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When an Insufferable Blowhard Runs Out of Money This is What it Looks Like

Let me set the scene for you: Rising oil and gas prices, rising equity prices and falling housing prices. Storm signals start winking on the global economic front after a month of a braggadocious presidential tour telling us all that finally the economy has got it right; that it’s on its way to recovery.

Where have I seen this film before? Oh yeah: February 2010, 2011, 2012.

In his State of the Union address of January 2011 and 2012, Obama was bragging about his economic accomplishments.

“We are poised for progress,” he told Congress in 2011. “Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.”

At the start of 2011, the president was an insufferable blowhard, anxious to let us know that he saved the economy. He was even more of a blowhard in December going into 2012.

But after successfully destabilizing the Islamic world by intervening in Libya, Obama, along with loose money policies of the Federal Reserve, created successively higher oil prices as more and more regimes felt pressure from the Islamic Spring and Obama stifled production at home.  And it wasn’t just oil prices, either, that went up. Food prices, gold and silver and other basic material prices were heading up just at a time when the global economy was showing signs of slowing.

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Inflation then acted as a brake on economies that were struggling to gain traction.

Then Mr. President Obama- who has always looked disinterested in real policy work- took several long vacations, inspired a sovereign debt crisis in the US and started the class warfare rhetoric that he now clings to bitterly as a substitute for religion and guns and real tax reform.   

Several sovereign debt crises later, the largest economic union in the world, the Eurozone, is on life support, while China deteriorates economically and Japan is listless.

And how did America do in this after all of Obama’s bragging?

Corporate profits are mixed, unemployment is ticking back up, while GDP grows at about 1.5 percent annually. The S&P 500 returned a measly 1.02 percent for 2011, however much Obama was roaring about the stock market in January.

Apparently the president doesn’t get to decide in January what the market will do for the year.

Now Obama knows that. 

Investors, who make economic decisions, not political speeches, didn’t buy the all-is-well mantra and bought very little equity in the stock market in 2011, despite “record profits.”   

This time around, in 2012, as Obama’s economy rises from the dead once again, he’s claiming only to have saved the auto industry on the backs of the taxpayers’ gift of ten and twenty dollars bills that stretches out a billion times.

General Motors, which made “record profits” last year, after getting the largest forgivable loan in the history of mankind- seriously- from the federal government, has announced profits have plunged.

Investors haven’t been buying those “record profits” either, chasing shares down to $20 from an offering of $33 in late 2010. $54 is break even for taxpayers- I guess investors were waiting for higher “record profits” before they are convinced that GM is as valuable as Obama says.

Now Obama has a big problem.

He wants you to believe that the economy is so bad that he needed trillions more to fix it. If that’s true, then all the bragging in the world by him isn’t going to remove the responsibility he has for the mess that he’s created over three years. 

But he also wants you to think that things are improving as well. If that’s true, if unemployment is heading downward, as Obama would want you to believe, then the question becomes: Why does he need trillions more to fix an economy already in recovery?

It’s clear the both-ways president, as usual, wants it both ways. He wants to declaim any responsibility for anything, while taking credit for everything.

He got Bin Laden, he saved GM and he blamed Bush.   

Subtle clues can be seen in places other than the bottom line of the employment report that the economy is fragile and at risk of fracturing.

Let’s for a moment ignore the contortions that socialist economists execute in order to make it appear the best-of-times and the worst-of-times alternately for the benefit of Obama.

Millions of people have left the workforce in the last year, driving labor participation rates to a 30 year low and costing the economy literally hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Consumer sentiment is down markedly, but that’s a lagging indicator of the economy. Confidence will be meaningful only on election-day. Even still, consumer confidence is well below what is considered healthy- for an economy or a president.

Getting the picture?

While GDP was not-so great in the first half, that was a one-off event. It will be a disaster in the second half of the year. And the first quarter of 2013 will be decidedly worse, maybe even 2008-9 type worse.

Already we have seen durable goods orders drop. And quarterly dividend futures point to companies eager to retain cash despite “record profits.”

Now add into that potent mix of economic miasma: 1) an Obama energy policy that has resulted in higher, less stable prices; 2) an Obama foreign policy that has resulted in more hostile and less stable global relationships, and; 3) world wide central bank policies that admits of one conclusion: We are out of money.

We. Are. Out. Of. Money.

So this is what it looks like when an insufferable blow hard runs out of money?

Yes, sir. 

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• WAYNE ALLYN ROOT
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I am President Obama’s classmate at Columbia University, Class of ’83. I am also one of the most accurate Las Vegas oddsmakers and prognosticators. Accurate enough that I was awarded my own star on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars. And I smell something rotten in Denmark. Obama has a big skeleton in his closet. It’s his college records. Call it “gut instinct” but my gut is almost always right. Obama has a secret hidden at Columbia- and it’s a bad one that threatens to bring down his presidency. Gut instinct is how I’ve made my living for 29 years since graduating Columbia.

Obama and his infamous strategist David Axelrod understand how to play political hardball, the best it’s ever been played. Team Obama has decided to distract America’s voters by condemning Mitt Romney for not releasing enough years of his tax returns. It’s the perfect cover. Obama knows the best defense is a bold offense. Just keep attacking Mitt and blaming him for secrecy and evasion, while accusing him of having a scandal that doesn’t exist. Then ask followers like Senator Harry Reid to chase the lead. The U.S. Senate Majority Leader appears to now be making up stories out of thin air, about tax returns he knows nothing about. It’s a cynical, brilliant, and vicious strategy. Make Romney defend, so he can’t attack the real Obama scandal.

This is classic Axelrod. Obama has won several elections in his career by slandering his opponents and leaking sealed documents. Not only do these insinuations and leaks ruin the credibility and reputation of Obama’s opponents, they keep them on the defensive and off Obama’s trail of sealed documents.

 

By attacking Romney’s tax records, Obama’s socialist cabal creates a problem that doesn’t exist. Is the U.S. Senate Majority Leader making up stories out of thin air? You decide. But the reason for this baseless attack is clear- make Romney defend, so not only is he “off message” but it helps the media ignore the real Obama scandal.

My answer for Romney? Call Obama’s bluff.

Romney should call a press conference and issue a challenge in front of the nation. He should agree to release more of his tax returns, only if Obama unseals his college records. Simple and straight-forward. Mitt should ask “What could possibly be so embarrassing in your college records from 29 years ago that you are afraid to let America’s voters see? If it’s THAT bad, maybe it’s something the voters ought to see.” Suddenly the tables are turned. Now Obama is on the defensive.

My bet is that Obama will never unseal his records because they contain information that could destroy his chances for re-election. Once this challenge is made public, my prediction is you’ll never hear about Mitt’s tax returns ever again.

Why are the college records, of a 51-year-old President of the United States, so important to keep secret? I think I know the answer.

If anyone should have questions about Obama’s record at Columbia University, it’s me. We both graduated (according to Obama) Columbia University, Class of ’83. We were both (according to Obama) Pre-Law and Political Science majors. And I thought I knew most everyone at Columbia. I certainly thought I’d heard of all of my fellow Political Science majors. But not Obama (or as he was known then- Barry Soetoro). I never met him. Never saw him. Never even heard of him. And none of the classmates that I knew at Columbia have ever met him, saw him, or heard of him.

But don’t take my word for it. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008  that Fox News randomly called 400 of our Columbia classmates and never found one who had ever met Obama.

Now all of this mystery could be easily and instantly dismissed if Obama released his Columbia transcripts to the media. But even after serving as President for 3 1/2 years he refuses to unseal his college records. Shouldn’t the media be as relentless in pursuit of Obama’s records as Romney’s? Shouldn’t they be digging into Obama’s past–beyond what he has written about himself–with the same boundless enthusiasm as Mitt’s?

The first question I’d ask is, if you had great grades, why would you seal your records? So let’s assume Obama got poor grades. Why not release the records? He’s president of the free world, for gosh sakes. He’s commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. Who’d care about some poor grades from three decades ago, right? So then what’s the problem? Doesn’t that make the media suspicious? Something doesn’t add up.

Secondly, if he had poor grades at Occidental, how did he get admitted to an Ivy League university in the first place? And if his grades at Columbia were awful, how’d he ever get into Harvard Law School? So again those grades must have been great, right? So why spend millions to keep them sealed?

Third, how did Obama pay for all these fancy schools without coming from a wealthy background? If he had student loans or scholarships, would he not have to maintain good grades?

I can only think of one answer that would explain this mystery.

Here’s my gut belief: Obama got a leg up by being admitted to both Occidental and Columbia as a foreign exchange student. He was raised as a young boy in Indonesia. But did his mother ever change him back to a U.S. citizen? When he returned to live with his grandparents in Hawaii or as he neared college-age preparing to apply to schools, did he ever change his citizenship back? I’m betting not.

If you could unseal Obama’s Columbia University records I believe you’d find that:

A)   He rarely ever attended class.

B)   His grades were not those typical of what we understand it takes to get into Harvard Law School.

C)   He attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student.

D)   He paid little for either undergraduate college or Harvard Law School because of foreign aid and scholarships given to a poor foreign students like this kid Barry Soetoro from Indonesia.

If you think I’m “fishing” then prove me wrong. Open up your records Mr. President. What are you afraid of?

If it’s okay for U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to go on a fishing expedition about Romney’s taxes (even though he knows absolutely nothing about them nor will release his own), then I think I can do the same thing. But as Obama’s Columbia Class of ’83 classmate, at least I have more standing to make educated guesses.

It’s time for Mitt to go on the attack and call Obama’s bluff.

New Obama Slogan: From One, Many

President Obama is my president. He’s not illegitimate. He’s not a usurper. He was duly elected by my fellow citizens — and as much as I think he’s a horrible commander-in-chief with anti-American ideals, that’s the choice Americans made in 2008.

But by the same token, President Obama isn’t my president. He isn’t doing anything for me, the typical, faceless American citizen. I’m not a member of a minority group — at least a minority group that counts (being Jewish obviously doesn’t count when it comes to Obama’s giveaway grab bag). I’m not a welfare case, and I’m employed. I’m not a member of a public sector union.

And so I don’t count when it comes to President Obama.

President Obama’s entire re-election campaign — and, thus far, his entire presidency — has been predicated on appealing to various splinter groups within the American population. He isn’t interested in presenting broad policy initiatives that appeal to the vast swath of Americans; in fact, his one major policy initiative, Obamacare, bombed with the American public so badly that the Democrats were unceremoniously thrown from Congress in 2010.

That’s why Obama finds himself on the defensive with regard to his polarizing campaign tactics. In an interview with Black Enterprise magazine, Obama said, “I want all Americans to have opportunity. I’m not the president of black America. I’m the president of the United States of America.” But that’s not what he says on his campaign website, where he breaks down Americans by color, including a subgroup of African-Americans for Obama, where he pushes posters urging blacks to “get his back” — just $35 to show your support!

Obama’s website also offers groups for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Jewish Americans (well, liberal Jewish Americans), Latinos, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgenders, people with disabilities, small business owners (all two of them who support Obama), seniors, women, and young Americans, among others.

Obama sees America as a country of differences papered over with the flag; Americans, by contrast, have historically seen America as a country of different folks united by dreams, goals and principles. To Obama, unity is aesthetic, an idea to be photoshopped to the front of a campaign brochure. To Americans, unity is engraved on our coinage.

But that fundamental difference in perspective has yet to manifest itself in this campaign. Americans seem to want to take Obama at his word. They don’t understand that his campaign philosophy of 2008 is worlds apart from his campaign philosophy of 2012. He has failed as a universal president — a president whose rising tide has lifted all boats. His only success must spring from his particularism. He must deconstruct his “all things to all people” persona in order to appeal to any one particular group.

But Obama’s enigmatic persona means that there’s no there there. He hasn’t offered enough to any one group to qualify as a representative member. His answer to Black Enterprise came in response to a question about whether he’s done enough for the black community. And he hasn’t. But he can only campaign as a black candidate or a gay candidate or a Latino candidate or a whatever-he-is-this-week candidate.

And that just won’t fly. Because, to paraphrase a famously unifying politician of the recent past, we’re not black states and white states, gay states and straight states — we’re the United States. Even if our president seems to like us better scattered and disunited.

Ben Shapiro, 28, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, a radio host on KRLA 870 Los Angeles, and Editor-At-Large for Breitbart News. He is the four-time bestselling author of “Primetime Propaganda.”

Liberals, Progressives and Socialists

In Europe, especially in Germany, hoisting a swastika-emblazoned Nazi flag is a crime. For decades after World War II, people have hunted down and sought punishment for Nazi murderers, who were responsible for the deaths of more than 20 million people.

Here’s my question: Why are the horrors of Nazism so well-known and widely condemned but not those of socialism and communism? What goes untaught — and possibly is covered up — is that socialist and communist ideas have produced the greatest evil in mankind’s history. You say, “Williams, what in the world are you talking about? Socialists, communists and their fellow travelers, such as the Wall Street occupiers supported by our president, care about the little guy in his struggle for a fair shake! They’re trying to promote social justice.” Let’s look at some of the history of socialism and communism.

What’s not appreciated is that Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, the term Nazi stands for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis pale in comparison with the horrors committed by the communists in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China. Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China’s communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is documented on University of Hawaii Professor Rudolph J. Rummel’s website, at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills, and in his book “Death by Government.”

How much hunting down and punishment have there been for these communist murderers? To the contrary, it’s acceptable both in Europe and in the U.S. to hoist and march under the former USSR’s red flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle. Mao Zedong has been long admired by academics and leftists across our country, as they often marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving his little red book, “Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung.” President Barack Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.

Whether it’s the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children’s Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined.

Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

The unspeakable horrors of Nazism didn’t happen overnight. They were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.” It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans — who would have cringed at the thought of genocide — who created the Trojan horse for Hitler’s ascendancy. Today’s Americans are similarly accepting the massive consolidation of power in Washington in the name of social justice.

If you don’t believe it, just ask yourself: Which way are we headed tiny steps at a time — toward greater liberty or toward more government control over our lives?

Perhaps we think that we are better human beings than the German people who created the conditions that brought Hitler to power. I say, don’t count on it.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Meet the Real Workers Obama Screwed Over

Chutzpah overload in full effect: President Obama’s sleazy super-PAC, run by his former White House spokesman Bill Burton, just released an ad accusing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of causing the cancer death of a steelworker’s wife.

It’s not just a slanderous and false attack. It’s a foolish attempt to camouflage the administration’s massive jobs death toll, politicized pension plundering and Big Labor bailout cronyism. And it will backfire big time because the thousands and thousands of true victims of Obama’s economic wreckage are speaking up and fighting back.

Let’s dispense with the “Romney = murderer” meme first. The warped Priorities USA ad features the claims of one Joe Soptic, a former employee at the Kansas City-based GST Steel plant. The plant went bankrupt years after Bain Capital acquired it. Soptic blames Romney for the loss of his job and health insurance — and for the subsequent death of his wife a “short time after” the plant’s closure.

But Romney stopped working for Bain in 1999. The plant closed in 2001. And Soptic’s wife died in 2006. Oh, and Soptic admitted to CNN on Tuesday afternoon that the family in fact had health insurance at the time of Soptic’s wife’s death. But it’s still all-powerful, time-traveling, omnipresent Darth Romney’s fault.

Obama flack turned super-PAC slime-master Burton shrugged off the facts and doubled down on the campaign’s class-warfare bloviation. “Families and individuals had to find new jobs, new sources of health insurance and a way to make up for the pensions they lost,” he told Politico. “Mitt Romney has had an enduring impact on the lives of thousands of men and women, and for many of them, that impact has been devastating.”

Yet, the Soptic story is the best they could scrape together? Stamp this one “EPIC FAIL.”

While Team Obama promotes fables to indict Romney, the incontrovertible stories of the current administration’s economic malpractice are finally getting out. In 2010, I first reported on how Obama’s UAW bailout threw tens of thousands of nonunion autoworkers under the bus. It’s the ongoing horror story of some 20,000 white-collar workers at Delphi, a leading auto parts company spun off from GM a decade ago.

As Washington rushed to nationalize the U.S. auto industry with $80 billion in taxpayer “rescue” funds and avoid contested court termination proceedings, the White House auto team and the Treasury Department schemed with Big Labor bosses to preserve UAW members’ costly pension funds by shafting their nonunion counterparts.

In addition, the nonunion pensioners lost all of their health and life insurance benefits. The abused workers — most from hard-hit northeast Ohio, Michigan and neighboring states — had devoted decades of their lives as secretaries, technicians, engineers and sales employees at Delphi/GM. Some workers have watched up to 70 percent of their pensions vanish.

“I worked for 34 years at GM/Delphi Corp. When Delphi went bankrupt, we lost everything,” Dana Strickland of Michigan wrote me. “Because I was salaried (middle management), we lost our pension and health insurance. I did not belong to the union, so GM/Delphi could have cared less. I have never felt so betrayed. We never hear this brought to the public’s attention. People need to know how we were screwed, while the Obama administration kissed up to the union.”

“I’m one of the Delphi Salaried Retirees that lost the health care, life insurance and 67 percent of the pension I was promised in retirement after working hard for 40 years,” Charles Stone of Michigan e-mailed. “Words cannot describe the frustration and let down these events have thrust on my family’s lives, and to have GM’s rescue all sugar-coated in the current political environment is like putting lipstick on a pig. … We will continue to fight to right this grievous wrong.”

Tom Rose of Ohio added: “I am one of the 20,000 salaried retirees that lost all of my health care and — in my case — a 40 percent pension cut. So I am now paying increased health care costs with fewer pension dollars and contributing what is left to our lawsuit to correct this injustice. Meanwhile, the politically connected union has their full pension and 90-plus percent of their health care. You have hit upon the key question: How can our own federal government pick winners and losers amongst its own citizens?”

Through two costly years of litigation and investigation, the Delphi workers have exposed how the stacked White House Auto Task Force schemed with union bosses to “cherry pick” (one Obama official’s own words) which financial obligations the new Government Motors company would assume and which they would abandon based on their political expedience. Obama’s own former auto czar Steve Rattner admitted in his recent memoir that “attacking the union’s sacred cow” could “jeopardize” the auto bailout deal.

In June, 20 months after a federal judge first ordered the government to cooperate, the Delphi Salaried Retirees Association broke through the administration’s information stonewall and dislodged 62,000 pages of documents in their lawsuit to right the administration’s wrongs. As The Daily Caller reported on Tuesday, the documents included “internal government emails (that contradicted) sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts … and that administration figures violated federal law.”

Meanwhile, the Delphi workers who got shafted are getting in the faces of the administration and the public with a new web ad produced by conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring. They are asking, “Why, Mr. President? Why?” They — and America — deserve answers and justice, not more Bizarro World smears and fantastical bedtime stories.

men who were conscripted to the army in order to militarily invade Vietnam, who disagreed with the war. It is illegal in America to deny conscription, and any individual who does becomes a fugitive. "Draft Dodgers" are those who left the country or went into hiding in order to escape the compulsory law.

Mitt and Ann Romney in a 1973 yearbook at Harvard; he earned a joint law and business degree.

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President Obama has a Harvard law degree. Former President George W. Bush has a Harvard M.B.A. Will the next president have both?

One of the most exclusive clubs in academe is a Harvard University dual-degree program allowing graduate students to attend its law and business schools simultaneously, cramming five years of education into four. On average, about 12 people per year have completed the program — the overachievers of the overachievers — including a striking number of big names in finance, industry, law and government.

The program is so small that it has drawn little attention outside rarefied circles, but that may change as its most famous graduate, Mitt Romney, campaigns for the White House, subjecting every phase of his life to scrutiny.

When Harvard started its so-called J.D.-M.B.A. program in 1969, there were just a handful like it. Others have cropped up since, but Harvard’s has what may be the most successful alumni roster, particularly in finance.

In addition to Mr. Romney, founder of Bain Capital, the roughly 500 graduates include Bruce Wasserstein, who led the investment bank Lazard until he died in 2009; leaders of multibillion-dollar hedge fund and private equity firms like Canyon Capital Advisors, Silver Lake Partners and Crestview Partners; high-ranking executives at banks like Citigroup and Credit Suisse; C. James Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company; and Theodore V. Wells Jr., one of the nation’s top trial lawyers.

The young Mr. Romney wanted to go to business school, while his father, George W. Romney, a cabinet secretary and former Michigan governor, urged him to go to law school. So the younger Mr. Romney did both, studying at Harvard from 1971 to 1975.

“What was special about these people was that they had bandwidth,” said Malcolm S. Salter, an emeritus business professor who helped create the program. “They had to be driven, hard-working and organized to a degree that was unusual even for Harvard business or law grad students.”

Guhan Subramanian, who graduated from the program in 1998 and now is its faculty chairman, said the students could be viewed as “résumé builders who haven’t figured out what to do with their lives and are just checking off all the boxes.” But he said they are genuinely interested in mastering both fields.

Students must be admitted separately to the business and law schools before applying for the program. That is a feat in itself, because the two student bodies are quite different.

The law school takes younger students, often straight out of college, putting more emphasis on academic credentials, while the business school usually wants work and leadership experience. Business students are often described as being more gregarious and at ease with numbers, law students as more intellectual and facile with words.

And then there are politics.

“I was among the most conservative people at the law school and one of the most liberal people at the business school,” said Peter Halasz, a partner at the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel, who completed the program in the early 1980s. “Studying at both exposes you to many different kinds of people and various sides of an argument.”

The political gap was wider in Mr. Romney’s era, scarred by Vietnam and Watergate, when law students wore T-shirts and business students wore ties to class. “The law school was very swept up in the politics of the time, but the business school pretty much ignored them,” said Detlev Vagts, a law professor who ran the program for more than 30 years.

Charles E. Haldeman Jr., former head of Putnam Investments and Freddie Mac, was a year ahead of Mr. Romney in the program. “Back then, people were trying to save the world,” Mr. Haldeman said. “Because I was interested in business, and doing well economically mattered to me, and I didn’t think the country was controlled by evil people, the law school students did think of me as a little different.”

Both schools were overwhelmingly male in those days. And far more graduates have gone into business than law; many, like Mr. Wasserstein, switch to business.

Lawrence Golub, chief executive of the Golub Capital investment firm, said that the vast majority of graduates end up in business rather than law because of the earnings potential and the quality of life. “One learns that the life of associate at a big corporate law firm is demanding, unpleasant and not as lucrative as what you can do on the business side,” said Mr. Golub, who graduated from the program in 1984 and founded its alumni society.

For many graduates, Mr. Golub said, the toughest lesson after a lifetime of uninterrupted success is “that failing won’t kill you.”

In the 1970s, many graduates went into management consulting, as Mr. Romney did, but for most of the program’s history, finance has dominated, which some people connected to the program find mildly disappointing. Professor Salter said he had hoped the program would produce more public servants.

But former students and professors say it makes sense that a group of overachievers would be drawn to financial markets, a hypercompetitive field with the promise of immense riches.

Adebayo O. Ogunlesi, a program graduate, said, “I wanted to be a business or commercial lawyer and thought I could meet prospective clients at H.B.S.”

But Mr. Ogunlesi, whose law classmates included Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., practiced law only briefly. He became head of investment banking at Credit Suisse, then chairman of Global Infrastructure Partners.

“When you’re negotiating as a banker, it helps to throw in a few choice legal terms to suggest that you could help them think through how the deal can get done from a legal point of view,” he said.

Students start by taking the first year of one program, and then the first year of the other. In their third and fourth years, they take courses from both.

Those who start with the first year of law school — often regarded as the hardest — as Mr. Romney did are more likely to complete both degrees.

But in another sense, Mr. Romney is atypical. He is one of only two alumni to have a high-profile career in politics, along with Christopher Cox, a former congressman and Securities and Exchange Commission chairman. 

As long as politics remains a relatively low-paying, fickle career, graduates do not expect to see many students taking the political path. All the more reason that other dual-degree graduates, whether or not they support Mr. Romney, admit to being intrigued by the prospect that one of theirs might become president.

“Who knows,” Mr. Golub said, “maybe we’ll be holding our next reunion at the White House.”

 

Some 800,000 additional Texans than expected went to the polls today to cast ballots in what might normally have been a sleepy cakewalk for the ho-hum Establishment Flabby Middle.

Yep. Another Kay Baily Hutchison, another Bob Krueger, that’s all folks in Texas reallywanted, right, Mr. Dewhurst? Someone with french-cuff shirts and collar stays, someone that enjoys the Silent Auction at the Country Club to benefit the United Fund, who speaks in smooth and dulcet tones, and never, ever threatens to actually read the Constitution –let alone abide by it.

Well, gee whiz, guess what happened on the way to the Lowell Wiecker Memorial Big Tent?

The American People happened, that’s what.

And Ted Cruz absolutely crushed David Dewhurst, by nearly 12 percentage points. Ted didn’t merely eke out a victory, or fall over the finish line by a whisper. No. He filleted the Lieutenant Governor, basted him with a spicy sauce of righteous American anger at our current political class, and served him up with a bow to all the establishment types –who, by the way, will now poo-poo the notion they weren’t with Cruz from the get-go.

Does anyone these days queue up hours in advance to listen to a speech by Charlie Crist? Anybody? Bob Bennet?

The truly remarkable thing about Mr. Cruz’s victory is the massive, massive fortune that his opponent sank into the race, and how slathering all the money around by Dewhurst had the exact opposite effect of it’s intent: People are sick of the relentless personal, bizarre, irrelevant attacks in concert with the complete absence of philosophical and political substance. Personal attacks are fine, as far as they go: But, they must be paired with solid, substantive, strongly articulated debate. Ted Cruz offered this in spades.

And in this election, Mr. Obama can see the future, if he cares to look into the glass:

It is a grim and brutish future for the man who is President for the next 159 days, electorally speaking. Just as in Texas, the otherwise somnolent folks that tend to eschew politics in this nation will have been stirred to wrath –fury!– by a President and a political class that is utterly, utterly disconnected from, and uninterested in, them.

How in the name of a loving God could a President so obnoxiously rule against the known, (-and knowable) will of the American People for four years expect anything other than a good, old-fashioned drubbing? All Barack has done for four years is attack his opponents with the most adolescent blather, accuse them of being lazy, racist, good-for-nothings that don’t appreciate his genius– and then sign into law bill upon bill that the American People manifestly despise and reject? How? Has Mr. Obama ever actually acted Presidential for more than a couple of speechifying afternoons? Has he ever been the President of the entire nation –rather than the chief antagonist for the Democrat Party?

The American People are fed up. They are tired of being ignored, tormented, and ripped off. We are a kind and loving people. We are tolerant to a fault.

But, Mr. Obama, pace Admiral Yamamoto: You have awakened a sleeping giant.

Just ask David Dewhurst.

James Pethokoukis | August 3, 2012, 9:08 am

Only in a world of lowered, New Normal expectations was the July jobs report anything less than another disaster for U.S. workers. Nonfarm payrolls rose 163,000 last month as the unemployment rate rose to 8.3%. In addition, employment for May and June was revised by 6,000 jobs.

– Not only is the 8.3% unemployment rate way above the 5.6% unemployment rate that Team Obama predicted for July 2012 if Congress passed the $800 billion stimulus plan. It’s way above the 6.0% unemployment rate they predicted if no stimulus was passed.

– Job growth, as measured by nonfarm payrolls, has average about 75,000 jobs a month during the Obama recovery for a total of 2.7 million jobs. Context: During the first three years of the Reagan Recovery, job growth averaged 273,000 a month for a total of 9.8 million. If you adjust for the larger U.S. population today, the Reagan Recovery averaged 360,000 jobs a month for a three-year total of 13 million jobs.

– This continues to be the longest stretch of 8% or higher unemployment since the Great Depression, 42 straight months.

– If the labor force participation rate was the same as when Obama took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate would be 11.0%.

– Even if you take into account that the LFP should be declining as America ages, the unemployment rate would be 10.6%.

– If labor force participation rate hadn’t declined since just last month, unemployment rate would have risen to 8.4%.

– The broader U-6 unemployment rate, which includes “all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons,” ticked up to 15.0%.

– Two years ago, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner wrote his now-infamous “Welcome to the Recovery” op-ed for the New York Times. During those two years, the economy has added an average of just 137,000 jobs a month.

– Not only is the 8.3% unemployment rate way above the 5.6% unemployment rate that Team Obama predicted for July 2012 if Congress passed the $800 billion stimulus plan. It’s way above the 6.0% unemployment rate they predicted if no stimulus was passed.

– Good point on the report from IHS Global Insight:

In the household survey, which produces the unemployment rate, both the employment-to-population ratio and the labor force participation rate dropped, not signs of a healthy labor market. The report will alleviate fears that the US might be tipping back into recession. But uncertainties over the strength of global growth, the Eurozone crisis, the fiscal cliff and the November elections are giving plenty of reasons for caution. We expect subdued monthly job creation in the 100,000-150,000 region in the second half of the year

– And Citgroup’s take:

To keep us all guessing, today’s data included a particularly weak reading on employment from the household survey, which showed a 195,000 drop in employment and 150,000 drop in the labor force. The unemployment rate rose to 8.3% from 8.2%. While trend employment gains are not progressing at a particularly robust rate, we would not view a 0.1 percentage point move in a singlemonth reading as particularly significant. Also showing that the underlying trend is not very robust, the work week was unchanged and average hourly earnings rose just 0.1%, suggesting a much smaller gain in real income than reported in June (which also argues for smoothing). Aggregate hours worked rose a modest 0.1%.

Obama’s Signature Move: Unsealing Private Records

Mitt Romney presents one enormous problem for Barack Obama’s campaign: No divorce records. That’s why the media are so hot to get their hands on Romney’s tax records for the past 25 years. They need something to “pick through, distort and lie about” — as the Republican candidate says.

Obama’s usual campaign method, used in 100 percent of his races, has been to pry into the private records of his opponents.

Democrats aren’t going to find any personal dirt on the clean-cut Mormon, so they need complicated tax filings going back decades in order to create the illusion of scandal out of boring financial records.

Romney has already released his 2010 tax return and is about to release his 2011 return. After all the huffing and puffing by the media demanding those returns, the follow-up story vanished remarkably quickly when the only thing the return showed was that Romney pays millions of dollars in taxes and gives a lot of money to charity.

Let’s take a romp down memory lane and review the typical Obama campaign strategy. Obama became a U.S. senator only by virtue of David Axelrod’s former employer, the Chicago Tribune, ripping open the sealed divorce records of Obama’s two principal opponents.

One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader. But then the Chicago Tribune leaked the claim that Hull’s second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.

Those records were under seal, but as The New York Times noted: “The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had ‘worked aggressively behind the scenes’ to push the story.” Many people said Axelrod had “an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story.”

Both Hull and his ex-wife opposed releasing their sealed divorce records, but they finally relented in response to the media’s hysteria — 18 days before the primary. Hull was forced to spend four minutes of a debate detailing the abuse allegation in his divorce papers, explaining that his ex-wife “kicked me in the leg and I hit her shin to try to get her to not continue to kick me.”

After having held a substantial lead just a month before the primary, Hull’s campaign collapsed with the chatter about his divorce. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.

As luck would have it, Obama’s opponent in the general election had also been divorced! Jack Ryan was tall, handsome, Catholic — and shared a name with one of Harrison Ford’s most popular onscreen characters! He went to Dartmouth, Harvard Law and Harvard Business School, made hundreds of millions of dollars as a partner at Goldman Sachs, and then, in his early 40s, left investment banking to teach at an inner city school on the South Side of Chicago.

Ryan would have walloped Obama in the Senate race. But at the request of — again — the Chicago Tribune, California Judge Robert Schnider unsealed the custody papers in Ryan’s divorce five years earlier from Hollywood starlet Jeri Lynn Ryan, the bombshell Borg on “Star Trek: Voyager.”

Jack Ryan had released his tax records. He had released his divorce records. But both he and his ex-wife sought to keep the custody records under seal to protect their son.

Amid the 400 pages of filings from the custody case, Jack Ryan claimed that his wife had had an affair, and she counterclaimed with the allegation that he had taken her to “sex clubs” in Paris, New York and New Orleans, which drove her to fall in love with another man.

(Republicans: If you plan a career in public office, please avoid marrying a wacko.)

Ryan had vehemently denied her allegations at the time, but it didn’t matter. The sex club allegations aired on “Entertainment Tonight,” “NBC Nightly News,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” and NBC’s “Today” show. CNN covered the story like it was the first moon landing.

(Interestingly, international papers also were ablaze with the story — the same newspapers that were supposed to be so bored with American sexual mores during Bill Clinton’s sex scandal.)

Four days after Judge Schnider unsealed the custody records, Ryan dropped out of the race for the horror of (allegedly) propositioning his own wife and then taking “no” for an answer.

Alan Keyes stepped in as a last-minute Republican candidate.

And that’s how Obama became a U.S. senator. He destroyed both his Democratic primary opponent and his Republican general election opponent with salacious allegations about their personal lives taken from “sealed” court records.

Obama’s team delved into Sarah Palin’s marriage and spread rumors of John McCain’s alleged affair in 2008 and they smeared Herman Cain in 2011 with hazy sexual harassment allegations all emanating from David Axelrod’s pals in Chicago.

It’s almost like a serial killer’s signature. Unsealed personal records have been released to the press. Obama must be running for office!

So you can see what a pickle the Obama campaign is in having to run against a Dudley Do-Right, non-drinking, non-smoking, God-fearing, happily married Mormon.

They’ve got to get their hands on thousands of pages of Romney’s tax filings so that the media can — as Romney says — lie about them. It will be interesting to see if Obama can pick the lock of the famously guarded IRS.