Scraping the Bottom- Obama

“President Obama, I support the Americans’ outstretched hand. But what did the international community gain from these offers of dialogue? Nothing.” — French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Sept. 24

“When France chides you for appeasement, you know you’re scraping bottom. “– Charles Krauthammer and more from Krauthammer:

Do the tally. In return for selling out Poland and the Czech Republic by unilaterally abrogating a missile-defense security arrangement that Russia had demanded be abrogated, we get from Russia … what? An oblique hint, of possible support, for unspecified sanctions, grudgingly offered and of dubious authority — and, in any case, leading nowhere because the Chinese have remained resolute against any Security Council sanctions.

Confusing ends and means, the Obama administration strives mightily for shows of allied unity, good feeling and pious concern about Iran’s nuclear program — whereas the real objective is stopping that program. This feel-good posturing is worse than useless, because all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb.

Olympic Crony-ism – the Chicago Way

Wake-up America! While we were sleeping, the enemy didn’t rest. Enemies come from the outside and from within.  Casper ten Boom, the father of Corrie ten Boom, author of  “The Hiding Place” said, “A mouse may live in the cookie jar, but that doesn’t make the mouse a cookie”

America can’t afford to rest on her laurels or the time of laurels will pass into history. Americans are waking up to an America they have trouble recognizing.  Vigilance is the watch word of this day. Some are doing their job in this regard.

Michelle Malkin is unrelenting in exposing tales of cronyism, corruption, planned or pending corruption:

When government officials play the Olympic lottery, taxpayers lose. That has been the disastrous experience of host cities around the world (Forbes magazine even dubbed the post-Olympic financial burden the “Host City Curse”). So, why are President Obama and his White House entourage headed to Copenhagen, Denmark this week to push a fiscally doomed Chicago 2016 bid? Political payback.

According to Malkin, who does her homework:

Chicagoans of all political stripes who oppose massive government funding of Mayor Richard Daley’s pet project have inundated my email-box. Reader Will P. sums it all up by noting that the games would “protect the current corrupt structure” and paper over Chicago/Illinois’s myriad woes, including: “Governor after Governor going to jail. Pay to play schemes. Crumbling and outdated infrastructure. Deteriorating public housing. Failing, dumbing-down schools. Hospital cutbacks. Sanctuary city. Never-ending gang wars (outbursts every Spring requiring massive police presence, police outmanned at the Taste of Chicago, innocents shot in the crossfire weekly, current beating video out now). Cemetery scandal (bodies removed and graves resold)…Acorn, Bill Ayers, Rezko, Blago, Wright. Univ. of Illinois “clout” scandal. Illegal preferential city hiring. City inspectors on the take (Operation Crooked Code). Voter fraud. The unemployment rate. Taxes through the roof. Mayor Daley attempting to extend city taxes to the suburbs. All this, and more…”

Read more here and here.

Does Obama Trample Truth?

I think Obama plays Truth like a shell game. Charles Krauthammer asks , “Does He lie?”

Krauthammer thinks Obama’s too slick for a simple, out and out, lie:

Obama doesn’t lie. He merely elides, gliding from one dubious assertion to another. This has been the story throughout his whole health care crusade. Its original premise was that our current financial crisis was rooted in neglect of three things — energy, education and health care. That transparent attempt to exploit Emanuel’s Law — a crisis is a terrible thing to waste — failed for health care because no one is stupid enough to believe that the 2008 financial collapse was caused by a lack of universal health care.

So on to the next gambit: selling health care reform as a cure for the deficit. When that was exploded by the Congressional Budget Office’s demonstration of staggering Obamacare deficits, Obama tried a new tack: selling his plan as revenue-neutral insurance reform — until the revenue neutrality is exposed as phony future cuts and chimerical waste and fraud.

Obama doesn’t lie. He implies, he misdirects, he misleads — so fluidly and incessantly that he risks transmuting eloquence into mere slickness.

Slickness wasn’t fatal to “Slick Willie” Clinton because he possessed a winning, near irresistible charm. Obama’s persona is more cool, distant, imperial. The charming scoundrel can get away with endless deception; the righteous redeemer cannot.

Read it all here.

How the Mighty Have Fallen

H/T Anchoress for the video link:

Charles Krauthammer isn’t as generous in discerning Obama’s motives, agenda and Waterloo saying in part:

In a center-right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.

Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.

Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob — misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest — from drug companies to auto unions to doctors — in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.

More Nonsense Called Health Care Reform

Charles Krauthammer opines:

In the 48 hours of June 15-16, President Obama lost the health care debate. First, a letter from the Congressional Budget Office to Sen. Edward Kennedy reported that his health committee’s reform bill would add $1 trillion in debt over the next decade. Then the CBO reported that the other Senate bill, being written by the Finance Committee, would add $1.6 trillion. The central contradiction of Obamacare was fatally exposed: From his first address to Congress, Obama insisted on the dire need for restructuring the health care system because out-of-control costs were bankrupting the Treasury and wrecking the U.S. economy — yet the Democrats’ plans would make the problem worse.

Accordingly, Democrats have trotted out various tax proposals to close the gap. Obama’s idea of limits on charitable and mortgage-interest deductions went nowhere. As did the House’s income tax surcharge on millionaires. And Obama dare not tax employer-provided health insurance because of his campaign pledge of no middle-class tax hikes.

Desperation time. What do you do? Sprinkle fairy dust on every health care plan, and present your deus ex machina: prevention.

…..

Prevention is a wondrous good, but in the aggregate it costs society money. Nothing wrong with that. That’s the whole premise of medicine: Treating a heart attack or setting a broken leg also costs society. But we do it because it alleviates human suffering. Preventing a heart attack with statins or breast cancer with mammograms is costly. But we do it because it reduces human suffering.

However, prevention is not, as so widely advertised, healing on the cheap. It is not the magic bullet for health care costs.

You will hear some variation of that claim a hundred times in the coming health care debate. Whenever you do, remember: It’s nonsense — empirically demonstrable and CBO-certified.

Demand Answers! “Facts are Stubborn”

Read all about the healthcare that includes killing the unborn infant in the womb!…here.

From Emily Buchanan, executive director, Susan B. Anthony List:

Demand Answers at Town Hall Meetings!

With Congress in recess, many Representatives are holding Town Hall meetings so that constituents can voice their opinions.

As you’ve probably heard in the news, thousands of American voters are coming together at these Town Hall meetings to demand answers from their Representatives concerning the health care bill.

It is time for Susan B. Anthony List Pro-Life Activists to get involved and demand answers on why Congress wants to use our tax dollars to provide abortion coverage in every health care plan, public or private.

Already, Representatives are feeling the heat on abortion.

Just yesterday, when asked about abortion coverage in the health care bill,

Rep. John Dingell, the chief sponsor of the bill, responded: There will be no payment of taxpayer funds for abortion.”

Simply put, this is a bold-faced lie.

Just this week, the Associated Press (AP) wrote a story

headlined, “Gov’t insurance would allow coverage for abortion.”

The truth is on our side, and we must make sure we share the truth with every member of Congress face-to-face to Stop the Abortion Mandate!

Here are 5 easy ways that you can make a difference in your community:

1. Find local Town Hall meetings sponsored by your Representatives. Click Here for a list of Town Hall meetings across the country.

2. Bring a homemade sign that says, “Abortion is NOT Health Care” with www.StopTheAbortionMandate.com

below it.

3. Simply ask your Representative: “Why is the current health care bill forcing me to pay for abortion coverage?” Click here for more sample questions and tips!

4. If your Representative denies the charge, hold up the Associated Press story and read the headline. Ask them why they are lying about abortion coverage in the bill. Click Here to print out the Associated Press story.

5. Please bring a video camera and have someone record your question and record the response. Contact us at information@sba-list.org so we can help you send us the video.  At the Town Hall, seek out members of the press and do interviews with them.

Emily Buchanan
Executive Director, Susan B. Anthony List
703-875-3370

www.sba-list.org


From Americans United for Life Action’s Charmaine Yoest:

Just yesterday, in a USA Today op-ed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) argued that the people attending town hall meetings and questioning the wisdom of the House health care reform bill have been “un-American.”  “Opponents are afraid not just of differing views,” they write, “but of the facts themselves.”

But as John Adams famously argued in 1770, “Facts are stubborn things.”

The truth is that there is nothing more American than the First Amendment right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.”  The facts of the plan under consideration demand that pro-life Americans speak up now or risk being forced to pay for a plan that mandates taxpayer funds for abortion, strips health care providers of conscience rights, and threatens the ill and elderly with denial of care.

Here’s a better idea than questioning one another’s patriotism:  show them you’re not afraid of the facts.  Go to your U.S. senator or representative’s town hall meeting and ask informed questions.  AUL’s legal team has written a talking-points flyer for pro-lifers to distribute at these meetings.  It gives detailed information on the parts of the bills under consideration that relate to abortion, end-of-life care, and conscience rights.  The flyer also includes our three essential principles that must be in any health care reform plan that protects life.  Click here to download the flyer.

All the information on the flyer is also available on AUL’s RealHealthCareRespectsLife.com, along with additional in-depth analysis from our legal experts on the health care reform plans currently in the House and Senate.  If you haven’t done so already, make sure to sign the site’s petition to add your voice to the thousands urging the President to keep abortion out of health care. Thank you for joining me in protecting and defending life!

Caught on Tape: Obama Calls Abortion the Center of His Health Care Agenda

If you’ve seen our FightFOCA.com, you know that, as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama promised abortion advocates at a Planned Parenthood conference that the “first thing” he’d do as President was to sign the Freedom of Choice Act. Thankfully, you and the 700,000 others who signed our “Fight FOCA” petition helped convince him that was a bad idea. But did you know that, at that same conference, Obama said that mandated abortion coverage would be at the “center and heart” of his health care agenda? He did, and we’ve got the tape.