Scientists reveal Romney and Obama are actually clones

One of the recent Rasmussen Polls has Ron Paul beating President Barack Obama in a head to head contest.  But in the same poll Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are tied.   It is not the first time.  For almost two years Romney and Obama have been close in the polls.

Now, at last, we know there is a reason why.  Romney IS Obama.

At least that is the claim of scientists at Rothdale’s laboratory in Lead’s, Ireland who publicly announced yesterday that both men were actually cloned in the King’s College – Chicago University experiments of 1956.  Dr. Geoffrey Gordlers of Newcastle made the announcement and took questions from a stunned university audience at the Goldman Sachs Student Center.  As far fetched as the report may be there is indeed compelling evidence that is hard to explain.

Consider the following video evidence.

Obama owes Caroline Kennedy Big Time

Forget the $16 trillion national debt. Forget what we owe China. The greatest unpaid debt of Barack Obama, one of the greatest unpaid political debts of all time, is what the president owes Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, the daughter to John F. Kennedy.

Every day that passes with this debt unpaid, is an uncomfortable day for Barack Obama. For it is an object lesson to any future supporter. If a president can stiff Caroline Kennedy, he can stiff anybody.

It was Caroline Kennedy who made supporting Barack Obama fashionable. Her endorsement, which came on January 27, 2008 gave his candidacy the credibility and legitimacy it was lacking. It came at a time when Hillary Clinton was poised to nail down the Democrat nomination for president. As Kennedy’s father said after the Bay of Pigs disaster, “Failure is an orphan, but victory has a thousand fathers.” There are many who claim that they elected Barack Obama but no one has a greater claim than Caroline Kennedy.

For much of her life, Caroline Kennedy lived in mystery. While others sought fame she sought anonymity and privacy. In the process she became even more popular. She was a blank slate that others could write upon. And she was never lured into public to disabuse them of their notions. She sacrificed all of that in January, 2008, when she wrote her endorsement of Barack Obama.

The candidate appeared to honor that support the following December. A deal was arranged to have Mrs. Kennedy appointed to the vacated New York Senate seat. Caroline was trotted out onto television to talk about it. Her appearances were disastrous, making Sarah Palin cerebral by comparison. In only a matter of minutes, a woman whose dignity and mystery gave her a persona that transcended her White House childhood, was reduced from legendary to ordinary.

The Obama team bristled at the suggestion that they had not prepared her. She was a Kennedy, they said, the family practically invented modern politics. She had failed her audition at the New York Times. She had offended Governor Patterson, the man who would have to appoint her. It was her fault, not theirs.

A few months later Barack Obama tried again. The White House started floating Caroline Kennedy’s name as a possible ambassador to the Vatican. It was such a glaring political misjudgment that some now question the sincerity of the effort. Kennedy friend, Ray Flynn, the former Democrat mayor of Boston and the last Ambassador to the Vatican was aghast. Mrs. Kennedy ‘s pro abortion position would not fly in Rome, he warned, what were they thinking? Predictably the Church rebuffed her nomination.

This time, it was clear that the Obama White House had let her down. It is one thing to ignore a political debt. It is another to punish someone who has done you a great service.

In March, 2011, Obama finally appointed Mrs. Kennedy’s husband, Edwin Schlossberg, to the president’s commission on fine arts. It made eyes roll. It is one of thousands of honorific positions the White House passes out to lower level supporters and their friends. A third year into a presidency these positions are the scraps that have fallen to the floor and are often turned down.

Caroline Kennedy would not be the first presidential child to go unthanked for helping elect a president. Robert Tyler, son and personal assistant to his father, President John Tyler, left the White House to become prominent in Pennsylvania politics. Eventually Tyler befriended James Buchanan and encouraged him and coached him in his long career. During Buchanan’s’ run for office, Tyler was at this side, giving him a perspective that no one else could offer. But when Buchanan became president he promptly dropped Tyler. There is only one president and any other light that shines too brightly will not be tolerated. Tyler, like Mrs. Kennedy, never complained.

The perfect position for Caroline Kennedy, the obvious position, is the Court of St. James, that is ambassador to Great Britain. It is the position held by her grandfather and her uncle. It is a position that honors tradition and royalty. But Mrs. Kennedy, who wrote in her endorsement that Obama reminded her of her father, has obviously misjudged her man.

“And when it comes to judgment,” Mrs. Kennedy wrote, “Barack Obama made the right call on the most important issue of our time by opposing the war in Iraq from the beginning.”

Like much of her endorsement of Obama, it is all now only ironic. Obama has been a war president, making Republican and Democrat foreign policy virtually indistinguishable from the other. There is no New Deal, or Great Frontier. There is only old Republican style cronyism. Students must pay back their education loans at 8% interest, while members of the Federal Reserve Board can award themselves billions in interest free loans to prop up their banks.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Ron Paul and the occupy Wall Street protest

Now what are all of those people doing camped out on Wall Street? Are they socialists? Commies? Anarchists? Left, right? For some reason the television news people don’t like them, which makes me sympathize. What’s going on?

I’ll explain.

Let’s say you are a young couple, newly married, anxious to get your piece of the American dream. And let’s say you decide to open your own hamburger stand.

Your first obstacle will be a maze of federal regulations. They are all well intended, helping out the disabled, protecting the environment, providing for workers’ health. The problem is that there are too many of them and they cost too much.

When I worked in the Bush Senior White House I saw the major companies come in and lobby for these REGS. They wanted them to be required for small businesses too, even businesses with five employees. Why? Because it would knock out the Mom and Pop operations who couldn’t afford them. By driving up costs they could assure that they would have a monopoly on hamburgers. But let’s say your parents mortgage their house and get you the start up money to pass that test.

Second, you will find that your competition controls the meat industry in this country. It is not just that they have volume but rather that their political donations assure that their friends get appointed to government meat inspection agencies. Sometimes, the very people who worked for the company will cross over and become a regulator. You must be prepared for some hair-raising conflicts of interest.

Third, your tax dollars will go to subsidize your competitor, the big hamburger company. Are you aware of this? This could be hundreds of millions of dollars.

There’s just no nice way to say this. Washington is corrupt. The big hamburger company establishes a lobby in Washington, D.C., which you can’t afford to do. They start with a firm of lawyers and former Justice Department prosecutors and meat inspectors. They lobby congress for money for their big hamburger corporation. And they get it.

For example, when I worked in the White House a major hamburger corporation lobbied for money saying that the French government was subsidizing their hamburger industry. Apparently the French felt that American hamburgers represented a cultural invasion. We had to either get a free trade agreement that worked or subsidize our own hamburger company.

Bottom line? Your competition is much larger and more powerful than you and not only controls the price and quality of the meat but takes dollars out of your pocket as an additional subsidy.

Now, here comes the piece de resistance.

Congressman Ron Paul has been railing about the unfairness of the Federal Reserve and the fact that it creates additional money, in secret, unaudited by anyone.

So thanks to Ron Paul, this past year, we were finally given a partial audit of the Federal Reserve. This applied to their activity in 2008. Here is what we learned. We learned that the Federal Reserved loaned out $16 trillion. That’s in one year. Keep in mind, that the entire accumulated national debt is just over $14 trillion. Remember Glenn Beck’s towering charts in his television studio?

And to whom did this money go? Well, banks, including banks that were owned by the members of the Federal Reserve board. Hmmmm. Nice huh? I guess they were secret for a reason. There were also a number of no bid contracts for companies to handle all of this. Here is a sweet tidbit, $3 trillion went to banks in foreign countries. We Americans are generous people. And oh, I almost forget, numerous corporations received this money too. For example, that big hamburger company, the one who needs federal subsidies? I think they got another $500 million interest free loan from the Federal Reserve.

Okay, who paid for that? Well, nobody. It was money “created” by the Federal Reserve. But you should really say that “everybody” paid for it because by increasing the money supply you are diluting its value for the rest of us. You are driving up the cost of wheat. You are causing famine in Africa.

Well, you say, why doesn’t somebody say something about this? They are trying. They are camping out on Wall Street. But then, keep in mind, the only way we can really know what is happening is through the news media. And that big hamburger company advertises in the news media. And one of the companies that got millions of dollars from the Federal Reserve owns one of the television networks.

So if you are that couple, just graduating from college, wanting to get your piece of the American dream? Forget it. You have two choices. Go to Wall Street and camp out. Or get a job at McDonalds. I think they pay $7.25 an hour. (But you can steal food.)

Doug Wead is a New York Times bestselling author and former adviser to two American presidents. He is a senior adviser to Ron Paul.

Jon Huntsman’s Secret Plot to Win in 2012

The conventional wisdom is that Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah and presidential candidate, is being played by his political handlers. According to this narrative, they are taking the billionaire for the biggest paycheck of their lives. They are telling him that he can bypass Iowa, play to the middle and the media, like John McCain did in 2008, pull an upset in New Hampshire and ride his dark horse to the nomination. This presupposes that the billionaire has a gargantuan ego, is a political dolt and that his handlers are superhuman con men. Having watched Huntsman in action during these debates and knowing some of his paid handlers, none of the three seem plausible to me.

So what is Jon Huntsman trying to do? If he can’t win why is he in this presidential race? And why were NBC executives so willing to help him in the last Republican debate, making sure their producers and directors got the message “puff Huntsman” signaling the anchors to keep going to him again and again with softball questions? Why should a contender who is running dead last in the polls get such fawning attention and respect from NBC, of all places?

Governor Huntsman announced for president last June 21, with poise and class, acting oblivious to the anti-Mormon bias in the GOP ranks in Iowa and the South. Hadn’t he learned anything watching Mitt Romney suffer through that process in the last cycle? Was he really going to split the Mormon vote in Nevada and ruin Romney’s legitimate chances there? And then he dissed his own religion. Huh? What serious candidate knocks his own base? And yet, unperturbed, Huntsman has remained suntanned and relaxed throughout the process, ignoring the coming losses with a transcendent confidence.

Nothing that has happened so far should be feeding that confidence. The governor garnered only 69 votes in the Iowa Straw Poll. Write-in candidates not even on the ballot got more votes than Huntsman. He was the butt of Jon Stewart jokes. He is, even now, running at 2% in some Republican presidential preference polls. Dead last among the contenders. He never fails to tell his GOP audiences that he believes in climate change, which won him kudos yesterday from Al Gore. He loves telling evangelical Christian audiences in Iowa and South Carolina that he believes in evolution. In fact, he has brought the subject up, unsolicited, in the last two national debates. It seems that Huntsman has some monkey business on the brain.

So what is going on?

Here is the answer my friends, Jon Huntsman is running for a cabinet position in Barack Obama’s second term as president. He will let his GOP rivals pile on. He will let the GOP audiences sneer. He will remain the gentleman, above the mean spirited debate around him. And he will bask in the glory afforded him by an adoring mainstream media, who favors Obama’s re-election anyway. And when duly re-elected Barack Obama, declared by the Sienna Institute to be the 15th greatest president of all time, will grandly announce to the American people, “I am going to keep my promise, I am going to do everything I can to unite this country, even to the point of naming a Republican to my cabinet” he will call for Jon Huntsman. Obama will be shown reaching all the way across the aisle to the GOP to pick one of their own presidential contenders as his new Secretary of Commerce. Only he really won’t have to reach very far to get his man. And Huntsman is obviously not “contending” for the nomination. The media, with a straight face, will say “what a bipartisan, statesman-like gesture by our dear president.”

Jon Huntsman has all the credentials to be in an Obama cabinet. He is a second generation billionaire who knows how to be play the game. He was Ambassador to Singapore for George Herbert Walker Bush and Ambassador to China for Barack Obama. And that means he understands well that former Ambassadors, from time immemorial, especially when they are wealthy, are expected to pay for their position after the president leaves office. After all, an ambassador keeps his title for life. It is the closest thing we have to royalty in America. And if the president should die, the ambassador should be very generous to his family. It is like a Lord and his King. A former president, for example, should be able to count on the use of the former ambassador’s corporate jet, or the box seats at a favorite sporting event, or a plush position on the board of directors of one of the billionaire’s companies.

Huntsman must play this game especially well, since he has been “knighted” by both Republican and Democrat administrations. What can he do for an encore? Surely he does not want another Ambassadorship.

You can bet that you won’t hear Jon Hunstman echoing Ron Paul, Michelle Bachman and Rick Perry, calling for an audit of the Federal Reserve. His companies may need some of those billions, beyond the reach of the ordinary folks.

And for those who feel sorry for a very eloquent and intelligent man, who seems to have fallen way behind in the presidential race? Well, save your pity for another. Jon Huntsman is actually very far ahead in the race to be in President Obama’s next cabinet. Only Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta are ahead of him. And there is a danger of getting too far out front, something that Clinton and Panetta know well and Huntsman should remember. So we should hear him step it up a bit with a little more partisan language. If he is going to be of any use for Obama he has to at least try to sound like a Republican.

It is all part of his plan. The only thing that can go wrong now? Well, one of the Republicans might win.

Ron Paul: You think Hurricane Irene was bad? Wait till you experience FEMA

Governor Dan Malloy of Connecticut called presidential candidate Ron Paul an idiot last Thursday. He was answering a loaded question on CNN, responding to Congressman Paul’s concern about a bankrupted FEMA. This government agency, founded in 1978, now doles out money to victims of natural disasters. Of course, Malloy is salivating over that well earned money coming his way. His insult to Congressman Paul must reflect the high anxiety involved. It must be very stressful to have this whole notion questioned, right when you’ve won the lottery.

Privately, Ron Paul staffers tell the story of a constituent who called his office asking for relief from FEMA. It seems they had draped his house with a tarp. They thought it had a leaky roof. It turned out that FEMA had made a mistake. The damaged roof belonged to a neighbor’s house. The constituent had called FEMA, asking for permission to transfer the tarp to the other home. “No way,” an official from FEMA ordered, “If you touch that tarp you will be arrested.”

Huh? Congressman Paul’s constituent was a bit perplexed. Had he lost his house? Was it now the government’s house?

Actually, in his now famous Fox News Sunday interview, Ron Paul expressed compassion for the victims of Hurricane Irene and only then brought up the very real question of how FEMA, now on the verge of bankruptcy, should function. Paul told a tale of corruption. How money is awarded to contractors without bids. Paul suggested that American pull in a little bit from it’s overseas empire and bring some of the money home to help those in need, like the victims of the hurricane. He said the national guard should be home helping in a crisis like this, that this was more of its role than the endless wars overseas. CNN and Malloy missed that.

Here are some numbers to give you a little perspective. Hurricane Irene is the most expensive natural disaster in American history, topping $ 20 billion. Since 2000, America has given that much in military and humanitarian aid to Pakistan. This is the country that harbored Osama Bin Laden. And we are still giving it money.

Meanwhile, we spent $1 trillion on the war in Iraq, where we soon learned that there were no weapons of mass destruction, nor Al Qaeda. That means that the entire bill for Hurricane Irene cost less than 2% of the War in Iraq. And what did we get for the war in Iraq? Well, Al Qaeda which we thought was there, has now finally arrived. I suppose that is worth something. The Christian church, which flourished as a protected minority under Saddam Hussein, has been killed off or driven out. There is now Sharia law and the nation has tilted to Iran. Once its bitterest enemy, Iran is now its new found friend. Way to go gang. Hoorah.

Here is some more perspective. We now know, thanks to a partial audit, that in 2008 alone, the Federal Reserve spent $16 trillion to help shore up the American economy. $3 trillion went to other countries. Billions went to selected corporations. Can you spell corruption? This money, spent in 2008 alone, is more than the entire national debt, which is now topping $14 trillion.

So again, who is the idiot that raised the question about spending money? Isn’t money just little numbers that are transferred electronically? Who cares? We can always make more little digits. Right? Governor Malloy can relax. The rest of the country will continue to obsorb these pay days doled out by elitist politicians and often to their elitist cronies. The wars will be financed, the disaster funds replenished and we will solve the jobs problem by just having the government hire everyone. Let’s see, I would like to be paid $100,000 a year to enforce tarp placement on roofs with suspected leaks. And God help the citizen who touches my tarps.

Bill Clinton to Obama: Forget congress, raise the debt ceiling yourself

Yesterday Bill Clinton suggested that President Barack Obama ignore congress and just raise the debt ceiling limit himself. He would supposedly invoke the 14th Amendment to the Constitution as his rationale and let the courts decide the issue. Obama demurred.

This is all no accident. Having worked in the White House I can tell you that no former president, let alone one whose wife is the Secretary of State, would sandbag the White House by making such a statement without checking in for instructions. My guess is that Clinton called and told the White House what he was going to say and why and what impact it would have. And the White House mulled it over and decided it would work for them. Either that or the White House asked Clinton for help and this was his answer. “Hey, I appointed your wife Secretary of State. Time to step up.”

What is going on? Several things. First, the statement shows that Clinton is very much in Obama’s camp. This is important because Clinton was the last president to balance the budget. His economic stewardship is looking better and better when compared to the runaway spending of the Obama administration with its $1.2 trillion annual budget deficits. This puts Clinton and all of his prestige on the line with Obama and his European style neo-socialism. Second, it serves as a threat to an already diminished U.S. Congress. “The President might just do this without you.” Third, this illustrates just how dangerously close we are to abandoning the Constituion altogether. More and more this is a nation ruled by the celebrity of the presidency and the national media.

TIME magazine recently devoted a cover story to the debate. By any standards, we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis. How did this happen? How did we wake up one morning to find our system of government changing right underneath our feet?

As a student of history I can say that this should come as no great surprise. This is what happens when there is a severe economic downturn. The last Great Depression saw the rise of communism and fascism in Europe, with Stalin and Hitler and the death of more than 100 million people. In this, perhaps the second worst depression in world history, we in America are experiencing some of the more traumatic political changes. To be sure we don’t have jackbooted soldiers goose stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue but we are seeing the unthinkable, national leaders playing loose with the great American Constitution and freely, even joyously abandoning the free enterprise system. While European governments are turning to the private sector and backing away from the Welfare State, France, for example, reducing its payments for social services across the board, America is moving forward at a rapid pace.

In 2003, President George W. Bush launched a $1 trillion – off the books – war in Iraq. In 2008 he bailed out the banks, which in turn gave their executives $1.3 billion in bonuses with those same tax dollars that very same year. The move ran up record annual deficits of $500 billion. In Europe, when governments nationalized banks they were proudly called “socialist” governments. Francois Mitterrand, was the “Socialist” President of France. Slow to catch on, the American media and public continues to refer to George W Bush as a “conservative” Republican president.

Upon his election and with a full Democratic House and Senate behind him, President Barack Obama rolled out a stimulus package the likes of which the country had never seen. At a price tag of $787 billion, the President promised the plan would create and save between 3- 4 million American jobs. “Shovel ready jobs,” he called them.

At first there was a knee jerk reaction in the media and the nation. Didn’t such massive spending guarantee a revitalizing of the economy? Questions remained about whether it was right on wrong in the long term but all seemed to agree we would get a bump. In July, 2009, Newsweek proclaimed, “The Recession is Over.” But in fact, Newsweek was over. And the recession was still ongoing with unemployment higher than it ever was under Bush. Then came outcries of corruption. A USA Today study showed that counties who supported Democrat Barack Obama for president received twice as much money as counties who supported his Republican opponent. Recently, Obama joked, “I guess shovel ready wasn’t very shovel ready, was it?” Numerous university studies have concluded that zero jobs were created.

Bill Clinton’s comments yesterday seem a bit like a lifesaver being thrown to a drowning man, the downing man being Barack Obama. The last president to actually balance the budget was saying that he would just raise the debt ceiling arbitrarily. After all, we can’t default. Meanwhile on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressman Ron Paul made the point that we default all the time. When we allow the Federal Reserve to print money we are defaulting by knowingly and deliberately paying Seniors diluted dollars. We are cheating our contract with them, defaulting on the promised payments. The numbers are the same but what they can buy is now much less.

There was the Greenback default of 1862. There was the Liberty Bond default of 1934. The national media would have you believe that this is mostly a congressional problem now. But history is not so easily duped. With Obama in the White House and controlling the US Senate, and with his unprecedented spending and borrowing and creating of new money, he needs a way out as much as the congress or this will be seen for what it truly is; the Obama Default of 2011.

Ron Paul to Obama: Quit ordering Israel around!

In a statement released after the president’s speech, Thursday, May 19, 2011, Congressman Ron Paul took Barack Obama to task. “Unlike this president, I do not believe it is our place to dictate how Israel runs her affairs.”

Ron Paul’s statement, released immediately after the speech, reflected the congressman’s long held views against American leaders meddling in the affairs of other countries. “Israel is our close friend,” the statement reads, “While President Obama’s demand that Israel make hard concessions in her border conflicts may very well be in her long-term interest, only Israel can make that determination on her own, without pressure from the United States or coercion by the United Nations.”

Paul argues that America must stop trying to rule the world and dictate policy to foreign capitals and bring its armies home from its endless wars. Warning that the country is facing annual deficits of $ 2 trillion the congressman’s statement read in part, “Our military’s purpose is to defend our country, not to police the Middle East.”

Ron Paul has been at the forefront of a growing movement of Americans who feel that our national interventionism has gone to extreme and is making us enemies all over the globe. In the 2008 presidential debates, while Mitt Romney and John McCain argued over how long American troops should stay in Iraq, Paul was alone in saying that they shouldn’t have gone into the country in the first place.

It was a shocking statement at the time and both Romney and McCain smirked condescendingly, but today polls show two-thirds of the American people calling for a full withdrawal of American troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan.

“When will our leaders finally do what’s right for America,” Ron Paul’s statement asks, “And rethink this irrational approach we’ve followed for far too long?”

Paul has been critical of American’s foreign aid suggesting that it is conflicted and the money misused. He once described it as money taken from poor people in a rich country and given to rich people in poor countries. Paul has pointed out the absurdity of our policies. “We give $3 billion to Israel and $12 billion to her enemies.”

Obama’s stunning statement, siding with the Palestinian position, calling for Israel to return to its 1967 borders would mean among other things the loss of the Golan Heights and most of Jerusalem.

The statement comes only hours before his Friday meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Many devout Christians and Jews saw the return of Jerusalem to Israel in 1967 as a fulfillment of Bible prophecy. An NBC report from Cairo Thursday night showed little enthusiasm among Middle Easterners for President Obama’s speech.

It remains to be seen how deep the anger will be in America. President Obama’s decision may have come at a heavy political price at home with little gain in the Islamic world.

See: Ron Paul Makes Sense

Osama is dead, Obama’s re-election is alive!

There has been more than one casualty in America’s successful raid into Pakistan to get Osama Bin Laden.  Republican chances to take back the White House are equally dead.  At least for the moment.

It is hard to think of anything that can happen on the world stage, or in the American economy, that could change the atmosphere.  Unemployment at 10%?  Long lines at service stations?  Runaway inflation?  Forget it.  None of that can now drain President Obama’s political equity.

Some in the media had begun to compare Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, well think again.  Think what would have happened if Carter’s raid to rescue the hostages in Iran had not broken down in the desert?  Think of those rescued hostages and their weeping spouses standing with Carter in the Rose Garden.  Compare Obama to THAT Jimmy Carter and you get just a sense of what has happened here politically.

Remember, some pundits were harping on how Obama was really soft on Islamic Jihad, trying to pretend that there was no such thing as an “Islamic” terrorist, changing the language, bowing before a Saudi King, tilting American policy toward the Palestinians and conflicted about what to do in Libya?  Now, such issues have been erased at the speed of a Ronald Reagan joke.

Barack Obama’s leadership in getting Osama Bin Laden is clear.  It was Obama who took great heat in naming Leon Paneta as Director of the CIA.  Paneta was a political animal who had served as chief of staff to Bill Clinton and not just chief of staff, but one of the most successful in American history.  Cabinet members get listed in the Alamanc, have giant oil paintings of their faces hung in long marble hallways but in our modern presidency chiefs of staff really run the country and sometimes the world.  Their political skills are finely honed.  Obama wanted the best at the CIA and now we know why.  He wanted something done.

Incidentally, there is no better tribute to Paneta’s political skills than his recent move to Department of Defense.  If the operation to get Bin Laden were successful, he would get the credit.  If it failed, if another helicopter had malfunctioned, and Pakistan had reacted to our incursion and there had been a major blow up of relations between America and an Islamic nation with nuclear weapons, well, like the Bay of Pigs, the new man had messed up.  This is the sort of Nixonian genius it took to get a Bin Laden.

Likewise, Obama’s handling of expectations was superb.  While George W. Bush, the master of expectations, uncharacteristically raised the bar, saying that we would get Bin Laden, even if it took a year, but implying that it was weeks away, Barack Obama learned the lesson and never said a thing beyond his early campaign promise that this should be, and would be, his priority.  What has happened is a clear vindication of Obama’s decision and style.

Besides the American people themselves, and the president, Leon Paneta is the big winner.  Obama could do much worse than make him his running mate in 2012.  It would be a daily reminder on the campaign trail that “We got Bin Laden.  It is sunshine again in America.”  Just keep in mind that presidents almost never change their running mates.  It is not only politically disruptive to all the players who have developed their relationships with Vice President Biden, it is an admission of sorts, that Obama could have done better last time.

And how does this huge event impact the Republican nomination process?

Potential candidates that were not sure of their commitment will now probably drop out sooner.  This could mean Sarah Palin and even possibly Mike Huckabee, whose television-radio career makes him richer by the day. Meanwhile, new candidates, like Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachman  and Jon Huntsman may benefit from the vacuum.

Frontrunner, Mitt Romney should have an easier path to the nomination.  If he still wants it.  In the latest poll he was the only Republican who beat the president in a head to head contest.  And that was last week.  Now, the impossible quest of defeating Barack Obama will require evangelical Christians and Mormons to get along and make peace to win, which should ease the way for a Romney nomination.   Romney is a Mormon, Palin and Huckabee are both evangelical Christians.

But the big winner in the GOP may just be congressman Ron Paul who leads a movement.  He will lose some of his libertarian Democrat support, who will coalesce behind their newly popular president.  But with Osama Bin Laden dead, Ron Paul’s call for an end to the multiple wars and millions of dollars in aid to countries like Pakistan may resonate even further.  One can hear Ron Paul’s argument, “You mean we borrowed money from China and gave it to Pakistan while they protected Osama Bin Laden?”  And Dr. Paul’s call for economic reform, including an audit of the FED, is now widely embraced by the American public.

The fact is this.  Within 24 hours the world changed.  Obama is back in the driver’s seat.  If he can get an economic bounce, even a little fake, money supply bounce, he will be unbeatable.  And the economic collapse of American will be postponed a few years more.

HOW WILL BARACK OBAMA BE RANKED IN HISTORY?

In 2010 the distinguished Sienna Institute determined that Barack Obama was the 15th greatest president of all time and George W. Bush the sixth worst.  The survey reveals much more about the school girl crush academia has on liberal politicians than anything about our last two presidents.  Here is the cold, hard truth.

Yes, the election of Barack Obama was a great historical event.  It was a moment of such staggering import that no other event in presidential history can compare.  One has to go outside of the American political box to an event such as the landing on the moon to find an equal.  Keep in mind that eight of the first twelve presidents had slaves in the White House.  And yet, even so, Barack Obama, who is currently presiding over the second worse economic recession in American History, and has brought us to the economic brink, is not the 15th greatest president.  Sorry.  No president who has allowed such bad numbers for such a long time has ever ranked very high.

This is not an attack on Mr. Obama.  The odds were stacked against him. Consider the following, of the last ten presidents only four were re-elected.  And of those four, one resigned in disgrace, one was impeached and one left office with one of the lowest approval ratings for a president in his last month in office since such polling began, having led American into its second worst depression.  Only one, Mr. Reagan, left with any degree of dignity.

Well, as Mr. Obama says even now, “It took us a long time to get into this, it is going to take us some time to get out of it.”  Which is his way of saying, “George did it.”

It is an intriguing notion but if one is going to use it to rank the presidents then one must be consistent.  One must give Reagan credit for the Clinton economic years.  After all, Reagan won the Cold War and it was the peace dividend that set the economy on a record trajectory.  Clinton could have humbly deferred credit, saying in a paraphrase of Obama, “It took us a long time to get this thing  going and I am just grateful that it is still happening on my watch.”

And Carter should get credit for the release of the American hostages, which only happened the day of Reagan’s inauguration.  In fact, one could play this game all the way to Washington.  Historians allowing Obama slack on this lingering recession would especially owe an apology to John Tyler, whom they disparage.  For it was Tyler who laid the groundwork for bringing Texas into the United States not James K. Polk who signed the deal.

The point is that you have to judge the presidents on how they play the cards that are dealt them.   The historians of the Sienna Institute rank Obama high on “communication.”  But if Obama knew it was going to take more than two years to end the recession he should have “communicated” that earlier.   We are left with the impression that he is as surprised that his policies don’t work as we are.

They rank him high on “imagination.”   But his plan to solve the mortgage crisis didn’t even make a dent and even now he lingers, with no solution, although this was the major issue that helped elect him.  Obama’s deficit spending in relation to the GDP is perilously close to that of Greece.   Unemployment  has remained high, close to nine percent, and for a longer time than in any other period of our modern history outside of the Great Depression.

Yes, the banking crisis and the first months of the recession were George’s fault.  The latter might be partially laid at the feet of a $ 1 trillion – off the books – war in Iraq.   But the fact that the recession continues month after month can only be laid at the feet of President Barack Obama.

At this writing food prices are spiking all over the world.  It is what many writers, including yours truly, said would happen.  It is the much anticipated consequence of the U. S. Federal Reserve flooding the market with new dollars.  Ironically, it is a tax on the poor, including many inner city African Americans who are now suffering.

Will Barack Obama be re-elected in 2012?

Almost everyone in public life is rooting for Barak Obama.  Do you remember that famous, jubilant  NEWSWEEK cover story of 2009, declaring that the recession was over?  Little did we know at the time that the recession was just getting started.  It was NEWSWEEK that was over.

And there is no doubt that the economy will get a positive bump before 2012.  That even happened during the George W. Bush recession.  There are always positive bumps in bad times and negative dips in good times.  There yet may be some solutions to the mortgage crisis.  It would not take much for this administration to improve on that.  And unemployment will eventually change.  It is unthinkable that it will hold at this rate for two more years.

So yes, almost any good news at all might be enough to help Barack Obama get re-elected.  But it will not move him into the top tier ranking of American presidents.  Too many have suffered too long for that to happen.  And if he doesn’t get that “lucky” positive bump, he will not only fail to be re-elected, he will likely fall to the bottom tier of any presidential rankings.

Obama Inauguration

How FDR got us out of the Great Depression: Lessons for today

Conservatives and Liberals still argue about government’s role in ending the Great Depression and many people see the discussion more relevant today than ever before.  Conservatives point to a compelling 2004 study by two UCLA economics professors showing that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies actually prolonged the recovery.  Written four years before the recent crisis the report concludes that “ill conceived stimulus policies” prolonged the Depression.  But the conventional wisdom of history flows with such force that in 2008 George W. Bush dare not risk laissez faire.

The real story of how America came out of the Great Depression, and FDR’s role in the process, may be less about liberal and conservative government policies and more about good business sense than most modern ideologues might suspect.  The real story is about gold.  And FDR’s frugal, exacting, yes even “conservative,” management style.

What unfolding historic records now show is that FDR picked the British clean, that is, he rearmed Britain in her hour of need, giving her the weapons to stand up against Hitler, but only in exchange for “real wealth.”  First it was gold bullion.  At one point, when Britain dallied, claiming difficulty in getting the gold safely transported, a helpful FDR dispatched an American Battleship to Cape Town, South Africa to complete the task.  We not only took Britain’s gold, we took much of the French gold that had been smuggled out before the collapse of France and much of the Czech gold that had been smuggled out before the collapse of Czechoslovakia.

When the gold bullion was gone, we picked up military bases on British soil around the world.  At one point, Churchill offered the American president entire islands but FDR was too shrewd for that.  It would mean caring for the natives, providing food and employment.  No, FDR just took naval bases, thank you.  And when those were all strategically selected, he took intellectual property, such as radar and the beginnings of our atomic research, a story that until now, has been conveniently ignored by history.  To hear our version, it all happened under the bleachers at the University of Chicago.  Any work of British scientists is downplayed.  The full story of the Maud Committee, which operated in Great Britain in 1940, and developed the concepts of uranium enrichment and fission bomb design, is quickly passed over.

To give you an idea of how all of this put America to work and not only primed the pump and brought us out of the Great Depression but launched us into Super Power status, consider a communiqué from British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill to Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s personal envoy.  The time is June, 1941, when Hitler is launching Barbarossa, his invasion of the Soviet Union.  On the 26^th Churchill writes that Britain will need seven months, maybe even nine months, of all available American tank production.  Imagine, no show rooms, no salesmen, no newspaper advertising needed.  Everything being manufactured is already sold in advance.  You get a bit of the picture of how American rocketed out of the Great Depression.

Before the war was over workers at General Motors and Ford in Detroit, Michigan, Nash-Kelvinator in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Studebaker in South Bend, Indiana, were all working in shifts around the clock, manufacturing armed vehicles for the USA, Britain and the Soviet Union.  This was not government stimulus.  This was American work, productivity.  We were manufacturing something that others were willing to buy.

Many times FDR’s emissaries would return from visits to Churchill’s weekend retreat, completely convinced that the cupboard’s were empty, that there was nothing left in Britain to pay for more American production, that the British Empire had been stripped clean.  We now had a moral imperative to defend Britain freely, they would say, to save Western Civilization.  But the wily Roosevelt was always dubious.  There had to be something more, natural resources from the colonies, perhaps something more from Canada or elsewhere that can be bartered and sent our way.  Only when Great Britain was absolutely threadbare, and the Commonwealth reasonably raided as well, and FDR’s many envoys and spies assured him that there was nothing left, did he generously announce “Lend Lease,” which meant we would now finally “loan” Britain the money to buy even more from us.  That was 18 months after the beginning of World War Two.

This is not to say that we Americans were not generous.  At the end of the war, under Harry Truman we offered magnificent loans of product and equipment to Great Britain, with minimal interest.  Our Marshall Plan saved France and Germany and the rest of Europe from descending into poverty.  It alone represented a subsidy of $13 billion at a time when our national GDP was $258 billion. But rather this is to show how American production, not American deficit spending, brought us out of the Great Depression.  And how our initial management of that production created the wealth we could later shower upon the world. It was the biggest transfer of wealth in the shortest period of time in modern history.  It dwarfs what the oil cartel has done since the 1970’s.  The British finally paid back their debts to the United States in December, 2006.

Well, you might say, “Why haven’t I heard about all of this before?” And the answer is that only now are historians beginning to catch up with the truth of those years for much of it was buried as “classified” by the Anglo-American governments.  And then, interested parties had their own political reasons for crafting alternative versions.  Churchill, for example, had no desire to go down in history as the man who lost the British Empire.  Indeed as politicians often do, he successfully portrayed himself as the very opposite, the man who tried to hold it together, wrapping himself in the Union Jack and openly mourning the ongoing loss of British colonies.

Keep in mind.  Wealth is basically what people want.  It may be oil to run automobiles, or timber to build houses and schools.  In the middle ages, timber was so scarce in Great Britain that stealing wood was a hanging offense.  Just as stealing a horse was in the American West.  So wealth may be a horse, or timber, iron, oil, diamonds or gold.  And while man can often create his own wealth, such as mixing cooper with iron to create the more malleable bronze for fashioning new weapons or tools, or today building computers or automobiles in a manufacturing plant, much of the wealth of the world is natural, God given, taken from the land and then transformed by man.

The British Empire had virtually ruled the world for a hundred of its three hundred years of existence.  The sun never set on their Empire.  So for years this natural wealth flowed in ships to the British Isles or was traded with neighboring nations for something else and that resource or luxury was then brought home.  It was extracted from the earth by colonial labor, a more politically acceptable form of serfdom.  And all those years those tiny British Isles were defended by the world’s greatest navy.

Now, all of this begs the following questions.  If FDR would not accept paper notes as repayment for American loans to our English speaking brothers, if he demanded gold bullion, iron ore, oil, diamonds, timber, intellectual property, military bases, all at a time when Hitler threatened western civilization, then why would the communist regime in the People’s Republic of China accept anything less?  Why would China subsidize and finance a trillion dollar American war in Iraq and accept printed paper money, diluted in value by inflation, as its repayment?

In 1940-41, Great Britain used her wealth to buy product from the United States, the greatest manufacturer on earth.  And when she had no wealth, we loaned her the money to buy even more and indebt future generations.  Today, the United States has used its wealth to buy product from the People’s Republic of China, the greatest manufacturer on earth.  And now that we have no wealth, she is loaning us the money to buy more.

So what will China now demand in repayment?  Will she demand intellectual property?  Weapon research? Military bases? Natural resources? The British repaid us in 2006, when will we repay China?

America’s economic and political future depends on your view of history.  If you still believe that she emerged from the great depression through government deficit spending and stimulus programs, our future will be bright indeed.  For our spending today in relation to GDP is staggering and is not far off from our spending of 1941-45.  But if you believe that America worked or produced her way out of the Great Depression in exchange for “wealth.”  If you believe that the bulging gold reserves of Fort Knox made us the world’s richest nation, then we may soon find ourselves in the position of Great Britain and Europe at the end of World War Two.  They were then at the mercy of the generosity of the United States.  We will be at the mercy of the People’s Republic of China.