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October 6, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Tuesday, October 6
MSNBC: Opposing Obama’s Olympic Push “Rivals Jane Fonda Sitting on a Gun in North Vietnam” - SEE HERE.
Not Yours To Give
Mark Alexander, Patriot Post.us
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents..." --James Madison
My paternal ancestors settled in East Tennessee about 10 years before it was admitted to the Union (1796). Not far from where they settled lived a fellow who was the region's most famous frontiersman.
David Crockett was his name.
He has been immortalized as a folk hero, known for his battles with the Red Stick Creek Indians under Andrew Jackson, and his last stand at the Alamo with fellow Patriots James Bowie from Kentucky and William Travis from South Carolina.
Crockett battled the Creek side-by-side with fellow Tennessean Sam Houston, but both men were friends to the Cherokee clans, which were composed of highly civilized native peoples living in the border regions between Tennessee and North Carolina.
At the end of his formal service as a soldier, he was elected Lieutenant Colonel of the Tennessee Militia.
Crockett is less known for the several terms he served in Congress between 1827 and 1835 during the presidency of his old commander, Andrew Jackson. Crockett's friend, Sam Houston, had been elected governor of Tennessee. Read article.
Now will Congress investigate ACORN?
Editorial, Washington Examiner.com
Evidence continues to accumulate from far and wide that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is lousy with corruption. The latest revelations come from Louisiana and Oklahoma. In the former, the local ACORN Housing Corp. office received contracts worth a combined $625,000 from the City of New Orleans for repairing existing low-income housing and developing new units in poor neighborhoods. The contracts were paid for with funds from federal Community Development Block Grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. An investigation by the Pelican Institute think tank of New Orleans, however, found that no work was actually performed to fulfill the contracts. Worse, Pelican couldn't talk to the ACORN official managing the contracts because he had left the organization months ago. One more thing: The office address listed on the contracts for ACORN turned out to be a vacant lot, although new plumbing connections indicated a trailer had recently been located on the site.
Meanwhile, in Oklahoma City, documents found in a recently vacated ACORN office included a detailed memo titled "Power Plan" for a five-year effort to elect supportive legislators and transform Oklahoma to a progressive state "in the way it was 100 years ago." The man in charge of the office left town without paying back rent or utility bills, according to OklahmaWatchdog.org. Also found in the documents was a script for a Houston ACORN-directed recruiting campaign for "hiring Outreach Workers to remind people to get out and vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming election." As a tax-exempt nonprofit, ACORN is barred from participating in partisan election activities, and its national spokesmen have insisted throughout the 2008 presidential race that their organization was not working to elect Obama. Read article.
Obama's Olympic Failure Will Test the Washington Press Corps
Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard.com
Now is the time for the mainstream media to show it’s not totally in President Obama’s pocket. The Washington press corps will never fault Obama for pushing hyper-liberal policies in a moderate-to-conservative country. Ideological criticism by the press is reserved for Republican presidents.
But the media is faced with three facts as a result of Obama’s embarrassing failure in Copenhagen. 1) The failure itself. 2) The incompetence. 3) The lack of persuasive ability. There’s nothing ideological about any of these items. Read article.
Obama’s Pain Pills [Reader Post]
Steven T. Sampson, Vietnam Vet, Flopping Aces.net
On June 24, 2009, President Obama made the following statement on an ABC Obama Infomercial, “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but just taking the pain killer.” This is the wise counsel of a man who has never known life and death on an intimate level. This comes from a man who has led a sheltered existence and never considered serving his country other than a partial term in the senate and a few months in the White House. Are you prepared to have this spoiled untested man make life and death considerations for your loved ones.
Life and death decisions are to be treated as some of the most important decisions in your lifetime. They will affect the quality of life for all those involved for the rest of their days. I have made those decisions and I live with their consequences day by day.
It was a hot sultry day in the summer of ’67, I was a nineteen year old Marine squad leader with the lead squad of a platoon sweep through a jungle valley of Indochina. I assigned my best man to take the point, we were moving slowly and expecting trouble. Read article.
Three Dangerous Stooges
Victor Davis Hanson, JWR.com
Last week, three dictators — from Iran, Libya and Venezuela — delivered lunatic hate speeches at the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Why do these anti-Semitic dictators feel so free to damn America from downtown New York? Why do their abettors spurn our requests for help? And why do creepy regimes plot to get nukes, and fund terrorists?
Easy. They do not fear, much less listen, to an indebted and energy-hungry America that either needs their cash or oil — or both.
Libya's Moammar Gadhafi raved for 90 minutes. He railed about everything from the Kennedy assassination to his own jet lag. He trashed the United States and the Jews. Even Gadhafi's translator collapsed from exhaustion trying to keep up with the stream-of-consciousness insanity.
Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered his usual madness. Once again, he libeled the Jews. He denied his country's breakneck efforts at getting the bomb. And he blamed the United States for his own self-inflicted problems.
Shortly afterward, Tehran disclosed it's been secretly building a second nuclear enrichment facility.
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez may have delivered the strangest monologue. He mostly idolized leftwing filmmaker Oliver Stone for making a fawning documentary about revolutionary Venezuela. But somehow Chavez also brought up the Kennedy assassination. And, yes, he also faulted America for his own problems.
Bottom line: The United States — even with the world's largest military — is having a hard time pleading for Russian help, lecturing China to act responsibly, boycotting Iran, or isolating Gadhafi or Chavez.
It wouldn't if we produced our own energy and got our financial house in order. Read article.
The Verdict on Honduras
Otto J. Reich, NRO.com
The Law Library of the Congress of the United States (LLC) has issued an opinion on the removal and expulsion of Manuel Zelaya as president of Honduras. The LLC’s conclusion: Zelaya’s removal was legal but his deportation from the country was not.
Here is the summary of the opinion:
The Supreme Court of Honduras has constitutional and statutory authority to hear cases against the President of the Republic and many other high officers of the State, to adjudicate and enforce judgments, and to request the assistance of the public forces to enforce its rulings.
The Constitution no longer authorizes impeachment, but gives Congress the power to disapprove of the conduct of the President, to conduct special investigations on issues of national interest, and to interpret the Constitution. In the case against President Zelaya, the National Congress interpreted the power to disapprove of the conduct of the President to encompass the power to remove him from office, based on the results of a special, extensive investigation. The Constitution prohibits the expatriation of Honduran citizens.
My thoughts: The LLC opinion may be inconvenient to Zelaya supporters, but it is based on facts. For the Obama administration to insist otherwise is inexplicable. Zelaya, a corrupt and feckless autocrat who was allied with Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and other self-professed enemies of the United States, was lawfully removed from office by a unanimous decision of the Honduran supreme court. The U.S. had nothing to do with Zelaya’s removal, and it should do nothing to force his return. Read article.
Stop Allowing The Left To Set The Rules
Lloyd Marcus, American Thinker.com
I am so sick of the Left being allowed to make the rules. Imagine the absurdity of a competition in which one side is allowed to set the rules against their opponent. The Left tells us what is racist. The Left tells us what we can and cannot say. The Left published a cartoon depicting former black Secretary of State Condolezza Rice as an Aunt Jemima; another depicted Rice as a huge-lipped parrot for her Massa Bush. Neither were considered racist by their creators or publishers, or even widely condemned on the Left.
In opposition to black Republican Michael Steele's campaign to run for U.S. Senate, a liberal blogger published a doctored photo of Steele in black face and big red lips made to look like a minstrel. The caption read, "Simple Sambo wants to move to the big house". Not one Democrat denounced these racist portrayals of black conservatives.
And yet, a sign seen at a tea party depicting Obama as a witch doctor is considered by the Left to be beyond the pale and obviously racist. Why is the Left, given their track record of bias, granted final authority to determine the intent of the sign? Why do we conservatives so quickly and easily allow ourselves to be put on the defensive?
The rules set by the Left are extremely clear. Racist images of black conservatives and negative images of Bush are fair game. Even a play about murdering President Bush was called "harmless art". Meanwhile, all unflattering images of Obama are racist, and constitute dangerous, potentially violent hate speech. Read article.
The Brainy Bunch - To create a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.
Thomas Sowell, NRO.com
Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.
It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brilliant “brains trust” whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, rather than ending it. The U.S. emerged from the Great Depression only when the Second World War put an end to many New Deal policies.
FDR himself said that “Dr. New Deal” had been replaced by “Dr. Win-the-War.” But those today who support big spending like to credit wartime big spending for bringing the Great Depression to an end. They never ask the question as to why previous depressions had always ended on their own, much faster than the one under FDR, and without government intervention or massive government spending.
Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration — especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant “whiz kids” tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs. Read article.
How the Left Twists 'McCarthyism.'
David Horowitz, NewsRealBlog.com
In life, McCarthy was part of the Right. In death, he has been possessed by body snatchers on the Left. The apprehensions aroused by charges of “McCarthyism” are based on the Left’s assertion that there is a powerful and destructive impulse lurking just under the surface of our political life: a native fascism easily ignited and ready to rage dangerously out of control. It is an assumption not often questioned, although the evidence suggests that the opposite is true. Arthur Miller’s efforts in The Crucible to portray it as a peculiarly American atavism notwithstanding, the history of McCarthyism actually shows how alien the witch-hunt mentality is to the American spirit and how superficial its hold on the American psyche. Appearing in the extraordinary circumstances of the postwar period, McCarthyism was brief in its moment and limited in its consequences. And it was complete in the way it was purged from the body politic. The Wisconsin senator’s strut on the stage ended in a crushing repudiation by his colleagues in the Senate and an enduring obloquy in the rogues’ gallery of American history, a position close to that of Benedict Arnold and a handful of other villains. His enemies survived to be rehabilitated as martyrs and heroes of an American political “ nightmare,” while he himself is the only figure from that haunted era to suffer irreparable damnation.
Appearing in the extraordinary circumstances of the postwar period, McCarthyism was brief in its moment and limited in its consequences. And it was complete in the way it was purged from the body politic. The Wisconsin senator’s strut on the stage ended in a crushing repudiation by his colleagues in the Senate and an enduring obloquy in the rogues’ gallery of American history, a position close to that of Benedict Arnold and a handful of other villains. His enemies survived to be rehabilitated as martyrs and heroes of an American political “ nightmare,” while he himself is the only figure from that haunted era to suffer irreparable damnation. Read article.
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