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December 21, 2009
Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Monday, December 21
ROVE: The President Is No B+ GO HERE.
Less health care for more money: What's the catch? SEE HERE.
Unchurched, Unmarried, Poor, Inexperienced and Pro-Obama - HERE.
If B's Were F's, Obama Still Wouldn't Deserve a B-Plus
David Limbaugh.com
It's bad enough for America that President Barack Obama is a committed far-left ideologue, but when you couple that with his narcissism, you've got a recipe for a major disaster.
He told Oprah Winfrey he deserves "a good solid B-plus" for his first year in office. The only things standing in his way for that coveted A are -- for the most part -- other people, such as evil Republicans who oppose socialized medicine.
It's obvious that Obama is as self-absorbed as he is delusional. While most Americans are worried about the financial destruction of our country and our resulting inability to bequeath our heirs a land of liberty, Obama is fretting over the stresses the job is placing on him.
"The biggest burden on me right now is that economic growth has happened, but job growth has not happened." Note the "burden on me." Similarly, he said his painfully belabored decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan hit him "in the gut."
Obama insists economic growth has returned and job recovery is just a matter of time, but many are not so sure of either. But all are sure that his unwavering debt path is unsustainable and suicidal. Read article.
You Say You Want a Revolution
Robert R. Owens, Ph.D., NMJ.us
Our revolution changed the world. Our Declaration of Independence proclaims self-evident truths: that all men are created equal; that they’re endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, among these are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words shook a world held in the vise-grip of hereditary privilege, inspiring people around the globe. Our Constitution established a Representative Republic with a limited government of the people, by the people and for the people.
We’ve watched as our constitutionally limited government grew until today its leviathan runs amok like Godzilla in Tokyo smashing things and scaring boy scouts. Today the federal government is the largest employer in America. States are the largest employers in the states and counties are among the largest employers in the counties. Get the picture? Government’s on a rampage and unless Mothra is going to fly in to save the day we’ll have to deal with Frankenstein-on-the-Potomac ourselves.
Such brazen power plays, as the Executive Branch issuing the Legislature an ultimatum – “either pass Cap-N-Trade or we’ll impose it administratively through command-and-control,” make the dramatic changes in our political culture shockingly apparent. Read article.
Privileged Exemption
Arnold Ahlert, JWR.com
The contemptible mindset of intellectual elitists can be reduced to just two words: "privileged exemption."
Al Gore and his soulmates want to "save the planet" from global warming—which completely justifies their flying to conferences in private jets, riding around in gas-guzzling limos, and living in homes that use twenty times the energy of ordinary houses.
Congress can destroy the best health care system in the world—because they have their own Cadillac health care coverage, and will never have to endure whatever system they foist on us.
College professors can rail against the injustice of our democratic republic and our capitalist system—because they live in college-supplied housing, have job-for-life tenure, and adjuncts relieving them from much of the "burden" of teaching.
Politicians and celebrities are overwhelmingly in favor of "gun control"—because they have armed bodyguards and live in protected communities.
The same bunch wants "social justice," even if it bankrupts America in the process—because they've already amassed so much personal wealth (from the very same capitalist system they ostensibly abhor) that no amount of "income re-distribution" will alter their lifestyles one iota.
The miserable status quo of public education, due in large part to the intransigence of union contracts which nullify accountability, is acceptable—because the children of the elitists attend private schools, and because elite politicians need union contributions to get re-elected. Read article.
Banker Baiting 101 - Obama's latest populist turn won't help the recovery.
Review & Outlook, WSJ.com
The Obama Administration desperately wants a strong economic recovery, or so it says, but does it have any idea how to encourage one?
It says it wants job growth, but its policies keep raising the cost of creating new jobs. It says it wants small business to take risks, but it keeps reducing the rewards if those risks succeed. And it says it wants banks to lend more money, even as it keeps threatening to punish bankers if they make too many bad loans or make too much money.
The last contradiction is again on display as President Obama rolls out his latest populist blame-the-bankers campaign. This is becoming a White House financial staple. Recall how the President joined the Congressional posse amid this year's earlier AIG bonus uproar, until it threatened to run out of control. Later Mr. Obama targeted Chrysler's bond holders who weren't eager to accept the government's meager dictated terms. The bond holders rolled over, but everyone in financial markets got a message about what this Administration thinks about the sanctity of contracts.
Now, amid Democratic panic over 10% unemployment heading into an election year, the President is attempting a double populist play: Blame the bankers for causing the financial crisis and recession by lending too much, and blame them again for causing high joblessness now by lending too little.
"I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street," Mr. Obama said in an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes." Read article.
Obama and Human Rights: Wasted Opportunities and Diplomatic Incontinence
Michael Weiss, Pajamas Media.com
The president accepted his Nobel Peace Prize last week on the grounds that in some case it is necessary to go to war to preserve the peace, a nice act of philosophical jujitsu that, had it been tried by George W. Bush, would have met with charges of sinister doublespeak. But Barack Obama’s undeserved award, coming as it did when the country he leads is mired in two “hot” conflicts in the Middle East and a protracted “cold” one against the ideology of jihad, was only further scandalized by the fact that December 10 is Human Rights Day — the anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which has served for over half a century as modernity’s most comprehensive, most translated, and most ignored covenant on civilization. That this doctrine has been consistently flouted and scorned by world tyrannies is the fault of no one commander in chief, and yet, just a year into his term in office, Obama has already proved a busted flush on human rights from China to Sudan to Iran.
In October, the Dalai Lama — who ought to rightly be seen as a greater political dissident than “spiritual leader” — was given the first Lantos Human Rights Prize, named for the late Rep. Tom Lantos of California, who first invited the Dalai Lama to Congress in 1987. The expectation was that the most prominent voice for Tibetan independence would be granted an audience with the leader of the free world. Ah, but Obama’s trip to China was forthcoming and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had already sowed the Nixonian field by publicly declaring that Chinese human rights were secondary to global economic considerations. So lest Communist recrimination interfere with American realpolitik, His Holiness was asked to wait it out a spell until bilateral relations faded from the headlines.
The Dalai Lama said he took no offense at the snub, but his special envoy, Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari, noted disdainfully that the deferred meeting indicated a “new approach on Tibet by the U.S. administration.” This was like saying that Gerald Ford’s rescinding a White House invitation to Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1975 out of fear of offending Brezhnev indicated a new approach on anti-totalitarianism by the U.S. Read article.
Insanity, Defined
Howard Rich, Rasmussen Reports.com
One of the oldest clichés in the book defines insanity as doing the same thing “over and over again” and expecting a different result.
In that case, it’s a pity we can’t give our federal and state governments long-overdue lobotomies.
In spite of overwhelming evidence that the $787 billion bureaucratic bailout passed in February has failed to “stimulate” the economy, President Barack Obama is now proposing that Congress pass a “second stimulus.”
After months of record unemployment and signs pointing to an unprecedented holiday retail disaster, Obama still doesn’t get it.
America must “spend our way out of this recession,” Obama said in a recent speech to the Brookings Institution, reiterating his commitment to a failed interventionist approach that has consumed America policy-making for the last two years – and consumed American prosperity along with it. Read article.
Democrats want to do away with the Senate
Noemie Emery, Washington Examiner.com
In recent months, a narrative has emerged on the Left regarding the cause of the health care debacle: It's all the fault of the United States Senate, a perverse, bizarre and dysfunctional body, which ought to be phased out or killed.
To E.J. Dionne, it's an absurd institution, the "least democratic ... body" in any democracy, that has tied up the country in gut-grinding gridlock to the public's unending dismay. "Normal human beings ... real Americans -- cannot understand why, 10 months after Obama took office, Congress is still tied down in a procedural torture chamber trying to pass the health care bill Obama promised in his campaign."
Alec MacGillis called it "the chamber designed to thwart popular will," the saucer in which the coffee not only is cooled (in the words of George Washington) but often turns bitter and cold. Hendrik Hertzberg calls it the place where the hopes and dreams of "Obama mania" go to die at the hands of a small band of soreheads who have the power to stifle the will of the people. "If it weren't for the Senate," he says, more in sorrow, "you'd have a whole lot of accomplishments on the domestic front."
Exactly. It takes a perverse form of genius to talk about thwarting the will of the people when polls show most of the people prefer to have Congress do nothing, but they go on with great verve.
To John Heilemann in New York, "a tiny band of verbose old folks" stand in the way of 300 million, all of them thirsting for the kind of solutions polls show two-thirds of them seem to detest.
"What precisely is the point of the United States Senate?" he asks us, suggesting there is none. "The attempt to push [the bill] through has revealed something important. ... If a popular, shrewd president coupled with a Congress with a strong majority in both houses held by the president's party can't get its program passed no matter which party we're talking about, something is structurally wrong."
Actually, something is structurally wrong with the bill, which is a monstrosity that will increase costs while decreasing access and quality. The bill is so far to the Left, so expensive and so incoherent, it has justly unnerved a number of Democrats. Read article.
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