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October 1, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Thursday, October 1
Obama and ACORN: A Love Story
Why did the president feign ignorance of ACORN when his relationship with the group goes back almost 20 years? SEE HERE.
Andy Williams accuses Barack Obama of following Marxist theory
Telegraph.co.uk
Williams, a lifelong Republican whose hits include Moon River and Music To Watch Girls By, told the Radio Times he thought Mr Obama wanted to turn the US into a "socialist country".
"Don't like him at all," he said, "I think he wants to create a socialist country. The people he associates with are very Left-wing. One is registered as a Communist.
"Obama is following Marxist theory. He's taken over the banks and the car industry. He wants the country to fail." Read article.
Andy Williams, George Santayana, Ann Althouse, Liberals on Obama
Bruce Kesler, Maggie's Farm.com
Ann Althouse, a prominent law professor, teenager in the ‘60’s, dismissess Andy Williams as too “square” even back in the ‘60’s to be taken seriously now, when he calls President Obama of “following Marxist theory.”
I tested Williams’ squareness on my sons, now 4 and 9, this morning by showing them a YouTube of Andy Williams singing the theme song from Exodus, “This Land Is Mine.” Both loved it. But, are they biased because we’re Jewish? No. Both’s favorite TV show when younger, after the usual run of kiddie shows, was reruns on PBS of Lawrence Welk’s show. They both loved the melodious and understandable lyrics along with the lively and friendly performances.
So, are my sons square? Or, does Ann Althouse’s comment reflect a deprived upbringing, lacking personal connection to the emotions and tastes of an earlier generation? I choose the latter but what is important about this minor brouhaha is what it reflects about us. Read article.
Nightmare presidency - Obama is ruining India’s security climate
Daily Pioneer.com
He may not relish the comparison but it is now becoming increasingly obvious that Mr Barack Obama is the most hostile American President for India since Richard Nixon. In the eight months he has been in office, Mr Obama has snubbed India more than once. He has sent repeated signals that New Delhi is not integral to his Asian security architecture. Partly as a result of his country’s economic crisis, he has bent over backwards to accommodate China.
His open advocacy of protectionism has been most visibly targeted at outsourcing of technology jobs to India. He headlined anti-trade legislation by saying it would punish those who created jobs in Bangalore rather than Buffalo, a special mention that was extraordinarily impolitic and did not go unnoticed in India.
There has been a remarkable absence of clarity on Mr Obama’s strategic goals. In the early months, it was easy to pretend he was making up his mind. Now, it would seem he has no mind. His confusion on AfPak and constant shifting of tactical milestones would suggest he has little understanding of the nature of the challenge there and, behind those engaging phrases, is thoroughly confused. If the Obama Administration’s most recent thoughts on AfPak are taken as final, the American President is looking to cut and run. He would want to begin bringing troops home by early 2012, in time for his re-election.
This would mean delegating Afghanistan to the Pakistani Army! Read article.
Max's Mad Mandate: The Baucus health bill will break 50 state budgets via Medicaid.
Review & Outlook, Online WSJ.com
The more we inspect Max Baucus's health-care bill, the worse it looks. Today's howler: One reason it allegedly "pays for itself" over 10 years is because it would break all 50 state budgets by permanently expanding Medicaid, the joint state-federal program for the poor.
Democrats want to use Medicaid to cover everyone up to at least 133% of the federal poverty level, or about $30,000 for a family of four. Starting in 2014, Mr. Baucus plans to spend $287 billion through 2019—or about one-third of ObamaCare's total spending—to add some 11 million new people to the Medicaid rolls.
About 59 million people are on Medicaid today—which means that a decade from now about a quarter of the total population would be on a program originally sold as help for low-income women, children and the disabled. State budgets would explode—by $37 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office—because they would no longer be allowed to set eligibility in line with their own decisions about taxes and spending. This is the mother—and father and crazy uncle—of unfunded mandates. Read article.
ACORN, Kanye West and the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism
Evan Coyne Maloney, Big Government.com
Journalists need to ask themselves, how did this happen? How could they miss the corruption at ACORN? President Obama was once an ACORN lawyer, so the group is certainly significant enough to warrant media scrutiny. Then how did all the seasoned professionals get scooped by two students–James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles–one of whom isn’t old enough to legally drink?
ACORN’s many problems have been well known for quite a while, at least to anyone venturing beyond network newscasts and liberal blogs. As an organization, ACORN doesn’t just limit itself to churning out forged voter registrations. It’s a full-blown racketeering enterprise worthy of The Sopranos, and it finances its operations with the help of taxpayer money. Read article.
ACORN: Obama's Monica Lewinsky?
The Last Crusade.org
This is about as rich as a fresh, steaming cow patty on a cold winter morning; ACORN employees are caught, on five different occasions in five different cities, giving two undercover filmmakers – who they believe are a pimp and a prostitute – “tax advice” regarding how to cheat the government…and ACORN is going to sue the two undercover filmmakers who captured the employees illicit “tax advice” sessions?
Yeah, it wreaks, but we all know it’s standard operating procedure for a group that specializes in breaking the law. It’s the tactic known as “the best defense is a strong offense.” You’ll recall that this is the same group charged with voter registration fraud and using intimidation tactics in an election that put Barack Obama in the White House.
Now, at this point, let me say that I never again want to hear Cry-Baby Al Gore and his sniveling Disciples of Whining complain about some “hanging chads” in Florida. Those ballots ended up being counted over and over, by a team of elections officials in front of news cameras. These ACORN employees were only caught after a hidden camera exposed their blatant attempt to defraud the government out of our tax dollars. Read article.
Pinstripe Suits and Purple Pimp Hats: Obama’s bankers are ACORN’s bankers, and we fund them.
Kevin Williamson, NRO.com
Jamie Dimon has been described as “Obama’s favorite banker” by the New York Times. He’s ACORN’s favorite banker, too, and with good reason. Mr. Dimon is the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, which operates a charitable foundation that gave ACORN $1 million in 2007, along with a smaller grant to the ACORN Institute. Beyond the charitable grants, ACORN and its affiliates have long profited from their “partnerships” with the big banks, taking a cut of subprime loans marketed to low-income borrowers in poor neighborhoods.
However, JPMorgan Chase isn’t the only big offender here. According to Peter Flaherty — president of the National Legal and Policy Center, which is tracking corporate America’s underwriting of the Left — other big ACORN benefactors include such TARPalicious names as Bank of America and Citigroup. Taxpayers bail out the banks, the banks fund ACORN, and ACORN dispenses advice on human trafficking and tax evasion to aspiring pimps and hookers. Not America’s proudest moment.
Dimon, of course, is no white-shoe East Coast banker. He’s a Chicago Democrat, deeply plugged in to Obama’s machine — he was said to be Obama’s choice for secretary of the Treasury until advisers convinced the president to go with Tim Geithner — and so it’s no surprise to find his company shunting money ACORN’s way. And where there are Chicago Democrats and a whiff of corruption, can the name Daley be far away?
Bill Daley, brother of Chicago mayor Richard Daley and son of Boss Daley, runs JPMorgan Chase’s charitable foundation and also is in charge of the bank’s “corporate social responsibility” office. While it would be unfair to visit the sins of the father (and the brother, and the rest of the Chicago machine) upon the son, Daley is not the first name that comes to mind when one thinks of “social responsibility.” Even leaving aside his family connections, Mr. Daley represents precisely the overlap of Wall Street, Democratic machine politics, and ACORN that ought to give sober observers pause. Read article.
'Cap and Trade' Your Freedom
Joseph Farah, Israel-Commentary.org
I’m going to take a wild guess and say that only 5 percent of Americans could give an accurate definition of what “cap-and-trade” means. We hear the phrase a lot. It has what I call a high MEGO factor. MEGO is a news industry acronym for “my eyes glaze over.” Nevertheless, the plan by Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress to institute a ‘cap-and-trade” system on the production of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” (the principal one being water vapor, by the way) is nothing more than a plot to destroy the American economy once and for all.
You think I’m kidding? Here are the facts to consider:
•The plan is based on largely pseudo-science suggesting that these natural gases (not pollutants) are causing massive, catastrophic climate change.
•The plan is based on the idea that increases in these gases are caused by man’s activity on the planet, even though man-made carbon dioxide and water vapor represent an infinitesimally small amount of the carbon dioxide and water vapor in our atmosphere.
•Historic tracking of the relationship of carbon dioxide volume in the atmosphere and temperature increases does indeed correlate a trend — but not the way Al Gore explains it. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere follow warming trends. They don’t precede them.
•The planet has been much colder in man’s history And, it has been much warmer in history. These trends occurred before man was involved in major industry.
But, let’s put all that aside for a moment. Let’s pretend the assumptions of Al Gore and a handful of government-paid scientists are correct — the planet really is warming because of man’s activity. The “cap-and-trade” system about to be imposed on Americans will do nothing to stop or reverse the amount of “greenhouse gases” spewing into the world’s atmosphere — not even close. It will, however, destroy the economy. Read article.
Buying Health Insurance? Only If He Likes It
Rowan Scarborough, Human Events.com
The House Democrats' huge health care bill bestows immense powers on one Washington bureaucrat who it authorizes to regulate every step of insurance buying and to collect any data on the American people the czar deems necessary to do the job.
The position is called the Health Choices Commissioner. The post will be filled by the president and confirmed by the Senate to oversee a brand new government agency whose health industry powers seem boundless under the bill. This person, and this person alone, will decide whether a health coverage plan is acceptable to Washington or not.
"He will rigidly and vigorously defined the choices that are available to you," said Robert E. Moffit, a health policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. It is a massive shift in state's rights, moving decisions made by legislatures, governors and local insurance commissioners from the people to one desk in Washington.
"The big story in the House bill is that what you're looking at is a massive transfer of regulatory authority from the states to the federal government over health insurance," Moffit said. "This basically will undermine state independence, innovation in the provision of health insurance, the writing of health insurance and regulation. States vary from state to state on the kind of rules governing health insurance. What this does, it federalizes the entire process." Read article.
Barack Obama, College Administrator: Our commander-in-chief seems to think he’s president of the University of America.
Victor Davis Hanson, NRO.com
If you are confused by the first nine months of the Obama administration, take solace that there is at least a pattern. The president, you see, thinks America is a university and that he is our campus president. Keep that in mind, and almost everything else makes sense.
Obama went to Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard without much of a break, taught at the University of Chicago, and then surrounded himself with academics, first in his stint at community organizing and then when he went into politics. It shows. In his limited experience, those who went to Yale or Harvard are special people, and the Ivy League environment has been replicated in the culture of the White House.
Note how baffled the administration is by sinking polls, tea parties, town halls, and, in general, “them” — the vast middle class, which, as we learned during the campaign, clings to guns and Bibles, and which has now been written off as blinkered, racist, and xenophobic. The earlier characterization of rural Pennsylvania has been expanded to include all of Middle America.
For many in the academic community who have not worked with their hands, run businesses, or ventured far off campus, Middle America is an exotic place inhabited by aborigines who bowl, don’t eat arugula, and need to be reminded to inflate their tires. They are an emotional lot, of some value on campus for their ability to “fix” broken things like pipes and windows, but otherwise wisely ignored.
In the world of the university, a Van Jones — fake name, fake accent, fake underclass pedigree, fake almost everything — is a dime a dozen. Ward Churchill fabricated everything from his degree to his ancestry, and was given tenure, high pay, and awards for his beads, buckskin, and Native American–like locks. The “authentic” outbursts of Van Jones about white polluters and white mass-murderers are standard campus fare. In universities, such over-the-top rhetoric and pseudo-Marxist histrionics are simply career moves, used to scare timid academics and win release time, faculty-adjudicated grants, or exemption from normal tenure scrutiny. Skip Gates’s fussy little theatrical fit at a Middle American was not his first and will not be his last.
Many of the former Professor Obama’s problems so far hinge on his administration’s inability to judge public opinion, its own self-righteous sense of self, its non-stop sermonizing, and its suspicion of sincere dissent. In other words, the United States is now a campus, we are the students, and Obama is our university president. Read article.
From Bismarck to Obama: If you are going to pass a Big Idea such as universal health insurance, you need to give the public a Big Reason.
Daniel Henninger, Online WSJ.com
Delivering ObamaCare unto the world wasn't supposed to be this hard. Just how hard is obvious when the president of the United States does five Sunday talk shows of sequential shilling. The New York Times memorialized this low point for the office of the presidency by arranging on its front page five identical photographs of Mr. Obama with each anchorman sitting across from him like a can of Campbell's soup. Regard this as my order for the poster version of the Five Obamas.
Writing in these pages earlier in the month, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle suggested, as have other Democrats, that the country has been waiting for "national health reform" for 70 years. Seventy years!!!??? That's 1939. The only major obsession longer than this was the Red Sox curse. Even Helen Thomas wasn't on the story yet. This is a heap of political futility. Read article.
Authority Complex: Some issues are too important to leave to politicians.
Clifford D. May, NRO.com
In 1996, Vice President Al Gore was named by Pres. Bill Clinton to chair the White House Commission on Aviation Safety. Over the months that followed, he and an impressive list of commissioners — including senior law-enforcement and military officers, government officials, and academics — conducted “an intensive inquiry into civil aviation safety, security and air traffic control modernization.” In early 1997, they issued a final report, including a set of recommendations which, Vice President Gore stated confidently, “will serve to enhance and ensure the continued safety and security of our air transportation system.” I suspect you know where I’m heading. Despite such acts of terrorism as the 1993 World Trade Center attack, and despite Osama bin Laden’s “Declaration of War” against the United States (published in August 1996, in Al Quds Al Arabi, a London-based newspaper), Gore’s inquiry did not recognize that terrorism was more pressing than “air traffic control modernization” or the other issues under examination. Terrorism was covered in Chapter 3, titled “Improving Security for Travelers.” It began with this quote from President Clinton: “We know we can’t make the world risk-free, but we can reduce the risks we face and we have to take the fight to the terrorists.”
I suspect you know where I’m heading. Despite such acts of terrorism as the 1993 World Trade Center attack, and despite Osama bin Laden’s “Declaration of War” against the United States (published in August 1996, in Al Quds Al Arabi, a London-based newspaper), Gore’s inquiry did not recognize that terrorism was more pressing than “air traffic control modernization” or the other issues under examination. Terrorism was covered in Chapter 3, titled “Improving Security for Travelers.” It began with this quote from President Clinton: “We know we can’t make the world risk-free, but we can reduce the risks we face and we have to take the fight to the terrorists.” Read article.
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