Truth

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Arizona

Arizona

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Human Rights Wronged

United Nations: The U.S. State Department is holding up Arizona as America's human rights problem, fishing for applause from the likes of Cuba and Libya. But Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer isn't taking it lying down.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to go lower than even Andrew Young in his Carter-era heyday by holding up Arizona as a human rights violator in its groveling "Universal Periodic Review" for the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission.
The 29-page mea culpa of America's wrongs is nothing but a political advertisement for recent executive acts from the Obama administration, repackaged as human rights improvements.
Apologizing for legitimate domestic political differences is pernicious, given that hellish non-democratic nations like Cuba and Libya sit on the U.N. Human Rights Commission and no doubt are applauding. On human rights, the report managed to equate Arizona to Burma's tin-pot rule, Saudi Arabia's Shariah-law maimings, Iran's electoral fraud, and Cuba's "preventive" jailings of the innocent, obscenely blurring the lines between real human rights violations and mere policy differences.
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, to her credit, wrote a letter expressing "concern and indignation" to Clinton on Aug. 27, demanding that the reference to Arizona be removed.
She's right. The report's reference is a distortion of SB 1070, the state law Arizona passed to discourage illegal immigration and undercut the deadly Mexican cartels behind it. Brewer noted the cartels have left 170 dead bodies in Arizona's desert so far this year and pose a mortal danger to Arizona's citizens.
Moreover, Brewer points out that the Arizona law mirrors federal law, raising questions about why the law is considered a human rights violation if federal agents, but not state lawmen, can ask for ID from people who've already been arrested.
More to the point, Brewer underscored the hypocrisy of the federal stance, which hasn't managed to find any human rights grounds for challenging the law in court.
"In fact, the Department of Justice has correctly not included these so-called 'human rights' issues in the current litigation against the State of Arizona," Brewer wrote.
What it adds up to is an Obama administration that seeks to take its political battles to questionable forums like the U.N., using dissident states as its villains. It's a nasty abrogation of the U.S. duty to speak out on real human rights and, in the end, will only give comfort to tyrants and criminals.(IBD)

Monday, August 30, 2010

I’m Sorry We’re Evil!

Move over Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria. The State Department has made it official: The United States violates human rights. In an unprecedented move, the Obama administration submitted a report to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights detailing the progress and problems in dealing with human rights issues in this country. The document is a strange combination of left-wing history and White House talking points.
It describes how the United States discriminates against the disabled, homosexuals, women, Native Americans, blacks, Hispanics and those who don’t speak English. There is the expected pandering to Muslims, noting that the government is committed to “challenge misperceptions and discriminatory stereotypes, to prevent acts of vandalism and to combat hate crimes,” offenses that the American people evidently keep committing. And the current economic woes are blamed on the housing crisis, which itself was the result of “discriminatory lending practices.” The implication is that if Americans had only been less racist, they would be enjoying prosperity today.
The report notes that until recently, the U.S. engaged in torture, unlawfully detained terrorist suspects and illegally spied on Americans communicating with terrorists – but the report assures readers that Mr. Obama has been putting a stop to all that.
The main impact of the document will be to confirm critiques of the United States as a haven for hatred and rights abuses. It turns the Obama administration’s domestic political agenda into an international scorecard by which other countries can judge American “progress.” And it makes it that much more difficult for those abroad who have held up the United States as a model for the kind of liberal, capitalistic democracy they would like to see in their own countries.
“Progress is our goal,” the report proclaims, “and our expectation thereof is justified by the proven ability of our system of government to deliver the progress our people demand and deserve.” This reflects the general tone of a report that sees the state, not the people, as the source of American progress. All the problems discussed have a corresponding federal solution, whether health care, nutrition, housing or any other issue. To read the report, one could conclude that, to the Obama administration, big government is not just everything – it is the only thing.
The authors claim that the United States does not, by filing the report, “acknowledge commonality with states that systematically abuse human rights,” but of course it does. Dictatorships, authoritarian regimes and theocracies competing for legitimacy on the world stage have been handed a potent new weapon, the kind of assessment they would never offer about their own governments. The report also cautions that it should not be read to reflect “doubt in the ability of the American political system to deliver progress for its citizens.” The authors of the report should understand that the doubts in the Obama administration to deliver progress are already well-established. And they come from the American people, who don’t need the United Nations telling them to shape up. (Washington Post)


The First chair of the Commission in 2006 was Mexico. MEXICO!? :(
Gee, I guess that’s the kettle deciding the pot is black and then you’re not suppose to notice that the kettle is even black.
Because in an international social justice world where everyone is equally evil the good guys are bad guys and the bad guys just need more understanding! :(
Take Radical Islam for instance, or Iran or North Korea…
.
“The idea of our own American government submitting the duly enacted laws of a state of the United States to ‘review’ by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional,” AZ Governor Brewer wrote.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer demanded Friday that a reference to the state’s controversial immigration law be removed from a State Department report to the United Nations’ human rights commissioner.
The U.S. included its legal challenge to the law on a list of ways the federal government is protecting human rights.

Imagine that, wanting to secure our border and deal with people coming here illegally is a Human Rights Abuse!
Can’t imagine what this commission thinks of it’s former Chair-County Mexico and their immigration laws… :)

In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Brewer says it is “downright offensive” that a state law would be included in the report, which was drafted as part of a UN review of human rights in all member nations every four years.
According to the ACLU, the U.S. report correctly acknowledges the need for improvement in several key areas, including racial justice, women’s rights, LGBT rights and discrimination against Muslims and Americans of South Asian and Arab descent. However, the report neglects to address other key areas where the U.S. has failed to meet its human rights obligations, including felon disfranchisement, inhumane prison conditions, racial disparities in the death penalty system and deaths and abuse in immigration detention. The report also defends the use of military commissions to try terrorism suspects, despite the fact that military commissions pose significant human and civil rights violations.

Oh, goody, The American Communist Liberals Union approves. Well, that settles it. We’re evil incarnate.
We are all equally evil.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4322918/controversy-as-us-admits-human-rights-shortcomings

While it’s not on the UN report, this ditty from Rachael “Mad Cow” Maddow on the “end” of combat in Iraq is telling:
“The history of Iraq for the last generation is, Saddam taking power, a decade of the war with Iran, where we took Iraq’s side, then the first American war, then a decade of sanctions, then the second American war, toppling Saddam, presiding over a civil war, and now there’s us leaving. After all that, good luck! Hope it all works out for you guys!”
But don’t worry, they are the Insufferably Superior Moral Left!
They are better than you.
So you should just bow down to their greatness and not question their infinitely superior wisdom. :)

Sunday, August 29, 2010

You May Not Have a Dream…

While Fox News host Glenn Beck spoke to the droves of people that flooded the Lincoln Memorial to attend his “Restoring Honor” rally Saturday,Jaime Contreras, president of Service Employee International Union (SEIU) local 32BJ, said Beck’s rally didn’t “represent the dream.”
“It’s a shame what’s happening at the Lincoln Memorial. Shame on them! We are here to let those folks on the Mall know they don’t represent the dream!” Contreras said, cheered on by purple-shirted SEIU members in the audience. “They sure as hell don’t represent me! They represent hate mongering and angry white people!”
Just a teeny-weeny bit race obsessed and bigoted are we?
Sen. Harry Reid: “encouragement of Obama was unequivocal. He was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he said privately. Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.
Reid Again, this summer: “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.”
MSNBC’s Christ Mattthews at the Inaugural: I was trying to think about who he was tonight. And, it’s interesting he is post-racial, by all appearances. You know I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country, and passed so much history in just a year a year or two. It’s something we don’t even think about. I was watching, I say, wait a minute, he’s an African-American guy in front of a bunch of other white people. And here he is President of the United States, and we’ve completely forgotten that tonight.”
The Rev. W. Franklin Richardson, senior pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, N.Y., told the audience that he wasn’t threatened by Beck’s rally. “It’s alright with me that they’re at the Mall today, because we’re at the White House,” he said.
Gee, no partisan politics here. :)
JANEANE GAROFALO: She dated him, so either she suffers from Stockholm Syndrome – a lot like Michael Steele, who’s the black guy in the Republican party who suffers from Stockholm Syndrome, which means you try and curry favor with the oppressor.
KEITH OLBERMANN: Yes, you talk about self-loathing.
GAROFALO: Yeah, and there’s, any female or person of color in the Republican party is struggling with Stockholm Syndrome.
An Omaha man was arrested Saturday on suspicion of spraying tear gas into a crowd of mourners and protesters outside a funeral for a Marine killed in Afghanistan.
The protesters were from the Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church, run by Fred Phelps. Members of the church believe the deaths of U.S. troops are God’s punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.(AP)
Remember kids, the Left is vastly superior to you. They are more tolerance, more compassionate and more sensitive than you could possibly ever be! :)
For those outside the beltway, there was likely little attention paid to the “firestorm” around President Obama’s Co-Chairman of his Bipartisan Debt Commission, former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY). Simpson, in a letter responding to a disgruntled citizen, allegedly offended both women and Social Security recipients by concluding his response with some salty language (who described Social Security as a “milk cow with 310 million tits!” in an email. Simpson later issued an apology letter to the complainant.
The Left is all a tizzy about this. But when the Imam that’s going to be running the Mosque less than 1000ft from Ground Zero says:
“We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non Muslims,”Feisal Abdul Rauf said at a 2005 lecture sponsored by the University of South Australia. After discussing the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Rauf went on to argue that America is to blame for its testy relationship with Islamic countries. “What complicates the discussion, intra-Islamically, is the fact that the West has not been cognizant and has not addressed the issues of its own contribution to much injustice in the Arab and Muslim world.”
“We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non Muslims. You may remember that the US-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations. And when Madeleine Albright, who has become a friend of mine over the last couple of years, when she was Secretary of State and was asked whether this was worth it, said it was worth it.”
The man who wants to “built bridges” and create “understanding” folks!  :)
And according to The Left and the Media, he’s a centrist, moderate!
Must be similar to the Left’s annoyance with Obama being to “centrist” because he hasn’t been radically far left enough!
But remember, they are superior in every way to you. Just ask them.
“Welcome to Restoring Honor. You are standing on the banks of greatness, the banks of American dreams,” said Beck, during his initial remarks. “America is a land of opportunity.”
You evil angry white cracker you! :)
“For too long, this country has wandered in darkness and we have wandered in darkness in periods from the beginning. We have had moments of brilliance, and moments of darkness, but this country has spend far too long worrying about scars…today we are going to focus on good things in America.”
But victimization is the only thing the Left has, whatever would they do with themselves if everyone wasn’t a victim, even them?
Bill O’reilly:  With polls showing that about 70 percent of Americans believe building an Islamic cultural center containing a mosque just two blocks away from Ground Zero is inappropriate, the far left is once again on the run. Failing with the bogus “freedom of religion” argument, the crew that is offended by the manger scene at Christmas is now saying the mosque controversy is another attempt to “scare white people.” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson has put forth that loopy argument from his second home: MSNBC.
You may remember that the radical left designated the Shirley Sherrod story, the ACORN scandal, the New Black Panther Party-voting booth-Justice Department situation and the resignation of White House “green jobs” czar Van Jones as attempts to scare white Americans. I don’t know about you, but I’m white and those stories did not frighten me. I hope I’m not out of the white loop.
It is because of situations like the Ground Zero mosque that the far left has lost credibility, as well as viability. Americans are not stupid. They understand that New York City has more than 100 mosques. One more located near the site where fanatical Muslims murdered thousands of innocent people is certainly not necessary — especially considering the building would offend thousands of people who lost loved ones on 9/11. Why would anyone want to offend them?
After all, they are more tolerant, intelligent, compassionate, and sensitive than you, after all. :)
It would be nothing if not hypocritical to argue that Imam Rauf should be able to exercise his First Amendment rights without regard to Americans’ sensibilities while condemning Beck’s supposed “insensitivity” in exercising his.
And his freedom of religion must at least be equal to Beck’s. Right? :)
America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure. On the anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington he will stand in the shadows of giants — Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you think is more representative of this nation?
Beck is a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox of racial and ethnic confrontation.
And there is no road too low for him to slither upon. The Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that in a twist on the civil rights movement, Beck said on the air that he “wouldn’t be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us go to jail — just like Martin Luther King did — on trumped-up charges. Tough times are coming.”
But I worry about the potential for violence that grows out of unrestrained, hostile bombast. We’ve seen it so often. (NY Times editorial)
Pelosi: “They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare.”
Political Cartoons by Chip Bok
After all, who do they call “racists” “stupid” “ignorant” “violent” “domestic Terrorists”?
Other House Democratic leaders took a different tack: One senior aide has been circulating a document to the media that debunks the effort as one driven by corporate lobbyists and attended by neo-Nazis…
In addition, the tea parties are “not really all about average citizens,” the document continues, saying neo-Nazis, militias, secessionists and racists are attending them. The tea parties are also not peaceful, since reporters in Cincinnati had to seek “police protection” during one of the events, it states.
The guy beaten up at a Tea party Rally by a Union thug notwithstanding!
On MSNBC’s Aug. 25 “The Ed Show,” a seemingly angry host Ed Schultz said he was “fired up” about the Aug. 28 Glenn Beck event at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
“This is the story that has me fired up tonight – Glenn Beck is distorting Martin Luther King’s dream and his Tea Party followers are on edge,” Schultz sais. “You know, I just sense that we are going down a very dangerous road right now when a political organization like the Tea Party has members trying to intimidate elected public officials.”
…the entire Tea Party movement was the modern equivalent of the Brown Shirts, an organization that aided the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s.
Folks, this is what the Brown Shirts did in the 1930s in Germany,” Schultz said. “They used to target businesses, target people, target families, list names, attack their businesses. This isn’t about protesting. This sets the table for intimidation and harassment.”
But the Lefts attacks on big business to satisfy there class warfare imperative and their obsession with racial politics and their need to call everyone who disagrees with them a racist, to shut down all debate are just the angels of intellectual and moral superiority.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
If your conscience doesn’t match their stereotype of how a person of your group identity should vote, it’s obviously time for you to seek help for a psychological affliction.(red state.com)

If I were part of the liberal elite, I wouldn’t be as worried by the historic/racial overtones of the rally.  I’d be worried about what it symbolizes: A growing understanding on the part of regular Americans that they should (and need) no longer heed the supposed “wisdom” and “moral authority” of a liberal elite that has nothing but contempt for them. (Carol Platt Liebau)
At least I hope so. I have a dream as well…. :)

Saturday, August 28, 2010

The Last Stand of Liberals- Bigotry

Michael Ramirez Cartoon
Charles Krauthammer: Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the 40-year liberal ascendancy that James Carville predicted into a full retreat.
Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”
That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.
Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.
Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.
Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?
Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, ObamaCare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a Ground Zero mosque.
What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that pre-empts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument.
The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.
Then came Arizona and SB 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.
As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays — particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the Ground Zero mosque. The intelligentsia are near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief.
Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.
It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms).
Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims — a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it, “just downright mean”?
The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.
AMEN!


And as for border security? Nothing to worry about there.
The body of an official investigating the massacre of 72 Central and South American migrants killed in a ranch in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas was found today dumped beside a nearby road alongside another unidentified victim, according to local media.
No big Deal. It’s racist to SECURE THE DAMN BORDER! :(

Friday, August 27, 2010

Recession 2 “Summer of Recovery” 0

Political Cartoons by Michael Ramirez
The government is about to confirm what many people have felt for some time: The economy barely has a pulse.
The Commerce Department on Friday will revise its estimate for economic growth in the April-to-June period and Wall Street economists forecast it will be cut almost in half, to a 1.4 percent annual rate from 2.4 percent.
That’s a sharp slowdown from the first quarter, when the economy grew at a 3.7 percent annual rate, and economists say it’s a taste of the weakness to come. The current quarter isn’t expected to be much better, with many economists forecasting growth of only 1.7 percent.
Such slow growth won’t feel much like an economic recovery and won’t lead to much hiring. The unemployment rate, now at 9.5 percent, could even rise by the end of the year.
“The economy is going to limp along for the next few months,” said Gus Faucher, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. There’s even a one in three chance it could slip back into recession, he said.
The report confirms the economy has lost significant momentum in recent months. Most analysts expect the nation’s GDP will continue to grow at a similarly weak pace in the current July-to-September quarter and for the rest of this year.
The economy has grown for four straight quarters, but that growth has averaged only 2.9 percent, a weak pace after such a steep recession. The economy needs to expand at about 3 percent just to keep the unemployment rate, currently 9.5 percent, from rising.
According to data released earlier this week, home prices fell as much as five percent across the country in the month of July, and existing home sales fell 27%.

The worst in 15 years.

But if you listen to the liberals and their pundits, it slow but it’s all good. You just to have more hope. Give it more time. Don’t be so impatient.
So what if GDP growth has gone for 5% in the last quarter of 2009 to 1.6% now it’s still improving! :)
And you wouldn’t to hand the keys back over to Bush now would you!
After all, Bush was Republican and all Republicans are Bush. (a gold star to anyone who can spot the logical fallacy in that statement :) ) But isn’t that what the Democrats ARE saying…
Cue Sisyphus! :)


Will the economy actually enter a double dip, with G.D.P. shrinking? Who cares? If unemployment rises for the rest of this year, which seems likely, it won’t matter whether the G.D.P. numbers are slightly positive or slightly negative.
All of this is obvious. Yet policy makers are in denial. Why are people who know better sugar-coating economic reality? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is that it’s all about evading responsibility.(Paul Krugman)

After all, it’s Bush’s Fault! and you wouldn’t want Republicans! they’ll just wreck the car again like they did before! :)
After all, Bush was Republican and all Republicans are Bush.
And as Mr Krugman also says, showing his liberal roots,”The administration has less freedom of action, since it can’t get legislation past the Republican blockade.”
The Democrats currently have an overwhelming majority in the House and 59/100 seats in the Senate and The Presidency.
Yet, it’s a “republican blockade”.

The problem is that the Democrats can’t get all the Democrats to vote for all of this crap so they have to blame the minority party for it!
It sure as hell can’t possibly be their fault! :)
So, if November happens as predicted and the Democrats are the minority, it will be the tyranny of the majority then right? :) They will be the victims yet again, as they are now in the majority. :)
Perpetual Victimization!

But the Democrats will focus again on the 1 tree in the forest that isn’t on fire and say that’s you’re hope and change, just be patient, socialism wasn’t built in a day! :)


On Thursday, Standard & Poor’s said action is needed soon if the U.S. is to keep the much-coveted AAA bond rating that lets the government borrow in global markets at the lowest rates possible.
S&P’s warning came just days after Morgan Stanley asserted that the U.S., along with a number of other developed nations, is likely to default on some debt. Such defaults are “inevitable,” it said, given the growing number of retirees in developed nations who will have to be taken care of by a shrinking pool of workers.
The sovereign debt crisis “is not over,” said the investment bank’s Arnaud Mares, and that includes in the U.S.
What worries Wall Street is a public debt-to-GDP ratio of around 53%. That’s high enough as it is, but it’s about to go a lot higher. By 2020, recent data suggest, the ratio will top 100% — a red line that virtually all economists agree is dangerous.
In raw numbers, we owed roughly $7.5 trillion at the start of this year. By 2020 that explodes to $23.5 trillion, according to an analysis of Congressional Budget Office data by economist Brian Riedl.
What do these numbers mean? To begin with, we spend $187 billion a year, or 1.3% of GDP, to pay our debts now. Just 10 years from now, that will surge to $1.1 trillion, or 4.8% of estimated GDP. Fiscally speaking, we’ll be gasping for air.
Debt can be a good thing, but in big doses it’s poison. If, as some fear, the U.S. should simply say it can’t pay its debts and default — or do a de facto default by printing money to retire our debt — the consequences would be dire.
No nation would want our bonds in their portfolios. To entice them to buy, we’d have to offer a much higher risk premium — that is, higher interest rates.
That means our debt service could go even higher, squeezing out even more of our economy’s spending.
The dollar would implode, and prices for foreign goods — which now make up 15% of our economy — would soar. Private investment would shrink and, along with it, private-sector GDP
Americans’ standard of living, once the envy of the world, would recede into the pack of mediocre, government-run nations.
It doesn’t have to be this way. All this is due to unrestrained spending. The federal government now spends about $29,000 per household. That will rise to $38,000 by 2020. If you think “the rich” will, or can, pay for it all, think again.
Unless we begin to control spending, we can kiss our American lifestyles goodbye. It’s that simple.
Sadly, the White House is unwilling to see reality. Which may explain why, as our debts mount to ruinous heights, Vice President Joe Biden — President Obama’s point man on the recovery — can burble, “This is a chance to do something big, man!”
Yeah, man, something big — like wreck a country.
Warnings about America’s impending financial car wreck are being sounded, loud and clear. The only question is whether those driving the car will slam on the brakes before it’s too late.(IBD)

Got the car out of the ditch and drove it straight off a cliff and into a bottomless pit!
Way to go Barack & Co!
Yours is the Superior Intellect! :)

Thursday, August 26, 2010

How To Stay Here Illegally 101

Big Sis, DHS Secretary and Pro-Illegal Janet Napalitano has figured out a new strategy for creating a de-facto amnesty.
If they aren’t “serious criminals” you let them walk. Period.
So all you have to do to be an illegal alien permanently in this country is not be a “serious”  criminal in this country.
More or less. More on that after a this…

The Department of Homeland Security is systematically reviewing thousands of pending immigration cases and moving to dismiss those filed against suspected illegal immigrants who have no serious criminal records, according to several sources familiar with the efforts.
Culling the immigration court system dockets of noncriminals started in earnest in Houston about a month ago and has stunned local immigration attorneys, who have reported coming to court anticipating clients’ deportations only to learn that the government was dismissing their cases.
Richard Rocha, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman, said Tuesday that the review is part of the agency’s broader, nationwide strategy to prioritize the deportations of illegal immigrants who pose a threat to national security and public safety. Rocha declined to provide further details.
Critics assailed the plan as another sign that the Obama administration is trying to create a kind of backdoor “amnesty” program.
Raed Gonzalez, an immigration attorney who was briefed on the effort by Homeland Security’s deputy chief counsel in Houston, said DHS confirmed that it’s reviewing cases nationwide, though not yet to the pace of the local office. He said the others are expected to follow suit soon.
Gonzalez, the liaison between the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which administers the immigration court system, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said DHS now has five attorneys assigned full time to reviewing all active cases in Houston’s immigration court.
Gonzalez said DHS attorneys are conducting the reviews on a case-by-case basis. However, he said they are following general guidelines that allow for the dismissal of cases for defendants who have been in the country for two or more years and have no felony convictions.
In some instances, defendants can have one misdemeanor conviction, but it cannot involve a DWI, family violence or sexual crime, Gonzalez said.

Massive backlog of cases

Opponents of illegal immigration were critical of the dismissals.
“They’ve made clear that they have no interest in enforcing immigration laws against people who are not convicted criminals,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for strict controls.
“This situation is just another side effect of President Obama’s failure to deliver on his campaign promise to make immigration reform a priority in his first year,” said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “Until he does, state and local authorities are left with no choice but to pick up the slack for prosecuting and detaining criminal aliens.”
Gonzalez called the dismissals a necessary step in unclogging a massive backlog in the immigration court system. In June, there were more than 248,000 cases pending in immigration courts across the country, including about 23,000 in Texas, according to data compiled by researchers at Syracuse University.

‘Absolutely fantastic’

Gonzalez said he went into immigration court downtown on Monday and was given a court date in October 2011 for one client. But, he said, the government’s attorney requested the dismissal of that case and those of two more of his clients, and the cases were dispatched by the judge.
The court “was terminating all of the cases that came up,” Gonzalez said. “It was absolutely fantastic.”
“We’re all calling each other saying, ‘Can you believe this?’ ” said John Nechman, another Houston immigration attorney, who had two cases dismissed.
Attorney Elizabeth Mendoza Macias, who has practiced in Houston for 17 years, said she had cases for several clients dismissed during the past month and eventually called DHS to find out what was going on. She said she was told by a DHS trial attorney that 2,500 cases were under review in Houston.
“I had five (dismissed) in one week, and two more that I just received,” Mendoza said. “And I am expecting many more, many more, in the next month.”
Her clients, all previously charged with being in the country illegally, included:
An El Salvadoran man married to a U.S. citizen who has two U.S.-born children. The client had a pending asylum case in the court system, but the case was not particularly strong. Now that his case is terminated, he will be eligible to obtain permanent residency through his wife, Mendoza said.
A woman from Cameroon, who was in removal proceedings after being caught by the U.S. Border Patrol, had her case terminated by the government. She meets the criteria of a trafficking victim, Mendoza said, and can now apply for a visa.

Memo outlines priorities

Immigrants who have had their cases terminated are frequently left in limbo, immigration attorneys said, and are not granted any form of legal status.
“It’s very, very key to understand that these aliens are not being granted anything in court. They are still here illegally. They don’t have work permits. They don’t have Social Security numbers,” Mendoza said. “ICE is just saying, ‘At this particular moment, we are not going to proceed with trying to remove you from the United States.’ ”
In a June 30 memo, ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton outlined the agency’s priorities, saying it had the capacity to remove about 400,000 illegal immigrants annually — about 4 percent of the estimated illegal immigrant population in the country. The memo outlines priorities for the detention and removal system, putting criminals and threats to national security at the top of the list.

Up to 17,000 cases

On Tuesday, ICE officials provided a copy of a new policy memo from Morton dated Aug. 20 that instructs government attorneys to review the court cases of people with pending applications to adjust status based on their relation to a U.S. citizen. Morton estimates in the memo that the effort could affect up to 17,000 cases.
Tre Rebsock, the ICE union representative in Houston, said even if the efforts involve only a fraction of the pending immigration cases, “that’s going to make our officers feel even more powerless to enforce the laws.” (Houston Chronicle)
Mind you bullets from the recent gun battles in Mexico have been flying across the border and hitting building, including the University of Tex El Paso, but don’t worry about that DHS has it all under control. :)


Now to that “less” I spoke of…
An illegal immigrant arrested five times for driving offenses, including a 2005 hit-and-run that ultimately left an elderly Dacula man dead, was voluntarily deported last October, the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s office said Monday. Whether he will be involuntarily deported following his latest charge remains uncertain.
“He either didn’t leave the country as agreed or he left and came back,” said sheriff’s spokeswoman Stacey Bourbonnais. Added Sheriff Butch Conway, “they put him on the honor system, more or less.”
Celso Campo-Duartes’ current whereabouts are no mystery. He’s been in Gwinnett’s custody since May 28, when he was charged with disorderly conduct and unlicensed driving.
In January 2008, the suspect entered a negotiated plea to a charge of failure to stop at or return to the scene of an accident in the death of Aubrey Sosebee, an 83-year-old World War II veteran who was run over by the plumber as he was retrieving his mail. Campo-Duartes was sentenced to two years in prison and three years of probation and was released for time served.
A little more than a year ago, he was arrested for driving without a license and released the same day on $760 bond. In October, he was arrested on the same charge. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

So is he “serious” enough” or are the drug runners, smugglers, and coyotes coming across the border with impunity “serious” enough for DHS??
Like I have said before, now we know why the judge put SB1070′s enforcement provision on hold because they would “overwhelm” the system. :(
The problem is so big they don’t, cant, and won’t deal with it. But they will lie about it and call anyone who disagrees with them a racist!

The Obama administration said it would focus its enforcement of illegal immigration laws by targeting workplace activities, but a recent report shows that while audits of employers are slightly up over the Bush administration, worker arrests are down drastically since the end of 2008.
Under Obama, employer audits are up 50 percent, fines have tripled to almost $3 million and the number of executives arrested is slightly up over the Bush administration.
But under President Obama, the numbers of arrests and deportations of illegals taken into custody at work sites plummeted by more than 80 percent from the last year of the Bush administration. In the current fiscal year 2010, which ends Sept. 30, ICE has arrested 900 workers.
That compares to immigration agents under Bush raiding hundreds of businesses from factory to farm — and arresting and deporting more than 6,000 illegal immigrants in raids in 2008 — more than 5,000 simply for being in the country illegally.
“No administration in the history of this nation removed more illegal immigrants from the country than we did last year and I expect the records to continue. We’re serious about enforcement. We’re going to go out and we’re just going to do it,” he said.
Can you guess if this was Obama, Napalitano or ICE? they’ve all said the same talking point.

But if they aren’t “serious” criminals they can now walk. And even if they are “serious” they can always self-deport so they can walk across the border again tomorrow. No problem.
So we raid your business, we fine you, you’re workers are taken by ICE. Then if they aren’t “serious” criminals they let them go so you can rehire them again or you can hire the group let go by another employer yesterday.
Let’s just swap workers and call that jobs “saved or created”. Yeah, that’s the ticket! :)
That is unless you’re a chronic drunk in Atlanta who kills people at their mailbox that is. :( Maybe…
So just like the Blank Panther case and others, the government has made the decision on what selective enforcement they wish to pursue. The law is mailable to their political whims of the moment.

“It is tough when you have law enforcement turning a blind eye to entire categories of aliens — and that is what is happening here — it is a de facto amnesty,” Julie Myers, an ICE director under Bush said.
“No one is talking about giving a free pass for fraud, or ID theft is to be taken lightly, but we know the vast majority of the workforce did not commit any crime,” Marshall Fitz, director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress (a liberal think tank) said.
After all, being her illegally is not a crime to Liberals. It is to Federal law, but not to Liberals. So it’s no big deal.
And you’re a racist if you disagree, just remember that. :)
The law is there to enforced when they feel like it and how they feel like it.

SAN DIEGO — The speedboat is about three miles offshore when a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent cuts the engine to drift on the current in quiet darkness, hoping for the telltale signs of immigrant smuggling — sulfur fumes or a motor’s whirr.
“It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and the haystack is the Pacific Ocean,” agent Tim Feige says minutes before sunrise marks the end to another uneventful shift.
This is a new frontier for illegal immigrants entering the United States — a roughly 400-square-mile ocean expanse that stretches from a bullring on the shores of Tijuana, Mexico, to suburban Los Angeles. In growing numbers, migrants are gambling their lives at sea as land crossings become even more arduous and likely to end in arrest.
Sea interdictions and arrests have spiked year-over-year for three years, as enforcement efforts ramp up to meet the challenge.
And that doesn’t even count the sea piracy on the lake in Zapata in Texas.

1 if by land 2 if by Sea. The Illegals are Coming! The Illegals are coming! :)
But don’t worry, if you’re not a “serious” criminal Big Sis and her pals don’t actually care. And even if you are, it depends on their mood ring at that moment. And you can always self-deport yourself so you can come back tomorrow.
No big deal. But it looks like we give a damn.
And if criticize us you’re a racist! :)
So why are they so against securing the border against the drug dealer, coyotes and bullets? Hmmm…
So lesson #1 for Terrorists coming across the border, keep your nose clean and no one will be paying any attention to you, or at the very least just don’t be “serious”, until you set off your bomb!
If unrestricted illegal immigration is unsatisfactory and “sealing the border” is unsatisfactory, where is the path ahead?
How to look like we’re are doing something, but in fact we aren’t doing diddly. :)
SNAFU :)

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The Quintessential Partisan

More of David Limbaugh (Daily Caller): President Obama is the quintessential partisan, for sure, but he doesn’t reserve his vitriol for Republican politicians. He’ll turn on anyone who stands in his way, and he’ll make it personal through bullying, ridicule, and demonizing. Obama believes he can use his presidential bully pulpit to say whatever he wants about anyone or any group, whether foreign leaders, bankers, or tea party protesters.
Consistent with his narcissistic proclivities, Obama is angrily intolerant of his critics. He dismissed President Bush’s rare criticism by snapping, “We won.” Likewise, he lashed out at Senator John McCain for objecting to his stance on Iran, declaring, “Only I’m the president of the United States . . . and I’ll carry out my responsibilities the way I think is appropriate”—completely ignoring the substance of McCain’s criticism.
This is a hallmark of Obama’s governing style: he takes things personally and keeps score. He exudes a sense of entitlement about his agenda, expecting legislators to vote as he commands, as opposed to, say, their consciences or the wishes of their constituents.
For Obama, it’s more than just a matter of political power. There’s also his egotistical sense that he is absolutely right about everything, that everyone else is wrong, and that if given enough time, he can persuade the rest of the rubes of the superiority of his positions.

It has been my experience, online and in the media (say MSDNC), that the more Progressive Left they are they more that condescending snottiness and absolute Right of God comes out. The more left they are the more they are The Insufferably Superior Left. And thus, they are utterly incapable of being wrong and even if you can prove it, they will just attack you like a rabid raptor.
In their heads there is no such thing as them being wrong. EVER!
An easy test: Ask one of these nuts when will it not be George Bush’s fault?
Get out a wetsuit because the dripping condescending snottiness  and Bush Derangement Syndrome will flow like the flood of the century!
And don’t expect the Mainstream Media, The Ministry of Truth, to be there to protect you they are ideological now and they’re not news reporters. And they are in favor of Obama’s agenda and so they are going to disregard the kind of things he does and will make you (or Bush) the cause not him.
They still love him. Some on the far-far left are mad, it’s true, but that’s because he’s not been to far left ENOUGH  for their tastes!
He didn’t get the Public Option. He didn’t get Cap & Trade in full. He hasn’t redistributed the wealth enough for them. He hasn’t crushed Wall Street and the “rich” enough for them.
Yes, they are that radically out of touch with reality.

We’ve seen how he attributed the public’s repudiation of his agenda via the Massachusetts Senate election to his failure to sufficiently explain his healthcare position—though he had talked ad nauseam on the issue. But it was true of other issues as well—even strong moral issues for which there would never be a consensus, as with his attempt to confront pro-life forces at Notre Dame.
He took the same tack with the issue of homosexuality. At a White House celebration of Gay Pride Month—a controversial act in itself—Obama said he aspired to persuade all Americans to accept homosexuality—as if the issue were simply about “accepting homosexuals,” and that anyone opposing special legal classifications for homosexuality was prejudiced, discriminatory, and as Obama claimed, possessed of “worn arguments and old attitudes.” He added, “There are good and decent people in this country who don’t yet fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters—not yet.”
As a candidate, Obama usually told voters what he thought they wanted to hear. He told an audience in Las Vegas he wanted to help “not just the folks who own casinos but the folks who are serving in casinos.” But after becoming president he wasn’t quite as solicitous. In one of his many anti-capitalist riffs he took a cheap shot at CEOs at a townhall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana, in February 2009. “You can’t take a trip to Las Vegas or down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime.” Obama’s careless statement elicited a strong reaction from Las Vegas businessmen, many pointing out that if their business suffers, the first and hardest hit are the front line workers—the people at the front desk, the bell staff, and the taxi drivers, precisely the people Obama courted during the campaign.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reported that more than 400 conventions and business meetings scheduled in the city had been canceled, translating into 111,800 guests and more than 250,000 “room nights,” costing the city’s economy more than $100 million, apart from lost gaming revenue.
And despite British Petroleum’s assurances that it was “absolutely” responsible for the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama unleashed on BP a non-stop barrage of verbal abuse. Using language not usually heard from a U.S. president, he told NBC’s Today Show that he consults experts about the spill to find out “whose ass to kick.”
Even Obama’s supporters recognized he was resorting to sheer intimidation. As Democratic strategist James Carville noted, “It looks as if President Obama applied a little old-school Chicago persuasion to the oil executives.” But American presidents, of course, are not supposed to resort to this kind of outright thuggery to get their way. As Conn Carroll remarked on the Heritage Foundation’s blog, “Making ‘offers you can’t refuse’ may be a great way to run the mob, but it is no way to run a country.”

And the President oh-so-political Oil Drilling Moratorium (even now that the leak has been plugged it continues) has cost 10′s of thousands of jobs and continues to hurt the Gulf States, especially Louisiana.
But he doesn’t care. He has the backing of his environmentalist apparatchiks. So what does he care about jobs lost in a recession due directly to his meddling. It’s not his fault!
He’s scoring points for his agenda.

And leaving other apparatchiks to do the job for him also, Like the EPA and there declaration that “that carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels poses a threat to human health and welfare, a designation that set the federal government on the path toward regulating of emissions from power plants, factories, automobiles and other major sources.” (see also: http://indyfromaz.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/stop-breathing-save-the-planet/) statement and now apparently Connecticut’s attorney general and Democratic nominee for the Senate, Richard Blumenthal, is working to get courts to declare “cap and trade” regulations the law of the land. Blumenthal’s suit, Connecticut v. American Electric Power, is the most prominent of a handful of “climate change” lawsuits filed by environmental activists, state attorneys general and trial lawyers. These suits threaten to impose a steep tax on the American economy, with no input from our national elected representatives.
In 2004, Connecticut, along with seven other states, New York City and three environmental groups, filed suit against five companies responsible for “approximately one-quarter of the U.S. electric power sector’s carbon dioxide emissions.”
Their lawsuit sought to hold the companies “jointly and severally liable for contributing to an ongoing public nuisance, global warming” and asked the court to force each company “to abate its contribution to the nuisance by capping its emissions of carbon dioxide and then reducing those emissions by a specified percentage each year.”(IBD)

So Congress doesn’t have the stomach to do it, the Progressives will just use their judicial apparatchiks to force it down your throat!!
The Bully that never gives up.

Based on his behavior as president, it is clear he truly believes his own hype. He behaves and governs as though he has been sheltered all his life, or at least since he was a young adult, living in a bizarre bubble, hearing only positive reinforcement and made to believe in his own supernatural powers. This is a major reason he cannot bear opposition; this is a major reason he is not, in the end, a man of the people and deferential to their will, but a top-down autocrat determined to permanently change America and its place in the world despite intense resistance from the American people themselves.
David Limbaugh:  This is a guy who’s taken over private companies. This is a guy who — contravening the rule of law — allocates and pledges $140 billion to the IMF when Congress specifically said you cannot do that without our authority.
And he said — with an Orwellian argument, I can — this is foreign policy, I can divert $140 billion to the IMF for wealth redistribution in third world countries. Nothing to do with what the IMF was originally been set up for.
He can go after Gerald Walpin who is an IG for AmeriCorps because he uncovered fraud on the part of Obama’s friends and so he fires him without notice in total contravention of the rule of law there.
It’s a means to an end for him. He appoints judges who will rewrite the law. He will circumvent Congress when it comes to environmental policy by having his EPA declare carbon dioxide a toxic pollutant.
He will go out and thwart the secured creditors’ legal rights under the law — their rights under the law and favor the unions who are unsecured creditors, give them 50 percent on the dollar. Give the secured creditors 20 percent and then slam and slander the lawyer and slander them as speculators when they’re just trying to enforce their own rights under the law. (FOX)

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” Obama told ABC’s “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer last year.

And in his mind, and The Ministry of Truth, he is really good. Look at all the “legislative victories” he’s had!!
So what if 60+% of the people hate them. He won! That’s all that matters.
Like he cares.  As long as he’s right and the Ministry of Truth tell him he’s right and cover up any gaffes or “misquotes” he’s perfectly fine with doing whatever he wants.
After all, as he told Sen. McCain during the Health Care roundtable, He won the election! Get over it :(


But there’s also the fact that he’s tone-deaf. In addition to not caring what we think, he’s also tone-deaf because he has no clue after he passed – - he crammed Obamacare through he says, I’m going to continue to fight for the American people.
Oh, you are? So 24 percent of the people support what you’re doing and you’re fighting for us? How oblivious.

And how many times has he said that he will focus on jobs, then a shiny object like Health Care or Oil or some other Liberal fantasy distracts him and he just wanders off on vacation…
We either go full blown toward socialism, Marxism, Statism or we turn back and restore our founding principles. This upcoming election in November will tell the tale.
Freedom matters.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

It's all about Me!

Today is primary day in Arizona. But as a registered Independent I have become used to the way of things. I am not allowed to vote today because I am not a partisan of either main party.
I have no voice.
But our President has a voice. And boy does he love the sound of it.

From David Limbaugh’s new book Crimes Against Liberty: Who is Barack Obama? To say that he has an enormous ego is an understatement. Many commentators, including psychological analysts and foreign leaders, have described him as a narcissist.
Obama’s patent self-confidence is not just posturing. It’s evident he truly believes he is special. He did, after all, pen two largely autobiographical books before he had accomplished much of anything. He once told campaign aide Patrick Gaspard, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that . . . I’m a better political director than my political director.”
Obama’s belief that he is a gift to the world is a theme he would carry forward into his presidency. He truly believes he alone has the power to reverse the mess America has allegedly made of world affairs, and that only he can restore America’s supposedly tattered reputation.
Indeed, it often seems that for our president, American policy is not about the United States, but about him personally. At the Summit of the Americas, Obama sat through a 50-minute harangue against the United States by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who eviscerated the United States for a century of “terroristic” aggression in Central America. When it was Obama’s turn, he did not defend the United States, but made himself the issue: “I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.”
Obama’s numerous self-references soon became legendary. Obama referred to himself 114 times in his first State of the Union. By September 23, 2009, Obama had given forty-one speeches so far that year, referring to himself 1,198 times.  At his West Point speech in December, he referred to himself forty-four times. In a speech in Ohio in January, Obama referred to himself no fewer than 132 times and, in the same speech, had the audacity to proclaim, “This is not about me.”
That phrase, “This is not about me,” cropped up in many of Obama’s speeches, signaling that whatever “this” is, it’s precisely about him—his ego, his ideology, his agenda, his legacy, or his unbending ambition to have his way. The rhetorical device, “It’s not about me,” is a long established pattern in which he self-servingly pretends to project an air of humility to leave the impression that he is modest about accomplishing great things—thereby shamelessly seeking credit both for his modesty and his greatness.
Yet Obama continues to tell us—either as a brazen practitioner of Orwellian deception or as a poster child for political tone-deafness, “I won’t stop fighting for you.” If he were truly fighting for the people, he wouldn’t have mocked the tea partiers or closed his own counterfeit public forums on health care to all but union and other special interest supporters of ObamaCare.
Candidate Obama overtly cultivated a messianic image, from the grandiose pomp accompanying his campaign speech in Berlin to the Greek columns that adorned his acceptance speech at Chicago’s Invesco Field. His advisers fully bought into the façade, especially to the idea that Obama possessed a superior intellect—so far above the masses that it was difficult to convey his ideas in terms simple enough for the people to understand.
At a forum at the Kennedy School of Government, one participant suggested to Obama’s adviser and long-time confidant, Valerie Jarrett, that Obama’s ideas were so complex that the administration should consider writing simple booklets to explain them to ordinary people, just like the computer industry originally wrote DOS For Dummies. Jarrett said it was an excellent idea. “Everyone understood hope and change” because “they were simple . . . part of our challenge is to find a very simple way of communicating. . . . When I first got here people kept talking about ‘cloture’ and ‘reconciliation’ and ‘people don’t know what that’s talking about.’” Then it really got thick as Jarrett proclaimed, “There’s nobody more self-critical than President Obama. Part of the burden of being so bright is that he sees his error immediately.”
Obama didn’t exactly discourage this quasi-deification. In noting Obama’s “pathological self-regard,” former George W. Bush aide Pete Wehner reported that Obama surrounded himself by aides who referred to him as a “Black Jesus.” Wehner noted, “Obama didn’t appear to object.”
Surrounding himself with sycophants and egged on by an adoring media, Obama assumed the presidency with the arrogant ambition of transforming America. He believed he was The One—a visionary whose great deeds would be remembered generations from now. But while his charisma was a great asset on the campaign trail, as president he quickly found that his trademark oratory could not convince a skeptical nation of the wisdom of his extravagant plans.(Daily Caller)

“We were told we were getting a cool, calm, steady leader who could rise above emotional impulses to deliver classic statesmanship and prudent governance. But all too often we witness in him a petulant and vindictive bully who doesn’t seem to understand why anyone would challenge his omniscience,” Limbaugh writes.

Leftist Comedian Bill Maher in 2008: “New Rule: Republicans need to stop saying Barack Obama is an elitist, or looks down on rural people, and just admit you don’t like him because of something he can’t help, something that’s a result of the way he was born. Admit it, you’re not voting for him because he’s smarter than you. Barack Obama can’t help it if he’s a magna cum laude Harvard grad and you’re a Wal-Mart shopper who resurfaces driveways with your brother-in-law. Americans are so narcissistic that our candidates have to be just like us. That’s why George Bush is president.” :)


One of the questions a lot of pundits are speculating on is whether Barack Obama will make the great pivot after 2010, the way Bill Clinton did after 1994. Remember, Clinton made a big pivot to the right. Privately, a number of Democratic pollsters and others tell me they fundamentally believe Barack Obama is ideologically incapable of such a pivot. Limbaugh’s book provides the first real evidence that this is true. After 2010, there will be no moderation or pivot right. Obama is wedded to the failed liberal policies of the past hundred years that again and again the American public has repudiated.
But Obama holds that repudiation in contempt. As Limbaugh writes, “Obama’s disingenuousness is not just a matter of stretching the truth once in a while or engaging in a little old-fashioned hyperbole. His outright, habitual lies are a fundamental aspect of his governance…Inside a few months, he showed himself to be deeply racial, aggressively partisan, grossly incompetent, often verbally awkward apart from his teleprompter, an inflexible liberal ideologue, secretive, dishonest, undemocratic, dogmatic and dictatorial, and intolerant and dismissive of his opposition.”
“Based on his behavior as president, it is clear he truly believes his own hype, for we have discovered that instead of messianic, Obama is acutely, perhaps clinically, narcissistic…. Unless stopped, and reversed, the casualties of Obama’s systematic assault on this nation will be our prosperity, our security, and ultimately, our liberty.”(Red State.com)

On Fox Last Night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSBnzFtN6tk&feature=player_embedded
But don’t worry, he’s on vacation, AGAIN.
“It’s really inspiring, this vision they have for the future,” The president said at an event for Sen. Patty Murray. “Gives you a little pep in your step when you hear it.” referring to his new slogan for the GOP, “No We Can’t”.
Now that’s not petulant and childish now is it folks! :)


The net result of Obama’s failed policies is that consumers are reluctant to spend, entrepreneurs are reluctant to invest, and employers are reluctant to hire to the degree necessary to spur economic growth.–Doug Schoen, Democrat Strategist

But there’s always spin from the Ministry of Truth, In this case, CBS:
“President Obama’s approval ratings are certainly lower than they have been in the past, but it is worth noting they’re higher than President Clinton’s approval ratings were in 1994 at the same time and even higher than President Reagan’s approval ratings were in 1982 at this same time. I think the Reagan and Obama situation are sort of good comparisons because Reagan also had inherited a very difficult economy,” Jennifer Palmieri, of the liberal thinktank Center for American Progress, told the “Early Show.”
“The president’s had a lot of legislative victories but the White House understands very clearly that you don’t get points with the American people for legislative victories. They want to see results. The uncomfortable truth the white house is wrestling with [is] a lot of these policies they’ve enacted take time for people to see results in their everyday lives … that’s just going to take some time.” 

Be patient. He’s genius takes a long to appreciate, if you’re smart enough that is. :)
Reach for that Hope!
Anyone got Sisyphus on speed dial?

Monday, August 23, 2010

Trust in Me

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property. –Thomas Jefferson
Trust, but verify. –Ronald Reagan
If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost. –Senator Barack Obama August 2006

25% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -17. (Rasmussen)
For the past year, those giving Congress good or excellent marks have remained in the narrow range of nine percent (9%) to 16%, while 53% to 71% have rated its performance as poor. (Rasmussen)
Guess when the 71% was. Health Care “deem and pass” cram down talk in February. Right before they did cram it down your throat! :)


30% of Likely Voters say the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey taken the week ending Sunday, August 8.
Confidence in the nation’s current course has ranged from 27% to 35% since last July.

Pew Research Center:


Distrust
Thomas SowellDemocracy: It’s an awful thing in a country when its people no longer believe the government protects them and their rights. Yet, a new poll shows that’s exactly where Americans are headed right now.
In a Rasmussen poll of 1,000 adults taken last Friday and Saturday, nearly half, or 48%, said they see government today as a threat to their rights. Just 37% disagreed. The poll also found that only one in five (21%) believe current government has the consent of the governed.
In other words, people think much of what our government does today is illegitimate — possibly even illegal.
For a democratic republic such as our own, this is extraordinarily dangerous. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were created explicitly to protect Americans’ rights by limiting the scope, reach and power of the federal government.
The Declaration promises “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and goes on to say that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
In short, our government was designed to protect our rights — not to serve as an all-embracing nanny state that slowly, silently strips us of our ability to act as free individuals.
Bailouts, TARP, the takeover of the auto industry, nationalization of health care, the micromanagement of Wall Street and the banks, the expected $12 trillion explosion in U.S. publicly held debt over the next decade — all this and more adds up to a feeling of loss of control by the American people over their lives, both public and private, and a diminution of their rights.
The Founding Fathers understood this could happen. “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence,” George Washington presciently warned. “It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
His generation understood it would be up to us, the citizens, to ensure government wouldn’t trample our rights. That’s what the Constitution was — an agreement to limit government to certain, carefully prescribed duties. And that’s why we vote.
Today, Americans feel their rights are threatened by a government that has grown beyond its constitutional bounds. Once merely a dangerous servant, our federal government is on its way to becoming a fearful master. The only question is, will we let it?
How did we get to the point where many people feel that the America they have known is being replaced by a very different kind of country, with not only different kinds of policies but very different values and ways of governing?
Something of this magnitude does not happen all at once or in just one administration in Washington. What we are seeing is the culmination of many trends in many aspects of American life that go back for years.
Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the institutions set up by that Constitution are enough to ensure the continuance of a free, self-governing nation. When Benjamin Franklin was asked what members of the Constitution Convention were creating, he replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
In other words, a Constitutional government does not depend on the Constitution but on us. To the extent that we allow clever people to circumvent the Constitution, while dazzling us with rhetoric, the Constitution will become just a meaningless piece of paper, as our freedoms are stolen from us, much as a pick-pocket would steal our wallet while we are distracted by other things.
It is not just evil people who would dismantle America. Many people who have no desire to destroy our freedoms simply have their own agendas that are singly or collectively incompatible with the survival of freedom.
Someone once said that a democratic society cannot survive for long after 51 percent of the people decide that they want to live off the other 49 percent. Yet that is the direction in which we are being pushed by those who are promoting envy under its more high-toned alias of “social justice.”
Those who construct moral melodramas– starring themselves on the side of the angels against the forces of evil– are ready to disregard the Constitution rights of those they demonize, and to overstep the limits put on the powers of the federal government set by the Constitution.
The outcries of protest in the media, in academia and in politics, when the Supreme Court ruled this year that people in corporations have the same free speech rights as other Americans, are a painful reminder of how vulnerable even the most basic rights are to the attacks of ideological zealots. President Barack Obama said that the Court’s decision “will open the floodgates for special interests”– as if all you have to do to take away people’s free speech rights is call them a special interest.
It is not just particular segments of the population who are under attack. What is more fundamentally under attack are the very principles and values of American society as a whole. The history of this country is taught in many schools and colleges as the history of grievances and victimhood, often with the mantra of “race, class and gender.” Television and the movies often do the same.
When there are not enough current grievances for them, they mine the past for grievances and call it history. Sins and shortcomings common to the human race around the world are spoken of as failures of “our society.” But American achievements get far less attention– and sometimes none at all.
Our “educators,” who cannot educate our children to the level of math or science achieved in most other comparable countries, have time to poison their minds against America.
Why? Partly, if not mostly, it is because that is the vogue. It shows you are “with it” when you reject your own country and exalt other countries.
Abraham Lincoln warned of people whose ambitions can only be fulfilled by dismantling the institutions of this country, because no comparable renown is available to them by supporting those institutions. He said this 25 years before the Gettysburg Address, and he was speaking of political leaders with hubris, whom he regarded as a greater danger than enemy nations. But such hubris is far more widespread today than just among political leaders.
Those with such hubris– in the media and in education, as well as in politics– have for years eroded both respect for the country and the social cohesion of its people. This erosion is what has set the stage for today’s dismantling of America that is now approaching the point of no return.

“To those who claim omnipotence for the Legislature, and who in the plentitude of their assumed powers, are disposed to disregard the Constitution, law, good faith, moral right, and every thing else,” Lincoln declared in an early speech to the Illinois legislature, “I have nothing to say.”

In Lincoln, we have a glimpse of prudence in a liberal democracy; but it is also our best glimpse of it, and perhaps our best hope for understanding and recovering it, and our best hope for the possibility of statesmanship in an age of the partisan absolute, where ignorant armies clash by night. (Heritage.org)
Or on the Internet and the 24/7 News cycle…:)

Trust:
reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.confident expectation of something; hope.the condition of one to whom something has been entrusted.the obligation or responsibility imposed on a person in whom confidence or authority is placed: a position of trust.charge, custody, or care: to leave valuables in someone’s trust.something committed or entrusted to one’s care for use or safekeeping, as an office, duty, or the like; responsibility; charge.
The new “reach for hope” should be a renewal of trust. But Verify :)

Sunday, August 22, 2010

The Audacity of Hope

“Don’t give in to fear,’’ Obama said yesterday, urging voters to turn back GOP efforts to gain control of the House and Senate in November’s midterm elections. “Let’s reach for hope.’’
Elect me, and I will bring Hope and Change. 18 months later, Reach for that same hope.

Do you suspect that the reach will be like Sisyphus and the rolling the boulder up hill. For his assignment was to roll a great boulder to the top of a hill. Only every time Sisyphus, by the greatest of exertion and toil, attained the summit, the darn thing rolled back down again.
Obama and the Democrats thrive on stress, fear, anxiety and lack of hope. So just in them and all will be wonderful…someday….maybe…but if it’s not it’s Bush’s Fault and you just have to re-double your faith in “hope”. :)
They don’t want to actually thrive because you won’t want them to run your life for you then. So it’s better to just “hope”.

WASHINGTON  — Nearly half of the homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out.
A new report issued today by the Treasury Department said that approximately 630,000 people who had tried to get their monthly mortgage payments lowered through the effort have been cut loose through July. That’s about 48 percent of the 1.3 million homeowners who had enrolled since March 2009. That is up from more than 40 percent through June.
The report suggests foreclosures could rise in the second half of the year and weaken the ailing housing market, analysts say.
Another 421,804, or 32.3 percent of those who started the program, have received permanent loan modifications and are making their payments on time.
Many borrowers have complained that program is a bureaucratic nightmare. They say banks often lose their documents and then claim borrowers did not send back the necessary paperwork.
The banking industry said borrowers weren’t sending back their paperwork. They also have accused the Obama administration of initially pressuring them to sign up borrowers without insisting first on proof of their income. When banks later moved to collect the information, many troubled homeowners were disqualified or dropped out.

(Should sound familiar–Community Reinvestment Act anyone?) :)


Obama officials dispute that they pressured banks. They have defended the program, saying lenders are making more significant cuts to borrowers’ monthly payments than before the program was launched. And some of the largest mortgage companies in the program have offered alternative programs to those who fell out.
The Obama plan was designed to help people in financial trouble by lowering their monthly mortgage payments. Homeowners who qualify can receive an interest rate as low as 2 percent for five years and a longer repayment period.

And These are the bureaucrats who are going to save you on Health Care? :)
Well, at least that’s what they said during the 15 month fight. As was pointed out yesterday, it’s not what they want to tell you now.
And that Mandate that wasn’t a Tax, is a Tax. They admit it now.
But you’re going to love having government bureaucrats decide how you live and when you die. :)
Reach for Hope!

Essentially, we’ve now transitioned from the aforementioned terminology (Saved or created jobs), on to ‘jobs funded’, and eventually landed on something reminiscent of an after school special, ‘lives touched’.
So what exactly defines a touched life?
A spokesperson from the CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company explains:

“Lives Touched” is a figure that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) uses to track the amount of people who have been positively affected by the Recovery Act funds.  This total would include people who have been provided full time employment (i.e. saved and created jobs) through the Recovery Act and people who at some point have supported a project funded by the Recovery Act.
In other words, the administration has stumbled upon another way to inflate their job numbers.  They were already reporting on those saved or created, but will now include ‘people who at some point have supported a project.’
Lies, Damned Lies, and Stimulus Statistics! :)


NEW YORK: In signs of persisting financial woes in the US, the count of bankruptcy filings jumped as much as 20 per cent to 1.57 million in the year ended June 2010, the highest in four years.
The number of businesses going bankrupt climbed eight per cent to 59,608 during the same period, despite signs of economic recovery.
“A total of 1,572,597 bankruptcy cases were filed in federal courts in that period (year ended June 30, 2010), compared to 1,306,315 bankruptcy cases filed in the 12-month period ending June 30, 2009,” according to the latest data available with the Administrative Office of the US Courts.
Moreover, the bankruptcy filings are the highest since 2006 when the number stood at 1.48 million. (Economic Times)


“The President has shown he is willing to work with anyone who will join us to figure out new ways to create more jobs. The Vice-President spends each week making sure we’re squeezing job out of every Recovery Act dollar,”-White House Spokesman on The Summertime Blues list of 100 stimulus ‘projects’ that don’t create anything but debt.

The biggest circumvention of “we the people” was of course the so-called “health care reform” bill. This bill was passed with the proviso that it would not really take effect until after the 2012 presidential elections. Between now and then, the Obama administration can tell us in glowing words how wonderful this bill is, what good things it will do for us, and how it has rescued us from the evil insurance companies, among its many other glories.
But we won’t really know what the actual effects of this bill are until after the next presidential elections– which is to say, after it is too late. Quite simply, we are being played for fools.
Much has been made of the fact that families making less than $250,000 a year will not see their taxes raised. Of course they won’t see it, because what they see could affect how they vote.
But when huge tax increases are put on electric utility companies, the public will see their electricity bills go up. When huge taxes are put on other businesses as well, they will see the prices of the things those businesses sell go up.
If you are not in that “rich” category, you will not see your own taxes go up. But you will be paying someone else’s higher taxes, unless of course you can do without electricity and other products of heavily taxed businesses. If you don’t see this, so much the better for the Obama administration politically.
This country has been changed in a more profound way by corrupting its fundamental values. The Obama administration has begun bribing people with the promise of getting their medical care and other benefits paid for by other people, so long as those other people can be called “the rich.” Incidentally, most of those who are called “the rich” are nowhere close to being rich.
A couple making $125,000 a year each are not rich, even though together they reach that magic $250,000 income level. In most cases, they haven’t been making $125,000 a year all their working lives. Far more often, they have reached this level after decades of working their way up from lower incomes– and now the government steps in to grab the reward they have earned over the years.
There was a time when most Americans would have resented the suggestion that they wanted someone else to pay their bills. But now, envy and resentment have been cultivated to the point where even people who contribute nothing to society feel that they have a right to a “fair share” of what others have produced.
The most dangerous corruption is a corruption of a nation’s soul. That is what this administration is doing. (Thomas Sowell)
Hope and Change!
Reach for the Hope!


IBD: The consequences of government involvement in health care have become more and more apparent as people have become informed about what the health overhaul law would do. No longer does the government seem to be a fairy godmother but rather a tough enforcer of an avalanche of new mandates, taxes and regulatory requirements.
The assurance that government would make sure all Americans have health care coverage has turned into a mandate that we all must have insurance defined by the government and with the government determining what our “choice” of health policies will be.
The latest example of our loss of individual control over health care decisions is playing out deep in the weeds of definitions over what must be counted as medical care and what counts as administrative expense in health insurance — the so-called “medical loss ratio,” or MLR. According to the new law, at least 85% of premium dollars must be spent on medical care for large firms and 80% for smaller ones.

Or put it this way. You spend 75% of your premiums collected on claims. But now the government mandates 85% because that’s “fair”. So where do you get the extra 10%??
Since you aren’t the government and just raise taxes or print more money you have to either cut services or other expenses, or increase the premiums.
And if you increase the premiums the government and the liberals will scream that you’re ‘raping’ the people with greedy capitalism.
Sucks to be you.

It sounds like a simple and straightforward issue, but a world of challenges and complexity lies beneath the surface. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) has been charged with making recommendations to the federal government about what should and should not be counted in the equation.
To show how consequential the decision is, President Obama briefly scheduled, then canceled, a trip to speak to the NAIC meeting in Seattle in mid-August where the MLR issue was being debated.
Many of the decisions being made by regulators could make it almost impossible for private insurance companies to comply, leading inevitably to a government-run health system.
Connecticut state insurance commissioner Thomas Sullivan warned, “What we’ve learned since March, is that if you like your health insurance you may not be able to keep it,” he told the Seattle meeting, “and state regulators will have a role in implementing health care as long as that role supports the goals of HHS (the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), which may not necessarily be what’s in the best interest of consumers.”
He later told reporters: “I’m concerned there’s still a lot left to be done in interpretation … I fear that some have an agenda to interpret … with the express purpose of getting to a single-payer option.”
Many other health actuaries and experts at the Seattle meeting said they believed the MLR was meant to be so disruptive to private insurance that it would eventually push us into a single-payer system.
HHS is not obligated to take the recommendations of the NAIC. Ultimately, the bureaucracy will decide. And their decision will be hugely consequential.

Let the minutiae wrangling begin! And heaven help you if you’re on the wrong side of a bureaucrat!

An issue that is being most hotly debated right now is whether the federal, state and payroll taxes that insurance companies are required to pay must be counted today as administrative expenses or whether they can be subtracted from premium collections before the calculations are made.
Health insurers say the decision could determine whether they have the money to invest in fighting fraud, setting up networks of qualified physicians and updating information technologies. For other companies, the decision very well could determine whether they survive.
Six senior members of Congress also weighed in on the issue with a letter to the president of the NAIC, saying they meant for taxes to be counted as an administrative expense.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents insurance companies, countered that the legislation specifically says taxes shouldn’t be counted. Other independent analysts have validated the AHIP position.
So the politicization of health care begins, with even the president set to weigh in on a decision that would make most people’s eyes glaze over in the minutia. The president will meet with the NAIC at the White House in September or so to discuss the issue.
It now is clear that decisions about what kind of health insurance we have, how much we must pay, what it covers or doesn’t cover, will be made by politicians and bureaucrats.
This evokes a statement by health economist Paul Starr in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Social Transformation of American Medicine”: “Political leaders since Bismarck seeking to strengthen the state or to advance their own or their party’s interests have used insurance against the costs of sickness as a means of turning benevolence to power.”
The process has begun. Unless ObamaCare can be rolled back, the politicization of American medicine will reach into the smallest decisions affecting our medical care for decades to come.
And, just five months after the health overhaul law was enacted, we see how the regulatory bureaucracy may well push us into the single-payer, government-run health care system that even the very liberal 111th Congress couldn’t enact. (Even with all the bribes!)


But was predictable given that the Health Care Reform debate was about control, not Health Care.
Just like Immigration enforcement is about Amnesty, not security.
Global Warming is not about the planet.
Financial Reform wasn’t about reform, as much as it was about control.
Remember, Tort Reform was completely ignored during the Health Care debate because Trial Lawyers are too big to ignore Democrats. And Fannie and Freddie were ignored by Financial Reform because the government and the liberals doing the reform were at fault for it’s continued collapse!
It’s about what the politicians want, not what the people want or need.
You are being told you want this, when in fact they want you to want it.
The Drug Addicts want to addict you to their drugs so you’ll demand more of them from them and to do that they will take more of your soul in the process.
Reach for the Hope, Sisyphus!
Trust in them to bring you the Hope all wrapped up in a pretty bow and all nice and shiny.
They would never take advantage of you.
No, they just want what’s “fair”.
What’s so wrong about that…. :)