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December 23, 2009
Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Wednesday, December 23
Axelrod on Meet the Press: "Reform is Nirvana." - HERE.
The Reincarnation of ’60s Marxist Radicals - GO HERE.
A Political Earthquake
Rick Richman, Commentary Magazine.com
In today’s Rasmussen presidential poll, only 26 percent of the nation’s voters strongly approve of Barack Obama’s performance as president, while 43 percent strongly disapprove — giving him a Presidential Approval Index rating, a sum calculated by subtracting the number of strong disapprovals from the number of strong approvals, of negative 17. His overall disapproval rating is 53 percent (it has been 50 percent or more for over a month). But it is the extraordinarily high proportion of those who strongly disapprove that bears noting.
In January, George W. Bush left office with a “Strongly Disapprove” rating of … 43 percent. It took Bush eight years to achieve that level of strong disapproval, despite how the mainstream media pummeled him for years. Obama has reached that level in 11 months, despite a media that for months could not use his name in a sentence without also adding “Lincoln” and “FDR.”
To appreciate the magnitude of Obama’s ratings fall, consider that after his first full day in office, his presidential index was positive 30. Today’s index of negative 17 reflects a swing of 47 points in less than a year. Read article.
The Time Has Come
Mark Alexander, Patriot Post.us
"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth -- and listen to the song of that syren, till she transforms us into beasts. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not?" --Patrick Henry
The 2008 presidential election was much more than a referendum on the two candidates; it was a referendum on the ability of a majority of Americans voters to discern between one candidate who possessed the character and integrity of a statesman, and one who did not.
A year ago, a majority of our countrymen were hoodwinked into electing a charlatan with dubious credentials to the highest constitutional office in the land. Since then, millions of Americans who had become complacent about the Leftist threat to our liberty have begun to realize that our Constitution is now suffering an unprecedented assault.
There were those of us who realized in 2004 -- back when Teddy Kennedy and John Kerry let him take center stage at the Democrat National Convention -- that Barack Hussein Obama was a Marxist. Nonetheless, too many of our countrymen were lulled into believing that no leftist politico with such abhorrent extra-constitutional views on the role of government could rise to be president of the United States. Read article.
ObamaCare: Does It Cover ‘Stupidity’?
Larry Elder, JWR.com
Americans overwhelmingly like their health care and their health insurance. While Americans reject ObamaCare, the President and Congress insist on driving it through.
Most Americans, up to 85 percent, already have health insurance and are satisfied with it. Lacking health insurance is different from lacking health care — which, by law, emergency rooms must supply. Millions go without health insurance by choice and not due to lack of resources. Deduct from the number without insurance those who have access to it via entitlement programs, those temporarily without it while between jobs, those here illegally and those who could go on their parents' insurance plans by paying affordable amounts — and you're down to 10 million to 15 million people without health insurance for longer than a year. This represents 5 percent of Americans.
To address this, the President and the Democrats are this close to a complete government takeover of health care. And a takeover it is. Assuming some kind of plan reaches the President's desk, it will — at minimum — force all Americans to purchase health insurance or pay fines or worse. It will force nearly all employers to provide health insurance or pay fines. It will tell health insurers that they must accept applicants with pre-existing illnesses and restrict their ability to "discriminate" based on factors like sex and age.
Incredibly, the President and Congress tell us that our economic recovery hinges on "health care reform" and that they can achieve it — providing millions of people with health insurance estimated to cost a trillion dollars in the first decade — while simultaneously reducing the deficit. The plan anticipates cutting hundreds of billions from the popular Medicare programs, whose beneficiaries vote in numbers greater than any other age group. Doctors and hospitals already complain that Medicare reimbursements fall short of costs, let alone profits. Good luck with that. Read article.
Obama and the Religion of Popular Culture
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
It is a self-evident truth that religion may seem to be on the decline, but is always present within a society and a culture in one form or another. Secularization is not the decline of religion, but rather the decline of spiritual religion in favor of cultural religion that is simply background noise. Just as atheism, though it may lack a creator figure, forms of a belief system in a particular worldview and an accompanying set of values, so too religion is very much present in a secularized society. It is simply not religion as we understand it anymore, it is popular culture, and Obama is its key messianic figure.
With the decline of institutionalized religion, popular culture has taken its place as a bearer of human mythologies and values that explains the meaning of life and the nature of proper behavior to the masses. Most traditional forms of religion understand this and view themselves as openly or covertly at war for the hearts and minds of their followers with popular culture. A war they are often losing as the movie theater has become the new church and the television screen, the new at home altar. And with that in mind, it is important to examine just what the values and beliefs of popular culture are to better understand the rise of Obama.
Fame - The most fundamental spiritual value of the Religion of Popular Culture is fame. Fame serves as both the "reward" for leading a life in tune with the values of popular culture, and as the expression of its one and only real achievement. Behind all the narratives of popular culture, is the keystone narrative of fame in which a man or woman become famous, known and adored by millions, which in turn justifies their existence.
Without any true afterlife, the Religion of Popular Culture uses celebrity as eternity. The afterlife of popular culture is the fame of the present, reflected in a collective memory of idols such as Elvis or Marilyn Monroe that transcends death, maintaining an incorruptible perfection of image for as long as their fame lasts... to provide popular culture's facsimile of immortality. Read article.
When the Charm Rubs Off
George Will, Worth-Reading.Blogspot.com
Rushing to lock the nation into expensive health care and climate change commitments, Democrats are in an understandable frenzy because public enthusiasm for both crusades has been inversely proportional to the time the public has had to think about them. And the president pushing this agenda has, with his incontinent hunger for attention, seen his job approval vary inversely with his ubiquity. Consider his busy December -- so far.
His Dec. 1 Afghanistan speech to the nation was followed on Dec. 3 by his televised "jobs summit." His Dec. 8 televised economics speech at the Brookings Institution was followed on Dec. 10 by his televised Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, which was remarkable for 38 uses of the pronoun "I."
And for disavowing a competence no one suspected him of. ("I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war." Note the superfluous adjective.) And for an unnecessary notification. ("Evil does exist in the world.") And for delayed utopianism. ("We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes." But in someone's.) And for solemnly announcing something undisputed. (There can be a just war.) And for intellectual applesauce that should get speechwriters fired and editors hired. ("We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected." If the human "condition" can attain perfection anyway, human nature cannot be significantly imperfect.)
Then on Dec. 13, he was on "60 Minutes" praising himself with another denigration of his predecessor, aka "the last eight years." (Blighted by "a triumphant sense about war.") Read article.
Public option protrusions: Ongoing push to get camel's nose into the tent.
Donald Lambro, WashingtonTimes.com
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reached out to the mother of all government-run options in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save President Obama's health care bill, no matter what the cost.
But Mr. Reid's Medicare expansion proposal was doomed from the start, a victim of his party's division over a public option and fear of bankrupting one of the most politically sacrosanct and financially threatened programs in the government.
The idea of enlarging Medicare by opening it up to "buy-ins" among Americans 55 or older, and possibly younger than that, had been kicking around for months in House and Senate bill-drafting sessions, only to be discarded as a budget-buster that would drive an insolvent program ever more deeply into bankruptcy.
By any comparison, America's private medical care system is a whole lot healthier than Medicare will be. The idea of adding Mr. Obama's $2.5 trillion health care plan on top of a mountain of unfunded Medicare liabilities, the very program from which Democrats want to rob $400 billion to bankroll their health care scheme, makes no sense at all.
But liberal lawmakers, gleeful at the prospect of a historic expansion of the government's biggest health care program, were ecstatic at the idea, although some no doubt didn't think Mr. Reid went far enough. Why not put the entire country under it? But, of course, that's the ultimate goal. Read article.
The Man Who Wrote the Blueprint for Obamacare from His Prison Cell
NewsRealBlog.com
Robert Creamer is the husband of Democrat Rep. Jan Schakowsky. He formerly served as … a lobbyist for George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Today Creamer heads the Strategic Consulting Group, a political consultancy whose list of clients includes ACORN and the Service Employees International Union….
Pursuant to an FBI investigation, Creamer in 2006 was indicted for bank fraud and tax evasion…. He ultimately was sentenced to five months in federal prison plus eleven months of house arrest….
While incarcerated, Creamer wrote a 628-page political manual titled Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win (published in 2007). In the Acknowledgements section of the book, Creamer stated that his political views had been deeply influenced by “the legendary community organizer” Saul Alinsky.
Stand Up Straight advanced the notion that the Democratic Party could win a permanent majority in Congress by doing the following: Read article.
That Health-Care Tax Pledge
Review & Outlook, WSJ.com
The health-care bills are loaded with taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year.
'If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime." So spoke Barack Obama at his first address to Congress in February. We're about to find out if the President cares about that promise as much he does passing a health-care bill.
Congressional Democrats have loaded up their health bills with provisions raising taxes on the middle-class by stacks and stacks of dimes. And Senate Democrats on Tuesday made clear they won't be bound by the President's vow; 54 voted to kill Idaho Republican Mike Crapo's amendment to strip the bill of taxes on families earning less than $250,000 and individuals earning less than $200,000.
Those tax hits include a mandate of up to $750 a year for Americans who fail to purchase health insurance; new levies on small businesses (many of which file individual tax returns) that don't offer health care to employees; new tax penalties on health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts; and higher taxes on medical spending, including restrictions on medical itemized deductions, as well as taxes on cosmetic surgery. A Senate Finance Committee minority staff report finds that by 2019 more than 42 million individuals and families—or 25% of all tax returns under $200,000—will on average see their taxes go up because of the Senate bill. And that's after government subsidies. This profusion of tax hikes is central to the Democratic fiction that the Senate bill is budget neutral.
This profusion of tax hikes is central to the Democratic fiction that the Senate bill is budget neutral. Read article.
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