Obama Hits Bottom

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE   "Worse, this tax hike would immediately devalue the investments of millions of American households, and would make investing in American firms, which already labor under the developed world’s second-highest corporate-tax rate, even less attractive. It would do so precisely at the time when we should be encouraging investment, which is the only real source of reliable long-term job growth."

http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/lisabenson

While we believe that a tax increase is bad medicine for a country on the cusp of a double-dip recession and suffering from the weakest growth and worst job market in modern history, practically all parties — Republicans and Democrats, supply-side conservatives and their tormenters at the Brookings Institution — agree that a deep and fundamental reorganization of the U.S. tax code is highly desirable, and there are several excellent proposals for doing so. President Obama’s preference for simply jacking up tax rates on families earning $250,000 and more is crude and childish in comparison with the proposals of thoughtful Democrats, to say nothing of those offered by more sensible conservatives.

American Civil War Battle of Antietam, Sept 17th, 1862

The Battle of Antietam, 149 years ago: Wikipedia summary:
Referred to in the South as the Battle of Sharpsburg, since they named battles after the closest town. The northerners named the battles after the closest river.

Antietam battle maps

The Battle of Antietam "...also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, particularly in the South), fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek, as part of the Maryland Campaign, was the first major battle in the American Civil War to take place on Northern soil. It was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with about 23,000 casualties."

Civil War Trust  Click on the slide show at this page for pictures, then and now.

Antietam Battle Description

Many links for the Civil War Buff
Antietam on the Web
Pictures of the Battle of Antietam

The Maryland campaign of 1862

"The American Civil War Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) put an end to General Lee's 1862 incursion into the North, gave President Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the crucial Emancipation Proclamation, and probably doomed the Confederacy's hopes for European recognition and support." More here. 

Historian Bruce Catton's essay on the Emancipation Proclamation.

A Walk at Antietam

More photos around Sharpsburg Md.

Maybe we shouldn’t ask if Obama will quit …Maybe he already has!

Hot Air  "We’ve analyzed the potential for Obama to pull an LBJ and pull out of the 2012 election, or for Democrats to pressure him into quitting the race if he doesn’t reach that conclusion on his own.  With the obvious implications of Obama’s two proposals this month, the better question is whether he’s already quit being President in favor of just being a candidate:"

Obama mailed in both proposals rather than engage in the hard work of governance. If Obama had any interest in actually passing his deficit-reduction plan, he would not have filled it with tax hikes that have floated around the Beltway for years — and which both Republicans and Democrats have rejected in the past. The jobs bill was even less creative than his approach to deficit reduction, cribbed from a failed and costly exercise in central economic control. Obama didn’t bother to put much effort into either because he has no intention of doing the hard work needed to accomplish actual deficit reduction or improve the job-creation climate. The president has more than a year to go before the next election, but Obama has stopped governing and has shifted entirely to campaign mode. This is what it looks like when a president quits. Edward Morrissey

US News cartoon

Hollywood Love Affair with World’s Biggest Celebrity Hits Rough Patch…

PJ Lyfestyle  "You want to talk about real movie magic? How ‘bout a president who could save a “billion jobs” and still face an unemployment rate north of 9 percent?

"Hollywood’s love affair with Obama may have hit a few rough spots, but here’s betting the relationship will be reborn in 2012. Hollywood loves sequels as much as it does Democratic politicians."

It isn't that Hollywood is realizing that socialist policies are bankrupt; it's that they wish Obama was even further to the left.

Obama's Dilemma: U.S. Foreign Policy and Electoral Realities

STRATFOR ...."The vilification from all sides that follows any mention we make of American politics is both inevitable and unpleasant. Nevertheless, it’s our job to chronicle the unfolding of the international system, and the fact that the United States is moving deeply into an election cycle will affect American international behavior and therefore the international system."
....
"The U.S. president will not be deeply engaged in the world for more than a year. Thus, he will have to cope with events pressed on him. He may undertake initiatives, such as trying to revive the Middle East peace process, but such moves would have large political components that would make it difficult to cope with realities on the ground. The rest of the world knows this, of course. The question is whether and how they take advantage of it."
Obama's Dilemma: U.S. Foreign Policy and Electoral Realities is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

One has to ask, with near-daily trips to the hinterlands for campaigning and blame-shifting plus rounds of golf, when does Obama have time or even interest to spend with foreign policy advisors?
I see no trace of either in the man.

Obama’s Middle East Is in Tatters, Utter Tatters  "It is not actually his region. Still, with the arrogance that is so characteristic of his behavior in matters he knows little about (which is a lot of matters), he entered the region as if in a triumphal march. But it wasn’t the power and sway of America that he was representing in Turkey and in Egypt. For the fact is that he has not much respect for these representations of the United States."  Emphasis added.

Why Won’t Obama List Israelis Among the Victims of Terrorism?  "If not blowing up a bus in the Negev, then a shoot-out at the El Al counter at Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome. A family massacre in the Galilee, a mass murder of Olympic athletes in Munich, two high-toll bombings in Buenos Aires. In a Jerusalem Yeshiva, on a Tel Aviv thoroughfare. And the liquidation of five members of a family, yes, a family that lived in a settlement. But its three-month-old didn’t really know that. Knife across the neck anyway.
"The omission is surely deliberate."

Daniel Pipes: Obama's Pretend Counterterrorism Policy  "In brief, an organization connected to terrorists swoons over the administration's pretend counterterrorism policy while the grieving father of a terrorist scornfully dismisses it. That tells us everything.
"What now, with the enshrining of a fringe study as national policy? There are no shortcuts: Those who want a genuine counterterrorism policy must work to remove the Left and the multiculturalists from government."

Peter King (left) and Bennie Thompson (right) symbolize
 the difference in counterterrorism policy outlook.