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November 12, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Thursday, November 12
Presidential Priorities - SEE HERE.
Barack Obama And The Moslem World - GO HERE.
Afghan Mythologies: We have everything we need to defeat the Taliban. CLICK HERE.
Al Gore's "Our Choice" - Ex-VP’s got the whole world in his hands — and lots of its profits. [Shouldn't Algore be registered as a lobbyist?] READ about it HERE.
Obama's Arrogance of Power
Gene Healy, Washington Examiner.com
Last year's financial meltdown rightfully destroyed former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan's reputation as an infallible "wise man," but he said something wise in his 2007 memoirs, describing a constitutional amendment he'd been "pushing for years."
Wrote Greenspan: "Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office. I'm only half joking."
George Washington was called "the American Cincinnatus," after the Roman hero who took power reluctantly and returned humbly to his plow when crisis passed. That's the model Americans once expected presidents to follow. Things have changed, and not for the better. Read article.
The "Costs" of Medical Care
Thomas Sowell, Townhall.com
We are incessantly being told that the cost of medical care is "too high"-- either absolutely or as a growing percentage of our incomes. But nothing that is being proposed by the government is likely to lower those costs, and much that is being proposed is almost certain to increase the costs.
There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor's office and more in taxes-- or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.
Costs are not reduced simply because you don't pay them. It would undoubtedly be cheaper for me to do without the medications that keep me alive and more vigorous in my old age than people of a similar age were in generations past. Letting old people die would undoubtedly be cheaper than keeping them alive-- but that does not mean that the costs have gone down. It just means that we refuse to pay the costs.
Letting old people die would undoubtedly be cheaper than keeping them alive-- but that does not mean that the costs have gone down. It just means that we refuse to pay the costs. Read article.
Are You with Us or with Them?
Mona Charen, Townhall.com
President Obama likes to preen himself on his supposed moral superiority to his predecessor. He announced the closing of Guantanamo in his first week on the job (though 10 months on, it remains open) to advertise the new administration's disdain for George Bush's war-fighting tactics. And at every opportunity since, he has stressed that his policies -- on taxes, on the Middle East, on health care, on "man-caused disasters," and on "climate change" -- reflect a more refined and elevated morality than has ever before held sway in Washington, DC.
So you have to wonder how the president slept last Wednesday night.
He has known that critics in the United States regarded his posture toward the Iranian regime as weak. But on Wednesday, he heard this critique from a different quarter -- one that will be more difficult to dismiss.
Though the Obama administration has tripled the deficit in just 10 months in office, it has found one program to cut -- the $3 million to support the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The tiny research organization, which kept records of the disappearances, murders, and other human rights abuses in Iran, was abruptly defunded last month, sending a clear message of contempt to the Iranians who are putting their lives on the line to resist this vicious regime.
A successful overthrow of the nearly nuclear mullahs in Iran would be the greatest boon to world peace and stability since the fall of the Berlin Wall. After this week's events, it can no longer be said that the Obama administration isn't doing enough to support the opposition. The people on Tehran's streets know the truth -- he's effectively supporting the regime. Read article.
The Myth of '08, Demolished
Charles Krauthammer, Townhall.com
Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday's elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.
In the aftermath of last year's Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics -- most prominently, rising minorities and the young -- would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed "The Death of Conservatism," while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.
This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.
Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia -- presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in '08 for the first time in 44 years -- went red again. With a vengeance. Read article.
Same Old, Same Old - The apostle of hope and change is governing on ideas that were old hat fifty years ago.
Michael Knox Beran, NRO.com
Barack Obama won the White House promising a politics of change, yet he presides over an administration that has become a mortuary for dead ideas. In the year since his election, he has given the country not novelty, but the same old, same old, serving up policies that might have been arresting in the time of McKinley but have long since lost their luster.
From his administration’s profusion of “czars” and “special masters” to his party’s push to compel Americans to eat certain kinds of food and do certain kinds of exercise (that they might conform to whatever behavioral models are at present deemed good for them), from the drive to regulate the Internet to the proposal to require doctors to offer patients the latest refinements in “end-of-life counseling,” the president and his acolytes peddle the hoarier clichés of a now archaic politics of social regeneration.
It’s a “we know what’s good for you” philosophy that has come to grate on the nerves. Surely it is the inalienable right of every citizen to go to hell in his own way. President Obama has spoken of the moment in politics when “the perfection begins.” Sometimes one would just as soon the perfection ended. We are human beings, and deeply imperfect by nature. The last thing we need is a nosey, cajoling, and meddlesome state forcing a spurious gospel of betterment down our throats. Read article.
White House Post-election Arrogance
David Limbaugh.com
The White House arrogance on display in denying that Tuesday's election results were a repudiation of President Barack Obama's radical agenda is of a piece with its arrogance in attempting to advance this agenda against the people's will.
One of the great ironies of this administration is its promise of returning power to the people but governing with an iron fist and its back turned to the expressed wishes of the voters. The White House claims a mandate for its extreme blueprint to restructure America, but the voters had no idea Obama would go this far, even if many of us listening closely to his statements and studying his relationships and voting record did.
It's possible, given the relatively monolithic embryo in which Obama was politically incubated, that Obama believed the majority of Americans held the same contempt for America's political and economic system as he did. It should be clear to him now, though, that he's not on the same page with them -- perhaps not even in the same book. But if you're paying attention, you know that this cold, hard slap of reality hitting Obama in the face isn't slightly deterring him from pressing forward. If anything, it has strengthened his resolve to implement his agenda with increased urgency, before the public turns even more against him.
Obama's attitude in over-reading his mandate and dismissing the significance of Tuesday's elections is, I believe, consistent with the liberal mindset that liberals know better than the people what is in their best interests. Sen. Jim Webb, whose fellow Virginia Democrat was soundly defeated Tuesday, said the election results indicate that "people up here on our side need to get their message straighter."
But how much clearer can Obama and the Democratic Party be that they have embraced, wholesale, the domestic model of European socialism and the foreign policy model of Jimmy Carter appeasement? As dense as we the people are, I think we grasp that, gentlemen. Read article.
He Did Ask Us to Judge Him, Did He Not?
Claude Cartaginese, NewsRealBlog.com
"Judge me by the people with whom I surround myself" - Barack Obama, 2008
While he was campaigning and fervently denying his socialist proclivities, candidate Barack Obama admonished us to judge him by those individuals whose counsel he would actively seek once he was elected president. Since his election (and judging him by that measure), the president has done little to put his critics at ease in that regard. On the contrary, his selection of advisors to date has done nothing to dispel any doubts, and at this point it is safe to conclude that Barack Obama is, without reservation, a socialist.
Those of us who monitor such things have winced at some of the choices the President has made in the selection of those individuals whose counsel he has deemed worthy to solicit. Readers of NewsRealblog have access to a rapidly growing archive of timely and prescient articles detailing some of the more unsavory characters (with links to complete profiles for most of them at discoverthenetworks.org–a valuable resource freely available to all). The radical positions taken by these current (and former) advisors, such as Van Jones, Mark Lloyd, Cass Sunstein, Ezekial Emanuel and John Holdren should be familiar to all readers of this blog.
But these names are just the tip of the iceberg. Read article.
The Off-Year Elections and the Politics of the Obvious
Emmett Tyrrell, Townhall.com
It was all so obvious. No president in modern times has come to power with less political experience or less managerial experience. On the other hand, no president has come to power with a clearer record of political extremism. As senator, Barack Obama had the most left-wing voting record in the Senate, brief as his record was. Back in Illinois, he had a record of associations with extremists that would have sunk any other presidential candidate. Think of his friendship with Bill Ayers -- a co-founder of the Weather Underground, which actually bombed public buildings in the 1960s.
Think of Obama's attendance, week after week, at religious services during which the Rev. Jeremiah Wright thundered forth with diatribes lilting with such lines as "God damn America." The radical direction of the Obama presidency was foreordained.
With that in mind, was it not obvious that the Democrats would be routed this election year? The loss of the governorship in Virginia was not supposed to happen, according to liberals a year ago. The Prophet Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, spoke of Virginia as part of a "permanent Democratic majority."
In New Jersey, Gov. Jon Corzine -- with his vast fortune and elite Democratic connections and a huge Democratic margin in the voting rolls -- was seen as an easy win. But then the economy did what one would expect a weak economy to do when faced with unprecedented peacetime spending and onerous new taxation. It sputtered. Next came another obvious development: The electorate put the economy at the top of its list of concerns. Read article.
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