This has been the president's theme: His so-called stimulus package, bailouts for politically connected banks and industries, ludicrously wasteful programs like Cash for Clunkers, etc. have saved America from the greatest disaster since the Great Depression.Success No Matter What
But this theme runs up against some rather unfortunate facts...
The White House is a risky place for on-the-job training, as Barack Obama and the rest of us are learning...Mr. Obama imagined last year that he was auditioning to replace Martin Sheen on the television serial "West Wing." He's learning better now.PRUDEN: Reality bites Obama's 'West Wing'
Canadian Cheryl Baxter talks about the horror she lived through under the nationalized health care system. The brave Canadian finally had to come to America to get the surgery she needed. It cost her family tens of thousands of dollars. (So much for free health care!) It was either that or live with excruciating pain. Today Cheryl says her government let her down.Watch this powerful video
The Obama administration's position on the Honduran election is embarrassing. Can anyone imagine that if Fidel Castro declared tomorrow that he would hold free elections and invite the whole world to come as observers, the U.S. would reject the idea because Cuba is a military dictatorship? It would be absurd...A transparent election is the path to political stability endorsed by the Free World. It is unseemly and churlish for the U.S. to threaten that process. Does Mr. Obama treasure kind words from Hugo Chávez that much? If so, we're all in trouble.Honduras Just Wants An Election
Driving the push for this massive power grab and circumvention of the elected branches is a key White House official who avoided Senate confirmation by being installed not as EPA director, but instead as White House Climate Czar: Carol Browner.Read the whole thing!
Long before the Supreme Court ruled in a highly questionable 2007 case, Massachusetts v. EPA, that the EPA has the legal authority to justify its proposed 18,000 pages of greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act, Browner (then EPA director under President Bill Clinton) had her general counsel, Jonathan Cannon, prepare a now-infamous memorandum arguing—for the first time—that the EPA possessed such a power. At the time it was dismissed as a wild-eyed overreach that Congress would never allow. Now it’s happening, and Browner is right at the center of it.
Mary Nichols, the chair of the California Air Resources Board, has confirmed that Browner was the lead White House negotiator in establishing new automobile emissions standards, which for the first time rely on EPA’s presumed authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the 1970 Clean Air Act. Nichols told The New York Times that Browner quietly orchestrated private discussions from the White House with auto industry officials. “We put nothing in writing, ever,” Nichols said.
Left unchecked, Browner will move beyond automobiles to EPA’s entire staggering 18,000-page blueprint for regulating the U.S. economy. It will eventually regulate everything that moves (light-duty trucks, heavy-duty trucks, buses, motorcycles, planes, trains, ships, boats, tractors, mining equipment, RVs, lawn mowers, fork lifts, and just about every other piece of equipment that has a motor) and lots of things that don’t (any building over 100,000 square feet could be pulled in, along with smaller carbon dioxide emitters, like restaurants, schools, and hospitals that have commercial kitchens with gas burners).
Benjamin Netanyahu is the new leader of the free world. Obama abdicated that position with his appeasement to despotism and tyranny the day before at the UN. Actually, he abdicated on Jan. 20th 2009, when he declared that he would close Gitmo. It has been downhill for the United States ever since.Benjamin Netanyahu UN Speech Full Text & Videos, Sept. 24, 2009
Listen now, to how a serious man talks when confronting tyranny:
September 25, 2009
Categories: Senate
Ensign receives handwritten confirmation
This doesn't happen often enough.
Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.
Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it "Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold."
The note was a follow-up to Ensign's questioning at the markup.
By Carrie Budoff Brown 11:40 AM
...the national health insurance movement rose alongside a larger transfer of responsibility from the family to the state: "Every time the state assumes an additional function such as health insurance, child care or benefits for the aged, the need for close family ties becomes weaker."From Bismarck to Obama
More provocatively he [Victor Fuchs] says: "It may be that one of the most effective ways of increasing allegiance to the state is through national health insurance."
Over the last decade, the federal government has become bloated and inefficient. Voters are on to the scam. Mr. Obama keeps calling federal spending an "investment," but Americans apparently feel this is the worst investment they've ever made. They've come to regard Washington as a $2 trillion Bridge to Nowhere. They are right.Read the whole thing
What we have here is an inadvertent homage to Lewis Carroll:We are going to cancel a defense that takes five years to mount, because the threat will not materialize for five years. And we will not deploy land-based interceptors in Europe, because our new plan is to deploy land-based interceptors in Europe.
Stalin tested Truman with the Berlin Blockade, and Truman held fast. Khrushchev tested Kennedy, and in the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy refused to blink. In 1983, Andropov took the measure of Reagan, and, defying millions in the street (who are now the Obama base), Reagan did not blink. Last week, the Iranian president and the Russian prime minister put Mr. Obama to the test, and he blinked not once but twice. The price of such infirmity has always proven immensely high, even if, as is the custom these days, the bill has yet to come.Obama and the Politics of Concession
“Congress’ chief budget officer is contradicting President Barack Obama’s oft-stated claim that seniors wouldn’t see their Medicare benefits cut under a health care overhaul. The head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, told senators Tuesday that seniors in Medicare’s managed care plans would see reduced benefits under a bill in the Finance Committee.”OOPS!
Remember what Barack Obama said about Hillary Clinton’s health plan? “Hillary’s health care plan forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it...and you pay a penalty if you don’t.” Well, that idea is back...Unlike the other bills, this bill has two particularly harsh features for the middle class
'Milk it, baby – It's free money': You won't believe what happens inside Cash for Clunkers operationAside from the overflowing toilets, vomit on the floor, and getting paid for doing nothing (your taxpayer money at work though):
She said the vouchers are "rife with idiotic mistakes by Level 1 reviewers who are rejecting them for no reason at all, mostly because they are not paying attention."Stung! Undercover celeb exposes Obama fiasco
"I am amazed at the number of vouchers that have been rejected in the last six weeks," Willey said. "Many have been rejected and returned to dealers three to seven times! And for no good reason. What is happening here is that the Level 1 examiners are so inept and lazy that, rather than take the time to closely examine and review these vouchers the way that they should, they just hit the reject or approve button without a second thought. That, of course, slows down the whole process and the dealers aren't getting paid by the Department of Transportation. The dealers are frustrated and irate, and make no bones about it when they return their documents that are correct and don't need to be revised. When their documents are returned for revision, they have no number to call or person to e-mail."
Willey told WND that auto dealers were often very good about submitting the eight documents required to receive a rebate, but some vouchers were being sent back because Level 1 examiners failed to hit the "next" button to go to the following page of documents.
She said, "I saw that time and time again. Then the dealers would write back and say, 'It's on Page 2.'"
Willey said a single voucher would be passed around to as many as a dozen workers without being processed.
While Fed policy was undoubtedly important, it was not the primary cause of the Great Depression or the economy's relapse in 1937. The Smoot-Hawley tariff of June 1930 was the catalyst that got the whole process going. It was the largest single increase in taxes on trade during peacetime and precipitated massive retaliation by foreign governments on U.S. products. Huge federal and state tax increases in 1932 followed the initial decline in the economy thus doubling down on the impact of Smoot-Hawley. There were additional large tax increases in 1936 and 1937 that were the proximate cause of the economy's relapse in 1937.Further down in the article:
The damage caused by high taxation during the Great Depression is the real lesson we should learn. A government simply cannot tax a country into prosperity. If there were one warning I'd give to all who will listen, it is that U.S. federal and state tax policies are on an economic crash trajectory today just as they were in the 1930s. Net legislated state-tax increases as a percentage of previous year tax receipts are at 3.1%, their highest level since 1991; the Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2011; and additional taxes to pay for health-care and the proposed cap-and-trade scheme are on the horizon.And a summary (I haven't included his discussion of the gold standard and how that figures into our current situation):
The lessons here are pretty straightforward. Inflation can and did occur during a depression, and that inflation was strictly a monetary phenomenon.Please read the whole thing!
My hope is that the people who are running our economy do look to the Great Depression as an object lesson. My fear is that they will misinterpret the evidence and attribute high unemployment and the initial decline in prices to tight money, while increasing taxes to combat budget deficits.
Yes. Short answer. The leak to the Washington Post of the assessment by General McChrystal, the officer in charge of the war in Afghanistan, is quintessential Washington power politics and a major “go screw yourself Barack” by the person or persons who passed the paper to Bob Woodward. You do not get leaks when there is a policy consensus on an issue. There are several reasons classified or sensitive information is leaked–a policy disagreement, a desire to embarrass a principle official or a whistleblower.Will Obama Surrender Afghanistan to the Mullahs?
Here’s how Woodward started his story:
By Andrew G. BostomPlease read the rest of this article:
The 1990 Cairo Declaration, or so-called "Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam", was drafted and subsequently ratified by all the Muslim member nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Now a 57 state collective which includes every Islamic nation on earth, the OIC, currently headed by Turkey's Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, thus represents the entire Muslim umma (or global community of individual Muslims), and is the largest single voting bloc in the United Nations (UN).
Both the preamble and concluding articles (24 and 25) make plain that the OIC's Cairo Declaration is designed to supersede Western conceptions of human rights as enunciated, for example, in the US Bill of Rights, and the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Federal legislation requiring that every American have health insurance is part of all the major health-care reform plans now being considered in Washington. Such a mandate, however, would expand the federal government’s authority over individual Americans to an unprecedented degree. It is also profoundly unconstitutional.Read more
America is on an unsustainable fiscal path that threatens our future. Changing course is imperative, and Democrats should lead the way.Specifics:
Any serious effort to control the deficit must begin with spending restraint. Efficiency and frugality, common virtues in the private sector, must be incorporated into government. Congress should enact health-care reform that actually lowers the deficit. For the next fiscal year, assuming the economy has gathered sufficient momentum, we should freeze domestic discretionary spending, limit increases in defense spending to the rate of inflation, forgo pay raises for federal workers, and institute a federal hiring freeze.The danger:
...if we wait for the markets to force corrective action, the danger to our economy will be greater and the correction more painful.The solution:
Spending restraint will not come easily to the Democratic Party. Pent-up demand for investment in education, health care and the environment is understandable after the Bush years. But long-term progressive government can't be built on a foundation of debt and deficits. We cannot indefinitely share with the less-fortunate resources we do not possess. Ultimately, a growing economy with increased revenues and a stable national balance sheet are the best guarantors of social progress.
The choice is clear. We can take the path of least resistance and ignore the impending day of reckoning. Or we can do what is necessary to right the fiscal ship of state and lay a foundation for prudent, progressive government for a generation.Implied: Or Else.
I believe Barack Obama will choose the responsible course. If he does, he will find kindred spirits in our party prepared to help.
What does it say about Mr. Obama's respect for the separation of powers that he would instruct Mrs. Clinton to punish an independent court because it did not issue the ruling he wanted?How many of you, like me, are feeling this way:
Thousands of readers have written to me asking how all this can happen in the U.S., where democratic principles have been recognized since the nation's founding. Many readers have written that they are "ashamed" of the U.S. and have asked, in effect, "How can I help Honduras?" A more pertinent question may turn out to be, how can they help their own country?Hillary's Honduras Obsession
In its actions toward Honduras, the Obama administration is demonstrating contempt for the fundamentals of democracy. Legal scholars are clear on this...
President Obama promised he would win America friends where, under George W. Bush, it had antagonists. The reality is that the U.S. is working hard to create antagonists where it previously had friends...The U.S. decision [to scrap a missile-defense agreement the Bush Administration negotiated with Poland and the Czech Republic] also undermines the credibility of the U.S. nuclear defense umbrella. The Bush Administration sought to develop a global defense posture in part to reassure allies that they don't need their own nuclear deterrent, even as rogue regimes seek nuclear arms and the missiles to deliver them. America's Europe reversal tells other countries that they can't rely on the U.S. so it's best to follow the Israeli path and develop their own weapon and defenses. For that matter, this also makes the U.S. East Coast less safe; the ground-based system in Alaska and California covers the East, but barely. The Polish and Czech sites were to provide added protection.Obama's Missile Offense
The European switcheroo continues Mr. Obama's trend of courting adversaries while smacking allies. His Administration has sought warmer ties with Iran, Burma, North Korea, Russia and even Venezuela. But it has picked trade fights with Canada and Mexico, sat on trade treaties with Colombia and South Korea, battled Israel over West Bank settlements, ignored Japan in deciding to talk with North Korea, and sanctioned Honduras for its sin of resisting the encroachments of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.
In the most contentious exchange of President Barack Obama’s marathon of five Sunday shows, he said it is “not true” that a requirement for individuals to get health insurance under a key reform plan now being debated amounts to a tax increase.Health bill says 'tax' when President Obama said 'not'
But he could look it up — in the bill.
The president has abandoned his "guarantees" that the currently covered can keep their insurance and their doctors. He has dramatically lowered his estimate of the number of uninsured. He has been embarrassed by the fact that he used a false story of insurance denial leading to death in his big speech to Congress last week.
In summary, the president has had to change his arguments, abandon his statistics, and repudiate his anecdotes. Why would anyone believe his assurances, his estimates or his projections, especially about Medicare, given this record of shifting stories and stats?
The collapse of the president's credibility on Obamacare has been accelerated by the ongoing and exploding scandal about ACORN, a group with which he is and will remain closely identified. The president of course is not responsible for the individuals whose criminality has been captured on tape these past two weeks, but if this is the sort of organization he has represented in the past and which is part of his core alliance of activists. What does that tell voters about the reliability of the rest of the president's core coalition?
At a minimum this all adds up to red lights and sirens for the nation's seniors, who know or should know that they are the big target for Obamacare "savings" --which means huge hikes in the cost of Medicare Advantage or huge cuts in available benefits, or both. Seniors especially have to hit the phones to the Blue Dog Democrats --their numbers are listed here and below-- and dial again and again and warn these Democrats that they will be retired in 14 months if they push through Obamacare.
The Obama administration used arguments that they knew weren’t accurate in order to push this legislation through the House. Obama himself made these arguments, while analysts in the government had already shown them to be false. In other words, Obama lied, and so did his administration and allies in Congress.Read the whole thing!
And they didn’t just lie on the costs to American households for energy-production disincentives...
Cass Sunstein wants to spread America's wealthRead more
Echoes Van Jones on using 'environmental justice' to redistribute money
Posted: September 16, 2009
8:25 pm Eastern
By Aaron Klein
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
JERUSALEM – It is "desirable" to redistribute America's wealth to poorer nations, argued President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein.
According to Sunstein, global climate change is primarily the fault of U.S. environmental behavior and can, therefore, be used as a mechanism to redistribute the country's wealth.
The argument bears striking resemblance to comments made by Obama's former environmental adviser, Van Jones. WND reported Jones used a major environmental convention to argue for spreading America's wealth.
Now WND has learned Sunstein made similar, more extensive arguments.
Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.Read the rest
To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.
The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled.
However, as scary as all of that it, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated. If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.
The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people and the businesses they own. The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with. I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.
This legislation also provides for access by the appointees of the Obama administration of all of your personal healthcare information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.
If you decide not to have healthcare insurance or if you have private insurance that is not deemed “acceptable” to the “Health Choices Administrator” appointed by Obama there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a “tax” instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the “due process of law.
So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much out the original ten in the Bill of Rights that are effectively nullified by this law. It doesn’t stop there though. The 9th Amendment that provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people;” The 10th Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control.
I could write many more pages about this legislation, but I think you get the idea. This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and limiting rights. Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to “be bound by oath or affirmation” to support the Constitution. If I was a member of Congress I would not be able to vote for this legislation or anything like it without feeling I was violating that sacred oath or affirmation. If I voted for it anyway I would hope the American people would hold me accountable.
Two kinds of peoples lose wars. Those who lack the physical resources to defeat their enemies and those who lack the cultural resources to defeat them. We do not lack the physical resources, but our culture is the culture of the ostrich, a head stuck inside a television set and a body left vulnerable to whoever will have it. We have come to believe that compassion is more important than justice, sensitivity is more important than truth, and that if we fight for ourselves, then we are always wrong. Our moral high ground has becoming a sinking island topped by a white flag.9/11, Just Another Day
There is one thing and only one thing alone that we can do to survive. Turn the corner. For G-d's sake, turn the corner. The ostrich is an endangered bird in the Middle East where sticking your head in the sand is no defense against those who would chop it off. Soon it will be an endangered bird everywhere else. There is no escape from those who would kill us, but that we kill them first. The failure to understand that is the failure to survive.
It is now 8:46 AM on September 11, 2009. Eight years to the minute when the inescapable choice was put before every single American. Turn the corner before it is too late.
By crafting the Geneva Conventions at the end of World War II, the international community demonstrated the necessity of creating new legal frameworks to deal with new realities. That same need should now compel the international community to embrace a legal category to deal with the new phenomena of a war with no foreseen ending; an army with no honor and no respect for human life; an army with no uniform, no country and no government; and an army that does not reciprocate agreements...Our son was murdered—and his beheading videotaped—to satisfy this craving for publicity. Your recommendations must make it clear to every would-be terrorist that, if captured, he will go down the path of total oblivion to the extent allowed by law.We Need a New Legal Regime to Fight the War on Terror
"The DNC drafted, signed and notarized TWO slightly different versions of their Official Certification of Nomination documents, not one," he wrote. "One of those documents had complete legal language, and one of them was missing the text concerning the constitutional eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama.Read the whole thing!
"The version which is absent any certification of constitutional standing for the office of president is the version that was filed with every state in the country, and the one used by the DNC to elect Barack Obama president," he wrote.
WND contacted the Democratic National Committee multiple times over three days to request an explanation of the two images, including whether one might be a forgery. A spokeswoman in the press office confirmed, "We are aware of it," but declined to elaborate.
Likewise, WND contacted the office of Pelosi, but got no response over several days. And the White House declined to respond to multiple e-mails asking for a comment.
In the heated debates on health-care reform, not enough attention is being paid to the huge financial windfalls ObamaCare will dole out to unions—or to the provisions in the various bills in Congress that will help bring about the forced unionization of the health-care industry.Read the Union Health-Care Label
Tucked away in thousands of pages of complex new rules, regulations and mandates are special privileges and giveaways that could have devastating consequences for the health-care sector and the American economy at large.
The text certifying that Barack Hussein Obama was “legally qualified to serve under the provisions of the United States Constitution” had been removed from the document sent to the states.The Theory is Now a Conspiracy And Facts Don’t Lie
The Democrats killed all bills that would provide for reinforcement: They do not want to identify illegals. Obama says “Illegal will not get coverage.” Easy to say, and he has made it impossible to carry through. This is a new videoFrom the brilliant African-American economist Thomas Sowell:
Most American Jews sincerely believe that their liberalism, together with their commitment to the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle, stems from the teachings of Judaism and reflects the heritage of "Jewish values." But if this theory were valid, the Orthodox would be the most liberal sector of the Jewish community. After all, it is they who are most familiar with the Jewish religious tradition and who shape their lives around its commandments.Read the whole thing
Yet the Orthodox enclaves are the only Jewish neighborhoods where Republican candidates get any votes to speak of. Even more telling is that on every single cultural issue, the Orthodox oppose the politically correct liberal positions taken by most other American Jews precisely because these positions conflict with Jewish law. To cite just a few examples: Jewish law permits abortion only to protect the life of the mother; it forbids sex between men; and it prohibits suicide (except when the only alternatives are forced conversion or incest).
The upshot is that in virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.
All this applies most fully to Jews who are Jewish only in an ethnic sense. Indeed, many such secular Jews, when asked how they would define "a good Jew," reply that it is equivalent to being a good liberal.
But avowed secularists are not the only Jews who confuse Judaism with liberalism; so do many non-Orthodox Jews who practice this or that traditional observance. It is not for nothing that a cruel wag has described the Reform movement—the largest of the religious denominations within the American Jewish community—as "the Democratic Party with holidays thrown in," and the services in a Reform temple as "the Democratic Party at prayer."
In 2004, Sunstein penned a book, "The Second Bill of Rights: FDR'S Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever," in which he advanced the radical notion that welfare rights, including some controversial inceptions, be granted by the state. His inspiration for a new bill of rights came from President Roosevelt's 1944 proposal of a different, new set of bill of rights.Obama's regulatory chief pushes new 'bill of rights'
WND has learned that in April 2005, Sunstein opened up a conference at Yale Law School entitled "The Constitution in 2020," which sought to change the nature and interpretation of the Constitution by that year.
Obama actually began by suggesting that there was not a health care crisis in America...Obama did not seem to be advancing a very detailed plan, but rather championing some vague generalities. And when you line these generalities up, they form a very peculiar and implausible picture...Obama concluded with a painfully inappropriate abuse of the memory of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.A Telling but Not Moving Speech
President Obama's speech to Congress last night can be summed up rather easily. It was 40 minutes of boilerplate followed by a socko, emotional finish exploiting the death of Senator Teddy Kennedy. Which leads to this question: was Obama's finishing kick sufficient to achieve his goal of "reframing" the national debate on health care that hasn't been going his way? I don't think so.Read more
Obama didn't come close to offering a persuasive explanation of how he'd pay for ObamaCare. And that remains his biggest problem. He promises much, much more in guaranteed health benefits and says it will cost less. Even Obama himself couldn't really believe that. No one else who can add and subtract does. Cut "waste, fraud, and abuse?" Not a chance.
There was one mild surprise. Instead of scaling back his plan to comply with public sentiment, Obama stuck to every promise and provision on which he's dwelled in more than two dozen speeches. There was nothing new, except the size of his audience.
From this, it's clear he's decided to push a partisan bill through Congress with Democratic votes alone. We could tell this from the pleased expression House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had on her face throughout the speech. She's belongs to the no-compromise school.
But unless Obama has suddenly transformed public opinion, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won't be able to find enough Democrats, even among the usually malleable Blue Dogs,
President Obama's speech to Congress last night can be summed up rather easily. It was 40 minutes of boilerplate followed by a socko, emotional finish exploiting the death of Senator Teddy Kennedy. Which leads to this question: was Obama's finishing kick sufficient to achieve his goal of "reframing" the national debate on health care that hasn't been going his way? I don't think so.
Obama didn't come close to offering a persuasive explanation of how he'd pay for ObamaCare. And that remains his biggest problem. He promises much, much more in guaranteed health benefits and says it will cost less. Even Obama himself couldn't really believe that. No one else who can add and subtract does. Cut "waste, fraud, and abuse?" Not a chance.
There was one mild surprise. Instead of scaling back his plan to comply with public sentiment, Obama stuck to every promise and provision on which he's dwelled in more than two dozen speeches. There was nothing new, except the size of his audience.
From this, it's clear he's decided to push a partisan bill through Congress with Democratic votes alone. We could tell this from the pleased expression House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had on her face throughout the speech. She's belongs to the no-compromise school.
But unless Obama has suddenly transformed public opinion, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won't be able to find enough Democrats, even among the usually malleable Blue Dogs, willing to vote for ObamaCare. Defy the public to bail out a president in trouble? Only Democrats in safe seats are likely to do that.
I had five questions that I looked for Obama to answer in his address. I wanted to see if he was serious about achieving moderate, bipartisan health care. It turns out he's not. Here are the questions:
Just one day after President Obama plans tries to recapture the initiative in the health-care debate with a speech to a joint session of Congress, thousands of taxpayers plan to storm Washington, D.C., in a three-day event to take their fight against excessive spending, bailouts, growth of big government and soaring deficits to the front door of the U.S. Capitol.Read more
In a major movement unaffiliated with – but inspired by – Fox News' Glenn Beck's 9-12 Project, called the National Taxpayer Protest, thousands of Americans are answering the call and traveling to make their voices heard at Capitol Hill. Sept. 10 marks the kickoff of the three-day march on Washington.
As the debate on health care continues, liberals in Washington continue to try to convince Americans that we need government-run health care. Rather than tell the truth about long waits, denied treatments, lack of trained professionals, and bureaucratic mistakes, they try to convince listeners that the problems of the current system can only be solved by more government.This is story number one:
With that in mind, I will present one case study of government-run care per day - either for 100 days, or until the debate in Washington is over. These stories are drawn from the book Shattered Lives, by the National Center for Public Policy Research.
THIS IS THE FAMOUS 'GREAT AND FREE HEALTHCARE' THAT REGULAR CUBANS RECEIVEAs a reader pointed out on Michelle Malkin's blog in 2007:
If the lauded Cuban healthcare system is so wonderful, perhaps someone can explain to me the following:Gateway Pundit also warned us in 2007:Was any of this mentioned in “Sicko?” Of course not!
- Why some patients are taken to the hospital in wheelbarrows instead of ambulances?
- Why patients must bring their own linens for the hospital bed and often, a fan, to combat the stifling heat and lack of air-conditioning?
- Why cockroaches and other vermin are present in what is supposed to be “sanitary” health facilities? Why many common medicines are not available? If Cuba can export cutting-edge biotechnological products to other countries, surely the US embargo cannot be blamed for not allowing medicine to enter Cuba.
- Why, in a 185-bed cancer center in Santiago where some 6,000 people are treated MONTHLY, there is a shortage of basics such as codeine, anti-nausea drugs, anti-inflammatory drugs, antibiotics, antacids, laxatives, high blood pressure medicine, antihistamines, anti-depressants, contraceptives, vitamins and minerals? This particular hospital, sadly, is the norm, not the exception
- Why 41% of patients in Cuban hospitals are undernourished, particularly after surgery. Malnutrition risks increase with extended stays in the hospital, according to the U.S. National Institute of Health.
My modest proposal to rearrange how lawyers do business.
By RICHARD B. RAFAL
Since we are moving toward socialism with ObamaCare, the time has come to do the same with other professions—especially lawyers. Physician committees can decide whether lawyers are necessary in any given situation.
At a town-hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., last month, our uninformed lawyer in chief suggested that we physicians would rather chop off a foot than manage diabetes since we would make more money doing surgery. Then President Obama compounded his attack by claiming a doctor's reimbursement is between "$30,000" and "$50,000" for such amputations! (Actually, such surgery costs only about $1,500.)
Physicians have never been so insulted. Because of these affronts, I will gladly volunteer for the important duty of controlling and regulating lawyers. Since most of what lawyers do is repetitive boilerplate or pushing paper, physicians would have no problem dictating what is appropriate for attorneys. We physicians know much more about legal practice than lawyers do about medicine.
Following are highlights of a proposed bill authorizing the dismantling of the current framework of law practice and instituting socialized legal care:
Alias Barack Obama: a lie is born: The greatest identity fraud in history Paperback – July 10, 2012
