May 21, 2012
FSM HOT TOPICS
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Monday, August 17
by OVAL OFFICE WATCH August 17, 2009
President Obama’s weekly address HERE
1 Million Sign Petition Opposing Obama's Health-Care Plan. Bill Bennett, a nationally syndicated host on the Salem network, told CNSNews.com that the more his listeners heard about the petition, the more signatures it got, until it hit the 1 million mark.
“We just started talking about it, and the first couple weeks we had about 50- to 60,000 [signatures]. The interesting thing was the more we talked about it and the more Obama talked about his plan, the faster the signatures came.” READ ALL ABOUT IT HERE.
Democracy in Danger: What States Can Do to Safeguard America's Election System - SEE HERE.
Health reform too good to pass up
Steny Hoyer, CNN.com
History shows that the chance to reform the American health care system is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. So reform is absolutely worth the time it takes to get it right.
That's why Democrats are subjecting their plan to bring affordable health care to all Americans to intense scrutiny, and that's why we're going home to hear from our constituents, adding to the more than 550 health care town hall meetings and public events that have already taken place this year.
But there is also a distinct urgency to our work -- an urgency fired by an understanding that the most disastrous health plan is a simple extension of the status quo.
If reform splutters, we'll be left with a broken, unsustainable system, with health costs set to double over the next 10 years, and millions of more Americans projected to lose their coverage. As rising costs and rapidly-consolidating insurance giants strip coverage from more middle-class families, the costs of inaction will mount every year.
The failure of reform might hold political benefits for Republicans, like the senator who claimed that a health care stall is "going to be a huge gain for those of us who want to turn this thing over in the 2010 election." But for those Americans with more serious concerns -- including small business owners, the 47 million uninsured Americans, and the families in danger of joining their ranks -- health insurance reform must pass this year. Read article.
Two Problems
Susan Estrich, Rasmussen Reports.com
America has two problems to deal with in the health care debate, and only one of them relates to health care. The other is our increasing inability to have a conversation with each other without screaming, vilifying, threatening and boycotting.
It's getting scary out there, and I'm not just talking about death panels or whatever they are.
I'm talking about the civility that is the essence of democracy.
Liberals and conservatives have been busing people to each other's events since I started working in politics. They've been hiring professionals to promote "grassroots" involvement since long before the Internet made it easier. Are the protests at staged events staged? Maybe. Who cares?
Nancy Pelosi was plainly wrong to attack the protestors as "un-American." The White House strategy of dismissing them has long since been proved unwise.
But that's no excuse for turning civil discourse into something ugly.
Increasingly, I find myself hearing from people who say they hate Barack Obama. And Nancy Pelosi.
Not disagree with them. Not plan to vote against them.
Hate them.
There are serious and credible stories about the increased threats to the president's safety. Read article.
Former exec: Insurers fomenting town hall chaos
Mike Soraghan, The Hill.com
A former health insurance executive says the disruptions taking place at lawmakers' town halls around the country are the result of stealth efforts by health insurance companies.
Wendell Potter, a former CIGNA vice president, detailed what he said were past covert efforts by the industry. Though he said he does not have specifics for what is occurring now, because he's been out of the business for a year, it follows the same pattern.
"The industry is up to the same dirty tricks this year," Potter said at a Capitol news conference after meeting with House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), an avid supporter of the Democrats' plans for a healthcare overhaul.
"When you hear someone complaining about traveling down a 'slippery slope to socialism,' some insurance flack, like I used to be, wrote that," Potter added.
Potter said during his 20 years in the insurance business, the industry would funnel money to large public firms who would create front groups and find friendly voices in conservative media.
In particular, he cited front groups created to fight "Patients' Bill of Rights" legislation in the 1990s, as well as a campaign to discredit the Michael Moore film "Sicko," which harshly criticized the industry. Read article.
Obama: Immigration Action to Come in 2010
Cheryl W. Thompson & William Booth, Washington Post.com
Obama said that there needs to be "a pathway to citizenship" for millions of illegal immigrants in the United States, and that the system must be reworked to avoid tensions with Mexico. Without it, he said, Mexicans will keep crossing the border in dangerous ways and employers will continue exploiting workers.
"We can create a system in which you have . . . an orderly process for people to come in, but we're also giving an opportunity for those who are already in the United States to be able to achieve a pathway to citizenship so that they don't have to live in the shadows," Obama said during an hour-long news conference at the Cabañas Cultural Center in downtown Guadalajara. "Am I going to be able to snap my fingers and get this done? No. This is going to be difficult."
The president said he expects draft legislation and sponsors by the end of the year, but no action until 2010 because of more pressing issues, including health-care reform, energy legislation and financial regulatory changes.
"That's a pretty big stack of bills," he said.
Immigration is among the most controversial items on Obama's legislative agenda, with critics opposing what they call an amnesty for illegal workers and businesses concerned about reductions in their labor force. President George W. Bush twice attempted immigration reform during his second term, without success.
Asked about the prospects for immigration legislation in view of the blows to his administration over health care and midterm elections next year, Obama dismissed the idea that the elections would play a role. Read article.
Paul Rahe: The Great Awakening
Powerlineblog.com
Paul Rahe is professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of the three-volume study Republics Ancient and Modern. Professor Rahe's Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect has just been published. Commenting on this week's events, Professor Rahe writes:
In the early 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville visited Jacksonian America, he was taken aback by much of what he encountered. Nothing impressed him more, however, than the demonstrated capacity of the Americans to form private associations for public purposes.
This phenomenon - illegal in Tocqueville's France and rare on the continent of Europe, even today - amazed him. He was particularly struck by the political consequences of the Americans' confident practice of what he called "the art of association." For, as he discovered, opposition had sprung up to the so-called Tariff of Abominations outside the existing political parties.
This opposition was especially emphatic in the South. But, in a fashion that seemed spontaneous, organizations had been independently formed in every district of the country, and then they had joined together in a great network to bring pressure upon Congress.
Tocqueville did not express an opinion regarding the justice or wisdom of this movement. What interested and excited him was simply its existence. For it proved that, in a great commercial democracy established in an extended territory, civic agency was a genuine possibility. It proved that the residents of the United States of America were citizens, not subjects, and it demonstrated that the condition that he called "soft despotism" was not the only possibility afforded by liberal democracy.
Tocqueville's ruminations deserve attention for one simple reason. We are today witnessing a reawakening of the American spirit that so strongly impressed him. Read article.
A president grossly overplaying his hand
E. Thomas McClanahan, Kansas city.com
What we’re seeing in Washington these days is beginning to look like Jimmy Carter II.
Carter, like Barack Obama, started out with the idea of stimulating the economy.
His plan was to give every taxpayer $50, then throw in a few billion for tax cuts and public works programs. Simple, right? Wrong: In Washington, this soon became very complicated. Within a month, the package grew from $20 billion to more than $31 billion — a significant amount in the 1970s.
Special-interest groups piled on. Unions, minorities, the sugar lobby, bankers, shoe manufacturers — all clamored for a piece of the pie, all wanted to know: “Where’s mine?”
In April of his first year in office, Carter finally threw up his hands and scrapped the whole idea. He had dithered for four months. He had nothing to show for the effort. By then he was fatally diminished, his authority substantially eroded.
With the Obama administration, a similar unraveling is well under way and gathering momentum. Voters are increasingly restive. The country is souring on Obama’s gargantuan policy ambitions. The sense is growing that he has grossly overplayed his hand.
Like Carter, Obama looks increasingly like a president out of step with the times. Like Carter, there is a large gap between what voters expected based on the measured and moderate tone of his campaign and what began unfolding after his inauguration. Obama ran as a centrist, but he is governing from the left. Read article.
Our Spineless Congress
Julian Krasta, Novusordoseclorum.Blogtownhall.com
Once upon a time, in a more refined dimension, the Congress of the United States pledged allegiance to the Constitution and to the Stars & Stripes. Today, the Majority of this once august body are now using every foul tactic to clean America’s clock and ruin the lives of its citizens.
They have become the machinery of bully tactics, threats, and deceit. And they are functioning without resistance.
The mainstream media and ACORN are components of this machinery: They operate, construct, and destruct with impunity. We witnessed as they mocked decency, truth, and the laws during the presidential campaign. We watched as they stepped on heads and carried Obama across the finish line to victory: the MSM with their happy-go-lucky propaganda, and ACORN with their “ballot management.”
Congress bought the “hope & change” flimflam then sold their souls into slavery in the same way the German Army gave a blood oath to Hitler as Hindenburg lay in state. And just like those goose-stepping storm troopers, the Majority in Congress consider their “führer” and our homeland as one and the same.
The singular difference between Adolf and Barack is, at least Hitler preached unity. Obama has not, in my memory, stated in either broad or narrow terms that ours is one union; that we are one people, indivisible beneath one flag – our liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
There is, however, one glaring similarity: Just like Germany in 1933, America today is in a permanent state of emergency. Following are some of the reasons why. Read article.
Are We In America Or Amerika?
IBD Editorials.com
Democrats, bloodied over their attempt to force health care "reform" on Americans, are looking more unreasonable and hysterical by the day. This isn't healthy for the republic.
Their increasing anxiety and fear of failure are typified in the words of the leader of their party, who wants Republicans to keep their mouths shut while he "fixes" health care.
"I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking," the president said Thursday at a political rally in Virginia. "I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess."
So much for the promises of bipartisan lawmaking. So much for open discussion. So much for understanding who really caused the "mess" in the first place. Like Al Gore claiming the debate about global warming is over, the White House simply wants to shut down dialogue over who controls more than one-seventh of the economy.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has yet to come out in favor of repressing speech. But she's inclined to ignore it. The San Francisco Democrat vowed on Thursday, August 6 in Denver that the swelling public opposition to government-run health care would not persuade party leaders to back down.
"The plan for August is to have a discussion, to listen carefully to what people are saying, what ideas they may have to improve the legislation as it affects them," Pelosi said. In other words, Americans can suggest changes, but the elitists in Washington will not withdraw plans to take over the best health care system in the world. Read article.
OzyBama Will Meet the Same Fate
Bruce Kesler, Maggie's Farm.com
Democrats are complaining loudly that the American people are stupid and should shut up about President Obama’s health care program, cap-and-tax program, spend us into deeper deficits program, tax away our incentives program, apologize to our enemies program, castigate our friends program, and all his other radical remakings of America. Democrats are moving from their virtual pogrom to annihilate us uncooperative American kulaks to the next step of more physical coercion by their SEIU thugs.
Which brings to mind these lines from Shelley’s poem Ozymandias:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
During the past week, I’ve had conversations with old friends – leftist, centrist, and conservative – with whom I experienced the political battles of the 1960’s. All of us have a similar take on what’s happening now, compared to then. Now, it is the broader swath of working and middle class Americans, a far larger and more potent population, who are fed up and angry with being exploited and insulted by those who feel it their right and duty to impose their schemes to rearrange and endanger everyone else’s lives and weaken the America that sustains us. We all feel the potential for violence is high. Enough everyday Americans will defend themselves against thuggish attacks upon their right to speak out. Read article.
Government Health Care in Stealth Mode
Michael Barone, Rasmussen Reports.com
One video is worth a thousand words (or, as in this column, about 730). The video in question, put together by a group called Verum Serum, shows public statements by three advocates of single-payer (government monopoly) health insurance explaining that a health care bill with a "government option" would move America toward a single-payer government health care system. You may not have heard of the first two, Rep. Jan Schakowsky and professor Jacob Hacker. But you have heard of the third, President Barack Obama.
Schakowsky is a left-wing Democrat from the north side of Chicago and adjacent suburbs and, as chief deputy whip, part of the House Democratic leadership. The video shows her speaking to an enthusiastic group last April. She cites an insurance company spokesman as saying, "A public option will put the private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer." The audience cheers. "My single-payer friends," she goes on, "he was right." Later she adds, "This is not a principled fight. This is a fight about strategy for getting there, and I believe we will." Read article.
The Real Clunkers in this Deal
Steve Chapman, Townhall.com
Cash for Clunkers has been a thrilling moment for advocates of expanded government, who say it proves what we can accomplish when our leaders put their minds to it. They are absolutely right. The program proves the federal government is unsurpassed at two things: dispersing money and destroying things.
Of course, it already proved that in Iraq. But for sheer rapidity of confirmation, this program is hard to beat. Cash for Clunkers managed to go through a billion dollars in about four days, vaporizing a fund that was supposed to last until Halloween.
Cash for Clunkers has been a thrilling moment for advocates of expanded government, who say it proves what we can accomplish when our leaders put their minds to it. They are absolutely right. The program proves the federal government is unsurpassed at two things: dispersing money and destroying things.
Of course, it already proved that in Iraq. But for sheer rapidity of confirmation, this program is hard to beat. Cash for Clunkers managed to go through a billion dollars in about four days, vaporizing a fund that was supposed to last until Halloween.
The spectacle was particularly heartening to supporters of President Obama's fiscal stimulus plan, who had been disconsolate to find that when Washington attempts to embark on a sudden $787 billion spending spree, as it did last February, it needs months or even years to burn through the cash. Not only that, but it gave Congress a great excuse to throw more money onto the pyre.
In a period when financial pressures are forcing us all to adopt the forgotten ethic of "use it up, make it do, wear it out," the initiative is a throwback to the more extravagant days of 2007, when we were all spending like there was no tomorrow. It requires Washington to borrow funds to pay people to scrap perfectly functional vehicles merely because they get 18 miles per gallon or less, to subsidize cars that get 22 mpg or more. Read article.
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Occupy Chicago freakout: The LRAD is coming, the LRAD is coming!
May 21, 2012 00:57 AM
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May 20, 2012 11:09 PM
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Marion Barry has change of heart after being saved by Filipino hospital staff
May 20, 2012 10:00 PM
In what reads like a bad Hollywood movie script Marion Barry has changed his mind about Filipino nurses. Just a few weeks after complaining about how many Filipino nurses work in Washington DC Barry's life was saved by Filipino nurses. That's right, the same people he wanted to push our of DC hospitals ended up treating his potentially life threatening blood clot.
May 20, 2012 06:15 PM
Violence erupts at the end of the NATO Summit protests. Earlier today, members of Black Bloc were arrested for plotting to attack police stations, Mayor Emanuel's home and President Obama's campaign headquarters. Their violence then turned to the protest; police in riot gear move in, wearing gas masks. Protesters are throwing things at police according to video, live photos and reports from on the ground in Chicago.
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