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November 24, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Tuesday, November 24
A Health Bill Nobody Believes In - HERE.
'Failure Is Not an Option' - Obama and Holder's assault on due process. SEE HERE.
Palin-Hating 101 CLICK HERE.
Criminalizing Health Care Freedom
Brian Walsh & Hans Spakovsky, RCP.com
The "reformers" in the White House and the House of Representatives have made all too plain their vision of the federal government's power to coerce individual Americans to make the "right" health-care choices. The highly partisan bill the House just passed includes severe penalties for individuals who do not purchase insurance approved by the federal government. By neatly tucking these penalties into the IRS code, the so-called reformers have brought them under the tax-enforcement power of the federal government.
The Congressional Budget Office stated on October 29 that the House bill would generate $167 billion in revenue from "penalty payments." Individual Americans are expected to pay $33 billion of these penalties, with employers paying the rest. Former member of Congress and Heritage Foundation fellow Ernest Istook has concluded that for this revenue goal to be met, 8 to 14 million individual Americans will have to be fined over the next ten years, quite an incentive for federal bureaucrats.
Who will be included among those subject to civil and criminal penalties if this provision becomes law? For starters, any family of four whose combined income in 2016 is above $102,100 ($88,200 in today's dollars) and that chooses to pay all its medical expenses out of pocket rather than pay the $15,000 a year that the CBO says will be the lowest-priced insurance option for families. Also any healthy twentysomething in a city with high costs of living who chooses to take the risk of going uninsured. And by outlawing the popular high-deductible plans that are currently among the lowest-cost health-insurance solutions, the new law would only increase the number of Americans on the rolls of those who cannot afford insurance. Read article.
Obama's Chump Diplomacy
Rich Lowry, JWR.com
Oh, how the international community loves Barack Obama — loves to stiff him, play him along and manipulate him. He's the world's celebrity ingenue, the slender naif perpetually undone by the recalcitrance of foreign leaders.
Earlier this year, in a touching exercise in diplomatic and civilizational outreach, he sent two letters to Iran's mullahs and a new year's message to the Iranian people. How mannerly, how unthreatening. When the Iranian government beat protesters in the streets after it stole the election for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June, Obama kept his criticism muted. How sensitive, how subtle.
In October, the Iranians agreed to send their low-enriched uranium — at least the portion of it we know about — to Russia in what was hailed as a triumph for Obama's charm offensive. Except it's all predictably ending in tears. If George W. Bush put too much faith in oppressed people — their ability and willingness to rise up for freedom — Barack Obama puts too much faith in their oppressors.
The Iranians have all but announced that they are reneging on the October deal. U.S. officials, according to The Wall Street Journal, "acknowledge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be using negotiations to limit U.N. pressure while also working to legitimize his government domestically." Maybe they should get word to the president? Read article.
The Third World and Obama
Wesley Pruden, Washington Times.com
Now that every nut in America is equipped with a laptop computer, you're likely to run afoul of a nut on the loose almost anywhere.
I observed in this space earlier this week that Barack Obama's curious compulsion to travel the world to make endless apologies for America could stem from his spending the most formative years of his childhood in the Third World. I mentioned two observable facts, neither in any way accusatory or rude, that his father was a Kenyan (Marxist) and the mother who raised him was obviously attracted to men of the Third World. She married two of them.
These observations, and how that might have influenced a child, struck several readers - I've heard from them all - as unforgivable xenophobia, arrogance and, of course, the mindless all-purpose indictment, "racism." My observation that the president's mother was attracted to the Third World was, incredibly, taken as insult, as if being attracted to "men of the Third World" is bad. But bigotry, like beauty, lies often in the eye of the beholder, or in this case in the eye of the accuser. Most of the e-mails were crude, obscene and, worse, cast in the language of the schoolyard. Some included the obligatory shot at George W. Bush. With friends like these the president needs no enemies.
Mr. Obama himself writes about his birthright at length in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father" -- one of the best memoirs from any of our presidents. Since every one of us is the extension of our life's experiences, I observed that the impressions of his childhood could explain the president's obsession with making apologies and amends for his country's sins and shortcomings, perceived and otherwise. Read article.
The President’s Timetable For Retreat
IBD Editorials.com
President Obama has made a ringing commitment to fight the Taliban with one foot out the door. Seven years tops, he says, and we’re out of there. If he’s serious, we’ve already lost.
The president still seems to have trouble deciding what to do next in the country that he used to call the “central front” in the war on terror. But he’s clear about one thing: the need for an exit strategy.
Not a victory strategy, mind you, but a strategy that will ensure an American departure, preferably before he leaves office.
Obama, interviewed this week by CNN, could not have been clearer on this point. “The American people will have a lot of clarity about what we’re doing, how we’re going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost, what kind of burden does this place on our young men and women in uniform and, most importantly, what’s the endgame on this thing. My preference would be not to hand off anything to the next president. One of the things I’d like is the next president to be able to come in and say, ‘I’ve got a clean slate.’”
Ignore for a moment the dismissive language — “this thing” — to describe a war in which Americans are dying to defend their nation’s vital interests and to keep Afghanistan from falling back into the hands of murderous fanatics. Let’s just say it wasn’t a Churchillian moment.
But his substantive point, that the “endgame” is the most important part of his strategy, was too clear to be blamed on carelessness, fatigue or whatever. That statement, if he really means it, is as good as waving the white flag.
Maybe this is Obama’s way of warning the Afghans and their president, Hamid Karzai, that America can’t wait forever for them to set up an honest, reasonably competent government.
But Obama could have picked up the phone. The point is legitimate, but it’s not one to be made in public. Read article.
Barack Obama’s First Military Decision Is Now Proven to be a Bad Decision
Erik Erikson, Redstate.com
It has been almost 90 days since General McChrystal asked Barack Obama for more troops. No decision has been made. The General still waits as our soldiers keep dying.
But that might actually be a better alternative to any decision Obama might make.
As awful as that sounds, new information is proving Barack Obama’s got his first major military decision disastrously wrong and the repercussions to our national security will be far reaching in light of China’s growing aggressiveness.
Back up to January. Barack Obama had just been sworn in to office and the Pentagon then began reviewing whether the F-22 Raptor program should get more funding. Despite lots of talk about saving and creating jobs, the Obama administration nudged Defense Secretary Robert Gates to kill the F-22, an advanced stealth fighter for which no nation has put up a competing system.
In April, Robert Gates said he intended to kill the program. In July, Senators tried to keep the funding alive citing threats from China. But, Barack Obama’s administration said those threats were overestimated and Obama threatened to veto the entire defense budget if F-22 funding were left in.
Gates said Monday he’d heard no “substantive” argument for keeping the jet for national security reasons, pointing out that China has no planes that can compete with the more than 1,000 advanced fighter jets the U.S. will have by 2020.
Gates said that the gap between the two countries’ aerial arsenals will only widen.
Unfortunately for the United States military, that turns out to be flat out wrong. Read article.
Dealing with ethics problems will be a tough task for House Democrats in 2010.
Charlie Cook, National Journal.com
As House Democrats try to avert political disaster by limiting their 2010 losses to about 16 seats, the norm for post-World War II presidents' first midterm elections, dealing with their members' ethics problems may be one of their toughest tasks.
With health care reform off their plate for now, House Democrats are showing that they understand the tightrope they must walk -- address unemployment without exacerbating worries about the size of government and the federal deficit. Meanwhile, though, the ethical clouds over House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.; Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee; and several other members of that subcommittee bring back memories of the House Bank and Post Office scandal, which in 1994 helped end 40 years of Democratic rule in the House, and the scandals involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Republican Reps. Bob Ney of Ohio, Tom DeLay of Texas, and Mark Foley of Florida that helped topple the GOP majority in 2006. Independent voters, who swung toward Democrats by an 18-point margin in 2006 and cost Republicans their majority, are particularly sensitive to ethics charges. They will be watching to see whether Democrats clean their own House.
Although a grand jury is unlikely to indict Rangel, he has become a huge embarrassment for Democrats. Read article.
Obama Priorities Responsible for Unemployment
Judith Klinghoffer, Political Mavens.com
Stop telling me that unemployment is a lagging indicator. It may be so but it is higher and is lagging more in the US than in the rest of the developed world. Not only German but even British unemployment is declining! Oh, yes, it picked at 7.9% and declined to 7.8% to the “surprise” of economists. The are probably the same economists who no longer dare attach the word surprise to the ongoing decline in German unemployment to 7.7%. After all, Brown, unlike Merkel, used generous economic stimulus to try to deal with the recession. So clearly the stimulus alone is not responsible for the lack of decline in the American unemployment rate.
What is? More than ever, I suspect the fault lies in the Obama/Democratic congress legislative agenda which creates too much uncertainty in the business community for them to invest in the US.
Consequently, when American companies, even those run by the American government such as GM, prefers to direct it’s investment not only to fast growing Asia but also to slow growing Europe. Case in point, GM managers enlightening decision not to sell it’s European subsidiary Opel as it had previously announced it was doing.
It was a decision that benefits Britain and Germany not to mention that it will probably force GM to repay the German government 2.2 billion dollar advance it gave GM. GM’s decision stunned Europe. It should not have. Faced With potential costs inherent in thousands of pages of new complicated health care and cap and trade legislation, GM managers sensibly concluded that investing money in Europe is more sensible because the environment is more predictable. Read article.
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posted by: alicejensen
Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 04:41 AM
