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December 17, 2009
Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Thursday, December 17
Swingin' Copenhagen - SEE HERE.
Michael Ledeen: The Left, From Progressive to Oppressive - CLICK HERE.
Putting Party and Vanity Above Country
The Foundry, Heritage.org
Like a desperate last-minute Christmas shopper who will grab any gift and pay any price, Congress may rush through a hasty and ill-conceived rewrite of health care legislation. President Obama’s message to Senators seems focused more on party loyal and an appeal to desires for glory than on what Americans want or need.
With public support collapsing all about them (61% in opposition according to CNN’s December polling), Democrats may be motivated by a feeling that they’ve gone too far to turn back now, even if it’s in the wrong direction. They could invoke Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism that “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
What’s in the bill may become immaterial in this Christmas rush. That’s dangerous because the final form of the bill is still a mystery, after earlier efforts ran afoul of multitudes of objections. The 11th-hour rewrite of the bill will be major version Number Nine since varying editions began surfacing during the summer. With or without a co-called “public option,” it’s certain that the bill will displace millions of Americans from their current private insurance, put Washington in charge of all health care and insurance, and expand the number of people who depend on taxpayers to pay for their coverage.
Bureaucrats such as the new “Health Choices Commissioner” would be granted czar-like powers to impose what would function as a federally-controlled single-payer system.
“It’s now or never” sums up the White House message as President Obama asks his fellow Democrats to disregard the public opposition and pass Obamacare anyway. White House operatives told Politico this is the “last chance” and “last train leaving the station” as time runs out for the Senate to act before Christmas. Read article.
Ping Pong Politics
Lady Liberty, NMJ.us
Over a few games of beer pong (yes, really), I got a chance to talk a little politics with a couple of college students over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. It was no surprise to find that their view of Barack Obama was fairly positive since that demographic is almost overwhelmingly both Democrat and supportive of Obama's campaign and presidency. One said he thought that the President was a lot smarter than all of us (I disagree, and an interesting 'blog entry sets out some convincing reasoning as to how that's actually the case); another said he seemed like a decent enough man (I disagree with that, too). Yet for the first time, the positive comments were followed by a word that's becoming more and more pervasive these days where Barack Obama is concerned, and that word is "but."
Yes, Barack Obama seems to be a pretty smart guy but he's sure doing some stupid things!
Sure, Barack Obama appears to be a nice guy but his programs are bad for the country.
The fact is, it doesn't really matter what kind of scores the president received on any intelligence tests, nor should we really care whether or not we'd like him if we ever met him. While we all know that he's a charismatic user of the teleprompter and that he made myriad promises to hand out largesse from the US Treasury if he were elected, actions speak louder than words. And in his every deed, his every action since his election, he's proved himself to be either ignorant of history or uncaring for American citizens (and often both). That's not very smart, and it's certainly not very nice! Read article.
Will Obamacare Be Run from the West Wing?
The Foundry, Heritage.org
The latest Senate leadership health care compromise is a “Bumper Sticker.” There are no details yet, but the Bumper Sticker tells us enough about where this compromise is heading: a massive concentration of political control over the health care system.
While the Senate leadership has decided to turn the outlines of their latest “breakthrough”- perhaps even the legislative text- to the Congressional Budget Office for a cost estimate, we know something about what they have in mind. The broad outlines tell taxpayers a great detail about where the congressional liberals are going with this scheme. Curiously, with the right tweaks, it could do something quite unusual: end up concentrating control over the nation’s health insurance markets, literally, in the West Wing of the White House. Read article.
Obama’s Faithful Claim: Why is “The Great Communicator” Faltering?
Rhonda Robinson, NewsRealBlog.com
The title Ronald Reagan held as “The Great Communicator” was an honor he earned. Reagan was firm in his political beliefs and conveyed them with style, conviction and simplicity. He could speak above the daily political ramblings and address the heart of the country. Whether you loved him or hated him, you knew where he stood.
When Barack Obama stepped onto the scene, the Left saw in him their Ronald Reagan; a new great communicator. This hope is also quickly dissipating in the harsh light of reality.
Tina Brown, founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast, wrote on Dec. 3rd in Obama’s Fog of War that “The Great Communicator’s” skills were “breaking down.”
“It’s a strange paradox for a great wordsmith, but whenever Obama makes an important policy speech these days he leaves everyone totally confused.”
The reason, Brown later concludes is that it’s not his fault that he has to lie. Even he doesn’t believe what he says. Read article.
Illegal immigration axis: Pro-amnesty groups get a larger role.
Anthony Bowe, Washington Times.com
The Obama administration has dramatically realigned the 2010 census, practically transforming it into an arm of the illegal-immigration lobby by partnering with nearly two dozen pro-amnesty organizations. A comparison of census documents from 2000 reveals that's three times as many illegal-alien-amnesty organizations as were active during the Clinton administration census.
The administration's move will cause reverberations far beyond the arcane world of census numbers. The count of illegal immigrants could shift as many as eight congressional seats and reshape the Electoral College map for the next presidential election. As many as five battleground states from the 2008 election are slated to lose or gain seats before the 2012 election - changing each state's number of Electoral College votes - because of the illegal alien count.
That's not such a good idea. In a hiring frenzy necessary to perform the census, recruitment of census workers depends on census "partners" to pull in their members. Thousands of members and allies recruited by pro-amnesty groups could be responsible for counting the population as the foot soldiers of the census. After recruits pass an FBI background check and fingerprinting, the census- hiring arm turns its collective head away from their new employee's private political agenda. Read article.
Obama Reducing the Debt? Dream On.
David Limbaugh.com
Two recent news stories illustrate, more clearly than ever, the Obama Democrats' contempt for the free market and individual economic liberty. If given the chance, they will expand government and spend as much of our money as they can get away with.
First we learn that Obama and his party simply will not agree to keep their grubby government hands off the estimated $200 billion the banks are going to repay under TARP. Just when we finally receive this glimmer of good news to ameliorate our reasonable panic over the ever-increasing national debt, Obama announces that he intends to intercept a good portion of the debt repayments and spend it on job creation and assistance to certain debtors.
I assume we're supposed to be too dense to remember that his stimulus spending to date hasn't created jobs and that most of it hasn't even been used for that purpose. So when this administration says its first priority is reducing debt, understand we are being played -- by consummate cynics.
Likewise, the Democrats' various health care plans contemplate $500 billion in Medicare savings between 2010 and 2019. But instead of using the savings to shore up this entitlement's solvency, they are charging forward with a new entitlement: major subsidies to the uninsured to buy health insurance.
They just can't help themselves. Read article.
Democrats Whistling Past Graveyard
Mona Charen, Townhall.com
Americans are dismayed at the Democrats' stubborn unresponsiveness to their priorities. All major polls show that by more than a 2-to-1 margin, voters are more concerned about the economy and jobs than about health care.
Yet Speaker Pelosi reiterated again this week that "We would do almost anything to pass a health care bill." Points for frankness.
The Democratic Party is determined to shove health care reform down the nation's throat utterly disregarding the electorate's wishes. They (probably) have the votes to do it. But, as Al Gore might put it, railroading unpopular legislation through is a "risky scheme."
The Quinnipiac poll found the lowest overall approval rating yet for President Obama at 46 percent. Other results are similar. The RealClearPolitics average shows the president's approval rating at 48.6 -- down from 62 percent in June. Gallup found that 49 percent of voters would advise their representative to vote against health care reform while 44 percent would counsel voting in favor. Rasmussen's survey found that only 41 percent favor the bill.
If this were a referendum, it's clear which side would prevail. Read article.
What Are President Obama's Actual Objectives?
Austin Hill, Worth-Reading-Blog.blogspot.com
He campaigned against private sector economic mismanagement, and the "harsh realities" of global capitalism. He pledged during his campaign to end corruption in both the government, and the private sector.
After he took office, he claimed that he had "inherited" the worst economic situation in his country’s recent history. And then, the new President sought to consolidate his power. Once privately-owned enterprises became government-owned and operated entities, and were "restructured" so as to become, essentially, "workers’ cooperatives."
Not surprisingly, unemployment remained persistently high, even as the new was implementing his much-celebrated "reform" measures. And while private citizens had to struggle with the worsening economic conditions, government officials nonetheless continued to exert increasing levels of control over the nation’s wealth, and also continued to enrich themselves from that wealth, despite the suffering of "the governed."
Does this seem like a description of the first 11 months of the Obama Presidency? What I’ve described here thus far portrays the conduct of President Obama and members of his Administration fairly succinctly. Read article.
Freedom doesn’t have to ask the government for permission
Henry Lamb, CFP.com
The federal government was created by people who were sick and tired of a king’s government that controlled every facet of life. They wrote a Constitution that explicitly limited the power of the new government. Under this new government, individuals were free to pursue happiness as they chose. In 200 years, this new nation of free people created prosperity unmatched in all of history.
While free people were busy pursuing their happiness, others were free to pursue political power. Throughout the 20th century, a cancer grew in the very fabric of freedom. The idea that the role of government is to provide for its citizens is a return to the dark ages when the prevailing thought was that without the protection of a benevolent government (king), man’s life was, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The people who share Hobbes’ philosophy have been called by many labels over the years, but they all fit rather nicely into the ideas expressed most eloquently in modern times by Karl Marx.
It matters not what labels are pinned on the people who want to put government in charge of individual lives; what matters is that freedom cannot exist when it requires the permission of government. Read article.
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