NEA recommends reading Alinsky; GOP wins; CIT bankrupt; Soros: US a "drag on global economy"

These posts will be sporadic over the next two weeks or so, as I help finish editing the final draft of Sharron Angle’s book. Her campaign against Harry Reid is gaining steam; please send a donation if you are able (see: http://www.sharronangle.com/). 1) GOP sweep: Big governor victories in Virginia, NJ WASHINGTON – Republicans surged to victory in governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday, wresting control from Democrats in both states as independents who swept Barack Obama to a historic 2008 victory broke big for the GOP. It was a troubling sign for the president and his party heading into an important midterm election year. Conservative Republican Bob McDonnell's victory in the Virginia governor's race over Democrat R. Creigh Deeds and moderate Republican Chris Christie's ouster of unpopular New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was a double-barreled triumph for a party looking to rebuild after being booted from power in national elections in 2006 and 2008. …The president had personally campaigned for Deeds and Corzine, seeking to ensure that independents and base voters alike turned out even if he wasn't on the ballot. Thus, the losses were blots on Obama's political standing to a certain degree and suggested potential problems ahead as he seeks to achieve his policy goals, protect Democratic majorities in Congress and expand his party's grip on governors' seats next fall. …The Associated Press exit polls showed that nearly a third of voters in Virginia described themselves as independents, and nearly as many in New Jersey did. They preferred McDonnell by almost a 2-1 margin over Deeds in Virginia, and Christie over Corzine by a similar margin. Last year, independents split between Obama and Republican John McCain in both states. See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091104/ap_on_el_ge/us_election_rdp 2) CIT files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection WASHINGTON – After struggling for months to avert bankruptcy, lender CIT Group has filed for Chapter 11 protection in an attempt to restructure its debt while trying to keep badly needed loans flowing to thousands of mid-sized and small businesses. CIT made the filing in New York bankruptcy court Sunday, after a debt-exchange offer to bondholders failed. CIT said in a statement that its bondholders overwhelmingly opted for a prepackaged reorganization plan which will reduce total debt by $10 billion while allowing the company to continue to do business. The Chapter 11 filing is one of the biggest in U.S. corporate history, following Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, WorldCom and General Motors. CIT's bankruptcy filing shows $71 billion in finance and leasing assets against total debt of $64.9 billion. …Analysts warned that the bankruptcy could add to the uncertainty around loans for the nation's small businesses, especially retailers, which make up a significant portion of CIT's clients and are already struggling with tight credit markets. See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091102/ap_on_bi_ge/us_cit_group_bankruptcy 3) George Soros speaks of US as a “drag on the global economy” GLENN: Here is George Soros, a visitor of the White House, and we're talking now about, you know, who's really in charge? What is happening to our country? Are they trying to fix it or are they trying to fundamentally transform it into something that Americans don't recognize? Here's George Soros. VOICE: What sort of a financial deal should Obama be seeking to strike when he travels to China next month? SOROS: No, I think this would be the time because you really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order, financial world order. …SOROS: The system we have now has actually broken down. Only we haven't quite recognized it. And so you need to create a new one. PAT: Did you catch that? The system we have now. GLENN: Capitalism, free market. PAT: Capitalism, free market system broken down. STU: Hasn't broken down for him. PAT: Hasn't broken down for him. He just made $9 billion in hedge funds. We just don't know it yet. So we have to create a new one. …SOROS: And this is the time to do it. VOICE: In the United States how worried are you about the budget deficit and maybe about the possibility of inflation? SOROS: Well, certainly a decline in the value of the dollar is necessary in order to compensate for the fact that U.S. economy will remain rather weak, will be a drag on the global economy (emphasis mine). See: http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/32718/ 3a) Ben Bernanke: The Real Pay Czar …Ultimately, if someone gets paid in dollars--no matter how rich or how poor--the Fed has massive influence over the amount of goods and services they can buy with what they've earned. Lately, the U.S. dollar has fallen sharply on world foreign-exchange markets. Since early March, the dollar has lost 15% of its value vs. the euro and 8% vs. the yen. What this means is that, relative to other countries (and currencies), U.S. citizens have taken a pay cut. Our standard of living, when measured by purchasing power, has declined--we now have to work harder and export more in order to afford the same imports. …Now the dollar is consistently hitting new lows against foreign currencies, and gold is near an all-time high in dollar terms. And while all of this is important, what we are really seeing is the early signs (the canary in a coal mine) of what we expect to be a significant increase in inflation (emphasis mine). …The worst part of the pay cut is that the people who get hit the hardest by higher inflation will be low-income workers who spend a larger share of their income on the commodities that will go up the most in price. Getting a pay cut is never good, but when it doesn't help the economy grow over the long run, it's bound to generate more worker frustration, potentially leading to a vicious cycle of economic populism, where frustration leads to more government action, leading in turn to even more frustration. See: http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/02/ben-bernanke-pay-czar-bank-bonuses-opinions-columnists-brian-s-wesbury-robert-stein.html 4) $160,000 Per Stimulus Job? White House Calls That 'Calculator Abuse' Posting its results late this afternoon at Recovery.gov, the White House claimed 640,329 jobs have been created or saved because of the $159 billion in stimulus funds allocated as of Sept. 30. …The White House argues that the actual job number is actually larger than 640,000 -- closer to 1 million jobs when one factors in stimulus jobs added in October and, more importantly, jobs created indirectly, such as "the waitress who's still on the job," Vice President Biden said today. So let's see. Assuming their number is right -- 160 billion divided by 1 million. Does that mean the stimulus costs taxpayers $160,000 per job? Jared Bernstein, chief economist and senior economic advisor to the vice president, called that "calculator abuse." He said the cost per job was actually $92,000 -- but acknowledged that estimate is for the whole stimulus package as of the end of 2010. See: http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/10/160000-per-stimulus-job-white-house-calls-that-calculator-abuse.html 5) Clunkers: Taxpayers paid $24,000 per car …The Cash for Clunkers program gave car buyers rebates of up to $4,500 if they traded in less fuel-efficient vehicles for new vehicles that met certain fuel economy requirements. A total of $3 billion was allotted for those rebates. The average rebate was $4,000. But the overwhelming majority of sales would have taken place anyway at some time in the last half of 2009, according to Edmunds.com. That means the government ended up spending about $24,000 each for those 125,000 additional vehicle sales. See: http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/28/autos/clunkers_analysis/index.htm 6) Sources: House Health Bill Totals $1.2 Trillion WASHINGTON -- The health care bill headed for a vote in the House this week costs $1.2 trillion or more over a decade, according to numerous Democratic officials and figures contained in an analysis by congressional budget experts, far higher than the $900 billion cited by President Barack Obama as a price tag for his reform plan. While the Congressional Budget Office has put the cost of expanding coverage in the legislation at roughly $1 trillion, Democrats added billions more on higher spending for public health, a reinsurance program to hold down retiree health costs, payments for preventive services and more. See: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/02/sources-house-health-totals-trillion/ 6a) The Worst Bill Ever Epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting: The Pelosi health bill has it all. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she's prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that's what it takes to pass ObamaCare, and little wonder. The health bill she unwrapped last Thursday, which President Obama hailed as a "critical milestone," may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced. In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics. Yet at this point, Democrats have dumped any pretense of genuine bipartisan "reform" and moved into the realm of pure power politics as they race against the unpopularity of their own agenda. The goal is to ram through whatever income-redistribution scheme they can claim to be "universal coverage." The result will be destructive on every level—for the health-care system, for the country's fiscal condition, and ultimately for American freedom and prosperity. …All of this is intentional, even if it isn't explicitly acknowledged. The overriding liberal ambition is to finish the work began decades ago as the Great Society of converting health care into a government responsibility. Mr. Obama's own Medicare actuaries estimate that the federal share of U.S. health dollars will quickly climb beyond 60% from 46% today. One reason Mrs. Pelosi has fought so ferociously against her own Blue Dog colleagues to include at least a scaled-back "public option" entitlement program is so that the architecture is in place for future Congresses to expand this share even further. As Congress's balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can't regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine. Mr. Obama rode into office on a wave of "change," but we doubt most voters realized that the change Democrats had in mind was making health care even more expensive and rigid than the status quo. Critics will say we are exaggerating, but we believe it is no stretch to say that Mrs. Pelosi's handiwork ranks with the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act as among the worst bills Congress has ever seriously contemplated (emphasis mine). See: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703399204574505423751140690.html?mod=rss_opinion_main 7) NEA raves to teachers about Alinsky 'guidebook' Recommends texts by radical community organizer who 'encouraged positive social change' The National Education Association has made a glowing assessment of radical socialist community organizer Saul Alinsky and is enthusiastically recommending American public school teachers read two of his books, including one dedicated to Satan (emphasis mine). On its website, the NEA dubs Alinsky "an inspiration to anyone contemplating action in their community! And to every organizer!" It recommends Alinsky's "Reveille for Radicals," a 1946 book about the principles and tactics of "community organizing," and "Rules for Radicals," a 1971 text that articulated a socialist strategy for gaining political power to redistribute wealth from the "haves" to the "have-nots." The NEA, the largest labor union in the United States, represents public school teachers, college and university faculty, retired education employees and college students preparing to become teachers. The association describes Alinsky as a "master political agitator, tactical planner and social organizer" who wrote a "guidebook for those who are out to change things." "He sets down what the goal is: a society where people are free to live, and also aren't starving in the streets. A society where there is legal and economic justice," the NEA explains to educators. "Then he sets out to say how to get there." The NEA continues, "Alinsky's goal seems to be to encourage positive social change by equipping activists with a realistic view of the world, a kind of preemptive disillusionment. If a person already knows what evil the world is capable of, then perhaps the surprise factor can be eliminated, making the person a more effective activist. Alinsky further seems to be encouraging the budding activist not to worry to [sic] much about getting his or her hands dirty. It's all a part of the job, he seems to say." …Alinsky dedicated the first edition of his book, "Rules for Radicals," to Satan: "Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer." See: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=114881 8) Did Black Panther make secret White House visit? Malik Zulu Shabazz, national chairman of the radical New Black Panther Party, refused to confirm or deny to WND whether he visited the White House since President Obama took office, despite his name appearing on a recent administration disclosure. Shabazz' namesake was among the 110 names and 481 visits released by the White House on Friday as part of the Obama administration's so-called volunteer disclosure policy. The names were just a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who have gone through the White House's doors since January. Among the famous names that stood out on the brief list were Shabazz, Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers. The White House blog claimed all three names were "false positives" – names that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else. Added the official blog: "In September, requests were submitted for the names of some famous or controversial figures (for example Michael Jordan, William Ayers, Michael Moore, Jeremiah Wright, Robert Kelly, and Malik Shabazz). The well-known individuals with those names never actually came to the White House. Nevertheless, we were asked for those names, and so we have included records for those individuals who were here and share the same names." Other famous names confirmed to have visited the White House include Oprah Winfrey and George Soros. Asked by WND to confirm or deny he had visited the White House, Shabazz replied by e-mail "no comment on that one." See: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=114727