Jeff Hedgpeth, NewsRealBlog.com

 

President Obama says, “Everybody can buy a truck.”

 

I’ll bet that’s news to millions of Americans who not only can’t afford a truck, they don’t even have a job to start saving for one. This is no isolated incident with Obama. We all remember his comments about “clinging to religion and guns” during the 2008 campaign. President Obama has shown a stunning detachment from the real needs and wants of average Americans. Unlike the way many Americans related to President Clinton, no one seems to believe Obama can “feel their pain.”

 

Enter Scott Brown – in a pickup truck. His now famous ads show him as a man of the people. How much of that is true is yet to be seen, but one thing is for sure. It plays a lot better with Americans who are suffering through a severe recession to be the guy driving the truck rather than the guy making fun of it.

 

Scott Brown’s stunning victory in the Massachusetts Senatorial special election should be a wakeup call to this President, and his friends in Congress who seem to think they know what’s best for everyone else, but are afraid to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi. It should also be a wakeup call to the far Left media, and their constant carping about Americans who have the audacity to object to the deficit spending, lack of transparency, and generally tone deaf nature of our representatives in Washington DC. Read article.

 

Thomas Sowell, FrontPageMag.com

 

Some people say that there is no real difference between Republicans and Democrats. Whether that is said because of being too lazy to examine the differences or because it makes some people feel exalted to say, in effect, “a plague on both your houses,” it is a dangerous self-indulgence.

 

When Republicans were in power, they acted too much like Democrats, with big spending and earmarks, lending weight to the notion that there is no real difference.

 

Too many Republicans don’t even know their own party’s history. One painful consequence is that too many Republicans act as if they have to apologize for their party’s civil rights record— which is in fact better than that of the Democrats.

 

A higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was Republicans whose “Philadelphia Plan” in the 1970s sought to break the construction unions’ racial barriers that kept blacks out of skilled trades.

Just as boxers have to do training in the gym and roadwork before they are ready for a boxing match, Republicans need to do a lot of homework before they are ready for their next match against the Democrats. Read article.

Ryan Mauro, PajamasMedia.com

 

For all their philosophical differences, Republican/Libertarian Congressman Ron Paul and President Obama have found an area of agreement: terrorism is a reaction to flawed American foreign policy. To them, it is a political reaction that then lends itself to extremism, rather than an ideology that makes followers view current events with as much perversion as they view everything else.

 

On December 28, during a debate on Larry King Live, Paul said that “they are terrorists because we are occupiers.” On January 5, President Obama said that Guantanamo Bay was “an explicit rationale for the formation of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” the affiliate responsible for the Christmas airliner plot. This actually isn’t accurate, but this statement still substantiates the arguments of terrorists that they are simply responding to the actions of the U.S. and the key to stopping them is to stop provoking their anger. The truth is that al-Qaeda was already in Yemen before the controversy over the prison even began, and the terrorist group was targeting us long before Guantanamo Bay was even cited as an example of injustice.

 

Americans, surrounded for the most part by debate based on rational-thinking philosophy, struggle to understand totalitarian ideologies like that of radical Islam. In America, people generally react with violence only under the most extreme stress and provocation, so there is an inclination to assume that we did something to spark this reaction. This leads to the mistaken but common belief that somehow anger at American policy naturally results in terrorism as an act of final resort to change it, but political opposition does not translate into supporting theocracy, the killing of civilians, and the other extremist tenets of radical Islam. Read article.

 

Heather MacDonald, City-Journal.org

 

Barack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots “change,” he said, he was a different kind of politician, one who could translate people’s hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit, presenting Obama’s organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office.

 

This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time.

 

Yet a critical blindness links Obama’s activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn’t the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today. Read article.

 

Jonathan Gurwitz, SanAntonioNews.com

 

Republicans haven't been disappointed by Barack Obama's first year in the Oval Office. They set appropriately low expectations for the former community organizer, state senator and partial-term U.S. senator. And with the notable exception of Afghanistan — which he eventually got right — President Obama has met those expectations.

 

For many Democrats and, especially, independents who voted for Obama, it's a different story. Obama courted them with inspiring promises to transform Washington with “change we can believe in” and the self-affirming pledge, “Yes we can.” But the Obama administration's first 12 months have often been characterized by a desultory business as usual and the depressing tendency of the president to waffle whenever he can.

 

That politicians occasionally fail to fulfill campaign promises is not exactly a revelation. In this sense, Obama is far from being unique. What is unique is the contemptuous way President Obama has broken not one, not a few, but a series of explicit pledges that were central to his victory in 2008.

 

The most embarrassing example at the moment was his unceasing commitment to open the negotiations for health care reform to C-SPAN's cameras and public scrutiny. This was the rhetorical bludgeon he used to attack the Clintons and the secretive, backroom deals that candidate Obama said were responsible for the failure to pass health care reform in 1993.

 

Republicans see the Internet mashups of Obama's C-SPAN declarations and laugh. Democrats who wonder what happened to the public option and independents who want to know how pharmaceutical companies were able to cut a deal see them and cry. Read article.

 

MK Danon gives Obama failing grade for mideast policy

Rebecca Ann Stoil, JPost.com

 

On the eve of a four-day visit to the United States, hawkish Likud MK Danny Danon on Monday launched a blistering assault on President Barack Obama's Middle East policies, declaring that he would give Obama "a failing grade" for his first year in office.

 

"I would give Obama an 'F' for serious lack of knowledge or understanding on topics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," said Danon, speaking to The Jerusalem Post ahead of his US trip.

 

A longtime fierce critic of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's more conciliatory policies toward the Palestinian Authority, the Likud freshman turned his rhetoric on Obama, and promised to use his US visit to urge Obama to ease the pressure on Israel.

 

"His serious error during his Fox News interview in China, in which he called to freeze construction in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, unified the Israeli public around Netanyahu's leadership while weakening Obama's position in Israeli public opinion," Danon asserted. "Even [Kadima opposition Leader] Tzipi Livni was forced to defend our rights to Gilo."

 

 Israeli public opinion, said Danon, should matter to Obama. Read article.

 

 

Print This E-mail This

Share It: