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December 19, 2009
Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Saturday, December 19
The Real Lessons of 1994: Voters punished Democrats for Hillarycare. They'll do the same for Obamacare. SEE HERE.
Now or Never for ObamaCare - HERE.
Be Very, Very Afraid of Obama's Latest Big Brother Plan
HyScience.com
Bradley Blakeman explains Obama's latest 'Big Brother' step in his and the Democrats in Congress' overall plan to control 'every aspect of our lives' (emphasis mine):
Why the White House and Democrats' plans to expand the Office of Personnel Management should scare all Americans.
The Obama administration seeks to empower a very powerful government agency you have probably never heard of with new and expanded powers that will have a direct consequence on every American if they are successful in their efforts to implement national health care reforms.
The Obama White House is also drunk with power and is seeking to expand the powers of government agencies to oversee and act out to affect Americans in ways that this country has never seen before.
What is the Office of Personnel and Management and why should you care? Read article.
Have Yourself a Very Jihad Christmas
Allen Hunt, Townhall.com
President Obama's speech in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize showed great growth in his development as a leader. He courageously set forth the principles of just war before those who had assembled to give him a peace prize. The president boldly acknowledged America's very real enemy, Al Qaeda, in a move rarely heard from him prior in public addresses. His remarks also rectified his failure to mention any leaders besides himself in his remarks for the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In doing so, President Obama exhibited humility and grace as he noted the achievements of leaders like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Pope John Paul II, and Lech Walesa in his Nobel address.
President Obama failed in just one key area in his otherwise impressive address. Once again, he proved himself ignorant of history and embarrassingly sycophantic when it comes to the history and nature of Islam.
President Obama loves to reference the Crusades as his one Christian parallel for the modern-day Islam of massive religiously inspired violence. He could not be more wrong. Were Obama to read distinguished Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley-Smith's The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, he would find an excellent account of what happens when Islam expands it reach and what is required to thwart it. Read article.
US health care still: Democrats' bogus arguments
Betsy McCaughey, NY Post.com
Some Congress members and even President Obama have been bamboozled into believing that health care is better in other developed countries than in America.
On Nov. 20, for example, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) pointed to a large blue chart showing the United States in last place in health performance. "All of these countries have much lower costs than we do," he said, "and they have higher-quality outcomes than ours."
Conrad was duped by a bag-of-tricks report from the Commonwealth Fund (Health Affairs, vol. 27, no. 1, 2008). This put America in 19th place due to our nation's large number of preventable deaths -- meaning deaths from diseases that are curable if treated soon enough.
Yet most of these deaths are caused by heart disease and circulatory diseases. The United States has a high incidence because for 50 years Americans were the heaviest smokers and now are among the most obese. Bad behavior, not bad medicine, is to blame. Our health-care system treats these diseases very effectively.
As the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded, "It seems inaccurate to attribute . . . high death rates from these causes to a poorly performing medical system."
Plus, while the Commonwealth researchers claimed to consider curable diseases of all sorts, they conspicuously omitted malignant prostate cancer -- where US care is stunningly successful. An American man diagnosed with it has a 99.3 percent chance of surviving it -- far higher than in any Western European country. It's not a death sentence here, but in Scotland only 71 percent survive, in Germany, only 85 percent. Read article.
Spending Folly
Vasko Kohlmayer, FrontPageMag.com
Just in the first two months of fiscal 2010 – which began in October – our federal government managed to incur a budget shortfall of $292 billion. Alarmingly, the gap for the first two months of this fiscal year was wider than it was during the same period of last year, which ended with with a record deficit of $1.42 trillion. If this present trend continues, the government’s shortfall by the end of this month will match Bush’s 2008 spending record of $455 billion.
Here is something to ponder: In barely three months of this fiscal year, Barack Obama will manage to equal the outlays of George W. Bush during the whole of the most financially profligate year of his presidency.
The left used to bemoan bitterly the financial overindulgence of the Bush administration. Justifiably so. It is just too bad that they do not apply the same standard to the current administration. With Obama in charge they see nothing wrong with mind-boggling financial excesses and waste. They, in fact, clamor for more. Not content with the $786 billion pork-ridden outrage which they speciously called “stimulus,” they now demand another rescue package.
Liberals across the ranks – from Paul Krugman through Nancy Pelosi to Howard Dean – are calling for more money to be pumped into the moribund economy. One should not be wholly surprised at this, as the big spenders have repeatedly shown themselves singularly adept at stirring taxpayer money to themselves and their friends. Last week it was revealed, for example, that two firms ran by Hillary Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn grabbed nearly $6 million from the stimulus allotment.
In his speech at the Brookings Institution, President Obama promised what amounts to a new round of massive spending. Read article.
Bashing The Banks
Investors.com
Finance: The White House thinks it can jawbone banks into lending to people they don't want to lend to. We've been down this road before, and it led all the way to the 2007 financial meltdown.
The president on Monday gave a tongue-lashing to the "fat-cat bankers on Wall Street," as he called them the day before. He wants them to make more loans to small businesses and consumers to give the economy a boost.
But should banks be lending just because a politician tells them to? We tried this before. Indeed, it's the very source of the financial and economic calamity of the past two years.
President Obama may think dressing down the top dogs at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and others is good politics. But it's demoralizing and will only lead to more bank write-offs, more bank failures and less lending. Read article.
The Drone Dilemma
Mark Hosenball, Newsweek.com
A clandestine CIA search-and-destroy program, which launches missile strikes from remotely piloted drone aircraft, has killed more than a dozen senior leaders of Al Qaeda during the last two years. Among the dead: Abu Khabab al-Masri, reputed to be Al Qaeda's top expert on weapons of mass destruction, and Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban and reputed mastermind of the murder of Benazir Bhutto.
U.S. government spokesmen won't even confirm the program's existence, but a U.S. national-security official—who, like others cited in this article, declined to be named talking about sensitive information—says the program has been so successful that some counterterrorism officials want to expand it. They say the drones have been effective not just in killing terrorists but also in keeping them on the run and disrupting their ability to plan new attacks. They have asked for authority to target terrorists in more densely populated areas of Pakistan.
One person standing in the way of expanded missile strikes: President Obama. Five administration officials tell NEWSWEEK that the president has sided with political and diplomatic advisers who argue that widening the scope of the drone attacks would be risky and unwise. Read article.
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