Top 10 Things Obama Should Have Done Differently | The Daily Caller

Top 10 Things Obama Should Have Done Differently | The Daily Caller

Top 10 Things Obama Could Have Done Differently: Excessively well-sourced Obama boosters are now channeling, not just White House spin but White House self-pity. Both Ezra Klein and Jonathan Alter wonder aloud why our intelligent, conscientious, well-meaning, data-driven President is taking a “pummeling.” ”What could Obama have done?” (Klein) “What, specifically, has he done wrong .. .?” (Alter)

They’re kidding, right? There are plenty of things Obama could have done differently. Most of these mistakes were called out at the time. Here, off the top of my head, are ten things Obama could have done:

1. Not subcontracted out the details of the 2009 stimulus to interest-group-addled Congressional Democrats. Instead, he could have drawn up his own plan that relied more on large, quick payroll tax cuts rather than the ”shovel ready” infrastructure projects that, as Obama later admitted, weren’t shovel ready and (in the case of home-weatherization efforts) were delayed most of the year while bureaucrats figured out how to apply union-backed “prevailing wage” regulations. And why do we think aid to state and local governments–a stimulus centerpiece–had such a big Keynesian “multiplier”? Didn’t many states use the money to pay down their debts rather than retain workers?

2. Sold his health care reform as a valuable benefit for voters that would give them security (they’d be covered) and freedom (they could leave their jobs without losing insurance) rather than as an eat-your-peas plan that would not only “bend the cost curve” by denying treatments but somehow actually reduce the deficit–a sales pitch that assured Obamacare would be unpopular and vulnerable long after Dems rammed it through Congress. At the time, New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza said that Obama had “staked his presidency” on Budget Director Peter Orszag’s notion that “health care reform is deficit reduction.” It was a stupid bet. He lost it.

3. Made the UAW take a pay cut. Whoever else is to blame, the UAW’s demands for pay and work rules clearly contributed to the need for a taxpayer-subsidized auto bailout. To make sure that future unions were deterred from driving their industries into bankruptcy, Obama demanded cuts in basic pay of … exactly zero. UAW workers gave up their Easter holiday but didn’t suffer any reduction in their $28/hour base wage. Wouldn’t a lot of taxpayers like $28 hour jobs? Even $24 an hour jobs?

4. Pivoted! In 2010, after the health care bill passed, Obama was going to “pivot” to jobs but wasn’t able to do that when … yeah, I don’t remember what prevented him from doing it either. What’s that FDR quote Alter likes to trot out, about “bold, persistent experimentation”? That is not the attitude the Obama White House gives off when it comes to jobs. Maybe the Weitzman profit-sharing plan isn’t the answer. Maybe a use-it-or-lose-it credit card won’t work. Maybe a neo-WPA paying minimum wages wouldn’t attract unemployed middle class workers–though it could be tried in one or two states. But Obama’s attitude has been: “I tried A. I proposed B. So I propose B again. And again. And again.”

5. Not pursued a zombie agenda of “card check” and “comprehensive immigration reform”–two misguided pieces of legislation that Obama must have known had no chance of passage but that he had to pretend to care about to keep key Democratic constituencies on board. What was the harm? The harm was that these issues a) sucked up space in the liberal media, b) made Obama look feckless at best, delusional at worst, when they went nowhere; c) made him look even weaker because it was clear he was willing to suffer consequence (b) in order to keep big Democratic constituencies (labor, Latinos) on board.

6. Dispelled legitimate fears of “corporatism“–that is, fears that he was creating a more Putin-style economy in which big businesses depend on the government for favors (and are granted semi-permanent status if they go along with the program). I don’t think Obama is a corporatist, but he hasn’t done a lot to puncture the accusations. What did electric carmaker Tesla have to promise to get its Dept. of Energy subsidies? Why raid GOP-donor Gibson’s guitars and not Martin guitars? We don’t know. At this point, you have to think the president kind of likes the ambiguity–the vague, implicit macho threat that if you want to play ball in this economy, you’re better off on Team Obama. That’s a good way to guarantee Team Obama will be gone in 2013.

7. Stolen some populist Tea Party thunder by going vigorously after Wall Street. Even Alter says Obama “neglected to use his leverage over the banks and failed to connect well with an angry public.” (Alter was also the first to get Obama’s admission of “shovel-ready” ignorance. How many does it take, Jon?)

8. Not appointed pro-union innovators to NLRB who try to hamstring our biggest remaining industrial exporter by preventing it from opening a non-union factory in South Carolina–and then not had his spokesman say there’s nothing the president can do about it because, hey, the NLRB is “independent.”

9. Faced with Republican demands for leaner government, embraced them! Instead of letting GOPs make him the champion of bigger government and higher taxes, Obama could have said he thought higher taxes are probably inevitable but that he wasn’t going to raise them or cut a penny from benefits until he was sure all the fat has been wrung out of Washington. Become Dr. Cut-the-Bloat! Instead of letting his top management official advertise for a new $80,000-a-year ”deputy speechwriter,” tell him to lead a government-wide diet of the sort private companies conduct all the time. Publicize and promote the agency heads who cut their staffs and lower their budget requests instead of those who protect their turf. Have some “RIFs”–actual layoffs of redundant bureaucrats. The goal would not just be to reduce the deficit but to shrink the government to a level that’s … how do they put it … sustainable. This would be the greatest gift Obama could give to liberalism, and it would leave the Republicans gasping for air, speechless, Don’t they teach “co-optation” in Alinsky School? Given the choice between a triangulator and someone who acts like a triangulator, people will vote for the real triangulator every time.

10. Defend the core of Medicare, a popular universal program that works and (according to Orszag) is cutting costs, rather than proposing to shrink Medicare by raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67. It seems like only yesterday Democrats were trying to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 55–a political winner. Now the party has to defend a standard bearer who wants to raise taxes but who has no sympathy for the most valuable things those taxes pay for. (Screw granny for “green jobs”!).

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Would doing these 10 things have revived the economy? Who knows. Probably not. FDR didn’t really revive the economy either until World War II began, as Alter knows. But Obama would have shown leadership and creativity. He wouldn’t be both unsuccessful and disdained.

P.S.: I’m also not saying that Obama is necessarily headed towards a failed presidency in the larger judgment-of-history sense. Just a single-term presidency. If his health care reform sticks, he’ll go down as a success in a way Jimmy Carter won’t. One day soon we may look back on 2011 with fond longing. But that’s not the question Klein and Alter asked.

Update: Frum nominates three mistakes. Two of them aren’t on the above list, which of course doesn’t mean they weren’t mistakes. He also adds detail to #1. …

Backfill: More on use-it-or-lose-it cards as a stimulus trick here. …

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/28/top-10-things-obama-should-have-done-differently/#ixzz1WYRGXg32

Lawrence Solomon: Science getting settled | FP Comment | Financial Post

Lawrence Solomon: Science getting settled | FP Comment | Financial Post

Lawrence Solomon: Science getting settled

Lawrence Solomon Aug 26, 2011 – 11:37 PM ET | Last Updated: Aug 27, 2011 10:08 PM ET

New, convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun — not humans
The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.
The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.
In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.
The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory cre dence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.
The mobilization to rally the press against the Danes worked brilliantly, with one notable exception. Nigel Calder, a former editor of The New Scientist who attended that 1996 conference, would not be cowed. Himself a physicist, Mr. Calder became convinced of the merits of the argument and a year later, following a lecture he gave at a CERN conference, so too did Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist in attendance. Mr. Kirkby then convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber — he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.”
But Mr. Kirkby made the same tactical error that the Danes had — not realizing how politicized the global warming issue was, he candidly shared his views with the scientific community.
“The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century,” Mr. Kirkby told the scientific press in 1998, explaining that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth’s temperature.
The global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the Danes’ groundbreaking theory.
Yet this spectacular success will be largely unrecognized by the general public for years — this column will be the first that most readers have heard of it — because CERN remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success. Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” The CERN study and press release is written in bureaucratese and the version of Mr. Kirkby’s study that appears in the print edition of Nature censored the most eye-popping graph — only those who know where to look in an online supplement will see the striking potency of cosmic rays in creating the conditions for seeding clouds.
CERN, and the Danes, have in all likelihood found the path to the Holy Grail of climate science. But the religion of climate science won’t yet permit a celebration of the find.
Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.
First of two parts. Next week: The end of the global warming debate.
To see the striking graph that the journal Nature withheld from its print edition, click here.

Lawrence Solomon

Blog: You call this 'regulatory reform'?

Blog: You call this 'regulatory reform'?

You call this 'regulatory reform'?

James W. Lucas

Professor Cass Sunstein has announced the first results of the regulatory review the President ordered at the beginning of the year. Sunstein is the regulatory czar to the czar of all the czars -- his former University of Chicago law school colleague Barack Obama. All federal regulatory bodies were to eliminate regulations that were unduly burdensome to small businesses.

Private sector critics promptly called the reforms a drop in the bucket. Republicans in Congress have several legislative proposals to alleviate the federal regulatory burden on small business. However, all this begs a deeper question: why is the national government regulating small businesses in the first place?

Let us quickly try to quantify the size of Professor Sunstein and Obama's drop in the bucket. Sunstein claims that the reforms could save businesses over $10 billion in compliance costs over the next five years. The Small Business Administration reports that the total cost of regulation to American business is $1.7 trillion annually. If we assume that Professor Sunstein's savings estimate is reasonable, and that regulatory costs will not increase over the same time period (a very unreasonable assumption), that makes the total savings from the regulatory review equal to 0.001% of the costs of regulatory compliance. That's one-thousandth of one percent for those who like their numbers spelled out. "Drop in the bucket" overstates the impact.

Another way to measure the gross impact of federal regulation is to count the pages in the official publication of all federal regulations, the Federal Register. This is a bit crude as a measure, because a very long regulation may be fairly innocuous whereas a short one could have a massive cost imprint, but it is a decent rough gauge of the extent of the totality of federal regulation. The Federal Register for 2010 is over 81,000 pages long, a 19% increase in one year. We do not have a page count on the regulations to be repealed, perhaps because many of the revisions have yet to actually go into effect, but it is safe to assume that they will come nowhere near to matching the voluminous regulations still to be issued under the new Obamacare and Dodd-Frank laws. And there are also the numerous ongoing rule-makings by President Obama's hyperactive regulators at the EPA, NLRB, and the rest of the seemingly endless alphabet soup of federal regulatory bodies.

Now let's put this in some perspective. The Federal Register was first issued in 1936. At that time it was 2,600 pages long (and that was after four years of the New Deal). The left will argue that growth in federal regulation is inevitable as our nation grows. So, let's look at that. From 1936 to 2010 the population of the United States grew by 240% (128 million to 308 million). Over the same time period the Federal Register grew by over 3131%. That means that the page count of federal regulations has grown at over 13 times the rate of population growth since the middle of the New Deal. And again, as noted, Professors Sunstein and Obama still have much, much more regulation to come.

Articles: Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write

Articles: Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write

Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write

By Jack Cashill

On November 16, 1990, Barack Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, published a letter in the Harvard Law Record, an independent Harvard Law School newspaper, championing affirmative action.

Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick's biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.
Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review's affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.
The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.
"Since the merits of the Law Review's selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues," wrote Obama, "I'd like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works."
If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits ... have." Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone. He had vindicated Chen in his first ten words.
Although the letter is fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times. In one sentence, he seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries both: "Approximately half of this first batch is chosen ... the other half are selected ... "
Another distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space. Please note the unanchored phrase in italics at the end of this sentence:
"No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind." Huh?
The next lengthy sentence highlights a few superficial style flaws and a much deeper flaw in Obama's political philosophy.

I would therefore agree with the suggestion that in the future, our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer who would even insinuate that someone with Mr. Chen's extraordinary record of academic success might be somehow unqualified for work in a corporate law firm, or that such success might be somehow undeserved.

Obama would finish his acclaimed memoir, Dreams from My Father, about four years later. Prior to Dreams, and for the nine years following, everything Obama wrote was, like the above sentence, an uninspired assemblage of words with a nearly random application of commas and tenses.
Unaided, Obama tends to the awkward, passive, and verbose. The phrase "our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer" would more profitably read, "we should focus on the employer." "Concern" is simply the wrong word.
Scarier than Obama's style, however, is his thinking. A neophyte race-hustler after his three years in Chicago, Obama is keen to browbeat those who would "even insinuate" that affirmative action rewards the undeserving, results in inappropriate job placements, or stigmatizes its presumed beneficiaries.
In the case of Michelle Obama, affirmative action did all three. The partners at Sidley Austin learned this the hard way. In 1988, they hired her out of Harvard Law under the impression that the degree meant something. It did not. By 1991, Michelle was working in the public sector as an assistant to the mayor. By 1993, she had given up her law license.
Had the partners investigated Michelle's background, they would have foreseen the disaster to come. Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."
She did not write well, either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis at Princeton as "dense and turgid." The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."
Michelle had to have been as anxious at Harvard Law as Bart Simpson was at Genius School. Almost assuredly, the gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative action admission, and the profs finessed her through.
In a similar vein, Barack Obama was named an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Although his description of the Law Review's selection process defies easy comprehension, apparently, after the best candidates are chosen, there remains "a pool of qualified candidates whose grades or writing competition scores do not significantly differ." These sound like the kids at Lake Woebegone, all above average. Out of this pool, Obama continues, "the Selection Committee may take race or physical handicap into account."
To his credit, Obama concedes that he "may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy." This did not strike him as unusual as he "undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career."
On the basis of his being elected president of Law Review -- a popularity contest -- Obama was awarded a six-figure contract to write a book. To this point, he had not shown a hint of promise as a writer, but Simon & Schuster, like Sidley Austin, took the Harvard credential seriously. It should not have. For three years Obama floundered as badly as Michelle had at Sidley Austin. Simon & Schuster finally pulled the contract.
Then Obama found his muse -- right in the neighborhood, as it turns out! And promptly, without further ado, the awkward, passive, ungrammatical Obama, a man who had not written one inspired sentence in his whole life, published what Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
To question the nature of that production, I have learned, is to risk the abuse promised to Mr. Chen's theoretical employer. After all, who would challenge Obama's obvious talent -- or that of any affirmative action beneficiary -- but those blinded by what Obama calls "deep-rooted ignorance and bias"?

What else could it be?

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• Schmutzli 12 hours ago

  This explains why Obama's educational transcripts are more closely guarded than the formula for Coke or the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken.  I am convinced they are mediocre at best; likely containing a number of nebulous pass/fail "passes".  Of course, we do have Obama's own statement that he has written two books, "and I wrote them myself".  At least Nixon and LBJ can rest knowing their AA efforts were so successful they produced a president.  The nation, however, is no better for it.

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• jmlsmb 12 hours ago

  Bill Ayers, there I said it!  There is plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest he was the main author of Obama's book.  As for affirmative action, it is an insult to minorities and counterproductive to everyone.

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• PTTX 11 hours ago

  Excellent article that confirms what I have known all along.  Neither one is the brightest bulb in the package - far from it.  I agree with both Schmutzli and jmlsmb above regarding affirmative action.  How can it be that anyone, and I mean ANYONE, would choose to fly under that flag?  It is demeaning and absolutely counterproductive.  It is nothing more than cheating, in my view.  We have become a nation of educational dumbing down and look what that has brought to us.  In order to begin any sort of 180 turnaround we must include a complete overhaul of our educational system, a colossal failure if ever there was one.  Obama will go down as the biggest failure EVER, and rightfully so.  I do hope those who so fervently advocate for affirmative action and extol its virtues will one day be properly ashamed of themselves.  But I'm not hopeful on that one.

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• Jacey 11 hours ago

  Hmmm.  I thought O'Bozo said he wrote 2 books "and I wrote them myself" AFTER he had published his 3rd book, a children's story (following Dreams...and Audacity of Hope).  So what gives?  Did he slip up?   Apparently, it's not a secret in certain Chicago circles that the book for which he was most praised (Dreams...) was almost entirely written by terrorist and good friend, Bill Ayers.  You remember him, don't y'all?  He's that guy who lives down the street...

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• Ron 11 hours ago

  Bill Ayers stated on camera (without the question being asked) that he wrote "Dreams". The huge service that Obama is performing is the destruction of the Democratic party.  Yes he is doing as much damage as possible, but there is compensation. Also Obama is not the only one.  Al Gore is obviously mentally ill equating global warming deniers with racism.  Even Warren Buffet is ignoring an opportunity to be quiet.  So it is not just incompetent, ding-a-ling Obama.  It reminds me of Hitler in the old days blaming the Jews for all the troubles in the world.  Keep up the good work lefties.

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• bgtomli 11 hours ago

  The Gunning Fog Index of the 56-word referenced statement from Obama indicates that one needs 21.2 years of education to understand it.  Maybe that is why I cannot understand Mr. Obama's policies and his repeated abuse of the principles of our Constitution.  I am one of those lesser educated graduate chemical engineer-with-an-MBA-executives in private industry.  Hopefully the voters get the clear message by now about how incapable a leader He is.  God help us if Obama doesn't get the boot in 2012!

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• FeralCat 11 hours ago

  Inability to write; ineligibility to serve; incompetence to govern; ineptitude to lead; incapacity to learn.

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• chuckh 9 hours ago

  It was pretty clear from start that Barack Obama is a fraud. Common sense tells you that when a persons records are withheld from public scrutiny there is a problem. It should also be apparent that very powerful people are behind the hoax that is Barack Obama. The more intriguing question is why would anyone perpetrate this deception in the first place.  What would be gained from the election of an unqualified person to the presidency of the United States?
  
  The whole story of Barack Obama invites conspiracy theories. Who might be pulling the strings? And more importantly what is the endgame? I don't thing that the danger will be completely over after his defeat next year. I am sure that many of the thousands of new people hired into the federal government under Obama well remain after he is gone. Can they be trusted?

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• Plain Dealing Conservative 9 hours ago

  Unfortunately for uhh-bama, his writing ability is like his oration-making ability...mediocre at best (without a whole lot of assistance, ie; Bill Ayers and the Teleprompter of the United States, with its accompanying speech writers).  As for Michelle...nothing very surprising there either, looking at her job history.  Chosen because of his skin color and some hopeful (yet ambiguous) campaign slogan, "Hope and Change", the Obamas/Soetaros have proven to be the epitome of what is wrong with Affirmative Action (on a grande scale).

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• antares 9 hours ago

  PTTX 'Obama will go down as the biggest failure EVER, . . . .'No. The Worse President Ever was James Buchanan. His Secretary of War was a Southern sympathizer who moved munitions to the South and disposed Union troops to posts as disadvantageous as possible on the ever of war. Buchanan did not dismiss him. Instead, he fiddled about while the Union burned.Obama is giving Jimmy Carter a run for the second worst.

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• curved space 8 hours ago

  Yes you can tell it's actually his writing in that letter because he starts out "clarifying". Subject and predicate agreeing? Artificial constructs imposed on the Community by The Man.

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• Questioning 7 hours ago

  OK, anyone can produce such an example of 'turgid' writing at first pass.  I've looked back at my stream of consciousnesses writings and been appalled.  But that's 'the thing', you look back.  I thought an editor well, edited!  This mis-mash of unconnected thoughts and grammatical blunders looks too much like what passes for business writing in the USA today!  I wonder what his more recent 'thoughts on paper' look like; love to see some emails.....

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• lock 7 hours ago

  The excellent unraveling of the knot of publications attributed to the master of shuck and jive by Mr. Cashill still conveniently ignored by the msm as well as the long time associations with radicals and racists and the unacceptable to any debt holder lame excuse given to Simon & Schuster regarding his so called inability to repay the unearned cash advance, due to student loan balances.  Another pass given this affirmative action parasitic couple.  The almost doubling of Michelle's salary within days of the swearing in of her Senator husband was another flag ignored as was her initiated policy to redirect the uninsured poor to other hospitals to improve access for more lucrative paying patients.  I haven't time to continue recounting the many unreported, highly suspicious actions taken or given by this couple to hide their true history of so called achievements but, the Nobel is by far the most laughable on his blotter and the title of first Lady on hers.  Have to catch the bus to my second part time job as my debt holders could give a ----less about my student loan balances and the last two full time jobs, which I was qualified and applied for were filled by using the quota system.  Instead of EOE in help wanted ads, some...

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• knepper 7 hours ago

  It's clear that Obama/Soetoro did not write 'Dreams,' so the larger question is why is the media, even the 'respectable' conservative media shying away from this story?  Even the 'Fair, balanced, and unafraid' network is apparently afraid of this story.  You have to wonder what hold Obama's handlers have on these people.  Rupert Murdoch surely knows that George Soros is already trying to destroy his media empire, so why not take a few bricks out of the wall of lies surrounding Soros' Boy Wonder?

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• frank logan 7 hours ago

  The largest client of the law firm, Sidley Austin, was Commonwealth Edison, whose CEO was Tom Ayers, father of William Ayers.

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• Izzy 7 hours ago

  As grammatically impaired person myself, I find it amazing that prior to being President his major accomplishment was book writing.  He may feel he is strong in writing.  Grammar memorized wrong over a long period of time is nearly impossible to fix.  It's not just a writing problem, but a speaking problem.  This would explain the overuse of the teleprompter.  I'm shocked at what my kids tell me I'm saying grammatically wrong.  I'm waiting for the grammatically impaired to become a protected class, so I can't be turned down for a high paying writing job. (s)

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• Hk40cal 7 hours ago

  No matter how it's spread. Obama is; The first generation affirmative action fraud.  We now see what a slick talker, who reads others writings from a teleprompter, packaged just right can fool Americans with white-guilt. Whom ever is nominated on for the Republican ticket, better without fail, demand his college papers and transcripts and all the Why Howz papers regarding 'Fast and Furious"

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• Jacksprat 6 hours ago

  Having some familiarity with only one law review and that being more than a few of years ago I can unequivocally state that at that time membership, believe it or not, had nothing to do with affirmative action. The first group of students offered a place on the review were those with the highest grade point average. The second and last group of people offered a position were chosen from the student body at large from those students that wrote articles of high enough quality to be published. If your article was good enough to be published you would be offered a position on the review. The bifurcated process first recognized achievement via grades and the second recognized anyone else in the class via achievement by research and writing. Why should it be any other way?

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• janmidland 6 hours ago

  It had to be around 1990 when I was listening to NPR, and I remember an interview with the first African American editor of the Harvard  Review.  I often wondered if this was about Obama, or If anyone else remembers the interview.  It would be interesting to listen to a tape of the interview, because I think there was talk of what the future held for him.  I also wondered if the interview had something to do with him getting a book deal.

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• Pedlar7 6 hours ago

  Completely believable—the fraud that Soros and co. have perpetrated upon America (a record-less, unqualified Community Organizer as POTUS) will one day be brought to light.
  I just pray it's not too late.
  One minor point: Obama's letter isn't "...less than a thousand words long"; it's *fewer* than a thousand words long.

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• DaneChile 6 hours ago

  When one stops to think about it, we have never seen any proof that Hussein successfully completed _any_ degree -  much less what sort of grades he received.  If he were so durned intelligent he would be most happy to publsih his transcripts.  That says it all for me...

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• Ellen L 6 hours ago

  This confirms a comment I made on another article recently: most attorneys tend to be wordsmiths (perhaps their only redeeming quality), so it is obvious from BO's non-teleprompted remarks that he is the poster child for affirmative action.

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• Longdrycreek 6 hours ago

  I shudder to think I could be as ignorant as Obama and Michelle and not know it. Can you imagine being stupid and think you are an elite? What a terrible sentence to serve. However, ignorance and stupidity to do pose a problem for Progressives or Liberals. Progressives or Liberals believe what they want to believe. This is why utopia is always appealing to them. Reality is somewhere else.

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• skedaddle 5 hours ago

  My son's writings were similarly ungrammatical until his 10th grade English teacher beat some grammar rules into his head. Until then, he used big words poorly and punctuation was sprinkled like pepper on the page, just like 0bama. Barry and Michelle were given amazing educational opportunities but they squandered them all and remain uneducated brats. I'll be so glad when they're gone, the good Lord willing, in 2012.

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• JackRail 5 hours ago

  Welp, even though I didn't vote for Obama, I was hoping against hope that he wasn't really an affirmative action president. I should've known better than to trust a single thing said by the MSM, the Ivy League or anyone else even vaguely connected with this jive dude. Obama has proven correct every bad thing ever said about affirmative action. One simply wonders how he maintains that mountainous self-opinion, knowing inside that he's a phony who has to have help at every step.

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• Kit_Jefferson 5 hours ago

  This proves what I've always said, a degree will get you a job (or position if one prefers) but it won't keep a job unless the possessor thereof has sufficient grey matter between their ears and knows how to use it.

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• Matthew Quigley 5 hours ago

  When I was teaching junior year high school English, I was given the unenviable task of bringing my students, many of whom had not had to complete a written assignment since middle school, up to grade level in writing ability so they could pass the numerous tests required by the State of New Mexico for graduation.
  
    I recall giving a diagnostic assignment.  I wrote a topic statement on the board and told my students they were to give me three paragraphs dealing with that topic (and no, those weren't my precise words).  Most of my students did a pretty good job of explaining the topic provided and making their point, but it was obvious that three to four years of limited to no written work had taken their toll on the skills of these young people to write with clarity.  The first nine weeks of that school year were a writing "boot camp," and by the end of those nine weeks, the majority of my students were writing at grade level.  Some were beyond grade level, and a very few weren't yet there, but were close enough that work and practice would get them the level required.
  
  Here's the kicker:  All...

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• Jon W 5 hours ago

  The problem isn't that Obama is not a skilled writer. It's that he claims he is a writer when
  he is not. Not being able to write is neither a sin, nor a crime that carries any punishment.
  Lying does...well, for most people anyway. If Obama were to admit that his books were
  co-written(ghost written) that would destroy the well-crafted image that Obama is an
  exceedingly intelligent and capable writer and worthy of such praise. But here's the rub.
  Why do so many democrats seem to lie about subjects or events that are on their face,
  not worth lying about? Bill Clinton lies about remembering black churches burning in
  Arkansas when he was young,(there were none) his wife lies about being named after Sir
  Edmund Hillary(he hadn't yet done anything notable)and John Kerry lies about a secret
  mission to Cambodia(when so many can refute the claim).
  
  In Obama's case, I suppose that admitting his book was ghost-written came in a distant
  second to admitting who the ghost-writer of Dreams From My Father really was. Hmm?
  The democrat candidates book was ghost-written by an unrepentant domestic terrorist?
  In Washington political-speak, the optics alone could have ended Obama's Dreams

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• johnwayne337 5 hours ago

  I have not and never intend to read his book, but one can hear that he is improperly schooled when he speaks. Every time I hear him say the following my skin crawls as when one runs their fingernails down a blackboard! Instead of the proper "Which one" he says, "What one". Why should I read an idiot's book?

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• Dr. Dre 5 hours ago

  I remember reading Michelle's Princeton senior thesis on the internet in 2008, before the election.  I thought it kind of mean, but pretty funny, that the faculty of the Sociology Dept left in place all the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.  No one told her to have someone proof the thing before turning it in, and the faculty probably treated it like the piece of dreck that it was, knowing they were going to have to pass her anyway.  So they got their revenge, didn't they?
  
  Back when I was in college my roommate got an F on a big paper because the person who typed it for her spelled the paper's subject's name "Edward" when it should have been "Edvard" and that's how my roomie turned it in.  There used to be STANDARDS for academic work.

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• Radioman777 5 hours ago

  Putting coherent thoughts together apparently isn't his strong suit and neither is originality. Based on more or less casual observation over the past 3 centuries... errr... years, it appears that getting people to hate each other is probably the only "talent, skill, or ability" he possesses.

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• Sarahistheone 5 hours ago

  He really is the "manchurian candidate"...........almost three years later I am still asking myself what is wrong with the American voter? How in God's name did this imposter get elected. This is scary. If we don't win this election...it's over! Gov Palin has to run and must win! Are we going to make the same mistakes again. You may have not agreed with 43 but he truly loves our country. Demo rats are commie's. That's the way they want to see America. They don't agree with anything conservative and we don't believe in anything liberal. What happened to our country. I feel I woke up from a coma and I don't know where I am.

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• wpjn32459 5 hours ago

  Didn't Harvard and other Ivy's produce the likes of Stan O'neil (of Merrill Lynch fame) and most of the other mega-bank CEO's?  What the heck are these leaders of higher education doing?

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• Flavius_Maximus 5 hours ago

  I can somewhat Identify with what Obama has gone through, this in NO way approves of his conduct though it gives me a little clarity on the subject.  I have what is known as a Technology Degree, not the full course work that traditional engineering courses prescribe, but an applied science degree.  However, I have been successful with this education, well beyond my humble learning.  With the development of varied technologies that have been awarded numerous Patents for my employers and myself for the improved functionality and productivity to the products I have been assigned. 
  
  Throughout my Career I have been challenged by some that would question my abilities, given my education, this is not unexpected.  I tire of the inquiries of how I am able to compete with much more learned men than myself.  Where we differ is that I understand that this is a fair question as they have had a more rigorous education that was focused more on weeding out the undeserved that lacked the dedication to achieve than myself.  In my program the mediocre were passed through as the generalized thought was that industry would weed them out.  Different perspective, same results.
  
  I have felt at...

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• clayland 4 hours ago

  In a previous AT article which stated that Nixon was the founder and implementer of AA.  It is also interesting to note that he was responsible for our current enviromental battles.  April, 22, 1970, also known infamously as EARTH DAY.  A recent, American Experie*ce, show revealed some very interesting insights into this "movement".
  
  Denis Ha*es-(Bullitt Foundation)
  
  Paul Ha*ken-( Natural Capital Institute)
  
  Jim Ro*gers-( Duke Energy)
  
  All affirming an action to continue the pursuit of controlling carbon emissions through a carbon tax system.  So President Obama has difficulty writing, but he has a whole bunch of people who continue their personal agendas through his administration.  Going for the head is easy.  What is far more difficult is "rooting" out the Indian with the "tear" in his eye.
  
  

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• Swedishlady 4 hours ago

  Thank you Mr Cashill. I really appreciate your research on Obama. It should have been done long time  ago by the media, it´s a shame it wasn´t. The picture is pretty clear now, he really is a fraud. I hope the American voters will see it before the next election.

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• BobQSoss 4 hours ago

  Barack Obama, he have been a actual genius of writing proved by his stand-alone masterpiece:
  
  UNDERGROUND
  
  Under water grottos, cavernsFilled with apesThat eat figs.Stepping on the figsThat the apesEat, they crunch.The apes howl, bare Their fangs, dance,Tumble in the Rushing water,Musty, wet peltsGlistening in the blue.

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• riddler01 4 hours ago

  One can only wonder what arrangement (as to royalties) exists between Obama and Ayres?

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• jkendal 4 hours ago

  Affirmative Action wrongly puts the mediocre in the same league as the exceptional.  The affirmative action president should be the poster boy for not only the dismal failure that affirmative action is but also for how highly destructive it is when its recipients are put in positions of great power.

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• Gragar 4 hours ago

  Another example of not being vetted properly.

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• creeper 4 hours ago

  I have read as much of Michelle Obama's thesis as I could.  The effort was abandoned when it became clear to me there was nothing of substance in it.  The hallmark of that thesis is, as always with Michelle, her constant use of the first person.  Every point she seems to attempt is nailed down by a recounting of her own personal appearance.  Had I been her professor I'd have failed her on that incoherent composition of gibberish.
  
  Damn our media for foisting these imposters off on the country.

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• locomotivebreath1901 4 hours ago

  That English lesson is all well and good, Mr. Cashill, yet it flies far overhead of the average voter who knows in his superficial heart that Barack Obama can heal the planet and slow the ocean's rise, but Geo. Bush is stooopid.

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• turnipweed 4 hours ago

  More important than Obama's grammar and writing style is the fact he is an air head. I've noticed many little things that indicate he couldn't pass a 7th grade science test. A clever reporter could have a field day with Obama's lack of knowledge about the world around him. No wonder the laws of economics totally escape him.

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• grahamc 3 hours ago

  Obama also frequently uses "a" rather than "an".  Many media reporters and pundits are guilty as well.

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• CarpeDiem 3 hours ago

  we have all seen that obama is a pretend everything: he pretends to be an american born citizen, he pretends to be a harvard graduate; he pretends to be a professor; he pretends to be an author; he pretends to have been a senator, with nothing to show but his "present"; he pretends to be a president. what a charade!

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• Terry Walbert 3 hours ago

  The letter is on the Harvard Law Record website at http://www.hlrecord.org/2.4475.... Overall I found the letter long-winded: too many adjectives.  I believe he could have said the same thing in half the words.  Obama begins the eighth paragraph with "Let me end..." and does not.  He goes on for two more long paragraphs.

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• Webkritter 3 hours ago

  The inept President is the epitome of affirmative action. Not only did he reach this pinnacle of power on the color of his skin without being properly vetted, anyone who dares to disagree with his policies is instantly branded a racist.

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• fsy 3 hours ago

  The most important line in that letter is his open admission to have "benefited from affirmative action".  Isn't that a clear refutation of all the claims to "genius"?

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• inspectorudy 3 hours ago

  If any of you regularly read the fish wrappers of America you will see budding Obamas on the rise. The grammar and sentence structure is appalling in the newspapers of our day. Even with the decline of writing skills of the msm today, Obama is just as bad now after graduating over twenty years ago from one of the best schools in America. There is NO reason to hide his records except to shield him from ridicule and disrespect from his "Peers". As usual Jack has done some fine analysis on this fraud's claims.

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• daddyo44 3 hours ago

  Affirmative Action is a two-sided sword.  It can help deserving individuals achieve what they could otherwise have not.  But it can equally help undeserving individuals, those who rely primarily on AA and not their own ability (or inability).  BHO is a product of the latter, along with the liberal political machine (as honed in corrupt, backroom Chicago politics) providing food for his thoughts.  No doubt he is intelligent, but he is not a deep thinker who navigates his own way through the issues.  Instead, he surrounds himself with advisers ("czars") who do his deep thinking for him, rather than just researching and presenting facts to BHO. The advisers often make decisions for BHO, leaving the public oratory component for the President.  The problem is the advisers were not elected by the people, instead being appointed by BHO under the advisement of the liberal political machine.  The result is a President that is a poster boy for liberalism propped up by a far left political machine that feeds him only what they want him to know and make public.  They rely on his inability to derive his own decisions, to not think deeply about the issues.  They use his strong presentation...

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• danyoura 56 minutes ago

  you are referring to agreement between "subject and verb" not "subject and predicate"