Tag Archives: Politics

The Obama Touch – Disrespecting Foreign Allies

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Charles Krauthammer telling it like it is:

RealClearPolitics – Disrespecting Foreign Allies.

What is it like to be a foreign ally of Barack Obama’s America?

If you’re a Brit, your head is spinning. It’s not just the personal slights to Prime Minister Gordon Brown — the ridiculous 25-DVD gift, the five refusals before Brown was granted a one-on-one with The One.

Nor is it just the symbolism of Obama returning the Churchill bust that was in the Oval Office. Query: If it absolutely had to be out of Obama’s sight, could it not have been housed somewhere else on U.S. soil rather than ostentatiously repatriated?

Perhaps it was the State Department official who last year denied there even was a special relationship between the U.S. and Britain, a relationship cultivated by every U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt.  Continue reading →

Obama’s Adolescent Fantasy

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H/T Breitbart.tv: Former Attorney General, Michael B.  Mukasey, author of  How Obama Has Mishandled the War on Terror

In his book the former AG points out the danger of Obama’s castles in the air, his letting down America’s guard to accommodate his adolesent fantasy of utopian higher ideals vs. defender of the Nation and national security.

No Enforcement Arm – Healthcare Bill

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Mark Levin Fan » Blog Archive » Deny and repeal the health care bill; no enforcement or additional IRS funding in Senate bill.

It will cost the IRS $5 billion to $10 billion over 10 years to handle the new workload, according to a March 11 estimate by the Congressional Budget Office. But the Senate bill doesn’t provide any funding for the expansion of the IRS, and it virtually ties the hands of the IRS to collect fees on individuals and businesses who don’t buy health insurance.

“The use of liens and seizures otherwise authorized for collection of taxes does not apply to the collection of this penalty,” according to the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation. “Non-compliance with the personal responsibility requirement to have health coverage is not subject to criminal or civil penalties under the code and interest does not accrue for failure to pay such assessments in a timely manner.”

That means there’s virtually nothing the IRS can do to enforce the fines in the legislation, forcing the tax man to rely on the consciences of taxpayers or to skim off any federal benefits, tax credits or refunds they have coming to them.

War of Words – What’s In A Name?

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NPR staff memo quoted by La Shawn Barber in NPR Drops ‘Pro-Life for'”Abortion Rights Opponents’:

NPR News is revising the terms we use to describe people and groups involved in the abortion debate.

This updated policy is aimed at ensuring the words we speak and write are as clear, consistent and neutral as possible. This is important given that written text is such an integral part of our work.

On the air, we should use “abortion rights supporter(s)/advocate(s)” and “abortion rights opponent(s)” or derivations thereof (for example: “advocates of abortion rights”). It is acceptable to use the phrase “anti-abortion”, but do not use the term “pro-abortion rights”.

What’s in a name?  Barber points us to: “How the Public is Manipulated” which gives us a heads up and out of the sand noting:

  • It Makes a Pro-Abortion Assumption that the Debate is About Abortion Rights, Not Abortion
  • It Plays Word Games with the Word “Rights”
  • It Ignores the Fact That Abortion Can Exist Without Abortion Rights
  • It Assumes the Negative
  • It Ignores the Concept of a Right to Life
  • It Affirms the Concept of a Right to an Abortion

    • Barber makes some points of her own for the mainstream media:

    • Refer to abortion supporters as “right to life opponents”
    • Refer to gun control supporters as “gun rights opponents”
    • Refer to “hate speech” backers as “speech rights opponents”
    • Refer to racial preferences advocates as “constitutional rights opponents”

    Write me if she missed any.

    A Turning Point In Dismantling Of America

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    By THOMAS SOWELL

    With the passage of the legislation letting the federal government take control of the country’s medical care system, a major turning point has been reached in the dismantling of America’s values and institutions. Even the massive transfer of crucial decisions from millions of doctors and patients to Washington bureaucrats and advisory panels — as momentous as that is — does not measure the full impact of this largely unread and certainly unscrutinized legislation. If the current legislation does not entail the transmission of all our individual medical records to Washington, it will take only an administrative regulation or, at most, an executive order of the president to do that.

    Our New Masters

    With politicians now having access to our most confidential records and having the power of granting or withholding medical care needed to sustain ourselves or our loved ones, how many people will be bold enough to criticize our public servants, who will in fact have become our public masters? Despite whatever “firewalls” or “lockboxes” there may be to shield our medical records from prying political eyes, nothing is as inevitable as leaks in Washington. Does anyone still remember the hundreds of confidential FBI files that were “accidentally” delivered to the White House during Bill Clinton’s administration? Even before that, J. Edgar Hoover’s extensive confidential FBI files on numerous Washington power holders made him someone who could not be fired by any president of the U.S., much less by any attorney general, who was nominally his boss. The corrupt manner in which this massive legislation was rammed through Congress, without any of the committee hearings or extended debates that most landmark legislation has had, has provided a road map for pushing through more such sweeping legislation in utter defiance of what the public wants. Too many critics of the Obama administration have assumed that its arrogant disregard of the voting public will spell political suicide for congressional Democrats and for the president himself. But that is far from certain. True, President Obama’s approval numbers in the polls have fallen below 50%, and that of Congress is down around 10%. But nobody votes for Congress as a whole, and the president will not be on the ballot until 2012. They say that, in politics, overnight is a lifetime. Just last month, it was said that the election of Scott Brown to the Senate from Massachusetts doomed the health care bill. Now some of the same people are saying that passing the health care bill will doom the administration and the Democrats’ control of Congress. As an old song said, “It ain’t necessarily so.”

    Corrupt Process

    The voters will have had no experience with the actual, concrete effect of the government takeover of medical care at the time of the 2010 congressional elections or the 2012 presidential election. All they will have will be conflicting rhetoric — and you can depend on the mainstream media to go along with the rhetoric of those who passed this medical care bill. The ruthless and corrupt way this bill was forced through Congress on a party-line vote, and in defiance of public opinion, provides a road map for how other “historic” changes can be imposed by Obama, Pelosi and Reid. What will it matter if Obama’s current approval rating is below 50% among the current voting public, if he can ram through new legislation to create millions of new voters by granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? That can be enough to make him a two-term president, who can appoint enough Supreme Court justices to rubber-stamp further extensions of his power. When all these newly minted citizens are rounded up on election night by ethnic organization activists and labor union supporters of the administration, there might be enough votes to salvage the Democratic Party’s control of Congress as well. The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don’t usually bring out as many voters as presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.

    Acorn By Any Other Name

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    A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and Acorn by any other name will still just smell!

    Eric Shawn writes:

    Critics point to a variety of new local organizations that are springing up to apparently take ACORN’s place. In Brooklyn, New York the ACORN office now has a new sign: “New York Communities for Change,” and in Massachusetts the president of the new group, “New England United for Justice” is listed as Maude Hurd, the president of ACORN, in its articles of Organization.

    There are a growing number of such local groups replacing ACORN, according to Matthew Vadum, of the Capital Research Center. He says ACORN Housing has changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America, Inc., and that other ACORN connected groups include: Arkansas Community Organizations, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and Missourians Organizing for Reform Empowerment.

    “This is a trick, a public relations trick,” says Vadum, calling the move an attempt “to dupe Congress and the American people to think they have gone away and they have not.” He says “the same people are running the new chapters that have sprung up and in some cases, out of the same offices.”