty intellect as well and would devote his entire life to the service of his nation; for him it was a sacred calling.

Generally neglected among the panoply of the early presidents, John Quincy had the misfortune of an unremarkable single term and was followed in office by the towering figure of Andrew Jackson. He would return to Congress as a Representative from Massachusetts.

I recently finished reading Harlow Giles Unger’s captivating biography of John Quincy and, if you love history, it was a narrative I could barely put down. Few men in our nation’s early history witnessed and participated in so much of it from his birth in 1767 to witnessing the Battle of Bunker’s Hill in 1775 with his extraordinary mother, Abigail Adams, from a hillside near Boston.

That, however, was just the start. In 1778 he set sail for France with his father who was sent as an emissary of Congress to seek financial aid for the Revolutionary War. In 1781 he went to St. Petersburg and the Russian Court as secretary for the American minister Francis Dana. He rejoined his father at The Hague, then Paris, resuming his studies, until returning to the United States from 1785 to 1787 to earn a degree at Harvard College. He was admitted to the bar in 1790 and practiced law until 1793, but found it all rather tedious.

In 1794 George Washington appointed him minister to Holland where he honed his skills as a diplomat. In 1797 his father became the second President and he was appointed minister to Prussia, taking time to marry Louisa Catherine Johnson. In 1800 his father lost his bid for reelection, but in quick succession, John Quincy was elected to the Massachusetts State Senate and then to the U.S. Senate, but was forced to resign by the Federalists whose party he had earlier abandoned. In 1809, President Madison appointed him minister to Russia. In 1813 he negotiated the end to the War of 1812, and in 1817 President Monroe appointed him Secretary of State which, at the time, was the stepping stone to the presidency.

Though the credit goes to those whom he served, John Quincy was involved in most of the major events and issues, negotiating the acquisition of East and West Florida from Spain, along with the extension of the U.S. border to the Pacific Ocean. He would write the key passage of the Monroe Doctrine.

In 1825 the House of Representatives elected him President after an inconclusive Electoral College vote. In 1828 he lost the next election to Jackson, but by 1830 Massachusetts sent him the House of Representative where he became an early and ardent abolitionist. The infamous “gag rule” was instituted to stifle his advocacy of the end of slavery.

Perhaps most famously, he argued a case before the Supreme Court in defense of black prisoners of the slave ship Amistad, winning their freedom. In 1844, the gag rule was finally defeated.

Throughout all this time he had also fathered children, George Washington Adams, the first born, and John Adams II, and knew the loss of his beloved parents; his father dying on July 4, 1826, on the same day as Thomas Jefferson, as well the loss of his son, GW Adams.

In a long life of service to America, on February 23, 1848 he died in the House of Representatives.

It was not so much he was the son of a famous, gifted man, but that he too became one as well by dint of long years in the service of his nation. He was a patrician, multi-lingual, devoted son, husband and father, but he was also the last in the lineage of the Founders and those presidents who followed him would seem smaller until a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln was elected.

America has, for the most part, been fortunate in the choice of men who were elected to its highest office. We need to get lucky again.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Fear, Anxiety, and Anticipation

By Alan Caruba

I will watch the next and last presidential debate, but only reluctantly. It is the job of pundits to keep informed, but I have been suffering from an overload of information about Barack Obama since before he was elected and all of it suggested he would do a lot of damage before he left office.

The fact is we are all stuck with him through January 20, 2013 when—and if—Mitt Romney takes the oath of office. One can only ponder how much more damage Obama could do between November 7, the day after the election and then?

And, of course, one hopes the election results will not end up with the kind of situation that occurred when Bush defeated Gore, but not until the Supreme Court ruled. I keep seeing signs and indications that it may not be a close election insofar that significant numbers of Democrats—many of whom may be out of work or know someone who is—will vote for Romney.

It’s the waiting that is weighing on my mind and spirit. The first debate lifted my spirit and that of many others, but the second has been deemed a tie of sorts. For me it was just a cascade of more lies from Obama who is so crazy he actually believes what he is saying or so sly he doesn’t care.

There is a school of thought that Obama really doesn’t want a second term and the more I watch him, I am leaning toward that theory. I know he is raising money, appearing on late night talk shows, giving speeches in key swing states, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t just doing it to avoid the stigma of throwing the presidency away in favor of a life less rigorous.

One former White House aide to both Clinton and Obama has said Obama “doesn’t like people.” That is an odd trait for a politician, but not odd when you consider that he rather absently referred to the killings of our Benghazi diplomats as “bumps in the road.” It astounds me that liberals keep saying he loves the common people, but he surely does not comport himself like one of them.

It is, of course, the waiting that is beginning to wear on my nerves. Just about the only thing my fellow pundit-friends are writing about these days are analyses and jeremiads concerning Obama’s lies and lack of qualifications, failed policies, and such. Listening to the chattering class on Fox and other news channels is an endless dissection of polling data, most of which seems to be dubious at best, wrong at worst.

I confess that, having voted since the age of 21, starting with John F. Kennedy in 1960, I have never feared so much for the future of the nation, dependent on the election of a candidate. And I was a Democrat right up to Reagan’s campaign and have voted Republican ever since. My late Mother, a Democrat her entire life, changed her registration status after Clinton’s first term in office. She was in her 90s by then, but better late than never.

Put simply, another Obama presidency for four years terrifies me. He doesn’t like America.

That may sound simplistic, but no other President heaped so much publi debt on the books. From Washington through Bush43, Obama has managed to add more debt than all of his predecessors combined.

Beyond our shores, an America that stood strong against the former Soviet Union for over 45 years until it collapsed has a President who reassures the present leaders in the Kremlin that he can be “more flexible” if and when he’s reelected. I don’t like the sound of that, do you?

All positions of power attract a legion of sycophants and, in our system of government, supporters who seek access to that power—often through “bundling” campaign funds—or who have just concluded they like him.

It remains a mystery to me that the polls show how closely divided the nation is between Obama’s supporters and detractors. I doubt it has ever been this divided since just before the Civil War.

And that is what worries me the most. It’s those people who just don’t hear his lies or even know he’s lying.

It’s the mainstream media that has always been liberal, but which now sees its job as protecting Obama against the truth that everyone can see on countless outlets for information, including of course Fox News that often seems fair and unbalanced given the liberal puppets that spout more lies.

I am compelled to do what every republic expects. I am compelled to wait on the will of the people as expressed through the electoral system. It makes me anxious. It makes me fearful.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

What I Heard at the Debate

By Alan Caruba

As civil as the debate may have seemed, it was a brawl. Central to it were all the lies President Obama continues to tell about his record in office and about his challenger, Mitt Romney. And Romney would not let him get away with it. Time and again he rose to his feet to rebut and debunk those lies and I suspect a lot of people who saw him in the first debate were in agreement with him in this second debate.

In a column on Tuesday, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens perfectly anticipated Obama’s lies. Under the headline, “To the Wavering Voter” it repudiated the Obama campaigns assertions about a totally bogus “war on women” saying, “No, abortion rights and access to contraception will not be jeopardized if Mitt Romney becomes president. Not remotely, not vaguely, not even close.”

He went through the claims that Romney would engage in another Middle East War or that the nation would become a global pariah with Romney as president. Moving on, Stephens said, “No, your taxes will not go up by a couple of grand” noting that “As for the $5 trillion tax cut the Obama campaign insists Mr. Romney is offering, Obama campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter admitted on CNN that ‘It won’t be near $5 trillion,’ once deductions and loopholes are closed.”

I cite Stephen’s prescient column because, if he could anticipate Obama’s lies, than you can be sure Mitt Romney did and that was demonstrated throughout the debate. At the very end, Obama could not resist misrepresenting Romney’s earlier “47%” comment during a closed fundraising event. Romney described that as an “inelegant statement” and then repudiated it, but Obama repeated it in his closing statement.

Throughout the debate Romney called Obama a liar in the most gentlemanly way possible, but a liar he was and is.

One lie that jumped out at the very beginning of the debate was Obama responding to a college student’s question saying “Your future is bright”, adding “I want to build on the five million jobs we’ve created.” What jobs? Half of today’s college graduates cannot even find a job comparable to their educational level, if at all. And the future is most demonstrably not bright.

Romney responded with the fact that there are 23 million Americans out of work. The truth! He cited the phony official unemployment rate and said it was a lot closer to 10.7%. Obama said, “What Gov. Romney said just isn’t true.” Obama lied. Romney cited figures that appear daily in newspapers.

Throughout the debate Obama demonstrated how obsessed he is with class warfare, returning time and again to observations about the nation’s wealthiest class.

He lied about his energy policies and claimed that Romney’s plan was “to let oil companies write energy policy.” The absurdity of this was seen as Romney cited the cost of gas at the pump, Obama’s veto of the Canadian pipeline, and the refusal of his administration to allow drilling for oil and natural gas on federal lands. He cited the fact that the coal industry was targeted and the loss of coal-fired plants to generate electricity.

And Obama’s response was to lie again! “Very little of what Governor Romney said isn’t true.” But it was and it is. It’s not even a secret.

Romney scored some good points promising that he would fix the tax code, promising “No tax on your savings, interest, dividends and capital gains.” This is the money that investments generate and the nation is experiencing slow growth because such investments have been discouraged or rendered meaningless with the Federal Reserve’s low-to-no interest rates. And Obama’s only response was that “We have to make the wealthy do more.”

This is how a man worth ten million dollars responded, but surely Obama knows that the wealthy in this nation, through their taxes, represent 60% of the revenue collected annually.

Romney showed himself in control throughout the debate and showed something that has been sorely missing for nearly four years; leadership!

And all Romney had to do is cite facts that most voters already know; that Obama “doubled” the deficits, that 23 million are out of work, that millions more are on food stamps, that millions have slipped into poverty while Obama and Michelle lived and vacationed like royalty on the taxpayer’s dime.

On the issue of inequality in the workplace for women, Romney masterfully told how as Governor of Massachusetts he sought out women for his cabinet, then pointed out that “in the last four years 558,000 women lost jobs and many moved into poverty."  

“It’s not a strong economy,” Romney said and anyone listening knew he was telling the truth.

And yet Obama actually claimed there had been “31 months of job growth.” Then he criticized Romney for investing in companies in China. The fact is that Obama’s chairman of his jobs council, GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt closed GE divisions here in the U.S. and moved them to China!

In an understated, but quite symbolic moment, an African-American, Michael Jones, stood up and told Obama “I’m not optimistic about the future.”

Obama’s response was “Osama bin Laden is dead.” “We saved the auto industry.” And then he rattled on about “millionaires and billionaires.”

Romney’s response was “I think you know better”, adding “The President has tried, but his policies haven’t worked.

There were many other issues, but on the issue of the assassination of a U.S. ambassador in Libya, Obama first dodged the question and then claimed he had instructed that all embassies “beef up” their security when that was a lie. Then he had the audacity to claim Romney was trying to make “political points” from the attack, but Romney referenced the weeks that went by as the White House lied about a “spontaneous” attack. All Obama could cite was a speech in the White House Rose Garden that day after the killings.

Obama does not seem to understand that Americans do not want or need another speech.

In the end, Romney said “We don’t have to settle for what we’re going through.”

One can only hope that a lot of Americans, particularly those yet undecided, agree with him.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The World is Broke

By Alan Caruba

Every time I go to get gasoline or to the supermarket, my dollar buys less and less as the price of everything goes up. It is not the fault of banks, speculators, or any of the usual suspects. It is the fault of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve. It isn’t just a U.S. problem, it is a worldwide problem.

We all know this in general terms, but Edmund Contoski, the author of “The Impending Monetary Revolution, the Dollar and Gold”, explains the complete mess the world is in and how we got there. Sneering at the Greeks may be satisfying, but we too are the Greeks. So is the rest of the world.

Uncertainties about the value of money have led to a growing market in derivatives. These are contracts for insuring against loss of value from unreliable currencies and they impose gigantic costs on the world’s economy. “As of June 2008, the notional amounts (face value) of financial derivatives, according to the Bank for International Settlements, totaled $673 trillion—over twelve times the world’s nominal gross domestic product,” says Contoski.

The value of all goods and services produced in the world doesn’t even come close to the value of derivatives. The recession in the U.S. and the Euro-zone countries ended in 2009, but that didn’t cure worries about the value of money. As of June 2011, the derivatives had increased to $708 trillion.

Contoski has 45 years of experience in international markets and has lectured widely on international monetary issues, conducted investment seminars in precious metals and foreign currencies, in addition to having held various positions in economic research and world trade.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Banks Left FeelingQEeaey by Fed’s Efforts”, by David Reilly referred to the impact of the most recent QE or quantitative easing, a fancy term for the Federal Reserve’s policy of keeping interest rates at near zero while at the same time pumping fiat money into the economy. By “fiat” I mean money backed by nothing more than the government’s credit and, in case you haven’t noticed, the ratings firms that judge such matters have been lowering our credit rating. It is far from junk bond status, but the failures of the European Union members threaten the Euro and the failure of our government to address our $16 trillion debt and our trillion dollar annual deficits could have us all in a national soup line.

The nation’s largest banks have tons of cash, but they make their money lending it. As Reilly noted, “With rates set to stay lower for longer, the pressure is on banks’ net interest margins, or the difference between what they earn from borrowing money and lending or investing it…banks have limited room to further lower their cost of funding.”

The banker’s problem is that “each quarter banks see higher-yielding loans and securities mature, only to replace them with ones that yield significantly less.” This is a very bad place to be because “They could invest money in longer-dated securities or riskier ones. But that could open them up to big losses if rates rise.”  They are, in short, between a rock and a hard place. Since we all depend on banks to make loans necessary for purchasing a home, starting or expanding a business, or any other transaction, this means our lives are getting more stressful and less rewarding.

Time and again, Contoski comes back to the government as the source of our current problems. “No nation ever spent itself into prosperity. Greater borrowing is no solution for either Europe or America. Governments can borrow and create debt, but they cannot create wealth. If they could, inflation would be unnecessary. So would taxation.”

In addition to the “entitlement” programs such as Social Security in the 1930s and Medicare/Medicaid in the 1960s, the U.S. has steadily expanded them and now we are prisoners of the government as it takes over the entire health care system of the nation via Obamacare. Liberals think the government can always access money to pay for everything and thus “take care” of everyone, but it doesn’t. That’s why it taxes working citizens and has countless hidden taxes on gasoline, telephone use, and other things including a tax on dying. It must borrow the rest of the money it is spending and right now that amounts to forty cents of every dollar. That is unsustainable.

Contoski points out that “The United States has been spending far beyond its means, borrowing and piling up debt just like Greece and others. The International Monetary Fund said the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio would reach 100 percent by the end of 2011. It reach that figure by July 2011.”

“The U.S. situation is much worse than it appears. Unlike a private corporation, which would have to report liabilities such as Medicare and Social Security as they are taken on, Congress doesn’t record them until it writes a check.” What most Americans don’t know is that half the U.S. budget is already allocated to these programs before a single dollar is spent on anything and everything else from aircraft carriers to paper clips.

One observer calculated federal finances based on standard accounting rules since 2004, using data from Medicare and Social Security annual reports and the little-known audited financial report of the federal government. He concluded that the federal government has $145.5 trillion in unfunded obligations, based on data from the Fed and U.S. Treasury, compared to the $14 trillion “officially” reported as federal debt.

Near-zero Federal Reserve interest rates may sound great, but the reality is far different. Contoski says, “It makes life difficult for tens of millions of elderly Americans who depend on the interest from their savings accounts for their basic living expenses. It also destroys the incentive for younger workers to save for their retirement. That, in turn, destroys the accumulation of capital for investment that would provide economic growth.”

My late father was a certified public accountant. I rely on my bank to tell me how much money I have in my checking and savings accounts, neither of which generate enough interest to justify them except for the need to pay bills. I am, therefore, not an expert on economic and monetary matters, but I pay attention to people who are. You should too.

Unless the voters have a death wish, they will elect a former governor and a very successful venture capitalist to set in motion the difficult job of reducing our debt, restoring our nation’s credit rating, and  stopping the insane congressional spending.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Poisonous Presidency

By Alan Caruba

When the leaders of the United States, the President, his Vice President, his Secretary of State and others deliberately lie to its citizens, knowing full well that the facts about the tragic killing of an American ambassador and three of his staff are widely known, the nation has reached a point where it is paramount that he be removed from office.

The forthcoming election is the instrument and current indicators are that President Obama will be defeated. It is to be hoped that power in the Senate will be returned to the Republican Party and retainedl in the House of Representatives. This is the only way steps can be taken to avoid the financial collapse that faces the nation and achieve the repeal of Obamacare that Mitt Romney has promised if elected.

What worries me most, however, is the utter disdain for the truth that has marked the presidency of Barack Obama. It has been nearly four years of sustained lies about the steps that were taken to respond to the financial crisis facing the nation when he took office. The so-called “stimulus” wasted billions, becoming little more than a slush fund for Democratic fund-raisers, unions, and other connected parties to the administration.

Instead the administration literally seized control of General Motors and Chrysler, then in the normal process of bankruptcy, claiming to save the jobs of auto workers. What they did was shunt aside the legitimate creditors and investors in GM. They arbitrarily discontinued its often long relationship with several hundred auto dealerships, adding their employees to the unemployment lines. They then insisted that GM invest millions in the creation of an electric car that cost $47,000 to purchase and ended up purchasing them for government use with taxpayer’s money.

Obamacare, more than 2,700 pages in length and incorporating more than twenty new taxes, was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress with little evidence that any of those who voted for it had even read it. Arguing initially that he was not a tax, when challenged in the Supreme Court, the administration then said it was a tax. For some inexplicable reason, the Court permitted it to stand despite its clear over-ride of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause that forbids the government from requiring a citizen to purchase anything.

Under Obama, the foreign policy of the nation has now seriously weakened its position in the world and combined with cuts to defense spending, put its ability to protect the homeland and project power abroad at risk. The administration failed to negotiate an agreement with Iraq that would permit U.S. troops to remain in place, as they do at the invitation of many nations around the world, leaving Iraq vulnerable to al Qaeda. Setting a date for withdrawal from Afghanistan only emboldened the Taliban.

The so-called Arab Spring has mutated, not into the establishment of democratic institutions in nations like Egypt or Libya, but an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood to at least ascend to positions of power in opposition to America’s interests in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

We now know that President Obama skipped some sixty percent of the daily CIA briefings that presidents long have made a part of their duties and this no doubt led to its ignorance of the impending tragedy in Libya, but the fault lies, too, with the State Department that ignored the slain ambassador’s pleas for increased security for the embassy and consulate. This is a president who has been missing in action as the Islamic jihad began to heat up across the face of the globe.

The hostility of President Obama’s administration to the vital energy sector of the nation has denied access to oil extraction on the vast acreage of federal lands. It has denied permits for offshore drilling to a far larger degree than previous administrations. It has mercilessly attacked the coal industry, responsible for nearly fifty percent of all electricity generation in the nation. Plants for electricity have closed down under the pressure of costly EPA regulations. Only the natural gas sector has grown, thanks to the technology of fracking, but both oil and gas is being extracted mostly on private land.

The economy, which could have recovered in much the same way it did during the Kennedy and Reagan administrations, has barely increased while 23 million Americans remain out of work or have stopped looking for jobs. There are 47 million Americans on food stamps, utilizing eighty percent of the budget of the Department of Agriculture. There are millions who have seen the value of their homes decrease while others have faced foreclosure. The Labor Department was just caught rigging the data on new jobs to get it below 8 percent in a record-setting 43 months.

Barack Obama, a man whose personal life history is mostly a construction of lies, whose personal records have been hidden from public examination, and who stunned viewers of his first debate with Mitt Romney by appearing so unprepared and so willing to repeat past lies, has been at the heart of a poisonous presidency.

Americans, no matter what their political affiliation or as independents, are now saddled with $16 trillion in national debt, four to five trillion of which was imposed in just the last four years, have a common interest to defeat Barack Obama. The nation will not survive four more years if he is reelected.

© Alan Caruba, 2012