Editors Note : No Mr President Camden is not an example of hope , its just another example of policies put in place by the Democrat Party that have totally destroyed a city and an example policies that are totally destroying a country ! Camden , like Detroit and Baltimore is another warning of what not to do ! Camden is the future if we don’t change our ways .
Is the media really going to pretend Camden is anything but a dump , a disastrous failure and a warning?
PBA Prez Colligan to Camden-touring Obama: ‘You are being misled’
In a letter today to the Camden-touring President of the United States, the State Policemen’s Benevolent Association told Barack Obama that he has been misled to believe “PR spin” that the Camden County Metro Police Department is a success in battling violent crime that besets the waterfront south state city. (Pizarro/PolitickerNJ)
President Obama spoke last week as part of a panel about poverty and opportunity at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty. He was joined by Robert Putnam, author of “Our Kids,” and AEI President Arthur Brooks. The president spoke at length about his belief that, as a country, we need to invest in those who have not had opportunities. He said (emphasis mine):
A free market is perfectly compatible with us making investment in good public schools, public universities; investments in public parks; investments in a whole bunch — public infrastructure that grows our economy and spreads it around. But that’s, in part, what’s been under attack for the last 30 years. And so, in some ways, rather than soften the edges of the market, we’ve turbocharged it. And we have not been willing, I think, to make some of those common investments so that everybody can play a part in getting opportunity.
Later, the president went further in suggesting that our country’s investments in poor people have declined:
And right now, they [poor kids] don’t have those things [mentors, social networks, decent books and computers and so forth], and those things have been stripped away. You look at state budgets, you look at city budgets, and you look at federal budgets, and we don’t make those same common investments that we used to. And it’s had an impact. And we shouldn’t pretend that somehow we have been making those same investments. We haven’t been. And there’s been a very specific ideological push not to make those investments. That’s where the argument comes in.
It’s difficult to find the areas of disinvestment that the president is referring to. A 2014 report by the Cato Institute analyzed education spending trends by state and found that spending per student for K-12 education increased almost 200% from 1970-2010, in constant dollars.
Spending on poor families has also increased dramatically over the past few decades. The figure above shows spending in constant dollars on the four largest means-tested programs (excluding public health insurance programs). Food and nutrition assistance alone increased 78% since FY2005. And Medicaid spending far overshadows other means-tested programs at $276 billion in FY2014, an increase of 40% since FY2005. As a percent of GDP, federal spending on means-tested programs was 3.5% in FY 2014. It was 2.7% in FY2005 and 2.4% in FY2001, the last recession.
In response to President Obama’s comments, Arthur Brooks, President of AEI, talked about declaring peace on the social safety net and tackling middle-class entitlements, but appropriately argued for limits. He said:
So if you join me in believing the safety net is a fundamental, moral right, and it’s a privilege of our society to provide, you must avoid austerity and you must avoid insolvency. And the only way that you can do that is with smart policies.
And I’m 100 percent sure the president agrees with me about smart macro-economic public policies, so I’m not caricaturing his views either.
Since we believe that there should be public goods, then we’re really talking about the system that provides them and provides them efficiently.
Given what the data show on the substantial public investments that already exist, it seems appropriate to have a conversation on efficiently targeting them rather than discussing how to increase them even more.
Americans’ satisfaction with the direction of the country continues to slip, falling 6 percentage points from early this year, according to a new Gallup poll.
Twenty-six percent of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country, according to Gallup, returning to levels around the end of 2014, before a sharp 9-percentage-point uptick in satisfaction heading into the new year.
In the poll, which parallels a similar drop in economic confidence, Gallup notes, respondents list government, the economy and unemployment as top problems.
During President Obama’s term, satisfaction topped 36 percent in August 2009, but has ranged between 11 percent and 33 percent since then, according to Gallup.
A stalemate in the Senate would leave the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) without powers they have used to track terrorists for years, say supporters of the Patriot Act.
Without action by the end of the month, key provisions of the Patriot Act will expire, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argues would put the United States at a pre September 11, 2001-footing.
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Yet McConnell has no definite path to extend those provisions.
He and other hawkish senators are pressing for an extension of the key Patriot Act measures, but they are opposed by other senators, the White House and a majority of House lawmakers in both parties.
The House voted last week to approve reforms to the NSA provisions in an overwhelming 338-88 vote.
McConnell filed a short-term extension of existing law just 24 hours later, signaling his determination to move in a different direction.
Observers say it’s increasingly looking like the standoff could result in no action by Congress, which would mean the Patriot Act provisions would lapse.
That would be a worst-case scenario for the NSA, but a pipe dream for ardent civil libertarians who have been rooting for such a result.
“Right now that we’re down to the wire… it’s just not clear to me how you get authorization through the Senate and the House,” said Neema Singh Guliani, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union and critic of the law.
Defenders of the NSA say that would be disastrous for national security.
“Congress must act to reauthorize” the provisions, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) — two hawkish members of their respective Intelligence Committees — warned in an op-ed for Fox News on Friday. “The alternative is too dangerous.”
At issue is Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the federal government to collect “any tangible things” that are “relevant” to an investigation into terrorist or foreign intelligence activity.
The NSA has used that to collect millions of people’s phone call “metadata” — which include information about the numbers involved in a call and when the call occurred, but not people’s actual conversations — without a warrant. Supporters say that’s a crucial tool that has allowed the government to connect the dots between possible terrorist suspects.
If Congress doesn’t act, the program would end, the White House has said. The NSA would simply stop collecting the records.
The green energy movement in America is dead. May it rest in peace. No, a majority of American energy over the next 20 years is not going to come from windmills and solar panels. One important lesson to be learned from the green energy fad’s rapid and expensive demise is that central planning doesn’t work.
What crushed green energy was the boom in shale oil and gas along with the steep decline in the price of fossil fuel that few saw coming just a few years ago.
A new International Energy Agency report concedes that green energy is in fast retreat and is getting crushed by “the recent drop in fossil fuel prices.” It finds that the huge price advantage for oil and natural gas means “fossil plants still dominate recent (electric power) capacity additions.”
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Most of the government experts—and many private investors too—bought into the “peak oil” nonsense and the forecasts of fuel prices continuing to rise as we depleted the oil from the Earth’s crust. Oil was expected to stay way over $100 a barrel and potentially soon hit $200 a barrel. National Geographic infamously advertised on its cover in 2004 “The End of Cheap Oil.”
Barack Obama told voters that green energy was necessary because oil is a “finite resource” and we would eventually run out. Apparently, Obama never read “The Ultimate Resource” by Julian Simon which teaches us that human ingenuity in finding new resources outpaces resource depletion.
When fracking and horizontal drilling technologies burst onto the scene, U.S. oil and gas reserves nearly doubled almost overnight. Oil production from 2007-2014 grew by more than 70 percent and natural gas production by nearly 30 percent.
The shale revolution is a classic disruptive technology advance that has priced the green movement out of the competitive market. Natural gas isn’t $13, but is now close to $3, an 80 percent decline. Oil prices have fallen by nearly half.
Green energy can’t possibly compete with that. Marketing windpower in an environment of $3 natural gas is like trying to sell sand in the Sahara. Instead of letting the green energy fad die a merciful death, the Obama administration only lavished more subsidies on the Solyndras of the world.
Washington suffered from what F.A. Hayek called the “fatal conceit.” Like the 1950s central planners in the Politburo, Congress and the White House thought they knew where the future was headed. According to a 2015 report by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, over the past 5 years, the U.S. government spent $150 billion on “solar power and other renewable energy projects.” Even with fracking changing the energy world, these blindfolded sages stuck with their wild green-eyed fantasy that wind turbines were the future.
Meanwhile, the return of $2.50 a gallon gasoline at the pump is flattening the battery car market. A recent report from the trade publication Fusion notes: “electric vehicle purchases in the U.S. have stagnated.” According to auto analysts at Edmunds.com, “only 45 percent of this year’s hybrid and EV trade-ins have gone toward the purchase of another alternative fuel vehicle. That’s down from just over 60 percent in 2012.”
Oil production from 2007-2014 grew by more than 70 percent and natural gas production by nearly 30 percent.
Edmunds.com says that “never before have loyalty rates for alt-fuel vehicles fallen below 50 percent” and it speculated that “many hybrid and EV owners are driven more by financial motives rather than a responsibility to the environment.” That’s what happens when the world is awash in cheap fossil fuels.
This isn’t the first time American taxpayers have been fleeced by false green energy dreams. In the late 1970s the Carter administration spent billions of dollars on the Synthetic Fuels Corporation which was going to produce fuel economically and competitively. Solar and wind power were also brief flashes in the pan. It all crash landed by 1983 when oil prices crashed to as low as $20 a barrel after Reagan deregulated energy. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation was one of the great corporate welfare boondoggles in American history.
A lesson should have been learned there—but Washington went all in again under Presidents Bush and Obama.
At least private sector investors have lost their own money in these foolish bets on bringing back energy sources from the Middle Ages—like wind turbines. The tragedy of government as venture capitalist is that the politicians lose our money. These government-backed technologies divert private capital away from potentially more promising innovations.
Harold Hamm, president of Continental Resources, and one of the discoverers of the Bakken Shale in North Dakota tells the story of meeting with Barack Obama at the White House in 2010 to tell him of the fracking revolution. Obama arrogantly responded that electric cars would soon replace fossil fuels. Was he ever wrong.
We don’t know if renewables will ever play a significant role in America’s energy mix. But if it does ever happen, it will be a result of market forces, not central planning.
The fact is that our recent college graduates are already costing our country billions of dollars every year. Not long ago, the average tenure for an entry-level worker was five years. Now, that average is below two years.
U.S. companies report that the average cost of replacing a single entry-level worker is $20,000 (lost productivity, recruitment, training, and other costs). Amortized over five years, that’s an annual overhead of $4,000. Amortized over just two years, however, it soars to $10,000 per year.
Our young workers have a hair-trigger when it comes to changing jobs, or even just quitting a job without a replacement in hand. This is costing our country $6,000 more per year per new entry-level worker. That’s money that could be much better spent on creating new jobs or paying higher salaries.
Our high schools and colleges need to start paying more attention to the “soft” career skills that our young workers need to land and keep good jobs after graduation.
The Federal Reserve’s ability to give emergency loans to distressed institutions in a crisis would be restricted under legislation being prepared by lawmakers who want to stop “backdoor bailouts”.
The proposed legislation — a striking challenge to the Fed from a bipartisan pair of senators — will reignite debate over whether the US succeeded in ending banks’ “too big to fail” status with its response to the financial crisis.
The Fed contained panic during the crisis by offering emergency loans to institutions facing liquidity crunches. But, after the meltdown, Congress introduced restrictions to prevent the bailout of single struggling entities, while preserving Fed powers to provide liquidity to groups of firms.
Americans Not In The Labor Force Rise To Record 93,194,000
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/08/2015 08:57 -0400
In what was an “unambiguously” unpleasant April jobs payrolls report, with a March revision dragging that month’s job gain to the lowest level since June of 2012, the fact that the number of Americans not in the labor force rose once again, this time to 93,194K from 93,175K, with the result being a participation rate of 69.45 or just above the lowest percentage since 1977, will merely catalyze even more upside to the so called “market” which continues to reflect nothing but central bank liquidity, and thus – the accelerating deterioration of the broader economy.
A federal court has decided that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk, warrantless collection of millions of Americans’ phone records is illegal.
The decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday represents the second major court victory for opponents of the NSA, after a lower court decision called the program nearly unconstitutional six months ago.
The phone records program “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized,” Judge Gerard Lynch wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel. The court did not examine the constitutionality of the surveillance program.
The map issued by the Pentagon to prove that Isis had lost territory shows how false optimism dominates the actions of the outside powers towards the Middle East.
A graphic illustration of Western wishful thinking about the decline of Islamic State (IS) is a well-publicised map issued by the Pentagon to prove that the self-declared caliphate has lost 25 per cent of its territory since its big advances last year.
Unfortunately for the Pentagon, sharp-eyed American journalists soon noticed something strange about its map identifying areas of IS strength. While it shows towns and villages where IS fighters have lost control around Baghdad, it simply omits western Syria where they have been advancing in and around Damascus.
The Pentagon displayed some embarrassment about its dodgy map, but it largely succeeded in its purpose of convincing people that IS is in retreat. Many news outlets across the world republished the map as evidence of the success of air strikes by the United States and its allies in support of the Iraqi army and Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria. The capture of Tikrit after a month-long siege is cited as a further sign that a re-energised Iraqi state is winning and one day in the not too distant future will be able to recapture Mosul in the north and Anbar province in the west.
U.S. Split Along Racial Lines on Backlash Against Police, Poll Finds
By JANET HOOK
Americans are bracing for a summer of racial disturbances around the country, such as those that have wracked Baltimore, with African Americans and whites deeply divided about why the urban violence has occurred, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has found.
A resounding 96% of adults surveyed said it was likely there would be additional racial disturbances this summer, a signal that Americans believe Baltimore’s recent problems aren’t a local phenomenon but instead are symptomatic of broader national problems.
When asked to explain recent events in Baltimore and other cities that have seen confrontations between police and members of the African-American community, blacks and whites viewed the situation differently.
Asked to choose between two possible explanations for recent events, 60% of blacks said they reflected “long-standing frustrations about police mistreatment of African Americans.” Some 27% of black respondents said the disturbances were caused by people who used protests over an African American man dying in police custody “as an excused to engage in looting and violence.”
But among whites, the balance of opinion flipped: 58% said people were seizing an excuse to loot, while 32% said the events reflected long-standing frustrations with police.
While most people in the survey predicted further racial disturbances this summer, a smaller share expected them to hit close to home. The poll found that 53% of whites and 46% of African Americans said it was likely there would be a racial disturbance in the metropolitan area nearest to them.
Full results of the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, including public opinion of the 2016 presidential contenders, will be released on Monday evening.
by JOEL GEHRKE May 2, 2015 3:24 PM
Carly Fiorina made the case for her prospective presidential candidacy on Saturday, just days before she’s expected to officially jump into the race, telling a room full of conservative activists and writers that she has the policy background and the political skills to beat Hillary Clinton in a general election. “Hillary Clinton may be a vulnerable candidate, in many ways, but we should not underestimate her,” Fiorina said at the National Review Institute Ideas Summit. “We have to have a nominee who can take punches, but we [also] have to have a nominee who will throw punches.”
Fiorina’s political ambitions have met with derision among political experts, given that the only people to serve as president without holding prior elected office were war heroes. Fiorina argued that her experience rising from the secretarial pool to CEO at Hewlett Packard makes her a true outsider who can direct the general disgust voters feel toward Washington, D.C. — and toward crony capitalism in particular — at Hillary Clinton.
From Ferguson to Baltimore, the nation’s first black president is encountering the limits of his power when it comes to healing the nation’s racial wounds.
A series of racially-charged police killings, most recently in Baltimore, are quickly becoming a part of President Obama’s second-term legacy, defying predictions that his election to the White House would help bridge the country’s oldest divide.
Obama appears increasingly frustrated by the situation, this week lashing out at people rioting in Baltimore as “thugs” and “criminals.”
The president has also brushed off critics who say his administration should be taking a more forceful approach toward police misconduct.
“The challenge for us as the federal government is, is that we don’t run these police forces,” he said Tuesday during a Rose Garden press conference. “I can’t federalize every police force in the country and force them to retrain.”
The president has struggled to find the right balance between backing law enforcement and criticizing their questionable practices when police-related deaths of black men occur.
WASHINGTON —Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) (R-Texas) on Wednesday blamed President Barack Obama for the racial tensions and unrest unrolling across the U.S., including the current turmoil in Baltimore, Maryland.
“President Obama, when he was elected, he could have been a unifying leader,” Cruz lamented in a question and answer session hosted by the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Instead, the presidential candidate argued, Obama “has made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions, that have divided us rather than bringing us tougher.”
As evidence of Obama’s poor record on the matter, Cruz pointed to vice president Joe Biden’s comments during the 2012 campaign, in which Biden claimed Republicanswould put African-Americans “back in chains.” Pressed by reporters at the Chamber of Commerce event to name a specific case where the president inflamed racial tensions, Cruz cited the 2011 “beer summit,” in which Obama invited black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to have a beer at the White House with white police Sgt. James Crowley, who had arrested Gates at his home.
Obama “has not used his role as president to bring us together,” Cruz said. “He has exacerbated racial misunderstandings.”
Obama’s Brother Joins Hamas, Says ‘Jerusalem Is Ours; We Are Coming’
by Shoebat Foundation on January 28, 2014 in Malik Obama
By Walid Shoebat and Ben Barrack
While in Sanaa, Yemein in 2010, President Barack Obama’s brother Malik Obama was at an event billed as the Orphans Development Fund (ODF) Conference. It’s quite the ironic title considering a group photo Malik is in that he has posted to his website. In the photo, he can be seen wearing a Hamas scarf (keffiyeh) that bears a well-known Palestinian slogan – ‘Jerusalem is ours – WE ARE COMING!’ It also includes a map of Palestine that says, ‘From the River to the Sea!’ In other words, Malik is saying, THERE IS NO ISRAEL.
Here is Malik Obama’s boss (Malik works for him officially in his capacity as IDO Executive Secretary), Suar al-Dahab during a visit to Gaza last year at a Hamas event with the group’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Notice he’s wearing a similar keffiyeh at a conference entitled, ‘Aiding Jerusalem and Gaza”:
Here is Malik in 2010, with al-Dahab in Khartoum, Sudan during the Islamic Da’wa Organization (IDO) conference, presided over by Sudan’s terrorist leader Omar al-Bashir, who belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood and is wanted for crimes against humanity:
