The Conservative Ledger

Obama's Outrage: Nukes or Apartments?

2010-03-20T19:47:00.000-07:00

There was an episode of Seinfeld called Festivus for the Rest of Us which was a holiday where you were permitted to tell your family and friends all of the ways they had disappointed you.

You sort of got a reverse feeling of that when President Obama jetted around the globe on his World Apology Tour.

I suppose that Americans were expected to have felt a sense of redemption as the president bowed his head in shame before dignitaries and royalty alike.

America was at fault for so many of the world's ills, and the president was humbly determined to make things right.

After 9/11 there were cries from the Festivus--Blame America First--crowd to determine what sins the United States committed that would have caused the occurrence of such a tragic event. In other words, 9/11 was America's fault.

Barack Obama was cut from the same mold as the apologists who are quick to point the finger of blame at their own country.

Don't say we didn't warn you prior to the election that this was the change Obama promised.

But it's not enough to sacrifice the honor of your country. Out of the gate Obama was cozily lifting glasses to dictators and despots.

Seemingly, Castro and Chavez were his new best buds.

So, it is not surprising Washington's outrage over the Biden-Netanyahu flap. (While Vice President Biden was visiting Israel, the Interior Ministry announced plans for a housing project in Jerusalem.)

Well, the Obama administration took that as a political affront which sparked a 45-minute dressing down by Secretary Clinton in a heated phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

One must ask the obvious question, but when did the Obama White House display the same outrage towards, let's say, Iran regarding their nuclear ambitions and avowed threats to wipe Israel off the face of the map?

Of course, the world needs no further prodding to castigate Israel, but once Obama throws a glare all others are given the green light to pile on.

Curious that a housing project in Jerusalem would cause more worldwide furor than a nuclear weapons project in Iran.

For the record, let's be reminded that Israel accepted a partitioned state (and invited peace) back in 1947.

President Obama might be well-advised to consider that Israel, in contrast, has never threatened to end the existence of her neighbors.

Also, it might strengthen the president's hand if he would stop blaming America first and stand tall with our friends.

Congress is House of Felons

2010-03-13T17:54:00.000-08:00

I remember learning in high school civics how a bill becomes law. The teacher presented a very sterile outline from proposal to enactment on the legislative workings of Congress. The process was seemingly legal and deliberate.

They say that if you saw how a frankfurter was made, you'd never eat another hot dog. I can only assume that our civics teacher purposely censored the meat grinding details of law making because those ingredients are a tad unsavory and difficult to swallow.

Consider that a corporate executive would go to jail if he or she played by the same rules as your congressman. In the real world it's called bribery, extortion and kickbacks while inside the Beltway it's standard operating procedure otherwise known as backroom deals, compromise and concessions.

The Health Care bill resembles a policy racket as elected officials send staffers (or runners) to extort the best deal they can in exchange for their vote.

Party leaders are like bookies who extend time, credit or favors to their wavering members.

The president is said to be disgusted with the "ugly process" of making deals, but it's unlikely that the hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks will be deleted.

Even the president has given a nod to the Louisiana Purchase ($300 million to secure the vote of Senator Mary Landrieu.)

Read more here...

Congress Proposes Ban on Toilets

2010-03-13T10:09:00.000-08:00

Dateline 2030

A Congressional committee studying the benefits of recycling has proposed new legislation to deal with the nation’s dwindling water supply.

The bill under consideration would ban the use of all privately owned toilets.

Said one staffer, “Flushing toilets are an unsustainable use of a critical national resource.”

If enacted, Americans will be required to recycle their toilets at a government approved facility.

Congress has authorized payment of $100.00 and a chamber pot for each toilet recycled.

Toilets on Capitol Hill are considered public, and therefore exempt from the proposed legislation.

Fox News commented, “The exemption is fitting since Congress has perfected the art of dumping its load on the American people.”

A Dying Empire

2010-02-28T15:58:00.001-08:00

Americans live in a warfare/welfare state that is the insidious design of neo-socialists and neo-conservatives.

I say insidious by Webster's definition in that our condition developed so gradually as to be well established before becoming apparent.

This was not the vision of Washington and Jefferson.

Along the way, we heeded not the warnings of patriots and statesmen.

Historians like to conjecture how the Founders would perceive the current state of our union.

They would be appalled.

Pat Buchanan wonders how conservatives got roped into the Wilsonian view of a Pax Americana reminiscent of the old Roman Empire.

Some would say that basing U.S. troops in 148 countries is an insurance policy for American security.

A true conservative would ask whether our army exists to defend America, or protect the world.

Pat Buchanan writes: How could conservatives whose defining virtue is prudence and who pride themselves on following the lamp of experience have been taken into camp by the hustlers and hucksters of empire?

Read more here.

Liberals the Intolerant Ones

2010-02-28T14:39:00.000-08:00

Curious how liberals love to demonize Republicans as the party of intolerance when, in fact, the left is intolerant of anyone who doesn't agree with them.

Bi-partisanship means that you not oppose the incremental creep of their socialist agenda.

Socialist? Yes, I said it. However you label it--liberal, progressive or socialist--the grand design is taken right out of the Manifesto.

Of course, a central point of the agenda is atheism which translates to an unforgiving intolerance of religion.

David Limbaugh writes: In their penchant for projection, leftists accuse conservatives and Republicans of intolerance, when in fact, their own intolerance dominates the issues of freedom of speech and religion.

Read more here.

Patriot Act Extended

2010-02-28T13:07:00.000-08:00

Remember when the Democrats railed against the Patriot Act; chastised and condemned President Bush for violating the privacy rights of American citizens?

Those same Democrats who made a campaign issue of national security have authorized--with the signature of President Obama--a one year extension of the security measures.

Read more here.

Where is the Republican Plan?

2010-02-28T11:47:00.000-08:00

They have been painted as the Party of No. They are obstructionists without a plan, or a vision, and no ideas to contrast.

It must be frustrating for Democrats to not have anything of substance to pin on the opposition party.

Where is the Republican plan on health care, the war on terror, job growth?

To their advantage, Republicans really don't need a plan. It's so much easier to let Democrats sink as a party in the quicksand of power.

Pat Buchanan writes that Republicans are conveniently united in what they are against, but come 2012 a different strategy will be in order.

In 2012, the party of Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul will have to have answers.

Read more of Buchanan's observations here.

Saying 'No' is a Strategy

2010-02-28T11:45:00.000-08:00

What did you think of the dog and pony show (emceed by President Obama) otherwise known as the great healthcare summit?

Why did he even invite the Republicans? Rather, why did the Republicans agree to participate?

It was as if the Democrats wanted the Republicans to be seen, but not heard.

This show of bipartisanship is all smoke and mirrors. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN, "A bill can be bipartisan without bipartisan votes."

Democrats are prepared to ramrod a bill through both houses of Congress, and President Obama is ready to sign it.

The nifty little secret is that the Democrats don't even need Republican votes to pass a bill, but they would like the political cover of a Republican stamp of approval.

Obama and his party would prefer the public's wrath be directed at both sides of the aisle.

Republicans are right to just say no. It is, after all, an effective strategy. Draw clear lines of distinction and let the voters decide.

As Ann Coulter succinctly noted: Republicans can't stop the Democrats from socializing health care: They are a tiny minority party in both the House and the Senate. (Note to America: You might want to keep this in mind next time you go to the polls.)

Read more here.

Americans Fear Big Government

2010-02-27T22:00:00.000-08:00

Washington (CNN) – A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.

Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.

Read more here.

White House Runs From Climategate

2009-12-01T07:42:00.000-08:00

The Hill

The White House on Monday made exceptionally clear that it wants nothing to do with the furor over documents that global warming skeptics say prove the phenomenon is not a threat.

Despite the incident, which rocked international headlines last week, climate science is sound, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stressed this afternoon, and the White House nonetheless believes "climate change is happening."

"I don't think that's anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore," he said during Monday's press briefing.

Climate change skeptics have asserted over the past week that the publication of more than 1,000 private e-mails and documents once housed in the University of East Anglia's computer system refutes most modern global warming evidence.

(Read more here.)

Great Debate Begins

2009-12-01T07:01:00.000-08:00

AP

Democrats called it a historic opportunity. Republicans called it a sham.

Long-awaited debate over President Barack Obama's health care overhaul kicked off in the Senate with lawmakers trading bitter partisan words over the measure to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy.

The legislative struggle is expected to last for weeks in a test that pits GOP senators determined not to give ground against Senate Democrats determined to deliver on Obama's signature issue.

(Read more here.)

Illegals Covered by Health Bill

2009-12-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

Washington Times

Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants could receive health care coverage from their employers under the bills winding their way through Congress, despite President Obama's explicit pledge that illegal immigrants would not benefit.

The House bill mandates, and the Senate bill strongly encourages, businesses to extend health care coverage to all employees. But the bills do not have exemptions to screen out illegal immigrants, who usually obtain jobs by using false identities and are indistinguishable from legal workers.

(Read more here.)

Dem Questions Afghan Policy

2009-12-01T06:49:00.000-08:00

The Hill

The chief architect of a bill to increase taxes to pay for the Afghanistan war said he didn't believe adding troops would yield much benefit.

"The problem is you can have the best policy in the world but if you don't have the tools to implement it it isn't worth a bean bag,"
Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.), the House Appropriations Committee chairman, told CNN on Sunday.

President Barack Obama is expected to announce on Tuesday he will add 30,000 troops to the war effort in Afghanistan to stem the rise of Taliban and to pursue al-Qaeda.

But Obey said supporting a corrupt Afghan government by adding troops amounted to a "fool's errand."

(Read more here.)

Is Tax and Spend the Cure?

2009-11-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

Michael Barone (The Examiner)

Double-digit. That hyphenated adjective has been used most often recently to describe October's 10.2 percent unemployment rate. But it can also be used to describe the federal budget deficit as a percentage of the gross domestic product. That precise number is not yet known, but it may turn out to have a more dire effect on our national life than October's unemployment rate.

In the fiscal year just ended, federal spending was nearly 25 percent of GDP while federal revenues slipped below 15 percent because of the financial crisis and recession. We have not seen a budget deficit of this magnitude since World War II, which surely was a greater challenge than recent economic troubles.

Apologists for the Obama administration argue that some 2009 spending, like that on financial bailouts, is nonrecurring. True, but as the Congressional Budget Office has reported, the trajectory of administration spending and revenue is pushing the annual deficit toward $1,000,000,000,000 -- that's $1 trillion -- for the next decade.

(Read more here.)

Obama Weak Like Carter

2009-11-23T07:40:00.000-08:00

Der Spiegel

When he entered office, US President Barack Obama promised to inject US foreign policy with a new tone of respect and diplomacy. His recent trip to Asia, however, showed that it's not working. A shift to Bush-style bluntness may be coming.

There were only a few hours left before Air Force One was scheduled to depart for the flight home. US President Barack Obama trip through Asia had already seen him travel 24,000 kilometers, sit through a dozen state banquets, climb the Great Wall of China and shake hands with Korean children. It was high time to take stock of the trip.

Barack Obama looked tired on Thursday, as he stood in the Blue House in Seoul, the official residence of the South Korean president. He also seemed irritable and even slightly forlorn. The CNN cameras had already been set up. But then Obama decided not to play along, and not to answer the question he had already been asked several times on his trip: what did he plan to take home with him? Instead, he simply said "thank you, guys," and disappeared. David Axelrod, senior advisor to the president, fielded the journalists' questions in the hallway of the Blue House instead, telling them that the public's expectations had been "too high."

The mood in Obama's foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The "first Pacific president," as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.

Upon taking office, Obama said that he wanted to listen to the world, promising respect instead of arrogance. But Obama's currency isn't as strong as he had believed. Everyone wants respect, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Interests, not emotions, dominate the world of realpolitik. The Asia trip revealed the limits of Washington's new foreign policy: Although Obama did not lose face in China and Japan, he did appear to have lost some of his initial stature.

In Tokyo, the new center-left government even pulled out of its participation in a mission which saw the Japanese navy refueling US warships in the Indian Ocean as part of the Afghanistan campaign. In Beijing, Obama failed to achieve any important concessions whatsoever. There will be no binding commitments from China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A revaluation of the Chinese currency, which is kept artificially weak, has been postponed. Sanctions against Iran? Not a chance. Nuclear disarmament? Not an issue for the Chinese.

The White House did not even stand up for itself when it came to the question of human rights in China. The president, who had said only a few days earlier that freedom of expression is a universal right, was coerced into attending a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, at which questions were forbidden. Former US President George W. Bush had always managed to avoid such press conferences.

A look back in time reveals the differences. When former President Bill Clinton went to China in June 1998, Beijing wanted to impress the Americans. A press conference in the Great Hall of the People, broadcast on television as a 70-minute live discussion, became a sensation the world over. Clinton mentioned the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when the government used tanks against protestors. But then President Jiang Zemin defended the tough approach taken by the Chinese Communists. At the end of the exchange, the Chinese president praised the debate and said: "I believe this is democracy!"

Obama visited a new China, an economic power that is now making its own demands. America should clean up its government finances, and the weak dollar is unacceptable, the head of the Chinese banking authority said, just as Obama's plane was about to land.

Obama's new foreign policy has also been relatively unsuccessful elsewhere, with even friends like Israel leaving him high and dry. For the government of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, peace is only conceivable under its terms. Netanyahu has rejected Obama's call for a complete moratorium on the construction of settlements. As a result, Obama has nothing to offer the Palestinians and the Syrians. "We thought we had some leverage," says Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel under the Clinton administration and now an advisor to Obama. "But that proved to be an illusion."

Even the president seems to have lost his faith in a genial foreign policy. The approach that was being used in Afghanistan this spring, with its strong emphasis on civilian reconstruction, is already being changed. "We're searching for an exit strategy," said a staff member with the National Security Council on the sidelines of the Asia trip.

An end to diplomacy is also taking shape in Washington's policy toward Tehran. It is now up to Iran, Obama said, to convince the world that its nuclear power is peaceful. While in Asia, Obama mentioned "consequences" unless it followed his advice. This puts the president, in his tenth month in office, where Bush began -- with threats. "Time is running out," Obama said in Korea. It was the same phrase Bush used against former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, shortly before he sent in the bombers.

There are many indications that the man in charge at the White House will take a tougher stance in the future. Obama's advisors fear a comparison with former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, even more than with Bush. Prominent Republicans have already tried to liken Obama to the humanitarian from Georgia, who lost in his bid to win a second term, because voters felt that he was too soft. "Carter tried weakness and the world got tougher and tougher because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators, when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead," Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, recently said. And then he added: "This does look a lot like Jimmy Carter."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Debt Crisis Looming

2009-11-23T07:29:00.000-08:00

The New York Times

The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.’s on terms that seem too good to be true.

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

(Read more here.)

End the Fed

2009-11-23T07:20:00.000-08:00

AP

Suddenly the Federal Reserve is everybody's punching bag.

Strip the Fed of its bank regulation powers, some in Congress are demanding. Get probing audits of its behind-the-scenes operations, others say.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is always fair game for criticism and second-guessing, usually over interest rate actions. But this year the criticism is much broader as Congress responds to widespread public anger that the Fed bailed out Wall Street but not ordinary Americans, and with unemployment in double digits.

(Read more here.)

Obama Ignores 10th Amendment

2009-11-23T07:15:00.000-08:00

Gene Healy (CATO Institute)

Not yet a year into his administration, Obama's record on 10th Amendment issues is already clear: He'll let the states have their way when their policies please blue team sensibilities and he'll call in the feds when they don't. Thus, he'll grant California a waiver to allow it to raise auto emissions standards, but he'll bring the hammer down when the state tries to cut payments to unionized health care workers.

That's not how it's supposed to work. As Madison explained in Federalist 45, the powers delegated to the federal government were "few and defined," to be exercised mainly on "external objects" like foreign policy and international trade. All else — criminal law, marriage, social policy — remained with the states or the people.

(Read more here.)

KSM Should Face Military Court

2009-11-18T09:57:00.000-08:00

Patrick J. Buchanan

Are we at war — or not?

For if we are at war, why is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed headed for trial in federal court in the Southern District of New York? Why is he entitled to a presumption of innocence and all of the constitutional protections of a U.S. citizen?

Is it possible we have done an injustice to this man by keeping him locked up all these years without trial? For that is what this trial implies — that he may not be guilty.

And if we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that KSM was complicit in mass murder, by what right do we send Predators and Special Forces to kill his al-Qaida comrades wherever we find them? For none of them has been granted a fair trial.

When the Justice Department sets up a task force to wage war on a crime organization like the Mafia or MS-13, no U.S. official has a right to shoot Mafia or gang members on sight. No one has a right to bomb their homes. No one has a right to regard the possible death of their wives and children in an attack as acceptable collateral damage.

Yet that is what we do to al-Qaida, to which KSM belongs.

We conduct those strikes in good conscience because we believe we are at war. But if we are at war, what is KSM doing in a U.S. court?

Minoru Genda, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, a naval base on U.S. soil, when America was at peace, and killed as many Americans as the Sept. 11 hijackers, was not brought here for trial. He was an enemy combatant under the Geneva Conventions and treated as such.

When Maj. Andre, the British spy and collaborator of Benedict Arnold, was captured, he got a military tribunal, after which he was hanged. When Gen. Andrew Jackson captured two British subjects in Spanish Florida aiding renegade Indians, Jackson had both tried and hanged on the spot.

Enemy soldiers who commit atrocities are not sent to the United States for trial. Under the Geneva Conventions, soldiers who commit atrocities are shot when caught.

When and where did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed acquire his right to a trial by a jury of his peers in a U.S. court?

When John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, alleged collaborators like Mary Surratt were tried before a military tribunal and hanged at Ft. McNair. When eight German saboteurs were caught in 1942 after being put ashore by U-boat, they were tried in secret before a military commission and executed, with the approval of the Supreme Court. What makes KSM special?

Is the Obama administration aware of what it is risking by not turning KSM over to a military tribunal in Guantanamo?

How does Justice handle a defense demand for a change of venue, far from lower Manhattan, where the jury pool was most deeply traumatized by Sept. 11? Would not KSM and his co-defendants, if a change of venue is denied, have a powerful argument for overturning any conviction on appeal?

Were not KSM’s Miranda rights impinged when he was not only not told he could have a lawyer on capture, but that his family would be killed and he would be water-boarded if he refused to talk?

And if all the evidence against the five defendants comes from other than their own testimony under duress, do not their lawyers have a right to know when, where, how and from whom Justice got the evidence to prosecute them? Does KSM have the right to confront all witnesses against him, even if they are al-Qaida turncoats or U.S. spies still transmitting information to U.S. intelligence?

There have been reports that in the trials of those convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing, sources and methods were compromised, weakening our security for the second attack on Sept. 11.

If the trial is held in lower Manhattan, how much security will be needed to protect against a car bomber who wants the world to see a mighty blow struck against the Great Satan? And if, as some suggest, the trial should be held on Governor’s Island, would that not make the United States look like a nation under siege?

What do we do if the case against KSM is thrown out because the government refuses to reveal sources or methods, or if he gets a hung jury, or is acquitted, or has his conviction overturned?

In America, trials often become games, where the prosecution, though it has truth on its side, loses because it inadvertently breaks one of the rules.

The Obamaites had best pray that does not happen, for they may be betting his presidency on the outcome of the game about to begin.

Sign the Savage Petition

2009-11-18T09:56:00.000-08:00

In May 2009, Michael Savage was added to a list of murderers, terrorists and others banned from the United Kingdom.

Michael Savage was the first victim, but others – maybe even you – will soon follow. Fighting back can work, and it must be done!

Sign the Michael Savage "Free Speech" petition here.

AP Going Rogue?

2009-11-18T09:49:00.000-08:00

Fox News

Sarah Palin is no normal politician, and at the Associated Press, apparently "Going Rogue" is no normal book.

When the former Republican vice presidential candidate and former Alaska governor wrote her autobiography, the AP found a copy before its release date and assigned 11 people to fact check all 432 pages.

Reviewing books and holding public figures accountable is at the core of good journalism, but the Associated Press' treatment of Palin's book seems an unprecedented move at the wire service.

(Read more here.)

No Recovery in Jobs

2009-11-18T08:30:00.000-08:00

NY Daily News

Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.

This is very bad news but we must face facts. Many of the lost jobs are gone forever, including construction jobs, finance jobs and manufacturing jobs. Recent studies suggest that a quarter of U.S. jobs are fully out-sourceable over time to other countries.

(Read more here.)

Health Reform Will Increase Costs

2009-11-18T08:18:00.000-08:00

POLITICO

Democrats have promised that health reform would reduce health care costs, but legislation the House passed last week would increase costs over the next decade by $289 billion. By 2019, health costs would rise to 21.1 percent of GDP compared to 20.8 under current law, according to an actuarial report prepared by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

(Read more here.)

China: The New Superpower

2009-11-15T20:33:00.000-08:00

McClatchy Newspapers

When President Barack Obama lands here Sunday night in China's largest city, he'll find many of its 20 million people intrigued by him and welcoming, but hardly deferential, and some openly skeptical of his promises of change.

In this, the mainland's most Western-minded and economically dynamic center, where Obama will deliver remarks on Monday before moving on to the capital of Beijing, many Shanghainese see the global balance of power shifting: China is ascending, while America may have peaked.

"The U.S. is a very big and strong country, military-wise, economy-wise. It's still important," said Zhou Jun, 38, who runs a garment business in Shanghai. "But compared to before, China has a lot more influence on the world."

(Read more here.)

China Trade Policy Risky

2009-11-15T20:17:00.000-08:00

London Telegraph

Far from taking over as the engine of growth from an exhausted West, China is making matters worse. Its "beggar-thy-neighbour" policies continue to play havoc with global trade and risk tipping the world into a second leg of the Great Recession.

President Obama said before going to China this week that Asia can no longer live by shipping goods to Americans already in debt to their ears. "We have reached one of those rare inflection points in history where we have the opportunity to take a different path," he said. Failure to take that path will "put enormous strains" on America's ties to China. Is that a threat?

(Read more here.)

APEC Presses Obama

2009-11-15T20:05:00.000-08:00

London Telegraph

President Barack Obama has promised Asia's creditor nations that Washington will not let US borrowing spiral out of control, vowing a major drive to cut the budget deficit and restore global confidence in the US dollar.

The assurance comes amid growing doubts across the world over the wisdom of White House spending plans. The US Congressional Budget Office expects the deficit to remain around $1.8 trillion as far ahead as 2019 under current plans, pushing the US national debt into the danger zone.

(Read more here.)

China Cog in U.S. Recovery

2009-11-15T19:36:00.001-08:00

International Herald Tribune

When President Obama visits China for the first time on Sunday, he will, in many ways, be assuming the role of profligate spender coming to pay his respects to his banker.

That stark fact — China is the largest foreign lender to the United States — has changed the core of the relationship between the United States and the only country with a reasonable chance of challenging its status as the world’s sole superpower.

(Read more here.)

Budget Hawks Target Deficit

2009-11-15T19:35:00.000-08:00

Investor's Business Daily

In the midst of a debate to spend $1 trillion on a new health care entitlement as federal debt spirals, reality may be about to bite.

Moderate Senate Democrats are warning that they won't vote to raise the nation's $12.1 trillion debt ceiling next month, unless a strong deficit commission is put in place.

(Read more here.)

Deficit Worries Democrats

2009-11-13T10:39:00.000-08:00

POLITICO

President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year's State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay other new domestic spending beyond jobs programs, according to top aides involved in the planning.

The president's plan, which the officials said was under discussion before this month’s Democratic election setbacks, represents both a practical and a political calculation by this White House.

On the practical side, Obama has spent more money on new programs in nine months than Bill Clinton did in eight years, pushing the annual deficit to $1.4 trillion. This leaves little room for big spending initiatives.

(Read more here.)

Shariah Law is Here

2009-11-12T14:35:00.000-08:00

Pamela Geller (American Thinker)

In surveying the cultural carnage in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on a military installation in U.S. history, it bears noting that there have been seismic shifts in America. When America was free of the shackles of Islam, say, fifty years ago, the current response to such an attack by an enemy faction would have been unthinkable.

I have watched in abject horror the elites' stunning reaction to this act of war. The denial, the submission, the excuses, the dodging, the self-flagellation, the shame -- the deceiving of the American people by the media, the military, society, law enforcement, authorities and politicians, all the way up to and including the White House -- amounts to the enforcement of Shariah law.

(Read more here.)

Ft. Hood Attack Act of War

2009-11-12T14:06:00.001-08:00

Clare M. Lopez (Human Events)

A week after a Muslim jihadi gunned down more than 40 fellow citizens at Ft. Hood, Texas, America’s national security leadership still won’t admit that the attack had anything to do with Islam.

By failing to acknowledge that connection, those with a constitutional duty to defend this nation “against all enemies foreign and domestic” consistently substitute a policy of political correctness at the expense of military readiness.

The fact is that the 5 November 2009 attack that took the lives of thirteen American patriots was not just an act of terrorism: it was an act of war.

(Read more here.)

CO2 Does Not Cause Global Warming

2009-11-12T02:13:00.000-08:00

London Telegraph

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes and is not responsible for climate change, a scientist has claimed.

Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist from Adelaide University, argues that a recent rise in temperature around the world is caused by solar cycles and other "extra terrestrial" forces.

He said carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, widely blamed for global warming, is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes erupting.

Prof Plimer said the world has experienced three periods of cooling since 1850 and furthermore carbon dioxide was increasing during many of those cooler periods.

(Read more here.)

Obama Repeats Carter's Mistakes

2009-11-07T13:53:00.000-08:00

Oliver North (Townhall)

Thirty years ago this week, a group of Iranian "students" shouting "death to America" stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking nearly 100 hostages -- among them 65 Americans.

Though foreign national employees and some Americans were released within a few weeks, the remaining 52 were held for 444 days.

For the American people, it was an introduction to militant Islam.

For then-President Jimmy Carter, intent on "engaging" the radical regime that had replaced Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, it was a disaster.

The Obama administration appears to have missed the lessons of this debacle.

(Read more here.)

Opt Out Plan is Scam

2009-10-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

Ann Coulter (Human Events)

The Democrats' all-new "opt out" idea for health care reform is the latest fig leaf for a total government takeover of the health care system.

The most important fact about the "opt out" scheme allegedly allowing states to decline government health insurance is that a state can't "opt out" of paying for it. All 50 states will pay for it. A state legislature can only opt out of allowing its own citizens to receive the benefits of a federal program they're paying for.

It's like a movie theater offering a "money back guarantee" and then explaining, you don't get your money back, but you don't have to stay and watch the movie if you don't like it. That's not what most people are thinking when they hear the words "opt out." The term more likely to come to mind is "scam."

(Read more here.)

The America We Have Lost

2009-10-24T11:14:00.000-07:00

Pat Buchanan

In the brief age of Obama, we have had "truthers," "birthers," tea party activists and town-hall dissenters.

Comes now, the "Oath Keepers." And who might they be?

Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are "either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia."

Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey.

"The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here," says founding father Stewart Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer. "My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can't do it without them.

"We say if the American people decide it's time for a revolution, we'll fight with you."

And if the Pelosi-Reid progressives went postal over town-hall protesters, calling them "un-American," "Nazis" and "evil-mongers," one can imagine what they will do with the Oath Keepers.

As with Jimmy Carter's long-range psychoanalysis of Joe Wilson, the reflexive reaction of the mainstream media will likely be that these are militia types, driven to irrationality because America has a black president.

Yet, the establishment's reaction seems more problematic for the republic than anything the Oath Keepers are up to. For our political and media elite seem to have lost touch with the nation and to be wedded to a vision of America divorced from reality.

Progressives are the folks who, in the 1960s, could easily understand that urban riots that took scores of lives and destroyed billions in property were an inevitable reaction to racism, poverty and despair. They could empathize with the rage of campus radicals who burned down the ROTC building and bombed the Pentagon.

The "dirty, immoral war in Vietnam" explains why the "finest generation we have ever produced" is behaving like this, they said. We must deal with the "root causes" of social disorder.

Yet, they cannot comprehend what would motivate Middle America to distrust its government, for it surely does, as Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal:

"Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated. Big majorities of whites say the past year's turmoil has diminished their confidence in government, corporations and the financial industry. ... Asked which institution they trust most to make economic decisions in their interest, a plurality of whites older than 30 pick 'none' – a grim statement."

Is all this due to Obama's race?

Even Obama laughs at that. As he told David Letterman, I was already black by the time I was elected. And he not only got a higher share of the white vote than Kerry or Gore, a third of white voters, who said in August 2008 that race was an important consideration in voting, said they were going to vote for Obama.

With black voters going 24 to 1 for Obama, he almost surely won more votes than he lost because of his race.

Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.

Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993 and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.

In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.

They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.

They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.

They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.

America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

Obama Must Own This

2009-10-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

Peggy Noonan (WSJ)

At a certain point, a president must own a presidency. For George W. Bush that point came eight months in, when 9/11 happened. From that point on, the presidency—all his decisions, all the credit and blame for them—was his. The American people didn't hold him responsible for what led up to 9/11, but they held him responsible for everything after it. This is part of the reason the image of him standing on the rubble of the twin towers, bullhorn in hand, on Sept.14, 2001, became an iconic one. It said: I'm owning it.

President Obama, in office a month longer than Bush was when 9/11 hit, now owns his presidency. Does he know it? He too stands on rubble, figuratively speaking—a collapsed economy, high and growing unemployment, two wars. Everyone knows what he's standing on. You can almost see the smoke rising around him. He's got a bullhorn in his hand every day.

It's his now. He gets the credit and the blame. How do we know this? The American people are telling him.

(Read more here.)

Obama Continues Poll Slide

2009-10-23T10:53:00.000-07:00

London Telegraph

The decline in Barack Obama's popularity since July has been the steepest of any president at the same stage of his first term for more than 50 years.

His current approval rating – hovering just above the level that would make re-election an uphill struggle – is close to the bottom for newly-elected president. Mr Obama entered the White House with a soaring 78 per cent approval rating.

The bad polling news came as Mr Obama returned to the campaign trail to prevent his Democratic party losing two governorships next month in states in which he defeated Senator John McCain in last November's election.

(Read more here.)

$13 Trillion Debt

2009-10-22T17:00:00.000-07:00

POLITICO

The Senate must soon increase the national debt limit to above $13 trillion — and Democrats are looking for political cover.

Knowing they will face unyielding GOP attacks for voting to increase the eye-popping debt, Democrats are considering attaching a debt increase provision to a must-pass bill, possibly the Defense Department spending bill, according to Democratic and Republican sources.

Adding it to the defense bill would allow Democrats to argue that they voted for the measure to help troops in harm’s way — and downplay that their vote also expanded the limit for how much money the country can borrow.

(Read more here.)

Dems May Defeat Health Reform

2009-10-22T16:41:00.000-07:00

My Way News (AP)

The Democrats' control of a hefty majority in the Senate - plus the House - would suggest that President Barack Obama is within reach of overhauling the nation's health care system this fall.

But the numbers mask a more complicated reality: Obama and Democratic leaders have modest leverage over several pivotal Senate Democrats who are more concerned about their next election or feel they have little to lose by opposing their party's hierarchy.

One is still smarting from being forced to abandon next year's election. Another had to leave the Democratic Party to stay in office. And some are from states that Obama lost badly last year.

(Read more here.)

White House in Campaign Mode

2009-10-20T10:28:00.000-07:00

Chicago Sun-Times

Have you heard the news? President Obama inherited an economic mess from the Bush administration.

You'd think it's October 2008, the final month in the Obama presidential candidacy, rather than October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency. Yet the Obama White House is in full campaign mode -- maybe because it needs to mask the shortcomings of the Obama presidency.

(Read more here.)

US Buried in Debt

2009-10-18T18:25:00.000-07:00

(AP)

What is $1.42 trillion? It's more than the total national debt for the first 200 years of the Republic, more than the entire economy of India, almost as much as Canada's, and more than $4,700 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

It's the federal budget deficit for 2009, more than three times the most red ink ever amassed in a single year.

And, some economists warn, unless the government makes hard decisions to cut spending or raise taxes, it could be the seeds of another economic crisis.

(Read more here.)

World Sees Obama's Soft Side

2009-10-18T17:45:00.000-07:00

Wesley Pruden (Washington Times)

A soft answer can sometimes turn away wrath, but not always, and presidents have to be wary of showing timidity and weakness in the face of a bully. This is the expensive lesson the tinhorns of the world are teaching Barack Obama. So far he is not an honors student.

Throwing Poland and the Czech Republic under that celebrated bus, a cramped space already brimming with old friends, pastors, mentors, tutors and even members of his own family who are no longer useful, was costly. It's never easy to be a friend of America, and Mr. Obama is making it impossible to be one.

(Read more here.)

Obama Debt 80% GDP

2009-10-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

Politifact

Sen. Judd Gregg, a Republican senator from New Hampshire, has been making the rounds on political news programs this week, criticizing President Barack Obama's budget as too costly.

Obama's budget plan would "take national debt up to about 80 percent of gross national product. ... Historically, it's been about 40 percent."

At 80 percent, Gregg has been fond of saying this week, the United States would be getting into "banana republic" territory.

(Read more here.)

Big Media Smears Limbaugh

2009-10-15T16:06:00.000-07:00

London Telegraph

Which public figure can be quoted as having said something bigoted and disgusting and it doesn’t matter whether he did or not because he might have? Who can Big Media brand a racist without checking the facts? Who has to prove he did not say something racist, rather than the accuser proving he did?

A pat on the back for anyone who guessed the answer: Rush Limbaugh.

Trouble is, he didn’t say these outrageous things. And it wasn’t difficult to check...

(Read more here.)

Are You a Dittohead Racist?

2009-10-14T07:36:00.000-07:00

Lloyd Marcus (American Thinker)

I have been a faithful Rush Limbaugh radio show listener for almost 20 years. I have never heard Rush make one racist comment. As a matter of fact, I am a black man who has been inspired and encouraged by Rush on numerous occasions. Rush is part of a partnership bidding to purchase an NFL football team. I am highly offended watching the liberal media's all out assault on this great American. In their efforts to block Rush from ownership of a team, the liberal media and the Left are attempting to brand Rush as a racist.

If Rush is a racist, then isn't it logical to assume that we, his listeners, are equally guilty for tolerating his racism?

(Read more here.)

Let the Rationing Begin

2009-10-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

The American Spectator

The Baucus bill includes specific, overt, government health care rationing, which the Obama Administration has already begun to implement under existing legal authority.

Doctors will just retreat from providing care for serious illnesses. They will "specialize" in low resource care for the more healthy. And the truly sick will discover that finding a doctor for necessary health care will become quite difficult, if they can find one at all. President Obama has said if you like your doctor you can keep him. But the question is, under the incentives of the Obama health plan, will your doctor keep you.

(Read more here.)

Central Banks Dump Dollar

2009-10-14T06:32:00.000-07:00

New York Post

Ben Bernanke's dollar crisis went into a wider mode yesterday as the greenback was shockingly upstaged by the euro and yen, both of which can lay claim to the world title as the currency favored by central banks as their reserve currency.

Over the last three months, banks put 63 percent of their new cash into euros and yen -- not the greenbacks -- a nearly complete reversal of the dollar's onetime dominance for reserves, according to Barclays Capital. The dollar's share of new cash in the central banks was down to 37 percent -- compared with two-thirds a decade ago.

Bernanke could go down in economic history as the man who killed the greenback on the operating table.

(Read more here.)

Democrats Now Party of Rich

2009-10-14T05:46:00.000-07:00

USA Today

Democratic members of the House of Representatives now represent most of the nation's wealthiest people, a sharp turnaround from the long-standing dominance that Republicans have held over affluent districts.

A USA TODAY analysis of new Census data found that Democrats represent a far different constituency today than they did in 2005, when they were the minority in the House, or in 1990, when they were the majority.

The analysis found that Democrats have attracted educated, affluent whites who had tended previously to vote Republican.

(Read more here.)

Healthcare is Already Rationed

2009-10-11T19:24:00.001-07:00

Doyle McManus (LA Times)

Neither Republicans nor Democrats like to admit it, but limits are part of the system -- with or without reform.

Republicans pretend that our current system doesn't stop anyone from getting all the care they need. Democrats pretend that efforts to control costs won't limit medical choices and treatment. But most real-world consumers know better: There is no free lunch.

It's true that we don't ration healthcare directly. If you're willing to pay cash, you can buy all the healthcare you want...

(Read more here.)

Fed Ignores Falling Dollar

2009-10-11T19:07:00.000-07:00

WSJ

The biggest story in the world economy is the continuing fall of the U.S. dollar, or at least it is everywhere outside of Washington, D.C., the place most responsible for its declining value. For good reason, the world is wondering if America has cast the dollar adrift.

The value of any currency is ultimately determined by the supply and demand for that currency. And the problem for the dollar at the moment is that there is a much larger supply of dollars than there is global demand for them. The solution rests not in Manila, Bangkok or Paris, but in Washington.

(Read more here.)

Dollar Needs Supply-Side Therapy

2009-10-11T18:02:00.000-07:00

Larry Kudlow (CNBC)

We need a stable dollar to stop inflationary pressures. And we also need lower tax rates to spur the economy, help it grow, and reduce unemployment. I’ve been calling this the Mundell-Laffer supply-side solution, after Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Mundell and my mentor, former Reagan advisor Arthur Laffer. It was put to work with great success nearly thirty years ago to stop stagflation. It also launched a twenty year bull market recovery.

This supply-side shock therapy would save the dollar. And it would put real long-term torque into the recovery.

(Read more here.)

Hire America!

2009-10-11T15:46:00.000-07:00

Patrick J. Buchanan (Human Events)

Over 800,000 people quit the labor force in September. They packed it in. They stopped looking for work. That is six times the number who quit looking in August and five times the monthly average of those who have given up the search for work in the past year.

Yet, with nearly 25 million Americans unemployed, or no longer looking for work, or in low-wage part-time jobs, 8.5 million U.S. jobs are believed to be held by illegal aliens who broke into the country or overstayed their visas.

Why is this not a matter of national outrage?

(Read more here.)

What Global Warming?

2009-10-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

BBC

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

(Read more here.)

Nobel Snubs Chinese Dissidents

2009-10-10T17:14:00.000-07:00

Breitbart

China's dissidents are voicing unease about President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, saying that the award could have been effective in promoting human rights in their country.

Some in China's democracy movement are outraged at what they see as a weak stance on rights by Obama, who the same week as Friday's announcement avoided a meeting with Tibet's exiled Dalai Lama that would have upset Beijing.

(Read more here.)

Peace Prize Fallout

2009-10-09T23:23:00.000-07:00

London Times

Gasps echoed through the Nobel Hall in Oslo as Barack Obama was unveiled as the winner of the 2009 Peace Prize, sparking a global outpouring of incredulity and praise in unequal measure.

In a clear swipe at his predecessor, George W. Bush, the committee praised the “change in the international climate” that the President had brought.

International reaction ranged from delight to disbelief.

The Nobel Peace Prize is a notoriously difficult award to predict, but yesterday's decision was clearly a political choice, with three of the past six peace awards going to Bush adversaries.

(Read more here.)

Nobel Partisan Prize

2009-10-09T09:49:00.000-07:00

London Times

The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself.

Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.

(Read more here.)

Peace Sur(prize)

2009-10-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

WSJ

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama, so early in his presidency, is bound to reignite criticism of the workings of the Nobel committee.

The deadline for nominations for the prize was Feb. 1 -- two weeks after Mr. Obama was inaugurated.

"So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far," former Polish President Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, said Friday. "He is still at an early stage."

The committee has been criticized for political bias, especially after it awarded the Nobel to Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Al Gore in 2007 -- moves that were both seen as rebukes to the then U.S. president, George W. Bush.

(Read more here.)

A Prize for What?

2009-10-09T06:01:00.000-07:00

Reuters

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday to U.S. President Barack Obama had many puzzled Americans scratching their heads.

"It would be wonderful if I could think why he won," said Claire Sprague, 82, a retired English professor as she walked her dog in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. "They wanted to give him an honor I guess but I can't think what for."

When told of Obama's win Robert Schultz, 62, a retired civil servant and Vietnam veteran, asked: "For doing what?

(Read more here.)

Britain Leans Conservative

2009-10-09T05:16:00.000-07:00

London Financial Times

David Cameron on Thursday blamed Britain’s economic crisis on a Labour-led era of “big government”, in a sombre and sometimes emotional speech aimed at convincing the nation he is a prime minister in waiting.

Mr Cameron warned that he was about to turn off the tap on public spending, and caused concern to some in the City when he said that “sometime soon” the country would have to stop “printing money” if it wanted to head off inflation.

(Read more here.)

GOP Warns of Sinking Dollar

2009-10-09T04:23:00.000-07:00

Reuters

Leading Republicans echoed Sarah Palin on Thursday in attacking President Barack Obama over the weakness of the U.S. dollar.

Analysts warn it is risky business playing politics with the U.S. currency, which has traditionally been off limits as a play to score points against political opponents.

That taboo appears to have been broken.

"We can see the effect of this in the price of gold, which hit a record high today in response to fears about the weakened dollar," Palin wrote on Facebook this week.

A weak dollar as representing a bad economy will be one of many lines of attack for Republicans against Obama and the Democrats...

(Read more here.)

Dems Propose Sick Tax

2009-10-08T14:14:00.000-07:00

Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

Faced with a need to scrounge for revenue to fund his plan for healthcare, President Barack Obama and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus have come up with a brilliant new idea: Tax the sick!

Obama and Baucus have singled out the sickest among the middle class for this heinous tax...

(Read more here.)

Dollar Under Assault

2009-10-08T09:36:00.000-07:00

POLITICO

It’s the biggest mystery in global finance right now: Who conducted a sneak attack on the U.S. dollar this week?

For American officials, the possibility of the dollar losing its long-term dominance in global commerce is a nightmare scenario, because it would likely mean sharply higher interest rates at home, and a declining ability to finance the U.S. debt.

(Read more here.)

GOParty Like it's 1994?

2009-10-08T06:18:00.000-07:00

WSJ

A big question hangs over American politics: Could next year be 1994 all over again?

That was the year a bitter debate over health care led to a disastrous congressional election for Democrats, in which they lost 54 House and 10 Senate seats and ceded control of both chambers to the Republicans.

Things have started to look similar under Democratic President Barack Obama...

(Read more here.)

Obama is Not Reagan

2009-10-07T23:52:00.000-07:00

Jean Kaufman (Weekly Standard)

Ronald Reagan believed in America.

One way he expressed this faith was through the image of "a shining city on a hill," a phrase Reagan uttered in one form or another in many of his speeches, including his 1989 Farewell Address in which he said, "I've spoken of the shining city all my political life." It was an expression with religious as well as historical origins, and referred to American exceptionalism.

You might say that Reagan believed in American exceptionalism, whereas Obama believes in Obama's exceptionalism...

(Read more here.)

Obama's Record Deficit

2009-10-07T08:49:00.000-07:00

Newsmax

The federal budget deficit tripled to a record $1.4 trillion for the 2009 fiscal year that ended last week, congressional analysts said Wednesday.

The Congressional Budget Office estimate, while expected, is bad news for the White House and its allies in Congress as they press ahead with healthcare overhaul legislation that could cost $900 billion over the next decade.

The previous record deficit was $459 billion and was set just last year.

(Read more here.)

Rangel Escapes Vote

2009-10-07T07:58:00.000-07:00

Newsmax

House Republicans came up short in a bid Wednesday to strip Rep. Charles B. Rangel, New York Democrat, of his post as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee because of mounting ethical problems.

The vote was 246-153, with two Democrats siding with the minority and 19 members voting "present."

Mr. Rangel faces allegations that he failed to report income from rental property in the Dominican Republic and at least $250,000 in a checking account...

(Read more here.)

Secret Plan to Dump Dollar

2009-10-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

AFP

The price of gold struck an all-time high at 1,038.65 dollars an ounce on Tuesday as the dollar fell on a reported plan by Gulf states to stop using the greenback for oil trading.

The dollar weakness appears to be related to secret talks about oil being priced in a basket of currencies including gold rather than the dollar, which has added to concerns about the future role of the dollar in international financial markets.

The dollar's future as the world's top currency was thrown into doubt on Tuesday as a report said Arab states had launched secret moves with China and Russia to stop using the greenback for oil trading.

Arab states have launched steps with China, Russia, Japan and France to stop using the dollar for oil trades...

(Read more here.)

The Independent

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil...

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil...

(Read more here.)

Sun Sets on California Dream

2009-10-04T17:07:00.000-07:00

UK Guardian

California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong?

California has a special place in the American psyche. It is the Golden State: a playground of the rich and famous with perfect weather. It symbolises a lifestyle of sunshine, swimming pools and the Hollywood dream factory.

But the state that was once held up as the epitome of the boundless opportunities of America has collapsed.

(Read more here.)

Consumers Demand Lower Prices

2009-10-04T16:51:00.000-07:00

My Way News (AP)

There has never been a better time to be a consumer. America is on sale.

The Great Recession has caused massive job losses and hardship for millions, but it has also fostered a shoppers' paradise. Anyone who still has the means to spend can find unheard of deals.

Prices on everything from clothes to coffee to cat food are dropping, some faster than they have in half a century. The two biggest purchases most people make - homes and new cars - are selling at steep price reductions.

"This is the new normal," says Donald Keprta, president of Dominick's, a supermarket chain in the Midwest, which just cut prices by as much as 30 percent on thousands of items. "We aren't going back."

(Read more here.)

Jobless Rate 17%

2009-10-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

AP

The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent in September, the highest since June 1983, as employers cut far more jobs than expected.

The report shows that the worst recession since the 1930s is still inflicting widespread pain and underscores one of the biggest threats to the nascent economic recovery: that consumers, worried about job losses and stagnant wages, will restrain spending. Consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of America's economy.

If laid-off workers who have settled for part-time work or have given up looking for new jobs are included, the unemployment rate rose to 17 percent...

(Read more here.)

Ahmadinejad's Jewish Roots

2009-10-03T08:12:00.000-07:00

London Telegraph

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's vitriolic attacks on the Jewish world hide an astonishing secret, evidence uncovered by The Daily Telegraph shows.

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.

A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

(Read more here.)

Obama's Olympic Failure

2009-10-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

London Times

There has been a growing narrative taking hold about Barack Obama’s presidency in recent weeks: that he is loved by many, but feared by none; that he is full of lofty vision, but is actually achieving nothing with his grandiloquence.

Chicago’s dismal showing today, after Mr Obama’s personal, impassioned last-minute pitch, is a stunning humiliation for this President. It cannot be emphasised enough how this will feed the perception that on the world stage he looks good — but carries no heft.

(Read more here.)

Reuters

U.S. President Barack Obama's politically risky Olympics gamble failed to bring home the gold on Friday, with the Olympics committee's refusal to grant the 2016 Summer Games to his hometown Chicago.

The president, whose even-tempered personality has earned him the nickname "No Drama Obama," broke from that mold to make an overnight dash from Washington to Copenhagen to personally lobby for Chicago.

(Read more here.)

China: The New Superpower

2009-10-01T09:54:00.000-07:00

London Daily Mail

Today, China will celebrate the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule with flowers, fireworks, performances and a huge military parade which will celebrate the country's new-found military might.

The regime has come an enormously long way in six decades, from a society of peasant collective farms, hidden from the world behind a veil of secrecy, to the world's fastest-growing economy, an industrial and military superpower-in-waiting.

But beneath today's orgy of celebrations that marks the anniversary lurks a disturbing reality. Mao's successors may have embraced cut-throat capitalism to a degree that makes even Western economists blanch. But the arrangements for the parade are a reminder that China remains a deeply authoritarian society.

(Read more here.)

Moore Denies Capitalism

2009-10-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

CNSNEWS

Documentary film director Michael Moore, who has become a millionaire thanks to the profits from his movies, told CNSNews.com that “capitalism did nothing” for him.

CNSNews.com spoke with Moore on the red carpet at the Uptown Theatre in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday night before the premiere of his upcoming documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story."

CNSNews.com asked: “Critics may say, when they see this movie, Michael Moore has amassed a fortune of over $50 million, some have said and –”

Moore said: “Really? Are you kidding me? Seriously? Wow. Well, capitalism did nothing for me, starting with my first film.”

(Read more here.)

Public Option Will Ration Care

2009-10-01T06:32:00.000-07:00

Scott Gottlieb (WSJ)

President Barack Obama deflects criticism that his health-care plan will bring on government rationing of medical care by arguing that insurance companies ration care. Everyone knows private payers limit access to some health care. But government does it in far more byzantine and arbitrary ways.

Consider the $450 billion Medicare program. It provides a model for—indeed its bureaucracy could well end up running—the "public option" health plan that Mr. Obama wants to offer all Americans under the age of 65. In recent years, Medicare's staff has been aggressively restricting coverage for costly treatments. Looking for ways to control spending on medical products—and preserve the illusory "trust fund" that pays Medicare claims—is what shapes the culture of the organization and motivates the agency's staff.

This often means limiting access to the costliest technologies. To do this Medicare relies on its rationing and pricing systems.

(Read more here.)

Dollar's End of Dominance

2009-09-30T06:27:00.000-07:00

Patrice Hill (Washington Times)

World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick warned that time is running out for the privileged role enjoyed by the American currency.

The dollar's status as the world's reserve currency has given the U.S. prestige and privileges that are unique in the world, lifting living standards by enabling Americans to borrow cheaply and consume far more than they produce with little consequence for decades.

The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar's place as the world's predominant reserve currency...

(Read more here.)

The Apologetic President

2009-09-29T16:45:00.000-07:00

Rep. Mike Pence (Human Events)

Less than fifty years ago, President John F. Kennedy pledged to support any friend and oppose any foe to ensure the survival of liberty. Throughout our nation's history, American presidents from across the political divide offered hope to those held captive by tyranny and reminded their captors that America’s cause was the cause of freedom. The question being asked by both friend and foe is whether the United States is still committed to that cause today.

President Obama’s first eight months on the world stage are deeply troubling. It is not just the repeated apologies for alleged American transgressions. We are witnessing a disturbing pattern that extends a hand of cooperation to our enemies while turning a cold shoulder to our friends and a blind eye to their suffering.

(Read more here.)

The Fall of Liberalism

2009-09-29T16:29:00.000-07:00

J. Robert Smith (American Thinker)

Less than a year into his presidency, Barack Obama's world grows bleaker. Liberalism's world is bleaker. At home and abroad, liberalism, as advanced by the President, is failing. Are we witnessing the beginnings of another historic event, loosely comparable to the fall of communism twenty years ago? Now the fall of liberalism?

(Read more here.)

The Emperor Exposed

2009-09-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

Thomas Lifson (American Thinker)

It is now abundantly clear that the image of Barack Obama sold to the American electorate was tightly edited, air-brushed, and exaggerated. He has worn a series of masks -- eloquent orator, brilliant scholar, centrist, and literary sensation. All of these masks are coming off as he copes with a job for which image will not suffice. For instance, hiding behind the eloquent orator mask is a guy who says "uhh" a lot when he is winging it, and who makes lots of factual and grammatical mistakes.

Now, thanks to Jack Cashill, the literary mask has been removed. Obama is a literary pretender. Case closed. The evidence is overwhelming that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Dreams from My Father, the book which established Obama's pose as a brilliant writer (and therefore a fine mind, in the estimation of many). The stylistic resemblance between the Dreams and Ayers' work is stunning.

(Read more here.)

Obama Jumps Shark

2009-09-29T14:16:00.000-07:00

Robert P. Kirchhoefer (The American Spectator)

Primetime is difficult. It can be incredibly unforgiving -- especially in this season of high-def politics. The exposure associated with 300 plus million viewers watching every presidential miscue has never been greater. Yet, primetime is the venue that the venerable Obama chose when he turned hope and change into a 24/7 infomercial. That his ratings are slipping is beyond debate. How and when he reached his tipping point is the real cliffhanger. No, his fade is not about policy, and it's not about politics. It's not about economics and it's not about healthcare. It's about style. It's about how President Barack Obama jumped the shark... (Read more here.)

Obama Engages UN

2009-09-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

Rich Lowry (New York Post)

President Obama yesterday did his best impression of a high-school sophomore participating in his first Model UN meeting, retailing pious clichés he learned from his pony-tailed social studies teacher.

Even Woodrow Wilson might have blanched at the mushy-headed exhortations to world peace and collective action better suited to a college dorm-room bull session or a holiday-season Coca-Cola commercial.

"No nation can or should try to dominate another nation," Obama intoned. "No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold."

Has an American president ever expressed such implicit hostility toward his own nation's pre-eminence in world affairs? Or so relished in recalling its failings, or so readily elevated himself and his own virtues over those of his country?

Between America and the world, Obama adopts a happy medium. It is in this sense only that he is a centrist.

"For those who question the character and cause of my nation," Obama said, "I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months." In other words, he's the redeemer of a nation sunk in war crimes (we condoned torture), high-handedness (we ignored the United Nations) and hypocrisy (we promoted democracy selectively) prior to the ascension of his blessed administration.

"We've re-engaged the United Nations," Obama bragged. "We have paid our bills. We have joined the Human Rights Council. We have signed the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We have fully embraced the Millennium Development Goals."

And he thinks it's going to get him something: "Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone."

All together now: Yes, they can!

Obama's mistake is in believing "the interests of nations and peoples are shared." They aren't. Georgia has an interest in becoming a strong nation capable of defending itself; Russia has an interest in quashing it. China has an interest in dominating all of East Asia; Japan and other neighbors have an interest in containing it.

Iran has an interest in gaining a nuclear weapon; Israel -- and the United States -- has an interest in stopping it.

On the latter, Obama was shockingly weak, if his weakness still retained the capacity to shock. He outlined with great specificity what the United States will do to reduce its own nuclear arsenal. We'll pursue a nuclear agreement with the Russians, move on ratifying the Test Ban Treaty, complete a Nuclear Posture Review, etc.

As for Iran, if it moves ahead on its nuclear program, it "must be held accountable."

How? Obama can't say, because Moscow and even Paris apparently haven't gotten word about the "new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect." Both are making discouraging noises about any serious sanctions against Iran.

Obama's version of America leadership mostly consists of a public diplomacy of self-flagellation and rhetoric touting fashionable causes. He'll pursue global disarmament and fight global warming. Indeed, Laurie David, not Hillary Clinton, might be ideally suited to be his secretary of state.

Obama hopes that all our self-effacing niceness will catalyze the world into ending its "bickering about outdated grievances." No wonder he twice had to deny that he was being naive.

The president isn't wrong to talk sweepingly of peace. Ronald Reagan did the same thing, although with a concomitant emphasis on freedom. But Reagan realized the world wouldn't lead itself, at least not where we should want it to go.

Look no further than the United Nations, that incoherent collection of the world's finest democracies and most dismal dictatorships. At the end of his speech, Obama said the United Nations could be "a place where we indulge tyranny, or a source of moral authority."

Immediately afterward, Moammar Khadafy took the podium for a rambling, 90-minute address. Even a first-time Model UN student might have noted the incongruity.

UN Gets Scolding

2009-09-25T08:39:00.000-07:00

Fox News

Holding aloft evidence of Hitler's Final Solution, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday railed against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his denial of the Holocaust and scolded the United Nations for allowing Ahmadinejad to speak during its opening session of the 64th U.N. General Assembly.

With detailed reminders in hand of the war that sent 6 million Jews to their deaths in concentration camps, including construction blueprints for Auschwitz, Netanyahu took his turn at the dais to recall the agreement within the world body to create the Jewish state and express astonishment at what he witnessed a day earlier in that organization's great hall.

He commended those who boycotted Ahmadinejad's speech, but condemned those who allowed it.

"To those who gave this Holocaust denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people. ... Have you no shame? Have you no decency?" Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu also scolded the United Nations for giving the Iranian president "legitimacy" just six decades after the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad addressed the body Wednesday, and in the run-up to the session repeated his belief that the Holocaust is a myth.

"What a disgrace," Netanyahu said. "What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations."

Netanyahu challenged the international community to step up and prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but expressed broad disappointment with the United Nations.

He accused the United Nations of remaining silent on attacks on Israelis from Hamas, and blasted the U.N. Human Rights Council for its "twisted standards."

The Human Rights Council issued a recent report that condemned Israel for its offensive in the Gaza Strip last January. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice last week called the report, conducted by South African Judge Richard Goldstone, "unbalanced, one sided and basically unacceptable," but the White House on Wednesday corrected a report that it would not allow the findings to reach the International Criminal Court.

"What a travesty," Netanyahu said. "Israel justly defended itself against terror."

He said the latest report presents a test to the international community: "Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?"

Netanyahu drew applause only when he talked about the need for a Palestinian state and when he finished his speech.

The day before, President Obama also drew heavy applause when he declared that "America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." Obama called for Palestinians to end their "incitement of Israel" as well, but that line did not trigger a response from the audience.

Obama earlier met with Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a bid to re-start peace talks. It's unclear how Israel will respond to the U.S. president's firm declaration on the settlements. Netanyahu, while suggesting Israel is open to a temporary freeze on West Bank settlements, told FOX News Tuesday that the settlers must be allowed to extend the "possibility of normal life."

He said the settlers need schools, health clinics and other buildings, and that he believes the issue should come at the end of negotiations -- not the beginning.

U.S. Sinking in Debt

2009-09-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

CNBC

The US is too dependent on Japan and China buying up the country's debt and could face severe economic problems if that stops, Tiger Management founder and chairman Julian Robertson told CNBC.

"It's almost Armageddon if the Japanese and Chinese don't buy our debt,” Robertson said in an interview. "I don't know where we could get the money. I think we've let ourselves get in a terrible situation and I think we ought to try and get out of it."

Robertson said inflation is a big risk if foreign countries were to stop buying bonds.

“If the Chinese and Japanese stop buying our bonds, we could easily see [inflation] go to 15 to 20 percent,” he said. “It's not a question of the economy. It's a question of who will lend us the money if they don't. Imagine us getting ourselves in a situation where we're totally dependent on those two countries. It's crazy.”

Robertson said while he doesn’t think the Chinese will stop buying US bonds, the Japanese may eventually be forced to sell some of their long-term bonds.

“That's much worse than not buying,” he said. “The other thing is, they're buying almost exclusively short-term debt. And that's what we are offering, because we can't sell the long-term debt. And you know, the history has been that people who borrow short term really get burned.”

The only way to avoid the problem, he said, is to "grow and save our way out of it."

"The U.S. has to quit spending, cut back, start saving, and scale backward," Robertson said. "Until that happens, I don't think we're anywhere near out of the woods.”

Robertson is not very optimistic about the short-term.

“We're in for some real rough sledding,” he said. “ I really do think the recession is at least temporarily over. But we haven't addressed so many of our problems and we are borrowing so much money that we can't possibly pay it back, unless the Chinese and Japanese buy our bonds.”

Palin Speech Compelling

2009-09-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in what was billed as her first public-speaking engagement outside North America, blamed the world financial crisis on government excesses and called for a new round of deregulation and tax cuts for U.S. businesses.

"We got into this mess because of government interference in the first place," the former Republican U.S. vice presidential candidate said Wednesday at a conference sponsored by investment firm CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets. "We're not interested in government fixes, we're interested in freedom," she added.

On the foreign-policy front, she told the room full of bankers and executives of the importance of the global fight against terrorism and of finding ways to engage China as a global power. She said China "rightfully makes a lot of people nervous."

Her speech marks an effort to reach out to an international audience and define her political identity since resigning from office earlier this year. Ms. Palin is among a handful of high-profile Republicans seeking a path back to power for a party that lost control of both houses of Congress and White House in last year's U.S. elections.

Ms. Palin's address, which drew strong applause at the end, was officially closed to the media. The Wall Street Journal reviewed a recording of the speech.

In the wide-ranging address, Ms. Palin touched on the rising U.S. budget deficit, the debate over a proposed health-care overhaul, the war in Afghanistan and China's role in world affairs.

She described her political philosophy as a "common-sense conservatism," and said the free-market policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher should be guides for how to get out of the current economic situation. "Liberalism holds that there is no human problem that government can't fix if only the right people are put in charge," she said.

Ms. Palin didn't refer to President Barack Obama by name, but said his promise for change during the election hasn't taken hold. She called his campaign promises "nebulous, utopian sounding…Now 10 months later, though, a lot of Americans are asking: more government? Is that the change we want?"

In an echo of last year's presidential campaign, she criticized government policies that result in what she called a redistribution of wealth. "There is no justice in taking from one person and giving to another," she said. "History shows it simply does not work."

Ms. Palin blamed the U.S. Federal Reserve's low interest-rate policy of previous years for setting the stage for last year's global financial crisis. She opposed appointing the Fed as the chief overseer of systemic risk in the U.S. financial system. "The words 'fox' and 'henhouse' come to mind. The Fed's decisions have created the bubble," she said.

She called for tax cuts as well as the elimination of the capital-gains and estate tax. Then, she said, the world will "watch the U.S. economy roar back to life."

On health care, Ms. Palin defended her previous criticisms that the health-care overhaul proposed by Democrats would lead to health-care rationing. "It's just common sense that government attempts to solve problems like health care problem will just create new problems." She called for "market friendly" health care reform that gives tax breaks to individuals to buy health insurance.

She acknowledged the economic rise of both China and India but called for a vision of Asia in which no one country would dominate.

"We all hope to see a China that is stable and peaceful and prosperous," she said. But she added that the U.S. must work with Asian allies in case "China goes in a different direction."

She said greater political openness in China could help soothe tensions. "Many believed that with China liberalizing its economy, greater political freedom would follow, but that hasn't happened," she said. "The more open [China] is, the less we'll be concerned about its military buildup and its intentions."

On U.S.-China trade relations, Ms. Palin called for more openness and warned against protectionism. "We need China to improve its rule of law, and protect our intellectual property," she said. "On our part, we should be more open to Chinese investment where our national security interests are not threatened."

She talked about the recent protests of ethnic minority Muslim Uighurs, Chinese labor conditions, and Tibet. Ms. Palin mentioned Charter 08, a document signed by prominent academics and dissidents calling for greater democracy and openness in China.

In other areas, she criticized Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for speaking skeptically about the need for more troops in Afghanistan. "Afghanistan is where the 9/11 attacks were planned and if we are not successful there, al Qaeda will find a safe haven there again," she said.

Ms. Palin warmed up the crowd with her impressions of Hong Kong, one of the densest urban areas in the world. "The wildlife-to-human ratio is different from Alaska, but I could get used to it," she said.

She also spoke about how Alaska once shared a land bridge with Asia. And she noted that her husband's Eskimo ancestors crossed that bridge. "To consider that connection that allowed sharing of peoples and bloodlines and wildlife and flora and fauna, that connection to me is quite fascinating," she said.

Melvin Goodé, a 49-year-old New York-based property consultant who attended the speech, said he voted for Mr. Obama in last year's election but was curious to hear what Ms. Palin had to say. He shrugged his shoulders when asked his thoughts on the speech but said that she generally did all right, given that she "wasn't supposed to know anything about the continent." "Now, let's see what the critics say," he said.

America is the Bad Guy

2009-09-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

Michael Barone (AEI)

In the early 1980s, while planning a vacation in Latin America, I went to bookstores to find histories of the region. All I could find were Marxist tracts arguing that "the people" were exploited by greedy corporations and military dictators, all propped up by the United States. Available literature on Latin America today includes much more sensible accounts. But some people, including Barack Obama, whose college thesis written in those years has never been made public, seem stuck in a time warp in which the United States is the bad guy.

That, at least, seems to explain Obama's latest foreign policy moves, starting with Honduras, where the president was ousted by the Supreme Court for violating a constitutional provision that forbids any moves to seek a second term. (Other Latin countries, notably Mexico, have similar constitutional prohibitions.) The White House immediately interpreted this as a military coup and decided that, this time, the United States would come out on the side of "the people." In fact, we find ourselves siding with a friend of the Iranian mullahs, Hugo Chavez, who swept aside similar constitutional limits in Venezuela, and opposing the elected Congress, courts and civil society of Honduras.

Honduras is not the only or, sad to say, most important example of where this administration has come out on the side of our enemies and against our friends. Israel has been told that it must stop all settlement construction, even the adding of spare rooms for newly arrived infants, while nothing is asked of the Palestinians.

In eastern Europe, Obama acknowledged last spring the importance of placing missile defense installations in our NATO allies Poland and the Czech Republic, then reversed himself this month and canceled the program.

The president of Poland, which has sent brave and effective troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, was given an after-midnight phone call, which he declined to take. The president of Russia, which has declined to aid our efforts to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons programs, expressed his delight--and pointedly made no concessions in return.

Neither has Russia made concessions in return for Obama's announced plans to cut back sharply on our nuclear stockpiles. The idea behind this is either that others will make similar cutbacks out of gratitude for our example or, more worryingly, that the possession of so many nukes by the United States is somehow a bad thing.

Then there is Afghanistan. In March Obama said we must persevere in the struggle there to protect ourselves against terrorists and installed a new general, ahead of schedule, to come up with a counterinsurgency strategy. That general delivered a report on Aug. 30 strongly implying that we must increase troops commitments. But as of Sept. 21, Obama has held only one meeting on the subject, according to The Washington Post's Bob Woodward.

On the Sunday talk shows a day before Woodward's story appeared, Obama said he had not yet decided on a strategy in Afghanistan. "I'm certainly not one who believes in indefinite occupations of other countries," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press," as if the United States were occupying a country against the wishes of most of its inhabitants to the detriment of "the people." Shades of those early 1980s Marxist Latin America tracts.

The reaction to the most recent moves has been harsh, and from unexpected quarters. Leslie Gelb, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the editorial writers of The Washington Post have expressed astonishment at Obama's apparent switch on Afghanistan. Edward Lucas, former Eastern European correspondent for the Economist, wrote in the Telegraph of London, "The picture emerging from the White House is a disturbing one, of timidity, clumsiness and short-term calculation. Some say he is the weakest president since Jimmy Carter."

The influential blogger Mickey Kaus argues that "anti-Obama anger" is caused not by his race, but "because he's a relative newcomer, as presidents go--an unknown quantity, an enigma, with a short track record and patches of that record left fuzzy."

But on foreign policy as his record emerges--as he reverses himself on missile defense and perhaps on Afghanistan--his motivating principle seems rooted in an analysis, common in his formative university years, that America has too often been on the side of the bad guys. The response has been to disrespect those who have been our friends and to bow to our enemies.

Canada to Boycott U.N. Speech

2009-09-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

Ottawa Citizen

Canada will boycott Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, saying his outbursts about the Holocaust and Israel are “shameful.”

Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon will be at the world body to attend the opening of the UN General Assembly’s annual debate, but officials signal he and other members of the Canadian delegation will vacate the Canadian seats when the Islamic republic’s president approaches the podium.

Walking out of the chamber is seen as a strong diplomatic show of disgust at the UN — and since the chamber is generally packed on the first day of the annual summit, Canada’s empty seats will not go unnoticed.

“President Ahmadinejad’s repeated denial of the Holocaust and his anti-Israel comments run counter to the values of the UN General Assembly, and they’re shameful,” said one Canadian official.

“He uses his public appearances to provoke the international community, and that is why Canada’s seats will be empty.”

The gesture is a step stronger than one announced Tuesday by the German Foreign Ministry, which asked other European Union member states to walk out of the General Assembly chamber if Ahmadinejad again denies the Holocaust, or makes anti-Semitic statements.

The Canadian initiative will be welcomed by Israel, which Tuesday urged all delegates in the 192-member chamber to stay away when Ahmadinejad speaks.

“A few days ago, he gave a new speech of hate,” Gabriela Shalev, Israeli ambassador to the UN, told Israeli army radio.

“The simple fact of leaving the room during his speech, or not to be present during it, is a symbolic act.”

Shalev insisted Israel had not been asking countries to “promise” they would boycott Ahmadinejad’s address.

“We are simply reminding them of how dangerous this person and the country that he leads are,” she said.

Iranian officials said this week that Ahmadinejad intended to use his speech to offer a message of “peace and friendship.”

But Ahmadinejad sparked new outrage just last week by again calling Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust a “myth,” then saying the angry reaction he provoked was a “source of pride” to him. His anti-Israel statements have included calling for the country — created by the UN shortly after the Second World War — to be “wiped of the map.”

Canada annually leads a multi-nation effort in the UN General Assembly to highlight in successive resolutions Iran’s poor human-rights record. The effort infuriates Iran, which pulls out all the diplomatic stops to try to block it.

On the front burner at the moment is the fate of hundreds of people arrested in the violent crackdown Ahmadinejad and his supporters ordered as opposition rose to his disputed re-election as president in June.

Among those jailed was Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, an internationally recognized documentary filmmaker, who was in the Islamic republic for Newsweek magazine to cover the election and ensuing protests.

“We remain deeply concerned by the human-rights situation in Iran, and the crackdown on legitimate democratic protests, and the arrests of Iranians and foreign nationals, are unacceptable,” added the Canadian official.

“We will continue to demand the release of those unjustly detained, including Canadian Newsweek reporter, Maziar Bahari.”

Canada's relations with Iran have been strained since the July 2003 death of Zahra Kazemi, a Iranian-Canadian photojournalist who died in custody after she was arrested outside a notorious Tehran prison.

World Says No to Obama

2009-09-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

Jerusalem Post

Everybody is saying no to the American president these days. And it's not just that they're saying no, it's also the way they're saying no.

The Saudis twice said no to his request for normalization gestures towards Israel (at Barack Obama's meeting with King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, and in Washington at meetings with Hillary Clinton). Who says no to the American president twice? What must they think of Obama in the desert kingdom?

The North Koreans said no to repeated attempts at talks, by test-launching long-range missiles in April; Russia and China keep on saying no to tougher sanctions on Iran; the Iranians keep saying no to offers of talks by saying they're willing to talk about everything except a halt to uranium enrichment; Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is saying no by refusing to meet with Binyamin Netanyahu until Israel freezes all settlement construction; the Israelis said no by refusing to agree to a settlement freeze, or even a settlement moratorium until and unless the Arabs ante up their normalization gestures. Which brings us back to the original Saudi no.

The only thing Obama did manage to get Bibi and Abbas to say yes to is a photo-op at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in NY. Mazel tov.

So why is everyone saying no to Obama?

It's the economy, stupid.

Everyone has worked it out by now: The great secret is out. America's economy has made Obama a weak president, and he will likely remain weak throughout his first term. He has about two years to pull the American economy out of its free-fall before he begins his reelection campaign. If he can do it, and that's a big if, chances are good that he'll get reelected, and in his second term he can try to pull some geopolitical strings. But for the next three years, expect to see a world that says no to Obama. No meaningful and dramatic diplomatic initiative can come out of the White House in the next three years, as long as Obama remains weak.

And that's a real pity, because there are some serious and imminent issues that need to be addressed.

Pyongyang is getting more bellicose and not being punished. The North Koreans have violated every single international agreement and norm, and nothing tangible has happened to them.

In Iran, this registers. "Look at how bad they're being," the mullahs say, "and they're getting away with it." Even so, the Iranian government is weak internally and internationally following its election fiasco.

The US and EU could tighten sanctions against Iran without the support of Russia and China, but they would need political will for that. Sanctions, such as a ban on refined oil imports, barring Iranian flights to America and Europe etc., could have a serious impact on Iran and weaken the regime further. The US and EU can act now against Iran like the US and UK did against Libya several years ago when they persuaded Gaddafi to abandon his nuclear ambitions. Back then, though, the US was much stronger. Now, the American economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea have all weakened the US.

In retaliation for increased, unilateral sanctions, Iran could turn up the heat on US and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will stymie Obama's plan to win and withdraw. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has the US president by the kishkes, in a manner of speaking. And so do the Taliban.

So, when a president with so many problems comes asking for a favor, everyone finds it easier to just say no.

Obama's Health Care Tax

2009-09-21T15:10:00.000-07:00

Dick Morris & Eileen McGann (New York Post)

The elderly were the first group to turn against President Obama's health-care pro posals, alienated by the plans to cut $500 billion cut from Medicare. The young and the uninsured may be the next to jump ship -- out of worry over about the huge premiums they'd have to pay.

Requiring everyone to buy insurance will impose a massive tax on all who now are uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office projects that it would force the middle-income uninsured to pay on average more than 15 percent of their income.

The poor will still have Medicaid. But for those earning more, the required premiums will be worse than any tax increase. For example, CBO estimates that when the program is fully implemented -- by 2016 -- an individual earning $32,400 a year would have to pay $4,100 in premiums before getting any subsidy. With deductibles and co-payments, he'd have to shell out $5,600 a year, or 17.3 percent of his income. A family of four, making $80,000 a year, would have to pay about $10,500 in premiums alone -- with deductibles and co-payments, up to $15,000 or just under 20 percent of income.

And if they don't buy insurance, they'll face federal fines that begin to approach these same premium levels. They won't be able to buy what they truly need -- catastrophic-only coverage at a lower premium -- that won't satisfy ObamaCare's "minimum insurance" mandate.

The young and uninsured will catch on: This bill is designed to force healthy people who don't have health insurance -- and may neither need nor want it -- to buy it anyway, in order to raise the money to subsidize those who do need it.

Obama has pledged only to increase taxes on the rich. But his program essentially taxes the core of the middle class (those making $30,000 to $80,000). It will make them overpay in order to pick up the slack for others who need the extra coverage.

In other words, health-care "reform" is a health-care tax dressed up as a program to cover the uninsured.

No matter how Democrats get the money to cover those who need insurance, they offend supporters that they need to pass the bill:

* If they get the money from more Medicare cuts, they alienate the elderly still further.

* If they get it from raising the deficit, they lose moderates.

* If they hike taxes to do it, they lose the "Blue Dog" Democrats who've gone on record as opposing such increases.

* If they don't increase the subsidies, they lose the uninsured themselves.

The latest data from Scott Rasmussen's poll of those who lack health insurance indicates that they're starting to turn skeptical about the Obama plan. It's supposed to help them, yet they back it by only 58 percent to 35 percent -- and only 30 percent support it strongly.

More to the point, only 35 percent feel it will improve the quality of their health care -- and, by 41-26, they feel the cost of their care will go up, not down, under the plan.

Having the uninsured -- the stated object of Obama's compassion -- turn against his reform would be the most lethal cut of all.

Is Obama the Next Carter?

2009-09-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

Edward Lucas (London Telegraph)

It is lovely to feature in other people's dreams. The problem comes when they wake up. Barack Obama is an eloquent, brainy and likeable man with a fascinating biography. He is not George Bush. Those are great qualities. But they are not enough to lead America, let alone the world.

Admittedly, the presidential to-do list is terrifying. The economy requires his full-time attention. So does health-care reform. And climate change. Indeed, he deserves praise for spending so much time on thankless foreign policy issues. He is tackling all the big problems: restarting Middle East peace talks, defanging Iran and North Korea and a "reset" of relations with Russia. But none of them are working.

Regimes in Moscow, Pyongyang and Tehran simply pocket his concessions and carry on as before. The picture emerging from the White House is a disturbing one, of timidity, clumsiness and short-term calculation. Some say he is the weakest president since Jimmy Carter.

The grizzled veterans of the Democratic leadership in Congress have found Mr. Obama and his team of bright young advisers a pushover. That has gravely weakened his flagship domestic campaign, for health-care reform, which fails to address the greatest weakness of the American system: its inflated costs. His free trade credentials are increasingly tarnished too. His latest blunder is imposing tariffs on tire imports from China, in the hope of gaining a little more union support for health care. But at a time when America's leadership in global economic matters has never been more vital, that is a dreadful move, hugely undermining its ability to stop other countries engaging in a ruinous spiral of protectionism.

Even good moves are ruined by bad presentation. Changing Mr. Bush's costly and untried missile-defence scheme for something workable was sensible. But offensively casual treatment of east European allies such as Poland made it easy for his critics to portray it as naïve appeasement of the regime in Moscow.

Mr. Obama's public image rests increasingly heavily on his extraordinary speechifying abilities. His call in Cairo for a new start in relations with the Muslim world was pitch-perfect. So was his speech in Ghana, decrying Africa's culture of bad government. His appeal to both houses of Congress to support health care was masterly – though the oratory was far more impressive than the mish-mash plan behind it. This morning he is blitzing the airwaves, giving interviews to all America's main television stations.

But for what? Mr. Obama has tactics a plenty - calm and patient engagement with unpleasant regimes, finding common interests, appealing to shared values - but where is the strategy? What, exactly, did "Change you can believe in" – the hallmark slogan of his campaign – actually mean?

The President's domestic critics who accuse him of being the sinister wielder of a socialist master-plan are wide of the mark. The man who has run nothing more demanding than the Harvard Law Review is beginning to look out of his depth in the world's top job. His credibility is seeping away, and it will require concrete achievements rather than more soaring oratory to recover it.

Obama TV

2009-09-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

Charles Hurt (New York Post)

During his first eight months in office, President Obama has sat down for three times as many television interviews as his most recent two predecessors combined.

And with yesterday's run of the Sunday-morning news show circuit and tonight's airing of "Late Night with David Letterman," Obama continues to blaze through the media hotter than any political figure in modern history.

"He's turning the presidency into an infomercial," warned former White House speechwriter Matt Latimer. "It's not just damaging to the White House. It will also ultimately hurt President Obama's image as a fresh, non-Washington leader."

The media blitz has won Obama unprecedented wall-to-wall coverage in the mainstream media.

In the New York Times alone, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, 405 stories on the Obama administration have appeared on the front page through mid-August of this year totaling 119,678 column inches. That's 9,973 column feet of Obama coverage on the Times front page alone.

But it is television that has been the most powerful draw for Obama.

In his five major appearances yesterday, Obama voiced skepticism about adding troops to Afghanistan, denied making a deal with Russia over missile defenses in Europe, and continued to push his government-run health-insurance program.

As of mid-August, Obama submitted to a total of 66 television interviews, dramatically outstripping his two predecessors, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project at Towson University in Maryland.

During the same period of their own presidencies, President George W. Bush gave 16 television interviews and President Bill Clinton gave just six.

Obama is also out-hustling his predecessors with the print media, giving 36 interviews with newspapers and magazines during his first seven months in office -- nearly doubling the numbers given by Bush and Clinton.

ACORN Fraud Exposed

2009-09-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

Newt Gingrich (AEI)

It's hard to know who should be more embarrassed by the revelations about the radical group ACORN, the mainstream media or the politicians who have funneled taxpayer dollars to the group for years.

It took two amateur twentysomething filmmakers to do what ABC, NBC and CBS couldn't or wouldn't: Expose an ongoing, taxpayer-funded criminal enterprise.

These intrepid filmmakers have now supplied video of four Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now offices providing detailed instructions on how to defraud the government in furtherance of child prostitution and human trafficking. So far, ACORN staffers in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New York and San Diego have been caught on tape "community organizing" for what they thought was a prostitute and her pimp.

Like I said, it took two kids to expose the scam, but it took a whole lot of liberal politicians to support it over the years. So congratulations to the 345 members of the House who voted to defund ACORN yesterday. But there's more work yet to do.

What's most shameful for Washington about this whole sordid affair is that this is not ACORN's first documented violation of the law.

ACORN has a long history of engaging in voter fraud. Seventy ACORN staffers in 12 states have been convicted of voter registration fraud by adding such notables as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to the voter rolls.

And the reason ACORN has continued to receive taxpayer funding despite these convictions--it has received federal funding totaling $54 million since 1994--is the politicians its "community organizing activities" have served. Although it exists on paper to connect low-income families with affordable housing and social services, ACORN is in fact the political dirty tricks muscle of liberal Democrats.

Operating under a variety of names and both tax-exempt and non-tax-exempt legal structures, ACORN, according to a recent House report, engages in "a criminal conspiracy...to launder federal money in order to pursue a partisan political agenda and to manipulate the American public."

Here's how the deal works: Liberal politicians ensure that ACORN continues to receive federal grants through agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development and, in turn, ACORN turns out shock troops to support liberal programs and candidates.

Before yesterday's historic vote, no fewer than seven amendments that would have prohibited or conditioned the receipt of federal funds by ACORN were defeated by the majority Democrats in the House in the past year. In one case, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said that "the powers that be" in the Democratic-controlled House had put a stop to an investigation of the group.

The excuse offered by ACORN's remaining defenders is essentially this: Sure, the tapes are reprehensible, but otherwise, ACORN does good work in poor communities. This excuse is unconvincing when used by defenders of the terrorist group Hamas and it's unconvincing here. Americans can no longer allow Washington to turn a blind eye--much less fund--an organization that uses the suffering of our most vulnerable citizens as a cover for its illegal and illicit activities.

So kudos, once again, to the House for cutting off funding of this group. But just defunding ACORN isn't enough. Americans deserve to know exactly what laws have been bent and broken and which politicians have benefited.

Republicans should propose and Democrats should support a thorough, independent, investigation of ACORN's octopuslike structure, including all of its associations with organized labor and its sources of federal funding. The books of its various associated groups and subsidiaries should be meticulously audited.

What's more, Attorney General Eric Holder should follow the lead of at least 14 states and start a federal investigation of ACORN. If Democrats want the American people to believe they're serious about their denunciations of the group's behavior, they will support such an investigation.

Thanks to two courageous young filmmakers, it's no longer possible for liberals and their allies in the media, to cry "vast right-wing conspiracy!" in response to damning revelations about ACORN. The evidence is right there, in living color. If Democrats aren't embarrassed enough to do something about it, I have no doubt the American people will.

Racism Charge Wears Thin

2009-09-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

Ken Blackwell (American Spectator)

Jimmy Carter is back in the news. It seems he's a bit desperate to be in the news these days. He's gone on record saying it's racism that is motivating the opposition to President Obama's policies. The Town Hall meetings of this summer, anger erupted over the rising mountains of debt that will crush us and our children's generation. But to Jimmy Carter such expressions of concern seem little different than mob actions. "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African American should not be President," Carter said in Atlanta.

It's certainly not the first time Jimmy Carter has played the discreditable race card. In 1980, he accused Ronald Reagan over and over of being a racist. When Jimmy Carter's dad was undeniably a segregationist in the Old South, Ronald Reagan was inviting his black friends from his Eureka College football team to spend the night in his home rather than face unjust discrimination at Illinois hotels. Ronald Reagan pledged -- and kept that pledge -- to enforce our nation's historic Civil Rights laws. No matter. Jimmy Carter's glass house may have been windowless, but that did not stop his stone-throwing.

President Obama's White House does not endorse Carter's unsubstantiated charges. Administration spokesman Robert Gibbs said: "[The President] does not believe that criticism comes based on the color of his skin." Gibbs attributed it instead to honest policy differences. Well, good for Gibbsy!

That should settle it. But it won't. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd launched an over-the-top charge, saying that when Congressman Joe Wilson yelled out: "You lie!" he really meant to say: "You lie, boy!" She was able to do this without even reading the obstreperous lawmaker's palm.

There is ancient historic precedent in America for Dowd's charge. Back in Salem in 1693, nineteen Americans were hanged on the basis of "spectral evidence." That is, there were no words, deeds, or documents that confirmed that they were witches, but they did have eerie "specters" about them. Maybe Arlen whispered in Dowd's ear!

Let me say, it is out of bounds and completely unacceptable for Members of Congress to yell out during a Presidential Address to a Joint Session. Joe Wilson knows that and has dutifully apologized. It is also deeply offensive and uncivil to depict President Obama as Hitler. I reject both kinds of demonstrations. It would be nice to see our liberal friends issue an apology -- even a belated one would do -- for the similarly vicious characterizations of George W. Bush as Hitler. We all remember the infamous videos that depicted President Bush and the Republicans as Nazis.

Jimmy Carter's flailing led 40,898,770 Americans to boot him out of office in 1980. Were they all racists, too? Since that time, he has won a Nobel Peace Prize by consorting with known terrorists and tin pot dictators.

Americans have largely forgiven him for the dangerous weakness of his four-year term. Americans are a generous people, praising Carter for his cabinet-making for Habitat for Humanity. He does deserve praise for this charitable work. But we should be grateful he's making cabinets for poor people and not for our nation. When he ripped out his presidential Cabinet, firing almost all of them, while leaving his errant White House staff in place, a leading Democrat cried: "He cut down all the tall trees, but left the monkeys!"

There's another irony to Jimmy Carter crying racist wolf. It was under his weak leadership that hundreds of thousands of Africans fell under communist domination. It is arguable that more black people lost their liberty under Jimmy Carter than under any President in U.S. history.

So let us hope Carter will take a cue from President Obama's White House and pipe down. He has had a mercifully long retirement. There's no provision for impeaching ex-Presidents. But we would all hope that age would finally bring some wisdom to this one. It's time for him to cease making the kind of baseless charges that led Ronald Reagan to dismiss him with a winsome smile and a famous turn of the head: "There you go again."

Dems Run From Carter

2009-09-17T07:32:00.000-07:00

POLITICO

Jimmy Carter is 84 years old and three decades removed from the White House, but he still has the power to make Democrats run.

Away from him, that is.

From the White House to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Democrats raced to distance themselves from the former president’s claim that racism was behind Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie” outburst and other attacks on President Barack Obama.

“Listen, he’s the former president, and he’s entitled to his point of view,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “I personally believe President Obama and his administration are focused on the issues, and I agree with that.”

“I don’t see this as a racial issue,” added Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). “There are a lot of people upset about how we on the Democratic side can engage like we have been, and there’s a lot of anger out there. So, I don’t see it as a racial issue.”

“I didn’t agree with it,” Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) said of Carter’s remarks.

Congressional Democrats have no interest in starting a racial argument that could turn off swing district voters whose support the party will need if it plans on keeping its grip on Congress in 2010. And the current occupants of the White House made it clear Wednesday that they have no interest in bringing race back to the fore of any discussion about Obama.

“The president does not believe that criticism comes based on the color of his skin,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters in his Wednesday briefing. “We understand that people have disagreements with some of the decisions that we’ve made and some of the extraordinary actions that had to be taken by both this administration and the previous administration.”

Carter said Tuesday that there’s “an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president,” and that that feeling drives some of the anti-Obama dissent.

He isn’t the first to suggest that race is driving some of the anti-Obama animus. Reps. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) and David Scott (D-Ga.), among others, have suggested that Wilson wouldn’t have interrupted a white president. And New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that “fair or not,” she heard “an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!”

In the hours before Tuesday’s vote, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, predicted that if Wilson’s outburst were allowed to go unpunished, “We will have people with white hoods running through the countryside again.”

But, by and large, congressional Democrats have tried to keep the race factor out of the Wilson debate.

With their resolution Tuesday night reprimanding Wilson, Democrats had sought to refocus their narrative toward their efforts to turn around the nation’s economy and pass a sweeping health care reform bill. Leaders had spent Tuesday trying to prevent anger among black lawmakers from boiling over in that evening’s floor debate about a resolution reprimanding Wilson.

During a caucus meeting just hours before the start of the debate, Democratic leadership aides said that Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, an African-American from Wilson’s South Carolina, pleaded with his fellow Democrats to keep the debate far from the racial issue.

But Carter’s comments brought them right back to it — even as they tried to get away.

“I just think 2010 will be about — as most midterm elections are — the whole economic well-being of America,” said Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who heads up the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “And that’s what the focus should be.”

“We should take our cue from President Obama,” Durbin told POLITICO. As his personal friend for many years, I can tell you, he is the last person to raise this issue.”

Wilson brushed off Carter’s comments Wednesday, telling POLITICO that they were a “distraction” — a point with which some of Wilson’s critics agreed.

Democratic Rep. Chet Edwards, who has represented a conservative, heavily white Texas district for 18 years, said he didn’t believe there was any evidence to support Carter’s assertion that racial factors had motivated Wilson.

“I just don’t want a divisive dialogue on race to become a battering ram of division for our country,” he said.

Alabama Democratic Rep. Artur Davis agreed. “It’s not a productive or healthy conversation,” he said.

Pro-Life Dems Oppose Bill

2009-09-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

LifeNews.com

The pro-life Democrat who says he had 40 Democrats who will vote against the health care bill in the House because it funds abortions can't get a meeting with President Barack Obama. Rep. Bart Stupak, in a new interview, talks more about how the pro-life Democrats can hold up the pro-abortion bill, HR 3200.

Responding to the speech President Obama gave last week promoting the bills, Stupak told the Weekly Standard that "there certainly is public funding for abortion" in the House measure.

He says the legislation would allow both the public health insurance plan, known as the public option, and federally subsidized private plans to pay for abortions using taxpayer funds.

Stupak, a Michigan congressman, told the conservative magazine that he has repeatedly asked for a meeting, or even a few minutes on the phone, with Obama but has been consistently refused.

"I just jumped Rahm Emanuel again this morning" to ask for a meeting, Stupak said Thursday.

Stupak says the White House may want to take him up on his offer because he says he still has enough votes to derail either the bill or the rules for debate on it, which would prevent the legislation from moving from the committee to the floor.

"She knows better than that," Stupak told the Weekly Standard about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thus far not allowing a vote on his amendment to truly ban all abortion funding from the bill.

Rules Committee chairman Louise Slaughter has also commented that she doesn't expect a vote on Stupak's amendment.

Stupak said the media has largely focused on the coalition of fiscally conservative Democrats who oppose the health care bill for financial reasons, but one of the major reasons HR 3200 may not be approved in its current form is because of Democrats who oppose the abortion funding found in it.

"I'm not a blue dog, a yellow dog, a stray dog, or a hot dog," Bart Stupak told the Weekly Standard. "I'm just a plain old Democrat."

Whatever their color, pro-life Democrats could provide the cushion the pro-life movement needs -- above and beyond the unified opposition from Republicans -- to hold up the bill unless or until abortion funding is removed.

Last week, Stupak gave an interview to CBN News where he again promised that he and his colleagues would vote no without his amendment.

"What I've told the speaker and the leadership and the administration is first of all you have to give us that vote," Stupak told CBN News about the desire for an amendment to stop the abortion funding.

"If you don't give us the vote, everything is off the table," he said.

In July, Stupak told CBS News that a total of 40 Democrats could be prepared to vote against the final health care restructuring bill if it does not exclude abortion funding.

Stupak said he is confident he will have "a minimum of thirty nine" Democrats who will join him in opposing the bill.

"If there is not direct language and we are denied our amendment we will focus our attention on the rule," Stupak warned.

Joe Wilson Hero to Right

2009-09-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

POLITICO

House Democrats may have passed a resolution of disapproval for Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), but many conservative grassroots activists are ready to award him a medal of honor.

Since blurting out “You lie!” during President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress last week, Wilson has become a cause célèbre for the right, particularly among those who crowded into the raucous August congressional town hall meetings and marched on Capitol Hill Saturday to protest the president’s proposed health care overhaul.

“Remember Joe the Plumber? Direct confrontation with someone like the president is going to make news,” said FreedomWorks spokesman Adam Brandon. “There are a lot of folks out there in the country that feel the president is lying, and that’s why he has become something of a folk hero.”

On Saturday, hundreds of protesters held signs or wore t-shirts supporting Wilson, emblazoned with slogans such as “Joe was right” and “Stand with Joe.” Some signs simply read “Joe 2012.”

Online, Wilson supporters can already choose from an array of products ranging from “Wilson for President” t-shirts to “Joe stands for me” bumper stickers.

“The movement has been waiting for someone to have a defiant attitude, and what he did was very reflective of what everyone feels,” said Eric Odom, executive director of the American Liberty Alliance, a libertarian-oriented group.

“Thank God for Joe Wilson,” Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) told the conservative outlet Newsmax on Friday. The congresswoman went on to describe Wilson as the “sweetest, most mild-mannered, loving guy you’ve ever seen.”

“He apologized for violating the rules of decorum in the House, and that’s right, we don’t do that in the House,” she said. “But Joe didn’t back down from his assertion because Joe was right.”

March on Washington

2009-09-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

Washington Post

Tens of thousands of conservative protesters, many complaining that the nation is racing toward socialism, massed outside the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, angrily denouncing President Obama's health-care plan and other initiatives as threats to the Constitution.

The crowd -- loud, animated and sprawling -- gathered at the West Front of the Capitol after a march along Pennsylvania Avenue NW from Freedom Plaza. Invocations of God and former president Ronald Reagan by an array of speakers drew loud cheers that echoed across the Mall. On a windy, overcast afternoon, hundreds of yellow "Don't Tread on Me" flags flapped in the breeze.

"Hell hath no fury like a taxpayer ignored," declared Andrew Moylan, head of government affairs for the National Taxpayers Union, urging protesters to call their representatives. The demonstrators roared their approval.

"We own the dome!" they chanted, pointing at the Capitol.

The demonstrators are part of a loose-knit movement that is galvanizing anti-Obama sentiment across the country, stoking a populist dimension to the Republican Party, which has struggled to find its voice since the 2008 elections.

With Democrats in control of Congress, battling the president legislatively has been difficult. But after a spring of anti-tax rallies and summer health-care protests proved to be effective, a growing number of GOP leaders are dropping their wariness and seeing the political possibilities of latching onto this freewheeling coalition.

Authorities in the District do not give official crowd estimates, but Saturday's throng appeared to number in the many tens of thousands. A sea of people surrounded the Capitol reflecting pool, spilling across Third Street and along the Mall. The sound system did not reach far enough for people at the edges of the rally to hear the speakers onstage.

"You will not spend the money of our children and our grandchildren to feed an overstuffed government," Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) said of the Obama administration, drawing raucous applause.

"Our history is decorated by those who endured the burden of defending freedom," Price said. "Now a new generation of patriots has emerged. You are those patriots."

The group's sponsors included FreedomWorks, a Washington-based group headed by former House majority leader Richard Armey (R-Tex.), and the groups Tea Party Patriots and ResistNet. They and others involved in the rally comprise a loose coalition of conservative groups that helped organize the health-care and anti-tax demonstrations in the spring and summer.

Brian Burnell, 45, who owns an insurance company on Maryland's Eastern Shore held a placard that read, "How Is That Hopey Changey Thing Workin' Out For Ya?"

"You want socialism?" said Susan Clark, a District resident marching with a bullhorn. "Go to Russia!"

The huge turnout indicated the growing frustration with Obama among conservative activists and showed that his nationally televised speech Wednesday did little to move his political opponents on health care.

Although it is unclear whether the demonstrators represent a large segment of voters or even of Republicans, Saturday's march illustrated that activists, some of whom are not enthusiastic about the GOP, have been galvanized.

Saturday's demonstrators spanned the spectrum of conservative anger at Obama.

Most signs were handmade: "Socialism is UnAmerican," "King George Didn't Listen Either!" "Terrorists Won't Destroy America, Congress Will!" and "The American Dream R.I.P." Many protesters carried the now-familiar poster of Obama made up to look like the Joker, captioned "Socialism."

"Nobody's standing up for us, so we have to stand up for ourselves," said Phil Chancey, 66, who drove to Washington from Clinton, Tenn.

"We're all endangered!" shouted Dave Rue, 67, a retired Mobil Oil employee who traveled to Washington from New Jersey. "We're endangered because they're pushing socialism on us."

Debbie Wilson, 51, of Apollo Beach, Fla., flew to Washington a week ago, driving to Colonial Williamsburg with her husband for sightseeing before the rally.

"We want our country to go back to the roots of doing what our Founding Fathers wanted us to do -- less government in every aspect of my life," she said. "We walked the streets of Williamsburg, and it felt like we were learning how to be a patriot."

Dozens of signs mentioned Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who heckled Obama during a Wednesday night speech to Congress. Dee Meredith, 62, of Callao, Va., said she had never heard of Wilson before he shouted at the president, "You lie!" At the rally, Meredith waved a placard: "Thank You Joe Wilson."

"We're the forgotten people," she said, "and he's given us a voice."

When Armey, speaking to the crowd, referred to Obama having pledged to uphold the Constitution, the protesters shouted at the president in absentia: "Liar! Liar!"

Jeff Mapps, 29, a stagehand and labor union member from South Philadelphia, left home about 6 a.m. to attend the protest. He said he had not been involved in previous demonstrations but that he watches Fox News host Glenn Beck "all the time" and wanted to be part of an event that he thinks will be historic. Beck had drummed up support for the march.

Holding a sign that said "Preserve, Protect, Defend" on a Red Line Metro train packed with conservative activists, Mapps fretted over a "blatant disregard for the Constitution."

"We've been watching it for six to eight months," he said. "It was finally an opportunity to get involved. It's been boiling over. . . . It's not just about health care. It's about so much more than that."

Anna Hayes, 58, a nurse from Fairfax County, stood on the Mall in 1981 for Reagan's inauguration. "The same people were celebrating freedom," she said. "The president was fighting for the people then. I remember those years very well and fondly."

Deriding what she called "Obamacare," Hayes said: "This is the first rally I've been to that demonstrates against something, the first in my life. I just couldn't stay home anymore."

What Holds Us Together?

2009-09-11T08:09:00.001-07:00

Pat Buchanan

Flying home from London, where the subject of formal debate on the 70th anniversary of World War II had been whether Winston Churchill was a liability or asset to the Free World, one arrives in the middle of a far more acrimonious national debate right here in the United States.

At issue: Should Barack Obama be allowed to address tens of millions of American children, inside their classrooms, during school hours?

Conservative talk-show hosts saw a White House scheme to turn public schools into indoctrination centers where the socialist ideology of Obama would be spoon-fed to captive audiences of children forced to listen to Big Brother -- and then do assignments on his sermon.

The liberal commentariat raged about right-wing paranoia.

Yet Byron York of the Washington Examiner dug back to 1991 to discover that, when George H.W. Bush went to Alice Deal Junior High to speak to America's school kids, the left lost it.

"The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props," railed the Washington Post. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was called before a House committee. The National Education Association denounced Bush. And Congress ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate.

Obama's actual speech proved about as controversial as a Nancy Reagan appeal to eighth-graders to "Just say no!" to drugs.

Yet, the episode reveals the poisoned character of our politics.

We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama's health-care plans were called "thugs," "fascists," "racists" and "evil-mongers" by national Democrats.

We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, "You lie!" at the president during his address to a joint session of Congress.

We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats.

One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.

Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.

The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?

Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.

Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.

Where we used to have classical, pop, country & Western and jazz music, now we have varieties tailored to specific generations, races and ethnic groups. Even our music seems designed to subdivide us.

One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.

But the old holidays, heroes and icons endure, as the new have yet to put down roots in a recalcitrant Middle America.

We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt. Crowley in the face-off with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates were called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and Barack Obama.

Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.

Now it is death panels, global warming, "birthers" and socialism. If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?

The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.

"E pluribus unum" – out of many, one - was the national motto the men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?

Is America, too, breaking up?

Americans Assess Obama Plan

2009-09-10T08:01:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal

A small crowd gathered at the marble bar in the Villa Macri Ristorante in Mishawaka, Ind.

Tim Held, a Republican who employs seven people at a sports apparel store, said he was listening to the president's speech with an open mind.

"I'm all for coverage for everybody," he said. "But as a small-business owner I don't want to pay for it."

President Barack Obama ability to sell his health-care overhaul relies heavily on convincing voters like Mr. Held. The 47-year-old man said he used to offer health insurance to his employees, but not anymore. It was too tough finding a decent plan.

As Mr. Obama spoke about small businesses binding together to shop for insurance he stopped chewing his roast beef sandwich long enough to say, "I like that."

John and Barbara Stephenson were more skeptical.

Neither had voted for Mr. Obama, and nothing he said Wednesday night changed their minds.

They said the president's proposals were going too far.

"I think he's going to cost our children and our grandchildren $3 trillion dollars," said Mr. Stephenson, 73, a retired marketing manager.

Mr. Stephenson said the couple have Medicare, as well as insurance from his retirement package.

"Are we going to be taxed on that?" he asked. Then he shook his head and said, "There is already too much government."

Doug Strader, a 40-year-old self-employed restaurant consultant, was at the end of the bar eating a bowl of vegetable and ham soup.

He said he works 70 hours a week and hasn't been paying close attention to the health-care debate. But he did have one big worry: Would he end up footing the bill for people who aren't helping themselves?

"I think everybody needs to have insurance, but I think there are plenty of people out there who will end up getting insurance who don't deserve it because they don't even try to work," he said.

Mr. Strader identified with the grim look on the faces of Republican lawmakers on TV. "He talks about insurance for everyone," he said, "but how are they going to pay for it?"

Ron Williams, chief executive of Aetna Inc., watched the speech from his office in Hartford, Conn. He praised Mr. Obama for "keeping the rhetoric down and focusing on the real issues of what's right for this country." Mr. Williams pointed out that more than half of health plans are operated as nonprofits.

John Wehrheim, a 53-year-old software salesman watched the speech at a church north of Atlanta. Before the speech, he criticized the president for not giving "clear, concise answers" on how to pay for the reform. "It's all a bunch of gobbledygook," he said.

His main worry, and one that Mr. Obama tried to allay in his speech, is the idea of government taking over health care. "I have a real concern the government could pull this off," he said. "They've never gotten anything right."

Mr. Wehrheim guffawed when President Obama said he wouldn't raise taxes to pay for the overhaul. "How can he guarantee that?" he said.

"I can't afford to pay more, not right now," he said. "And it's going to be hard to get people who have never had to use insurance to pay."

He agreed with Mr. Obama that there has to be some accountability -- just as drivers must have car insurance. But he is unsure about penalizing people who are barely making ends meet.

"My grandma had a saying," he said. "Your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins."

Obama Repeats FDR's Mistakes

2009-09-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

London Telegraph

Barack Obama is committing the same mistakes made by policymakers during the Great Depression, according to a new study endorsed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan.

His policies even have the potential to consign the U.S. to a similar fate as Argentina, which suffered a painful and humiliating slide from first to Third World status last century, the paper says.

There are "troubling similarities" between the U.S. President's actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the U.S. and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history, says the new pamphlet, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.

In particular, the authors, economists Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute, claim that the White House's plans to pour hundreds of billions of dollars of cash into the economy will undermine it in the long run. They say that by employing deficit spending and increased state intervention President Obama will ultimately hamper the long-term growth potential of the U.S. economy and may risk delaying full economic recovery by several years.

The study represents a challenge to the widely held view that Keynesian fiscal policies helped the U.S. recover from the Depression which started in the early 1930s. The authors say: "[Franklin D Roosevelt's] interventionist policies and draconian tax increases delayed full economic recovery by several years by exacerbating a climate of pessimistic expectations that drove down private capital formation and household consumption to unprecedented lows."

Rowley says: "It is also not impossible that the U.S. will experience the kind of economic collapse from first to Third World status experienced by Argentina under the national-socialist governance of Juan Peron."

The paper, which recommends that the U.S. return to a more laissez-faire economic system rather than intervening further in activity, has been endorsed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan, who said: "We have learned some things from comparable experiences of the 1930s' Great Depression, perhaps enough to reduce the severity of the current contraction. But we have made no progress toward putting limits on political leaders, who act out their natural proclivities without any basic understanding of what makes capitalism work."

U.S. Debt Worries China

2009-09-08T09:27:00.000-07:00

London Telegraph

The US Federal Reserve's policy of printing money to buy Treasury debt threatens to set off a serious decline of the dollar and compel China to redesign its foreign reserve policy, according to a top member of the Communist hierarchy.

Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee and now head of China's green energy drive, said Beijing was dismayed by the Fed's recourse to "credit easing".

"We hope there will be a change in monetary policy as soon as they have positive growth again. If they keep printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and this is very difficult to change, so we will diversify incremental reserves into euros, yen, and other currencies," he said.

China's reserves are more than $2 trillion, the world's largest.

"Gold is definitely an alternative, but when we buy, the price goes up. We have to do it carefully so as not to stimulate the markets," he added.

The comments suggest that China has become the driving force in the gold market and can be counted on to buy whenever there is a price dip, putting a floor under any correction.

Mr. Cheng said the Fed's loose monetary policy was stoking an unstable asset boom in China. "If we raise interest rates, we will be flooded with hot money. We have to wait for them. If they raise, we raise.

"Credit in China is too loose. We have a bubble in the housing market and in stocks so we have to be very careful, because this could fall down."

Mr. Cheng said China had learned from the West that it is a mistake for central banks to target retail price inflation and take their eye off assets.

"This is where Greenspan went wrong from 2000 to 2004," he said. "He thought everything was alright because inflation was low, but assets absorbed the liquidity."

Mr. Cheng said China had lost 20 million jobs as a result of the crisis and advised the West not to over-estimate the role that his country can play in global recovery.

China's task is to switch from export dependency to internal consumption, but that requires a "change in the ideology of the Chinese people" to discourage excess saving. "This is very difficult".

Mr. Cheng said the root cause of global imbalances is spending patterns in US (and UK) and China.

"The US spends tomorrow's money today," he said. "We Chinese spend today's money tomorrow. That's why we have this financial crisis."

Yet the consequences are not symmetric.

"He who goes borrowing, goes sorrowing," said Mr. Cheng.

It was a quote from US founding father Benjamin Franklin.