Victor Davis Hanson, NRO.com

 

There is little need any more to offer consistent opposition to Barack Obama, since he himself is already running hard against the many previous incarnations of Barack Obama.

 

The first one we met was Barack the radical progressive, in his primary campaign against Hillary. Then in the general election we were introduced to the centrist Obama, who promised to invade Pakistan if need be, called for an end to partisanship, and lectured about fiscal sobriety.

 

Then with congressional majorities, soaring public support, and obsequious media attention came the leftist ideologue President Obama, who tried to ram through a statist health-care regime, gobbled up private enterprises, and gave us Anita Dunn and Van Jones.

 

Now we are back to sorta centrist Obama, who is going to fight terror, not apologize any more to the Muslim world, and freeze spending rather than give us another $2 trillion in debt. 

 

These serial reset Obamas are quite astonishing even for a politician. Read article.

 

Michelle Rulle, NewsRealBlog.com

 

Even Obama, Biden and Pelosi seemed bored during the State of the Union Address. Obama couldn’t even gin up enough energy to discuss “Gitmo.” But it does not matter what he said. It’s all over for his presidency.

 

The Democrat Party now understands just how bad they blew it in 2009. This is good for the country, although bad for their party. They were the proverbial “dog with a bone” peering at its reflection in the water. The Party saw an illusion of maximum gain and went for the second bone—-and now all is gone. They sought maximum change in health care, maximum change in energy policy, maximum Miranda rights for terrorists, and maximum deficit spending. But the American public does not want any of it. Consequently, Obama may have set the land speed record to “lame duckness” by any president in history.

 

The Scott Brown election was a remarkable event. On a day when Timothy Geithner was being grilled by the “shocked, shocked” Congress on AIG’s “secret” role, bankrolled by the taxpayers, in overpaying for bonds to prop up Goldman Sachs, etc., the president had his own “mark-to-market” problems. Brown was not just the 41st Republican Senator. If he were, there is plenty of money to bribe someone to pass desired legislation. But his election could have occurred anywhere in this country. The Brown election wasn’t a “message”, it was a “mark-to-market” of the president’s agenda. There are no longer enough Democratic Senators and/or Representatives willing to support proposed Obama, Reid, and Pelosi legislation.

 

Now what? Read article.

Roger Kimball, Pajamas Media.com

 

Just how stupid do Obama and his top advisors think we are? By “we” I mean not only the American people at large but also Obama’s colleagues in the House and Senate, the folks who at the end of the day will determine exactly how much of the administration’s campaign of “shock-and-awe statism” will pass into law.

 

How breathtaking it seemed! The paint was hardly dry on the Obama romper room at the White House when the president unveiled his nearly $800 billion non-stimulating “stimulus bill” that assured the United States would be entering the Guinness Book of World Records as the most profligate nation in history. Then there was the “cash for dunderheads” program that was such a gift to foreign carmakers and such a boondoggle for American ones. What about the cap-’n-tax fantasy that would finally have driven the nail in the coffin of American industry if only the business community had shared the administration’s taste for economic suicide?

 

Or just last month the fiasco of Copenhagen and the bitter chilliness that is “global warming”? And of course “health care reform”: always and everywhere health care “reform” — a stupefyingly expensive mechanism for assuring that the federal government would expropriate a sixth of the U.S. economy while eviscerating the medical profession and sharply degrading the quality and timeliness of health care in this country. What bliss it was to be alive, and to be Left was very heaven!

 

When did it all start going south? Read article.

 

James Lewis, American Thinker.com

 

You don't pick brain surgeons by the color of their skin. You pick them by competence only. Same thing with airplane pilots. But we have allowed the profoundly irrational liberal media to persuade the American public that we are supposed to pick a U.S. president by affirmative action. Obama was elected to universal Hosannas because he is black. It wasn't a secret. That's why the Left around the world went into ecstasies when Obama ran and got elected.

 

We've been using affirmative action to hire and promote teachers and cops and to popularize movie stars and media heroes. We've had a generation of affirmative action agitprop, 24/7/365. Hillary Clinton was going to dictate racial and gender preferences for medical school admissions under HillaryCare. You can bet that reverse-racism is all over the 2,200 pages of ObamaCare. It's reverse-racism forever! 

 

In America today, competence is suspect, and incompetence gets all the attention. Yet competence is what keeps us alive.

 

Affirmative action was allowed by the Supreme Court as a temporary exception to the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution until blacks had the same opportunities others did. It has now been about forty years, and the goal posts have just moved farther and farther Left. Today it's not just blacks -- it's women, homosexuals, and illegal aliens. And it's no longer equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome, which was the goal of Communism for seventy years in the Soviet Union, until the whole Soviet Empire crumbled as a result.

 

In the Soviet Union, everything was politicized. Incompetent people ran agriculture along Stalinist lines. Everything turned into a lie, and lies accelerated as they propagated through the system, in exactly the way the Climategate lies get worse and worse as they get passed along by politically correct bureaucrats and scientists. When political loyalty controls the outcomes, honesty and competence are driven out at every level of society. Nobody can point to Obama's anti-terrorist policies and say that's wildly incompetent -- without fearing they will be accused of racism. Read article.

 

Byron York, JWR.com

 

It seems like a simple question. Who made the decision to charge Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the accused terrorist arrested for trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet on Christmas Day, as an everyday criminal, as opposed to an enemy combatant?

 

After all, Abdulmutallab was trained by al-Qaida, equipped with an al-Qaida-made bomb, and dispatched by al-Qaida to bring down the airliner and its 278 passengers. Even though the Obama administration has mostly abandoned the term "war on terror," the president himself has said clearly that the United States is at war with al-Qaida. So who decided to treat Abdulmutallab as a civilian, read him the Miranda warning, and provide him with a government-paid lawyer — giving him the right to remain silent and denying the United States potentially valuable intelligence that might have been gained by a military-style interrogation?

 

Recently that simple question — who? — became more complicated after several of the administration's top anti-terrorism officials testified on Capitol Hill. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, said he wasn't consulted before the decision was made. The Director of National Intelligence Director, Dennis Blair, said he wasn't consulted, either. The Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, said she wasn't consulted. And the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, said he wasn't consulted.

 

So how did it happen? We know from a new Associated Press report that after Abdulmutallab was taken into custody, he was questioned for all of 50 minutes — yes, less than one hour — before going into surgery for treatment of the burns he suffered trying to blow up the plane. While Abdulmutallab was in surgery, the Justice Department in Washington made the decision to read Abdulmutallab the Miranda warning and provide him with a court-appointed lawyer.

 

And that was that. "Isn't it a fact, that after Miranda was given … the individual stopped talking?" Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions asked Mueller. "He did," Mueller answered. But Mueller declined to say who made the decision to grant Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent.

 

The issue is enormously important. Read article.

 

In Search of Self-Governance

Rasmussen Reports.com

 

“Pollster Scott Rasmussen has his finger on the pulse of America, conducting hundreds of spot-on surveys every year,” says Dr. Larry J. Sabato Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “Now he takes what he has learned about us one step further, with thought-provoking advocacy about the way we the people should govern ourselves.”

 

Years of public opinion polls have shown a growing disconnect between the American people and the nation’s political leaders. Rasmussen’s conclusion: Americans don’t want to be governed from the left, the right or the center. They want to govern themselves. The American desire for – and attachment to – self-governance runs deep. It is one of our nation’s cherished core values and an important part of our cultural DNA. And right now, it needs to be saved.

 

“Self-governance is about far more than politics and government,” says Rasmussen. “It requires a lot of the American people, and it has nothing to do with the petty partisan games played by Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, even after more than 200 years of success, there is an urgent need to defend this most basic of American values.” Read article.

 

Austin Hill, Townhall.com

 

Breaking news: Barack Obama is human.

 

He is not a “messiah,” he is not omniscient, and he is not capable, all on his own, of “fixing everything” that is wrong with America.

 

Here’s another bit of “news” that is beginning to “break:” The President’s repeated attempts to fix everything can actually make matters worse instead of better. And given the results of a poll released last week by Bloomberg news service – according to them 77% of American investors view the President as “anti-business”- it seems that this painful reality of “presidential fixes” is hitting-home.

 

For those who are surprised by Obama’s heavy-handed, big-government, “anti-business” policy proposals, I respectfully ask “why?” Were you watching and listening carefully during the last presidential election cycle? Or were you, perhaps, just caught-up in the “style” of the Obama experience, and ignoring the “substance” of his rhetoric? Read article.

 

 

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