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Daniel Henninger

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From this Saturday's The Journal Editorial Report on Fox, host Paul Gigot asks his panel what they expect from President Obama during his second term, and after the initial response from Jason Riley, saying that the president is going to be looking to fund his first term agenda, because "socialized medicine is expensive," fellow panelist Daniel Henninger threw out this stink bomb:

GIGOT: Dan, what about this theory from liberals, which is -- and they're cheering it -- no more mister nice guy. The president is going to take on Republicans. He was way to compromising in the first term -- not that I recognize that president -- but that's the line that they're taking. And so, you know... look, he's going to put them in their place. He's going to demonize them, stigmatize them. Is that what we're going to see? What is that...

HENNINGER: We are going to see it. I mean, the left has been looking for years for an answer to right wing talk radio and they've got one -- the President of the United States. He's like a left wing talk show host.

Uh.... in a word Dan... NO. We've got plenty of "left wing" talk show hosts out there and they're mostly way to the left of President Obama. They went on to complain that President Obama is to blame for making the Republicans look bad and that he's causing them to fight among themselves, as though they needed an ounce of help in that department.

And the Republican health care plan he helped get passed that you all loved until a Democrat proposed it isn't "socialism." These wingnuts just keep pushing that Overton window further and further to the right.



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From this Saturday's Journal Editorial Report, after the Fox panel members spent some time weighing in on the latest polls and doing their best to get the audience pumped up about Mitt Romney's so-called "momentum" in the national poll and playing a portion of the President talking about Willard's "Romesia," the WSJ's Dorothy Rabinowitz decided to play the "angry black man" card to attack President Obama.

FREEMAN: But the other issue is, look, this is a well known incumbent late in the race. He's probably persuaded most of the people he's going to persuade and I think his campaign speeches now are telling you that, because it is a very fiercely partisan, ideological message that he's delivering as he travels to these swing states. He is not talking to independents.

GIGOT: Let's get a clip of that. We want to give an illustration of what James just pointed out.

(VIDEO)

OBAMA: It turns out it's not a five-point plan Governor Romney has got, it's a one-point plan:  Folks at the very top get to play by their own rules -- pay lower tax rates than you do, outsource more jobs, let Wall Street run wild.  And if this plan sounds familiar, it's because we tried it. […]

Now, Governor Romney knows this.  He knows his plan isn't any different than the policies that led to the Great Recession.  So in the final weeks of his election, he's counting on you forgetting what he stands for.  He's hoping that you, too, will come down with a case of what we like to call Romnesia.

(END VIDEO)

GIGOT: Romnesia. I've got it. You've got it, so what's ahhh... what do you think of that?

RABINOWITZ: Well, what we think of it is, what are we looking at here? We have to acknowledge, the President is a very angry man. That has been there evidently in the past, since that debate, all along...

GIGOT: But you know what Dorothy, here's the thing, he's always been such a cool customer. That's been his great appeal to so many people. It helped him in 2008 with John McCain. […] You're saying this is a different Obama we're seeing?

RABINOWITZ: Yes. When the sun is shining, reality is very different. What happened is that we heard the mantra for a long time now, we always knew this was going to be a close race. Well, maybe his handlers did, but Obama never did. You have to believe inside that you always thought that, but now, came Denver, he began to understand, this is reality. He is in danger of losing and everything that supported him, all of that sense of vast crowds – imagine what happened yesterday in Colorado.

If you took a look at Mitt Romney's immense crowds, that evokes the same, tremendous passion that Obama had, only it was Mitt Romney winning. So you have this enraged President and it comes out he can't stop, just as Biden could not stop, he cannot stop behaving inappropriately.

Ah yes, that "enraged President." Doesn't everyone see just how "unhinged" he is on the campaign trail, waging "class warfare" by daring to point out what Mitt Romney's policies are? The nerve of him. Par for the course, it's another day of upside down land and major projection of Romney's worst traits onto President Obama in Fox GOPTV land.



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The Obama campaign has a new ad out titled "Worried" which points out that Mitt Romney would like to return us to the policies we had under George W. Bush, and naturally the panel members on Fox's the Journal Editorial Report did their best to try to pretend that wasn't true.

While it may be true that Bush is not on the ballot now, and the economy is still in bad shape, that's not due to the policies of the Obama administration as the talking heads on Fox claimed and they completely ignored Republican governors and state legislatures around the country doing their part to lay off as many government workers as possible, or the Republicans in the Congress and the amount of obstruction we've seen from them.

They did do their best to pretend that Romney doesn't want to privatize Social Security, just like George W. Bush did and that there's a dime's worth of difference between the two there. And they criticized Bush for the prescription drug giveaway he passed, as though Republicans really care about government taking care of their allies in big pharma or any of the rest of their campaign donors for that matter. That's their standard excuse to try to pretend Bush wasn't a real Republican and was just like those tax and spend liberals they all hate so much. And even though they acknowledged that Mitt Romney would like to pass Paul Ryan's budget plan, there was no admission that his plan would just be a return to what we had under Bush, only on steroids.

Here's more from Jon Perr from back in June on exactly why Romney would just be a return to the Bush years and why that ad is correct: Mitt Romney is Running for Bush's Third Term:

In Las Vegas last week, Mitt Romney looked to his own biography in proposing a new requirement for anyone seeking the presidency:

"In addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birthplace of the president being set by the Constitution, I'd like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before becoming president of the United States."

Of course, if Mitt Romney had his way, the President should also have an MBA from the prestigious Harvard Business School. He ought to have made millions in the private sector and earned notoriety for running a high-profile sports enterprise. A scion of a proud Republican family, the occupant of the White House should promise massive, Treasury-draining tax cuts which would deliver the lion's share of their benefits to the very richest Americans, himself and his family included. The President should also nevertheless pledge to balance the budget even while boosting defense spending. And in his ideal America, he would like to privatize Social Security and leave Americans to fend for themselves in the private health insurance marketplace.

If that profile sounds like Mitt Romney, that's because it is. Then again, the same description also applies to America's First MBA President*, George W. Bush. And we all know how well that worked out.

(Click a link to jump to the details for each below the fold):



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From this Saturday's The Journal Editorial Report on Fox, the panel from Uncle Rupert's Wall Street Journal really doesn't like the idea of several counties in California using "eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages from investors and restructure them to help borrowers keep the homes." Funny, I don't ever recall anyone on Fox complaining about the use of eminent domain by people like George W. Bush so he could build his stadium in Texas, but if it's to help underwater home owners, well, that's just terrible.

Here's more from the L.A. Times on the story: San Bernardino County weighs eminent domain to fight foreclosures:

A plan by San Bernardino County to seize mortgages and restructure them for underwater homeowners using eminent domain is perhaps the most aggressive example of how local governments are seeking new ways to combat foreclosure.

The cities of Ontario and Fontana are partnering with the county to create a Homeownership Protection Program that would use private funds to acquire underwater mortgages from investors. The county and the two cities have created a joint authority to explore and possibly enact the plan, and the first public meeting of that authority will be held next week.

David Wert, a spokesman for the county, said the program is worth exploring because it could offer a solution to one of the region's most entrenched problems: the vast number of loans that are stuck underwater, with more money owed than the property is worth. If the program were to go countywide, it could benefit 20,000 to 30,000 homeowners, he said.

"The only thing we are doing at this point is conducting a conversation," Wert said. "But the reason the county is interested in talking about this is because this is a proposal that could — if everything checks out — address the problem on a fairly large scale."

Although still in its initial stages, the aggressive proposal has attracted controversy. A number of banking, financial and business groups oppose it, contending that seizing mortgages would raise constitutional issues and could increase lending costs in those cities.

The California Mortgage Bankers Assn., the American Bankers Assn. and the American Securitziation Forum, along with several other financial groups, sent a letter of opposition to the county and the two cities.

"We believe that the contemplated use of eminent domain raises very serious legal and constitutional issues," the letter read. "It would also be immensely destructive to U.S. mortgage markets by undermining the sanctity of the contractual relationship between a borrower and creditor, and similarly undermining existing securitization transactions."

Dustin Hobbs, a spokesman for the California Mortgage Bankers Assn., said the program also could hurt the local housing market.

"It could be devastating," Hobbs said. "If investors are unsure as to the disposition of mortgages in San Bernardino County and in Fontana and Ontario, it could really curtail lending in the area, and if not curtail, certainly increase costs for new loans."

San Bernardino County's plan is the latest of several measures by local governments to fight foreclosures and the problems often associated with resulting neglect: crime and blight. Read on...



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From Fox's Journal Editorial Report, Wall Street Journal editorial director Daniel Henninger along with host Paul Gigot and another of their editorial writers, Matthew Kaminski discussing what Gigot called the "biggest foreign policy story of 2011, the Arab Spring. And in typical Fox fashion where what's up is down and black is white, we get this bit of commentary on the cause of the uprisings from Henninger:

HENNINGER: Now, admittedly our options are limited, but why are they limited? The Arab Spring started last January. At least eleven nations erupted against existing dictatorships. The United States' reaction was we don't know what to do because we don't know who these people are, because we aren't engaged with those people.

GIGO: But for precisely that reason, we played or in part because of that reason, in part because of the reluctance of the Obama administration to lead in the world; you know they like to “lead from behind” as one of the advisers famously told The New Yorker. They've played a pretty passive role here. And so is that...

HENNIGER: Well I think they've done that as a matter of policy. They do not want to lead. They want to engage with other multilateral institutions. But I think what you're seeing in the Middle East is a microcosm of what the world looks like when the world's leading power disengages itself. It begins to spin out of control on its own and this is why this will occur in other parts of the world if we don't show global responsibility.

Which by engaging, what they're talking about naturally is threatening to or allowing Israel to go ahead and bomb Iran. They're just aching for a return to the days of George W. Bush and the neocons and more military engagements in the Middle East, facts and how badly that's worked out for us in the past be damned and they'll use any excuse to continue to push for just that as they did here. Heaven forbid we've got all this messy protesting and uprisings going on where people are tired of dictators and oppression. We'd better get more "engaged" to put a stop to it.

I think our meddling in the Middle East and propping up these dictators over the years that the populations are rising up against has done quite enough damage already, thank you. And to claim that we're not "engaged" already when we've still got thousands of troops and contractors over there and are doing drone attacks in the name of this fiasco they call the "war on terror" is utterly ridiculous.