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September 29, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Tuesday, September 29
Obama Will Disappoint Europeans As Post-American World Emerges
Mark Steyn, Investors.com
Barack Obama is not to blame for whichever vagary of United Nations protocol resulted in the president of the United States being the warm-up act for the Lunatic-for-Life in charge of Libya.
But it is a pitiful reflection upon the state of the last superpower that, when it comes to the transnational mush drooled by the leader of the free world or the conspiracist ramblings of a terrorist pseudo-Bedouin running a one-man psycho-cult of a basket-case state, it's more or less a toss-up as to which of them is more unreal.
To be sure, Col. Gadhafi peddled his thoughts on the laboratory origins of swine flu and the Zionist plot behind the Kennedy assassination.
But, on the other hand, President Obama said: "No nation can or should try to dominate another nation."
Pardon me? Did a professional speechwriter write that? Or did you outsource it to a starry-eyed runner-up in the Miss America pageant? Whether any nation "should try" to dominate another, they certainly "can," and do so with effortless ease, all over the planet and throughout human history. Read article.
Obama, the cable critic in chief
Jonathan Martin, Politico.com
For someone who says he doesn’t watch much cable news, President Barack Obama sounded pretty familiar with the standard talk show format of left vs. right when he was asked about it earlier this year.
“It feels like WWF wrestling,” Obama explained to NBC’s Brian Williams in an interview. “You know, everybody’s got their role to play.”
The off-the-cuff characterization was in keeping with his newly emerging role, squeezed in between East Room ceremonies and pushing for health care reform: the commander in chief is becoming the nation’s media critic in chief.
Obama isn’t just donning his Columbia Journalism Review hat to diagnose what ails the wheezing industry. He’s attempting to isolate one particular media irritant — cable news.
This president, it seems, has an obsession with it. Read article.
"Step Off, Barack!"
Greg Lewis.org
Barack Obama has bowed down in obeisance to Saudi King Abdullah. He's delighted Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinehad by throwing our Eastern European allies under the bus when he caved in to Russia's demands that we scrap the long-range missile defense system. And his FCC "diversity" czar, Mark Lloyd, has all but awarded the medal of freedom to Hugo Chavez. Despite this, like George Costanza - who in one "Seinfeld" episode tried his damnedest to ingratiate himself with Elaine's adventurer boyfriend, Tony - all Obama has gotten in return for his spineless pandering is a resounding, "Step off!"
The lead of a recent New York Times article, a classic example of that paper's snarky leftism, puts it another way: "As much as they may prefer to deal with Mr. Obama instead of his predecessor, George W. Bush, foreign leaders have not gone out of their way to give him what he wants." What the article's author, Peter Baker, fails to mention as he tries to shore up his case that Obama is "restoring the country's international standing" is that the President wants nothing more than to be welcomed into the fold by the gang of anti-American tyrants that has its sights on bringing ourcountry to its knees. Obama's need to be recognized as "one of the guys" by the group of thugs that includes the Iranian and Russian despots, along with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, has led him to make unprecedented concessions to our mortal enemies.
Iran's "step off" has included Ahmadinejad's latest holocaust-denying harangue and his country's refusal to allow the issue of nuclear weapons to be included in the agenda for the upcoming U.S.-Iran meeting. And despite diversity czar Mark Lloyd's plans to initiate a crackdown on American "right wing" broadcasting that would have a similar chilling effect on free speech to that of Venezuela's closing of all but one of the radio station that have dared to challenge Chavez's leadership, Chavez appears reluctant to admit Obama into the International Order of Dictator-Wannabes. Even though Obama lieutenant Lloyd has gone so far as to praise Chavez's "democratic" revolution, the President himself is still getting no more than a dismissive "so what?" from his South American idol.
In his attempts to gain favor with the world's dictators, the President has come out against legitimate democratic institutions of all kinds, often going to extraordinary lengths to maintain untenable positions in support of tyranny. Read article.
The Military-Industrial-Environmental Complex
Iain Murray and Roger Abbott, Washington Examiner.com
President Obama, speaking to the United Nations last week, cast climate change unequivocally as a threat to national security. He told the General Assembly, "Our efforts to end conflicts will be eclipsed by wars over refugees and resources. Development will be devastated by drought and famine." The President echoed the sentiments of hawkish-sounding lobby groups, such as the Partnership for a Secure America and the American Security Project, that are promoting cap-and-trade “energy legislation” as vital for national security. Catastrophic climate change, they claim, could become a “threat multiplier” as droughts, pestilences, floods, and famines purportedly caused by global warming spark and exacerbate conflicts overseas.
Behind this movement is an unlikely alliance of national security hawks hoping to boost their budget while reducing American dependence on foreign oil and greens looking to enhance their credibility with centrists and conservatives.
The Pentagon’s tendency toward mission creep could make this a formidable coalition. The Department of Defense now has a financial incentive to incorporate climate change into its risk assessments, in order to secure increasing appropriations from a Democratic Congress and administration committed to fighting global warming. It is all part of the dynamic which the great British Prime Minister the Marquess of Salisbury summed up so well: "If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe." Read article.
The Best Health Reform May Be to Kill Cap-and-Trade
David A. Ridenour, Townhall.com
If you worry about what Congress could do in its health care legislation, you should be terrified by the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, which could cost millions of Americans their health insurance.
Nearly 15 million Americans are now looking for work, bringing the official unemployment rate to 9.7% – the highest in 26 years. If the Senate passes Waxman-Markey, that rate will go much higher.
And employment and access to health insurance are inextricably linked.
There’s no debating a cap-and-trade system would harm the economy. The only question is how costly it would be.
The CBO low-balled the costs of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House in June, saying it would cost just $175 per household per year. This is the “less than the price of a postage stamp per day” figure we keep hearing.
But to arrive at this number, the CBO had to ignore employment and income losses from cap-and-trade – costs estimated to be thousands of dollars per household per year. After figuring that in, yes, cap-and-trade would cost less than a postage stamp per day, but only if you’re buying a $17.50 Express Mail stamp.
The Heritage Foundation provides a more comprehensive estimate, projecting a family of four would pay an additional $4,609 per year by 2035. Annual job losses would average 1.15 million between 2012 and 2030, with job losses rising to nearly 2.5 million in 2035.
Higher unemployment rates mean more uninsured. In 2007, employers provided health insurance for 63 percent of Americans under age 65 and paid for nearly 90 percent of all private health insurance policies. Although the newly unemployed may extend their health benefits through COBRA, many can’t afford to. According to Families USA, family health insurance premiums under COBRA equal, on average, 84 percent of unemployment benefits received. Read article.
Obamacare: Taxes for Everyone
Dick Morris, Vote.com
Now that the various healthcare plans are being reduced to print, the financial details are emerging and with them a fundamental conclusion is becoming evident: The Obama plan is a giant tax increase for much of the American people (not just the rich).
Start with the mandate that falls on those whose welfare is the supposed object of the entire program -- the uninsured. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the average uninsured person or family will have to pay between 15 and 20 percent of his or their total income on health insurance (counting premiums, deductibles and co-payments) before any of the subsidy in the Baucus bill kicks in. Even in the more generous House bill, the tab that the uninsured must pay is very, very high.
Most uninsured would likely be quite happy to avoid paying this much of their income for health insurance. But they will be forced to shell out the money under the program. Others would want catastrophic coverage (which for the young would likely not be too costly) but the Obama program requires comprehensive insurance that is costly to satisfy the government requirement.
Having spent the entire campaign speaking about "affordable" coverage, it turns out the program is not at all affordable, but a massive new tax on the average uninsured American.
Then there is the tax on health insurance premiums that is to finance about a quarter of the subsidy for the uninsured. This tax, billed as only to be levied on "gold-plated" policies, will, in fact, reach down to the average American. The Baucus bill specifies that the tax of 35 percent would be put on all premiums over $8,000 for an individual and on proportionately higher premiums for families. Read article.
Obama's Economic Legacy - Success or Failure?
Marilyn M. Barnewell, NWV.com
One definition of insanity is continuing to do things the same way but expecting a different result. Understanding that, one must ask the obvious question: Why does the Obama Administration keep doing the things that got the U.S. economy in trouble? It exemplifies one of three things: Insanity, duplicity, or stupidity. I suppose incompetence could be added to the list.
Over-spending and debt is what caused our current problems. More over-spending and debt will cause more damage and offers no relief. It is insane. What is being done will likely cause the commercial banking industry great stress if not failure. It is impossible to breathe life into something that is already dead on the premise that the old economy can be brought back to life. Yet, advisors to Barack Obama seem fixated on doing just that. Consumer credit no longer drives the economy – and will not for many years. Americans no longer trust the system or the government that supports it.
Quite simply, America is going through a process of bifurcation. The most easily understood explanation of “bifurcate” comes from an old saying: “All things live to maturity, level off, and die unless injected with new life and new blood.” The “new life” and “new blood” part is bifurcation. As a nation, we are not only bifurcating economically, we are bifurcating socially and politically. Read article.
Vietistan
Bruce Walker, American Thinker.com
Barack Obama and the Democrats spent years defaming the national security policy of the United States during a time of war. This opposition transcends criticism of policy or attacks on President Bush. Senator Reid, while our troops were in the field, pronounced the Iraq War lost.
Other Democrat senators equating the conduct of our soldiers with Nazis or with rogue forces that bombed villages. The Democratic Party feted such surreal conspiracy freaks as Michael Moore and appointed anti-American Marxists like Van Jones to important federal offices. "Bush lied, People died" bumper stickers popped up like ugly pimples on the back of countless vehicles in America. Our current Secretary of State essentially called General Petraeus a liar, without the slightest evidence.
Now, as Jeremiah Wright put it, "the chickens have come home to roost." The Democrats, indeed, those Democrats most vociferously hostile to our military forces and their commanders, now run Washington. They control not only the Executive Branch but also have comfortable, filibuster-proof majorities in both houses of Congress. President Obama and his party also have complete responsibility for what happens in our war on global terrorism. Read article.
Pashtuns and Pakistanis - A not-so-great game, but one America can't give up.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, Weekly Standard.com
The war in Afghanistan obviously isn't going well. Depressing critiques from all quarters underscore Afghanistan's appalling poverty, warlordism, religious conservatism, corruption, poppy fields, and retrograde matrix of ethnicity and tribe. Many of those who wanted to cut and run from Iraq have become similarly anxious about what, at least until November 2008, they saw as a better war. The stay-and-fight crowd is still the more powerful in Washington, but armed tenacity is an unnatural position for many pro-war liberals and some post-Cold War conservatives. Their support of President Barack Obama's war could wane. The prospect of a long conflict in a Muslim country could be daunting.
To see that this war is worth fighting is not to deny that Afghanistan could become even more demanding than George W. Bush's "war of choice." Topography alone could make the conflict more wearing: Some of the most violent areas of Afghanistan have some of the world's most formidable terrain. Iraq is a nation of well-paved roads; Afghanistan is a rough, rolling sea of rocks and dirt. Like the Bush administration on Iraq, the Obama administration has yet to be frank about what an
American commitment to the war in Central Asia will cost. No Larry Lindsey has yet arisen in the Obama White House and spoken truth to power. We could soon have 100,000 soldiers deployed, and we could have them there for years. Comparisons between the United States in Vietnam and in Afghanistan are for the most part surreal (the North Vietnamese and Vietcong had the Soviet Union behind them), but the image of helicopters flying over jungles will soon be matched--if the Obama administration is serious about fighting--by a horizon of helicopters flying over Afghanistan's parched mountains, verdant river valleys, and stacked-rock towns and villages.
We plan on massively augmenting the size of the Afghan army and police since we want them eventually to replace us. Perhaps 300,000 armed locals may be required. Afghanistan has no history of raising, let alone sustaining, such organized national forces. The cost of training and providing logistical support to Afghan units can't be fully calculated yet, but it is clear that Afghanistan cannot pay for what it desperately needs. Read article.
Obama's Time Warp: The U.S. Is Still the Bad Guy
Michael Barone, JWR.com
In the early 1980s, while planning a vacation in Latin America, I went to bookstores to look for histories of the region. All I could find were Marxist tracts arguing that "the people" were exploited by greedy corporations and military dictators, all propped up by the United States.
Available literature on Latin America today includes much more sensible accounts. But some people, including Barack Obama, whose college thesis written in those years has never been made public, seem stuck in a time warp in which the United States is the bad guy.
That, at least, seems to explain Obama's latest foreign policy moves, starting with Honduras, where the president was ousted by the country's supreme court for violating a constitutional provision that forbids any moves to seek a second term. (Other Latin countries, notably Mexico, have similar constitutional prohibitions.)
The White House immediately interpreted this as a military coup and decided that, this time, the United States would come out on the side of "the people." In fact, we find ourselves siding with a friend of the Iranian mullahs, Hugo Chavez, who swept aside similar constitutional limits in Venezuela, and opposing the elected congress, courts and civil society of Honduras. Honduras is not the only or, sad to say, most important example of where this administration has come out on the side of our enemies and against our friends. Israel has been told that it must stop all settlement construction, even the adding of spare rooms for newly arrived infants, while nothing is asked of the Palestinians.
Honduras is not the only or, sad to say, most important example of where this administration has come out on the side of our enemies and against our friends. Israel has been told that it must stop all settlement construction, even the adding of spare rooms for newly arrived infants, while nothing is asked of the Palestinians. Read article.
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