THE PRESIDENT WHO NEVER WAS

As the article below emphasizes, America seems to have elected a man to be the POTUS who cannot seem to grasp the nature of that job.

Barack Obama was a very effective candidate on the campaign trail. Far better than his rival John McCain. With a resume smaller than a standard business card, he convinced enough voters to put him into office with a campaign based almost solely on words.

As most Americans now acknowledge, at least in terms of job approval, Obama won the office but has failed to be presidential. The aforementioned article makes note of some examples.

It appears that perpetual campaigning is the one thing Barack Obama is good at and seems to like to do continually.

Leadership on the other hand is a bird of a very different feather. Neither Obama, nor it seems his advisers, have even the remotest of clues as to what is required of a leader. Particularly one who happens to be the leader of the free world.

Most can agree it is not about doing Letterman or living extravagantly in the midst of economic hardship or promoting the Olympics and playing golf while our troops fight and die on the battlefield or acting with arrogance and self-centeredness or making fantastic claims that even the most superficial observer knows simply are not true, and so on and so forth.

None of this things are worthy of the office of the President. None of these things are even closely related to the traits that are shared amongst the great leaders of history or even average leaders today.

Obama is a painfully self-important man and he seems to be unaware, or worse yet uncaring, regarding his immense flaws and inappropriate behavior.

Clearly he is not a leader and his term in office, at least to date, leaves our ship of state without a captain. Can we expect that he will gain enough wisdom to change course?

Probably not.

The Campaign Is Long Over, Mr. President

By RICHARD COHEN

Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States. As of yet, though, he does not act that way, appearing promiscuously on television and granting interviews like the presidential candidate he no longer is.

The election has been held, but the campaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief.

Take last week's G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh. There, the candidate-in-full commandeered the television networks and the leaders of Britain and France to give the Iranians a dramatic warning. Yet another of their secret nuclear facilities had been revealed and Obama, as anyone could see, was determined to do something about it — just don't ask what.

The entire episode had a faux Cuban missile crisis quality to it.

Something menacing had been discovered — not Soviet missiles a mere 100 miles or so off Florida, but an Iranian nuclear installation about 100 miles from Tehran. As befitting the occasion, various publications supplied us with nearly minute-by-minute descriptions of the crisis atmosphere earlier in the week at the U.N. session — the rushing from room to room, presidential aides conferring, undoubtedly aware that they were in the middle of a book they had yet to write. I scanned the accounts looking for familiar names. Where was McNamara? Where was Bundy? Where, in fact, was the crisis?

In fact, there was none. The supposedly secret installation had been known to Western intelligence agencies — Britain, France, the U.S. and undoubtedly Israel — for several years. Its existence had been deduced by intelligence analysts from Iranian purchases abroad, and it was pinpointed sometime afterward. What had changed was that news of it had gone public.

This happened not because Obama announced it but because the Iranians beat him to it after discovering that their cover was blown. They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug.

Potential War

No one should believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran seems intent on developing a nuclear weapons program and the missiles capable of delivering them. This — not the public revelations of a known installation — is the real crisis, possibly one that can only end in war. It is entirely possible that Israel, faced with that chilling cliche — an existential threat — will bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.

What would happen next is anyone's guess — retaliation by Hamas and Hezbollah, an unprecedented spike in oil prices and then, after a few years or less, a resumption of Iran's nuclear program. Only the U.S. has the capability to obliterate Tehran's underground facilities. Washington may have to act.

For a crisis such as this, the immense prestige of the American presidency ought to be held in reserve. Let the secretary of state issue grave warnings. When Obama said in Pittsburgh that Iran is "going to have to come clean and they are going to have to make a choice," it had the sound of an ultimatum. But what if the Iranians don't? What then? A president has to be careful with such language. He better mean what he says.

Losing Credibility

The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" — and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health care plan — and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees — and then again maybe he would.

Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health care legislation — "Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town ... " — and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence — meet it or else.

Obama lost credibility with his deadline-that-never-was, and now he threatens to lose some more with his posturing toward Iran. He has gotten into a demeaning dialogue with Ahmadinejad, an accomplished liar.

(The next day, the Iranian used a news conference to counter Obama and, days later, Iran tested some intermediate-range missiles.)

Obama is our version of a Supreme Leader, not given to making idle threats, setting idle deadlines, reversing course on momentous issues, creating a TV crisis where none existed or, unbelievably, pitching Chicago for the 2016 Olympics. Obama's the president. Time he understood that.

© 2009 Investor's Business Daily, Inc

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USPS: THE POSTER CHILD FOR GOVERNMENT RUN ENTERPRISE

Were we to put the government in charge of running our health care system, we could all expect to end up going postal.

As the accompanying story documents, the government cannot adequately run anything, including delivering the mail.

The truly logic free and evidence free argument pushed forward by statists and socialists both at home and abroad is that the government can do a better job than the private sector in most enterprise arenas. As we have seen with the postal service, Amtrak and health care for Native Americans as well as Veterans, such contentions are simply not true.

That is not to say that the private sector is perfect or for that matter always competent. But the nice thing about the competitive nature of the free market is the prospect of someone coming along with a better service or product than what is otherwise available. That tends to keep providers and producers honest since the loss of market share means the end of business for those who cannot keep pace.

Government does not have that reality to deal with and, as most Americans know, customer service is an unknown concept with most all government service providers. Because government has unlimited resources, it can be inefficient and ineffective in what it does and not have to worry. Government can enter the marketplace, do nothing but lose money and continue to survive since there is no need to make a profit. The taxpayer will always pick up the bill, even when it means going into unsustainable debt to do so.

Private sector organizations cannot compete with that in the long term. In the health care arena, a low cost, taxpayer subsidized insurance option will eliminate private insurance options over time. At the end of the day, when a private company cannot meet it's cost of doing business it can no longer compete. Government does not have that challenge and can go on without concern.

The USPS is the perfect poster child for government run enterprise. It has been losing money and business for years but it continues to be funded. In this particular case, government mail service has lost out to private competition as well as factors such as email and other electronic options for document delivery. Has that led to the end of the USPS or, for that matter, any significant business model adjustments to meet the realities of the modern marketplace? Not really.

But the post office is still in business. Why? Because us hard working taxpayers are forced to pay the bill.

A Postal Service bailout? By: David Rogers

The House voted Thursday to freeze Medicare Part B premiums for most elderly next year, even as Democrats moved to exempt the Postal Service from having to make $4 billion in payments due next week to cover retirement health benefits for its employees. The back-to-back actions reflect a flurry of last minute multi-billion-dollar fixes, often without warning, as the government approaches the new fiscal year beginning next Thursday, Oct. 1. Democrats hope the Medicare premium freeze, which sailed through on a 406-18 vote, will defuse what would otherwise be an October surprise for health care reform — threatened cuts in Social Security checks for millions of elderly. In the case of the Postal Service, the action closely tracks a House bill approved Sept. 15 but would allow proponents to get past the Senate now without the threat of amendments. At a meeting of House and Senate Appropriations Committee negotiators Thursday morning, the Postal Service language was incorporated into a stop-gap continuing resolution, or CR, that Congress must enact in the next week to keep the full government operations. As adopted, the postal agency, which now faces a liability of $5.4 billion due Sept. 30, would have to pay only $1.4 billion and would be allowed to effectively defer the remaining $4 billion until after 2017. “That’s good news” said a Postal Service spokesman, who argued the arrangement posed no risk for the taxpayer since the retirement fund holds $32 billion at this time. Nonetheless, critics argued the $4 billion will now be added as a potential cost on the government’s books given the fragile state of the Postal Service, and the whole handling of the issue is seen by many as a parliamentary sleight-of-hand. Republicans made no effort to target the postal provision but complained it had been added without warning to the otherwise non-controversial 30 day resolution. Moreover, to doubly protect their work product, the Democratic leadership for the Appropriations Committees has wrapped it into an otherwise non-controversial $4.65 billion budget bill covering the operations of the Capitol and such agencies as the Library of Congress. This legislative conference report can now be brought back to the House and Senate floor with special privileges that help avoid amendments. House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) pointed to fact that Republicans had used a similar ploy with a CR three years ago when they were in power and insisted he had been upfront about the tactics in a public meeting. Ranking Republican, Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, countered that the whole strategy was “one of the most cynical legislative maneuvers I’ve ever seen.” And Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) said Democrats made matters worse by wrapping the spending provision into the legislative appropriations bill –taking care of Congress’s “backyard” and doing little for the rest of the nation. On a 7-4 vote, House negotiators rejected an effort by Lewis to strike the proposed CR from the conference report on the legislative bill. But despite the cost, neither House nor Senate Republicans in the talks made any direct effort to target the Postal provision. In truth, many had voted for the relief when a free-standing bill on the same issue passed the House 388-32 Sept. 15. And in the case of the Medicare fix, Republicans were more upset with the process than the policy. “Democracy cannot work if we don’t let the people know why we’re making decisions, what the policy implications are not just to our senior citizens but to all our citizens,” said Texas Rep. Joe Barton, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He said Democrats had treated himself and other Republicans “cavalierly” and owed the country at least a hearing to explain what they had just done. Without some intervention by Congress, Medicare is slated to announce next month increased Part B premiums, which are typically deducted from a retiree’s Social Security check to help pay for physician services. This would be a routine event but for an unusual combination of circumstances this year that could result in some seniors being asked to pay as much as 14 percent more than their current premiums. For those impacted, that increase could mean a real cut in their Social Security checks next year, since retirees aren’t expected to get a cost-of-living increase in January given the drop in the consumer price index this year. For Democrats, who hope to be on the House and Senate floors with health care legislation next month, this would be a political nightmare. And as evidenced by the final vote, Republicans also concluded that to do nothing would be inequitable to those elderly who face the largest increases. All this happens against a background in which one of the biggest spending fights this week—over highway and transit investments—has been between Republicans themselves. This was seen Wednesday when the House had to decide whether to back the bipartisan leadership of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which is battling both the Senate and the White House over writing a new, long-term reauthorization of road and transit programs. Many in the House believe President Barack Obama’s administration should seize this opportunity to make long-term infrastructure investments to further stimulate the economy. But the White House and Senate prefer to put off this debate until after the 2010 elections, when there will be an opportunity to address the issue of new revenues to support such expenditures. The bill Wednesday simply extended the current program for three months as this debate continues, but, playing to his political right, Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) sought to derail the effort by denying proponents the two-thirds majority required under the procedures used. Whip notices sent out argued that Republicans should hold firm until Democrats pledged that any long-term bill will not include an increased gasoline tax. But Cantor failed badly as his party split open — 86-85 for the bill which passed easily 335-85. Most striking was the silence of Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). He voted with Cantor but earlier walked away without comment when a reporter asked if Republicans were opposing the bill. Then again, Boehner had opposed the Postal Service relief earlier this month, while Cantor voted for it.

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

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COMMANDER IN CHIEF INCAPABLE OF COMMAND

If nothing else positive can be said of the far left in America, let's at least acknowledge their consistency. As a case in point, consider the following article by Senator John Kerry.

That would be the same John Kerry who played both sides of the street regarding the Vietnam war. On the one hand he served and, once done, he came back home to oppose that war. It should be cynically noted that doing both served to promote his political resume.

However Kerry has at least some credibility regarding war and our military since he served. He makes some reasonable points in this article but in his inevitable manner, he ends up with wrongheaded, leftist ideological conclusions.

The current fight in Afghanistan is not near as complex as Kerry claims. Further, advocating that 100 Senators living an easy and pampered life in Washington DC should delay the decision making process relative to this war so that they can "...test all of the underlying assumptions..." is nothing more than a political smokescreen for the President to hide behind while he stalls on this matter.

If one wants to talk complexity, reforming health care in this country is really a complex issue yet Obama, Kerry and their merry band of leftists want to drive that decision in nano seconds while at the same time not forcing it upon the American people until after the 2012 presidential election. For those on the left, the health care agenda item needs to be decided immediately but the life and death decisions of the Afghan war can be delayed until domestic anti-war sentiment, so dear to their hearts, becomes more clearly decisive.

Barack Obama has never been and is not now a decision maker. He is an advocate by training and a compromiser by experience. He has no decision making expertise. His overriding guide in life is his academically based far left Utopian ideology. His is a world of theory. Unfortunately for him, the hard, cold facts of real life too often get in the way of his ideologically based goals. He cannot effectively deal with those realities which means he cannot make hard decisions.

He wanted to be Commander In Chief but he is incapable of command. As has just been revealed, he has only spoken with his own hand picked lead general in Afghanistan just once in over two months. Instead, he surrounds himself with the likes of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod who are there to insure that he stays on track with the agenda of the far left.

General McChrystal is an experienced, well established, intelligent and dedicated leader who is on the ground in Afghanistan full time and who goes to extraordinary lengths to be directly in touch with and understand both his troops and the people of Afghanistan. He has sent Obama his best estimate of what is required to prevail there. He most certainly is better equipped to know than are the politicians in the United States Senate, the president's advisers or Obama himself.

And what is their reaction to McChrystal's report? They delay it, they doubt it and in Obama's case, he flies off to Copenhagen on an "unscheduled" mission to promote the bid by the city of Chicago for the 2016 Olympic Games. The lives of our men and women in uniform and the concerns of their families here at home are thus demonstrably lesser priorities than which city will host a distant Olympics.

Keep in mind that Afghanistan is Obama's "good war" and that he pledged early on to defeat al Qaeda and capture Bin Laden. Now Obama wants to take more time to rethink the strategy. What he is really saying is he wants to rethink the politics. He and his minions know nothing about military strategy and like all leftists, they have no love of anything military.

Ultimately the decision that needs be made is not all that difficult or nuanced. Either the United States is in that war to "win it", which means bring it to a successful conclusion, or we are not. If we are not we should get out of Afghanistan immediately. The lives being sacrificed are in vain if we have no will to succeed. The bottom line is commit to it and find a way to prevail or get out. That requires either designing a strategy with a definable end result or drawing up a withdrawal plan.

But like the proverbial deer in the headlights, Speech Maker In Chief Obama dithers while Americans are killed and wounded on the field of battle. Hardly the mark of a leader.

Testing Afghanistan Assumptions

The lesson of Vietnam is don't commit troops without a clear strategy.

By JOHN KERRY

In the coming weeks, President Barack Obama will make the most difficult choice a commander in chief can face: whether to send more troops into harm's way.

The challenge of making the right decision was dramatized recently by the grim disclosure that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has warned that unless he gets more troops the eight-year war there "will likely result in failure."

The general provided a bleak catalogue of misaligned military operations, a corrupt Afghan government, and an increasingly lethal insurgency. He wants more troops and civilians to execute a nation-building counterinsurgency strategy that he hopes will reverse the slide. He says success is still achievable. As the commander on the ground, Gen. McChrystal fulfilled his assignment from the president, producing a tightly reasoned blueprint for a complex and increasingly dangerous conflict.

Now, we in Congress have our own assignment: to test all of the underlying assumptions in Afghanistan and make sure they are the right ones before embarking on a new strategy.

For example, one assumption of the proposed counterinsurgency plan is that our troops and civilians will be working in partnership with a legitimate and reliable government in Afghanistan. After the deeply flawed presidential election last month, we must ask whether we can succeed if our partner is weak and viewed with deep suspicion by his own people.

We also need to know whether a full-blown counterinsurgency, with its increased footprint and inevitably higher casualties, is a fundamental part of our plans to go after al Qaeda and avoid destabilizing Pakistan. Could a far smaller, well-honed counterterrorism strategy work as well or better?

Some have argued that counterterrorism commandos and sophisticated surveillance might be effective at targeting al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But critics contend that a counterterrorism campaign can succeed only as a component within a larger counterinsurgency.

If we increase our commitment, we might be able to develop "good enough governance" in Afghanistan, to quote the words Clare Lockhart (co-author of the insightful book "Fixing Failed States") used at a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. But even that would not guarantee that we achieve another vital objective: avoiding the destabilization of neighboring Pakistan. Chaos there could put nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.

The situation in Afghanistan has clearly changed since last March when the president unveiled his goal of defeating al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He and his advisers are exploring alternatives in light of the conditions on the ground and we should welcome the careful reassessment.

So far, the debate has focused on absolute numbers—how many U.S. and allied troops are required, how many Afghan soldiers and police do we need to train, how many more billions must we pour into that impoverished country? All the numbers are meaningless if the goal is ambiguous or the strategy is wrong.

Before we send more of our young men and women to this war, we need a fuller debate about what constitutes success in Afghanistan. We need a clearer understanding of what constitutes the right strategy to get us there. Ultimately, we need to understand, as Gen. Colin Powell was fond of asking, "What's the exit strategy?" Or as Gen. David Petraeus asked of Iraq, "How does it end?"

Why? Because one of the lessons from Vietnam—applied in the first Gulf War and sadly forgotten for too long in Iraq—is that we should not commit troops to the battlefield without a clear understanding of what we expect them to accomplish, how long it will take, and how we maintain the consent of the American people. Otherwise, we risk bringing our troops home from a mission unachieved or poorly conceived.

Gen. McChrystal offers no timetable or exit strategy, beyond warning that the next 12 months are critical. I agree that time is running out and that troops are dying without a sustainable strategy for victory. But we cannot rush to judgment.

Mr. Obama promises not to send more troops to Afghanistan until he has absolute clarity on what the strategy will be. He is right to take the time he needs to define the mission. We should all follow his lead and debate all of the options.

It may be that Gen. McChrystal has provided the road map to victory. Or it may be that some other strategy would work better, with fewer risks. We can't know until we test every assumption and examine every option.

At the end of the day, we need to answer every question to the best of our ability. Doing so will help develop the clarity required to establish goals and strategies that minimize risk to our troops, maintain regional stability, and protect our long-term national security.

Mr. Kerry, a Democrat, is a U.S. senator from Massachusetts.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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THE LARGEST "STIMULUS" BENEFACTOR: GOVERNMENT

The accompanying article is just one of many that could be written about where the Obama "Stimulus" spending is really going and who is really benefiting.

The number one benefactor, by a very large margin, is government itself. In other words this entire Obama scheme was the typical tax and spend mantra of the left repackaged and disguised as a critically important program for the health and welfare of the American economy.

The left in Congress as well as the leftist support groups around the country that benefit from government largess were all in favor of this massive and unnecessary spending nightmare.

Close to $500 billion is spent on government at all levels. The portion designated for tax relief is the one portion of this monstrosity that has at least half a chance to help the economy to some degree.

What do we know about government spending that cannot be refuted?

1. Much of the tax money that goes into government is subject to waste, fraud and abuse so that a certain percentage of it is just plain lost.

2. Keep in mind that said tax revenue is used, as the article below attests, to grow government which in turn does little to benefit the economy since every dollar that is taxed out of the private sector is not a dollar that earns any profit that benefits the greater good.

3. Money spent to bail out state and local governments is simply paying for accumulated debt and not generating any economic activity that would positively grow the economy.

4. Those tax dollars spent to buck up the state and local levels of government will only be of temporary value. Those governments are in trouble because their revenues are down and their spending is too high. The "Stimulus" relief will only be short term and than those governments will be right back where they started. In other words, this type of "Stimulus" is simply throwing good money after bad.

5. Government spending on government benefits the public employee unions and not much else. This amounts to nothing more than political payback on the part of Obama to the SEIU and others who spent millions to get him elected. It has zero to do with economic stimulus or benefiting the general public.

Every dollar that goes into the black hole of government will, once it washes through that system, come out the other end only in terms of cents on that dollar. Most of it disappears within the costly bureaucratic structure therein. Worse yet, that dollar collected and washed through the federal bureaucracy and thereafter spent on a state or local government bureaucracy will have virtually no value at all to the general economy.

The "Stimulus" legislation has done nothing for our economy despite the lies pushed forward by Joe Biden and Barack Obama to the contrary. Both said from the get go that the stimulus would arrest a growing unemployment rate and put millions back to work.

The numbers, which do not lie, provide a very different picture. The percentage of unemployed in the American workforce has continued to grow and even our dear leaders now admit that the rate of unemployment will eventually exceed 10% and will not be reversed anytime soon.

Government growth, both useless and counterproductive, has been heavily stimulated. Job growth and the economy have not.

Stimulus funds boost number of federal jobs

By Matt Kelley, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The $787 billion economic recovery package also is stimulating growth in the federal government as agencies hire thousands of workers and spend millions of dollars to oversee and implement the package, according to government records and spokesmen.

Fourteen of the top federal agencies responsible for spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act say they've hired about 3,000 workers with stimulus money. That's helped fuel the continued growth of the federal government, which increased by more than 25,000 employees, or 1.3%, since December 2008, according to the latest quarterly report. During that time, the ranks of the nation's unemployed increased by nearly 4 million, Labor Department statistics show.

Overall, there are about 2 million federal workers, the data show.

Thirteen agencies that report stimulus-related administrative expenses separately on their weekly spending reports say they've spent $186.8 million so far on salaries and other overhead. Those agencies have reported spending $46.1 billion in stimulus funds overall.

The new workers are tackling such tasks as managing stimulus-funded contracts, processing Social Security benefit claims and investigating possible cases of fraud and waste. They're overseeing about $288 billion in tax cuts and nearly $500 billion in federal spending, much of it in the form of transfers to state governments for education, health care and jobless benefits.

The Social Security Administration, for example, has hired 2,115 workers, spokeswoman Kia Green said. The Energy Department has hired about 240 workers, including engineers, contract managers and accountants, spokeswoman Tiffany Edwards said in an e-mail.

Stimulus critics such as Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the top Republican on the House oversight committee, say the package has enlarged the federal bureaucracy without making a dent in the nation's unemployment rate, which was 9.7% in August. "The only thing we have seen stimulated by this package has been the size of the federal government," Issa said in an e-mailed statement.

The growth is small and temporary, says John Berry, head of the federal government's Office of Personnel Management.

"The stimulus money hasn't really gone to federal employees; it's gone out into the economy," Berry says. "There's no permanent increase in the size of the federal government from the stimulus money."

Adding extra responsibilities with relatively few new employees threaten to overtax the federal workforce and undercut the Obamaadministration's goal of preventing improper spending, says Donald Kettl, dean of the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy.

"There's just a limit to how far you can push people and not open the process up to charges of waste, fraud and abuse," Kettl says.

Berry says his office has helped federal agencies streamline the hiring process by granting waivers of some employment rules, allowing agencies to hire without having his office approve the applicant and allowing retirees to temporarily return to their former jobs while continuing to draw retirement benefits.

"We have tried to do everything we can," Berry says

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WHY ARE CHARTER SCHOOLS UP & GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS DOWN?

Let us count the ways.

1. Government schools in most states are seriously flawed if not fully failed institutions. Most all of the education systems in the industrial world have passed ours by long ago.

2. Teachers unions have turned public schools into places that serve teachers and administrators before they serve kids. Educrats, not students, are the priority.

3. Government schools cannot discipline children and make little attempt to do so.

4. The quality of education is by and large better in charter schools.

5. Parents have been steadily removing their children from government schools and putting them into alternatives that better serve and educate kids, charter schools being one significant alternative choice.

6. In many metro areas, the overwhelming majority of children left in the public schools are those whose parent or parents just don't care about their kids education.

7. The political left has dominated the direction of government schools for decades and the result is useless curriculum, no discipline, minimal standards, increased per pupil expenditure, poorer test results, massive emphasis on political correctness, indoctrination, emphasis on special interests-identity groups-victimology, a decrease in English, math and science outcomes, a loss of quality teacher candidates among college attendees and graduates with ever diminishing capabilities to do college level work.

8. Many Charter schools on the other had represent the antithesis of such developments and in fact were established to provide families with educational choice so that children would not have to suffer within the strangle hold of the teachers unions and their leftist political allies. Increasingly, it is working to the benefit of ever more students.

The teachers unions vehemently oppose the Charter school option. Were it within their power, Charter schools would be banned and the students therein forced back into the failed government school system.

The article below speaks to but one of the ways in which government school teachers conspire to devalue and demean Charter schools. But as is noted therein, the public Educrats are spitting into the wind. They are being "creamed" by Charter schools but not the way they claim.

The clock is ticking relative to the fate of government schools as they are currently constituted. As is always the case in a free market economy, viable and successful choices have emerged that threaten the very future of the government school teachers unions and their low quality, poor outcome institutionalized agenda.

The world has and continues to change dramatically. Government schools have been standing still as the world has long since passed them by.

Do Charters 'Cream' the Best?

A new study finds breakthrough evidence.

'Creaming" is the word critics of charter schools think ends the debate over education choice. The charge has long been that charters get better results by cherry-picking the best students from standard public schools. Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist, found a way to reliably examine this alleged bias, and the results are breakthrough news for charter advocates.

Her new study, "How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement," shows that charter students, typically from more disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale. Because there are more applicants than spaces, New York admits charter students with a lottery system. The study nullifies any self-selection bias by comparing students who attend charters only with those who applied for admission through the lottery, but did not get in. "Lottery-based studies," notes Ms. Hoxby, "are scientific and more reliable."

According to the study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8 points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5 more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.

Charter students are also shrinking the learning gap between low-income minorities and more affluent whites. "On average," the report concludes, "a student who attended a charter school for all of the grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English."

The New York results are not unique. In a separate study, Ms. Hoxby found Chicago's charters performing even better than the Big Apple's. Using the same methodology, other researchers have seen similar results in Boston.

Charters are also a bargain for taxpayers. Nationwide on average, per-pupil spending is 61% that of surrounding public schools. New York charters spend less than district schools but more than the national average because, unlike district schools, they generally have no capital budget and must pay rent from operating expenses.

Little wonder President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are pressuring states to become more charter-friendly. Why the Administration can't connect the dots from the evidence to other effective school choice reforms, such as vouchers, can only be explained by union politics. Caroline Hoxby has performed a public service by finally making clear that "creaming" is a crock.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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WARNING: DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS BEWARE

VP Joe Biden opines accurately in the accompanying article when he suggests that the Congressional election of 2010 will put a halt to what he and his sidekick Barack Obama are attempting to do to America.

There is an angry mob that has coalesced across the country who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore. Politicians in general and vulnerable Democrats in particular had better pay astute attention to the political realities that have taken place and continue to grow in both commitment and intensity.

If the Democrat party forces Obamacare on the people of this country and throw Cap & Trade in on top of that, they will have fully doubled down on their own permanent dismissal from the halls of Congress.

A significant majority of voters do not want Barack Obama's version of government controlled health care and we are not going to forgive or forget those who jam it down our throats primarily because it is part of their partisan political agenda. Our Congresspeople are there to represent our wishes, not force their ideology upon us because that is what they want to do.

The American people are not stupid and are not about to be intimidated. Putting the vast majority of Americans on a forced march toward the unworkable Utopia of the far left will generate powerful and long lasting consequences. Heads will roll in the blow back.

Democrat pols will be voted out of office in very large numbers and they will be banished from the halls of power in Washington for a very, very long time.

In the meantime people will find each and every way to avoid and subvert the leftist agenda so that what the radicals want to do to our society will be slowed to less than a crawl. Resistance will be massive and widespread which in a free society amounts to unending roadblocks that virtually prevent government from moving forward much at all.

Americans will not be forced to do what is not in the interest of the nation and the overwhelming majority of families therein. If a government is unjust, it will not be sustained. There simply are not enough brain dead union members and self-serving trial lawyers to prop up that which is unsustainable.

Democrat members of Congress be warned: the end of your Congressional career is near if you ignore the will of the people. Tuesday, November 2, 2010 will become your day to pay. Ours is not a government by and for politicians.

You had better do what the people of this country insist be done or you will need to seek employment elsewhere. Beware of the angry voting mob.

Check, Please

Biden makes the case for the Republicans in 2010.

By JAMES TARANTO

Don't laugh, but Vice President Biden said something important earlier this week. ABC News reports:

Biden said [Monday] that if Democrats were to lose 35 House seats they currently hold in traditionally Republican districts, it would mean doomsday for President Obama's agenda.

Biden said Republicans are pinning their political strategy on flipping these seats.

"If they take them back, this [is] the end of the road for what Barack and I are trying to do," the vice president said at a fundraiser for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ).

It's not exactly an earth-shattering insight that a political party would pin its political strategy on winning elections that it has a chance of winning, though we suppose it's reassuring to think that even Republicans, and even Joe Biden, are smart enough to figure it out.

But Biden's observation that Republican victory in 2010 would be "the end of the road for what Barack and I are trying to do" is telling. It is an excellent argument for voting GOP next year. However much the Republicans may deserve to lose yet again, the country does not deserve to have done to it what Barack and he are trying to do.

What Barack and he are trying to do is steamroll through Congress radical and destructive changes in policy: government takeovers of the medical industry and labor-management relations and massive taxes on energy in the name of combating so-called climate change. One may surmise that Barack and he expected to have accomplished much of this already. Recall that early in the summer, the president was demanding that Congress pass "health-care reform" before August.

When Barack and he took office, they must have thought they were going to be able to govern without serious opposition. After all, they had neutralized both of the traditional checks on power: The other party was depleted, dispirited and discredited; and the mainstream media were mostly in the tank. The parlous state of the economy only fed their hubris. As Rahm Emanuel said just after the election, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."

The calculation must have seemed simple: With lopsided majorities in both houses of Congress, Democratic unity--or, failing that, Republican disunity--would be sufficient to get anything passed. This worked for the so-called stimulus bill, which had the support of enough Democrats to constitute a House majority, and enough Senate Republicans (three, to be exact) to prevent a filibuster. It worked in the House for the Cap'n Trade global-warmism bill, on which a handful of Republican "ayes" produced a slender majority. (Cap'n Trade's prospects in the Senate are doubtful.)

That this approach just barely succeeded in both these cases should have warned Barack and him that there was, in fact, substantial opposition to what Barack and he were trying to do. Over the summer, this opposition expressed itself in powerful and unpredictable ways: the emergence of a serious protest movement on the limited-government right, the appearance of angry citizens at congressional town-hall meetings across the country, the publication of blockbuster new-media investigations to which the mainstream media have been forced to pay attention, if belatedly and insufficiently.

The Obama Democrats were caught unprepared by this unorthodox opposition, and there is scant evidence that they have learned to adapt. Further, it is hard to imagine how they can adapt without enraging the far left--excuse us, the "progressives"--who have been denouncing opposition as racist, fascist and even homosexual ("teabaggers") and demanding that Barack and he do the same.

ABC reports that "Republicans welcomed the vice president's assessment of the 2010 landscape":

"What didn't seem possible just a few months ago, appears to be the topic of conversation even within the upper echelons of the Obama White House," said Ken Spain, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. "It is interesting to hear Vice President Biden admit that the administration's effort to double down on a partisan agenda of government takeovers could possibly mean the 'end of the road' for their political viability."

But not so fast. Columnist Michael Medved argues that a GOP takeover of Congress would be the best thing that could happen to the administration's political viability:

Republicans can plausibly argue that a GOP comeback would help President Obama find a pragmatic, unifying path rather than continuing to pursue the shrill hyper-partisanship of a shallow hack like Harry Reid. If [Obama] continues with big Democratic majorities, he may go the way of over-reaching, imperious, ultimately discredited presidents like Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter (whose 292 House seats gave him a veto-proof, two-thirds majority) or even, arguably, George W. Bush. If his supporters want President Obama to enjoy the consistent popularity of practical, deft, consistently popular chief executives like Eisenhower, Reagan and Clinton, they should welcome a GOP takeover of one or both Houses of Congress in 2010.

This argument seems much stronger than Biden's claim that another Democratic victory would lead Republicans to support what Barack and he are trying to do:

"All the hidden Republicans that don't have the courage to vote the way they want to vote because of pressure from the party . . . it will break the dam and you will see bipartisanship," Biden said.

Of course, loyalty to his party and the president obliges Biden to make the best case he can for Democratic congressional candidates and for what Barack and he are trying to do. But we can't help wondering if he isn't secretly hoping for a Republican takeover. Even Obama must know by now that he does not have unchecked power. The better the Republicans do next year, the less he will be constrained to behave as if he did.

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TWO KEY QUESTIONS THAT OBAMA & THE FAR LEFT CANNOT ANSWER

Far left radicals, Barack Obama included, are dedicated to the task of diminishing this great nation to the point of no longer being the exceptional example of what a free people can do when they are not under the dictatorial direction of government and when they can at the same time work within a free market based economy.

Currently we have a President who makes it a point to apologize for America's mistakes and weaknesses without much, if any, attention given to our accomplishments and strengths. This rhetoric repeats the long time mantra of far left radicals both at home and abroad. Barack Obama thereby remains a popular figure with his leftist homies.

All of which raises two inevitable questions that neither Obama or his radical pals can adequately answer. These are simple queries that demand a response. So far they go unanswered.

QUESTION 1:

If you so dislike this nation and all that it stands for and spend so many of your resources trying to change it in ways that are simply not acceptable to the vast majority of your fellow Americans, why not take advantage of your freedom of movement and go to a country that functions and is governed closer to your ideal (i.e. Cuba, any number of Western Euro nations, Venezuela)?

QUESTION 2:

Why is it that, unlike any other nation on the planet, people from around the world, in ever increasing numbers, aspire to come to America, become citizens and spend their lives in our society rather than their own thus making us the most popular final destination country on earth as well as in history?

These are two fundamental questions that demand answers from those who aspire to tear down the structure of America, so painstakingly built on the backs of millions of our predecessors, many of whom sacrificed all they had often including their lives, to get us to the position of advantage and comfort we enjoy today.

Left wing radicals do not aspire to improve America. Their goal, quite obviously, is to tear it apart. Hate and rage are their motivators.

Mr. President, answer the questions if you can.

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THE FAR LEFT & JIHAD: AN ANTI-AMERICAN ALLIANCE

Those on the radical far left in America are so agenda driven as to be both blind and deaf to the realities of the world around us. Worse yet, so many of them are stuck in the politics of the 1960's that they cannot allow for the fact that things change and the world some forty plus years later is very different than that of the summer of love.

The sworn and dedicated enemy of the country and all of us in it is Jihad. That is not a nation, it has no regular army, it fights with any and all weapons and it does so with the zealotry of religious fundamentalists.

Ironically, leftist radicals disdain and dismiss religious zealots here at home. But when it comes to Jihadist zealots, the far left has no problem being in bed with those who hate America. After all, they share that common agenda. Theirs is an unholy alliance that seeks to destroy this nation as we know it and have known it throughout history.

The real bad news in all of this is that Barack Obama is a man of the far left. Dedicated Obamaniacs are self-blinded to that truth yet all that anyone has to do is examine his background, experience, writings and speeches (that is, the ones where he is being honest) and it is impossible to reach any other conclusion. In other words the evidence speaks for itself.

And as President, Obama is taking this country over the cliff relative to the mortal threat that we face: the determination of our enemies and the track record of radical Jihad.

Consider the following:

1. Obama and his Attorney General are out to investigate and prosecute agents of the CIA for work that they have done in defense of the nation under the prior administration. It must be noted that said work was ordered by the previous president, declared legal by government attorneys and already thoroughly investigated by the Justice Department. This move by Obama has had a chilling effect on CIA operatives, foreign intelligence services relative to their cooperation with us and our allies in general. Further, this President has chosen to ignore the unprecedented appeal by seven former CIA directors to drop this repeat investigation. Obama is pursuing this matter because it is an issue close to the heart of the far left, which has always been anti-CIA. Degrading our intelligence services in the midst of a global Jihad against the United States is foolish and dangerous in the extreme.

2. Obama has also, as is so important to leftists, attempted to befriend states who openly support terror and who wish to so diminish America as to render us inconsequential. In fairness, the last two administrations have been complicit in this effort to some degree. Obama, a purported internationalist, now has agreed to one on one talks with North Korea (NK) about their development of nuclear weapons. The NK's have been playing us for fools for more than a decade in this matter and they now are fully nuked up. Obama, rather than keeping regional pressure on the NK's by remaining in the group of six nations dealing with the problem, was outmaneuvered by the NK's into an exclusively bilateral negotiation. Been there, done that and it not only failed but proved a valuable boost to the NK nuclear program. However as a man of the far left, Obama does what leftists always do: ignore the lessons of history, pursue an outdated and outmoded agenda, and unilaterally abandon our national interests first and do so without rational justification.

3. Watching all of the above are the Iranian zealots and financiers of Jihad. Our failure to effectively deal with North Korea has been beyond encouraging to them regarding the development of their nukes. They are playing the same game of stall and progress that they have watched the NK's use. Obama is playing right along with them. Like so many international leaders, Obama shakes his rattle and does absolutely nothing to back up his threats. In fact, his actions send exactly the opposite signal to the nut cakes in Iran: proceed with your program since nothing is going to be done to end it. Further, Obama's anti-Israel posture has emboldened Iran to continue to thumb their nose at the rest of the world. This is a classic far left driven outcome: agenda rich, reality free.

4. Far left radicals want the war in Afghanistan, Obama's good war, to end yesterday. Although Obama had initially done what appeared to be moves that would focus on winning that war, current circumstances are in great flux. Obama continues to talk a good game but his actions are no longer matching his words. Thus he is headed back to his comfort zone: the leftist radical agenda. The generals and advisers Obama chose and pledged to listen to, given that he has zero military or defense expertise, are telling him the only way we can succeed in Obama's good war is to escalate troop strength and commit to a long term strategy in order to defeat the enemy. In turn, Obama is backing away from his prior commitments to follow the advice of his generals and pursue the terrorists in that war. Once again the message to Jihadists around the globe is clear. Obama will not fight when challenged. As he leans toward the politics of cut and run, he emboldens our enemies. In the end, only leftists and Jihadist will be happy.

5. As we saw under Bill Clinton, the far left prefers to treat enemy combatants as common criminals rather than as what they are and what they claim to be: the army of Jihad, sworn to the defeat of America and the death of the American people. So Obama and his Justice Department have returned to the failed practice of prosecuting Jihadists in court, making Jihad a matter for criminal prosecution and domestic incarceration. That thinking was one of the prime factors that led to the attacks of September 11th. Legal prosecution is of no threat or significance to Jihadists. They respect only strength and they fully scorn weakness. There is only one effective way to eliminate Jihadists and putting them in jail is not it. In this kill or be killed worldwide conflict, the threat of jurisprudence carries no weight with our enemies. It is another in a long line of left over leftist 60's agenda items that is out of touch with current reality.

6. Note that the article which follows serves as a sober reminder that the Jihad has come to America once again. That the enemy is amongst us. We are not safe to begin with and the more that team Obama signals the world that we do not have the will to fight and win, the more dangerous and deadly our world becomes. The more this President shows weakness, and he shows it all the time, the more likely the prospects that we will be hit hard here at home and that innocent Americans will be sacrificed at the alter of the radicals on our far left.

There is not much difference in the anti-American qualities of Jihad and the agenda of the radical left. That is an unintended partnership that has found a home and a face in our novice and naive Commander In Chief.

Active Terror Cell Prepared NYC Attack, Officials Say

Authorities Believe After Three Arrests in Alleged Terror Plot, Others Still Out There

By BRIAN ROSS, RICHARD ESPOSITO, CLAYTON SANDELL and MEGAN CHUCHMACH

After overnight arrests this weekend in the alleged New York terror plot, FBI agents believe an active terror cell directed by al Qaeda was preparing an attack on New York City, and authorities say they have yet to identify everyone involved.

Officials tell ABC News they know of three distinct teams of four men each, but there may be others linked to the plot that remain unidentified.

CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF THE NEW YORK TERROR PLOT AND OTHER TERRORISM STORIES.

Law enforcement agents say they're watching a number of people on round-the-clock surveillance who they suspect might have been part of the alleged terror cell.

Suspects Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old airport shuttle driver, and his father Mohammed made their first court appearance in a Denver federal courtroom today, handcuffed and dressed in the same clothes they were arrested in Saturday night.

Click here to watch Zazi denying al Qaeda ties to television cameras.

They are charged with lying to federal agents during an investigation into the alleged terror plot that has been described as "the real deal" by authorities.

Zazi is set to have a preliminary and detention hearing Thursday morning and will remain in custody at least until then. The government is not seeking to keep his father, who was appointed a federal public defender, in custody, but his travel will be restricted to Colorado and he'll wear an electronic monitoring bracelet. He will have to remain in custody for two days until the monitoring system is set up.

Zazi, who authorities say appears to be the ringleader of the alleged plot, has been tracked by the FBI and the CIA for more than a year, during which time he has traveled twice to Pakistan for explosives training from al Qaeda.

Officials say they do not have specifics on the potential targets of the alleged plot, which may have been the most serious plan against the U.S. since 9/11.

Court records show Zazi ran up more than $50,000 in debt on 20 credit cards, leading to concerns he was preparing for a suicide mission. He declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy in Mar. 2009, and while he told investigators he had been traveling toPakistan see his wife, he checked the "not married" box on his application form.

In a criminal complaint, the FBI alleges they found nine handwritten pages on the manufacture and handling of explosives, detonators and the fuzing system in Zazi's possession.

"When [Zazi] was questioned about whether or not he knew anything about these written notes, and they were shown to him, he denied that knowledge," said NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Click here to watch Zazi returning home after a day of questioning.

Kelly said Mohammed Zazi was arrested "because he lied about the phone call that he made to his son when he was in New York."

Imam Ahmed Afzali

The third man arrested this weekend, Queens, NY resident Ahmed Afzali, appeared in a Brooklyn court today but no plea was entered. He is scheduled to have a detention hearing Thursday morning.

Afzali is also charged with making false statements to federal agents. He is alleged to have falsely told authorities that he didn't tell the Zazis he had been asked by officials about them.

Afzali's attorney Ron Kuby told ABC News that his client, a respected imam at a Queens, NY mosque who had worked as a source for law enforcement in the past, was doing what authorities asked him to do.

"It was the government that went to him and said we need to know the whereabouts of Najibullah Zazi," Kuby said. He said that Afzali then reached out to others to find Zazi, located and spoke to him, and then "duly reported this to the FBI."

"Now the FBI claims he didn't report everything, or he stated some details of the conversation wrong, so they arrest him," Kuby said. " So this is his reward for being a good member of the community."

Kuby said his client would plead not guilty.

Aaron Katersky contributed to this report.

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