obama

WSJ: Obama Would Europeanize America

Tickler Leave a comment

Another must read from the WSJ today…

The only organization with a worse rating than the Republican president is the Democratic Congress—14% approval, 75% disapproval. But there, too, the Democrats will gain strength. They are expected to increase their majority in the House, and current polling shows that in Senate races Democrats will increase their members from the current 51 (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats) to at least 57. They may even achieve the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

So where is the new Obama administration likely to take us? Seven things seem certain:

  • The U.S. military will withdraw from Iraq quickly and substantially, regardless of conditions on the ground or the obvious consequence of emboldening terrorists there and around the globe.
  • Protectionism will become our national trade policy; free trade agreements with other nations will be reduced and limited.
  • Income taxes will rise on middle- and upper-income people and businesses, and individuals will pay much higher Social Security taxes, all to carry out the new president’s goals of “spreading the wealth around.”
  • Federal government spending will substantially increase. The new Obama proposals come to more than $300 billion annually, for education, health care, energy, environmental and many other programs, in addition to whatever is needed to meet our economic challenges. Mr. Obama proposes more than a 10% annual spending growth increase, considerably higher than under the first President Bush (6.7%), Bill Clinton (3.3%) or George W. Bush (6.4%).
  • Federal regulation of the economy will expand, on everything from financial management companies to electricity generation and personal energy use.
  • The power of labor unions will substantially increase, beginning with repeal of secret ballot voting to decide on union representation.
  • Free speech will be curtailed through the reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine to limit the conservative talk radio that so irritates the liberal establishment.

These policy changes will be the beginning of the Europeanization of America. There will be many more public policy changes with similar goals—nationalized health care, Kyoto-like global-warming policies, and increased education regulation and spending.

Additional tax advantages for lower and middle income people will be enacted: a 10% mortgage tax credit that would average about $500 per household per year, a $4,000 tax credit for college tuition, a tax credit covering half of child-care expenses up to $6,000 per year, and even a $7,000 credit for purchase of a clean car.

More important, all but the clean car credit would be “refundable,” meaning people will get a check for them if they owe no taxes, which is simply a transfer of income from the government to individuals. In reality this is the beginning of a new series of entitlements for middle-class families, the longer-term effect of which will be to make those families more dependant on (and so more supportive of) larger government. The Tax Policy Center estimates that these refundable tax credits would cost the government $648 billion over 10 years.

These are Mr. Obama’s plans. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats would increase spending for their own interests and favorite programs. More important, the Congress will consider itself more important than a freshman president who has never held an executive position, so they will do what they want and he will have to go along with most of it.

READ IT HERE

WSJ: Obama’s ‘Redistribution’ Constitution

Tickler Leave a comment

The left will own the courts. This is why we need to own guns against a government that hates us. The future is very bleak for American under Hussein, Surrender Poodle (Pelosi), and Mormon in Name Only (Reid).

The Wall Street Journal published a piece online today about the ability Obama will have of restocking the courts against the values and wishes of more than half of America’s sleeping conservative population who don’t seem to be interested enough to vote this year (you deserve what you get, but I don’t so go to the trouble of voting against Obama).

One of the great unappreciated stories of the past eight years is how thoroughly Senate Democrats thwarted efforts by President Bush to appoint judges to the lower federal courts.

Consider the most important lower federal court in the country: the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In his two terms as president, Ronald Reagan appointed eight judges, an average of one a year, to this court. They included Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, Kenneth Starr, Larry Silberman, Stephen Williams, James Buckley, Douglas Ginsburg and David Sentelle. In his two terms, George W. Bush was able to name only four: John Roberts, Janice Rogers Brown, Thomas Griffith and Brett Kavanaugh.

Although two seats on this court are vacant, Bush nominee Peter Keisler has been denied even a committee vote for two years. If Barack Obama wins the presidency, he will almost certainly fill those two vacant seats, the seats of two older Clinton appointees who will retire, and most likely the seats of four older Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointees who may retire as well.

The net result is that the legal left will once again have a majority on the nation’s most important regulatory court of appeals.

The balance will shift as well on almost all of the 12 other federal appeals courts. Nine of the 13 will probably swing to the left if Mr. Obama is elected (not counting the Ninth Circuit, which the left solidly controls today). Circuit majorities are likely at stake in this presidential election for the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeal. That includes the federal appeals courts for New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and virtually every other major center of finance in the country.

On the Supreme Court, six of the current nine justices will be 70 years old or older on January 20, 2009. There is a widespread expectation that the next president could make four appointments in just his first term, with maybe two more in a second term. Here too we are poised for heavy change.

These numbers ought to raise serious concern because of Mr. Obama’s extreme left-wing views about the role of judges. He believes — and he is quite open about this — that judges ought to decide cases in light of the empathy they ought to feel for the little guy in any lawsuit.

Speaking in July 2007 at a conference of Planned Parenthood, he said: “[W]e need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

On this view, plaintiffs should usually win against defendants in civil cases; criminals in cases against the police; consumers, employees and stockholders in suits brought against corporations; and citizens in suits brought against the government. Empathy, not justice, ought to be the mission of the federal courts, and the redistribution of wealth should be their mantra.

In a Sept. 6, 2001, interview with Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ-FM, Mr. Obama noted that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society,” and “to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.”

He also noted that the Court “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted.” That is to say, he noted that the U.S. Constitution as written is only a guarantee of negative liberties from government — and not an entitlement to a right to welfare or economic justice.

This raises the question of whether Mr. Obama can in good faith take the presidential oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” as he must do if he is to take office. Does Mr. Obama support the Constitution as it is written, or does he support amendments to guarantee welfare? Is his provision of a “tax cut” to millions of Americans who currently pay no taxes merely a foreshadowing of constitutional rights to welfare, health care, Social Security, vacation time and the redistribution of wealth? Perhaps the candidate ought to be asked to answer these questions before the election rather than after.

Every new federal judge has been required by federal law to take an oath of office in which he swears that he will “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.” Mr. Obama’s emphasis on empathy in essence requires the appointment of judges committed in advance to violating this oath. To the traditional view of justice as a blindfolded person weighing legal claims fairly on a scale, he wants to tear the blindfold off, so the judge can rule for the party he empathizes with most.

The legal left wants Americans to imagine that the federal courts are very right-wing now, and that Mr. Obama will merely stem some great right-wing federal judicial tide. The reality is completely different. The federal courts hang in the balance, and it is the left which is poised to capture them.

A whole generation of Americans has come of age since the nation experienced the bad judicial appointments and foolish economic and regulatory policy of the Johnson and Carter administrations. If Mr. Obama wins we could possibly see any or all of the following: a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government-financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants; ruinous shareholder suits against corporate officers and directors; and approval of huge punitive damage awards, like those imposed against tobacco companies, against many legitimate businesses such as those selling fattening food.

Nothing less than the very idea of liberty and the rule of law are at stake in this election. We should not let Mr. Obama replace justice with empathy in our nation’s courtrooms.

Mr. Calabresi is a co-founder of the Federalist Society and a professor of law at Northwestern University.

READ IT HERE

OBAMA MUST BE STOPPED!

Washington Post’s Krauthammer: McCain for President

Tickler Leave a comment

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 24, 2008

Contrarian that I am, I’m voting for John McCain. I’m not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it’s over before it’s over. I’m talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they’re left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe — neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) — yelling “Stop!” I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I’d rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

First, I’ll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The “erratic” temperament issue, for example. As if McCain’s risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.

McCain the “erratic” is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.

Nor will I countenance the “dirty campaign” pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed that McCain supports “cutting Social Security benefits in half.” And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.

McCain’s critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What’s astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama’s most egregious association — with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who’s been cramming on these issues for the past year, who’s never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of “a world that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

There’s just no comparison. Obama’s own running mate warned this week that Obama’s youth and inexperience will invite a crisis — indeed a crisis “generated” precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he’s been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today’s economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

The Surge in Iraq by Barack Obama

Tickler Leave a comment

When President Bush ordered the surge in January 2007, Obama said:

“I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

This is a position he maintained throughout 2007. This year, long after proof and attacks forced him to comment, he acknowledged progress.

NY Times Finally Reports on ACORN’s Wicked Ways

Tickler Leave a comment

I was surprised the New York Times attempting to return to journalism* from 30 years of schilling for the DNC and any other hippie effort it’s staff stubbornly continues to defend, though we’d have thought they’d have grown out of them by now as so many others have. Granted, one article doth not a reformation make, but even a single article with some balance is something for them.

Ms. Kingsley’s concerns about the way Acorn affiliates work together could fuel the controversy over Acorn’s voter registration efforts, which are largely underwritten by an affiliated charity, Project Vote. Project Vote hires Acorn to do voter registration work on its behalf, and the two groups say they have registered 1.3 million voters this year.

As a federally tax-exempt charity, Project Vote is subject to prohibitions on partisan political activity. But Acorn, which is a nonprofit membership corporation under Louisiana law, though subject to federal taxation, is not bound by the same restrictions.

“Project Vote and Acorn have a written agreement that specifies that all work is nonpartisan,” Michael Slater, Project Vote’s new executive director, wrote in answer to e-mailed questions about the relationship.

But Ms. Kingsley found that the tight relationship between Project Vote and Acorn made it impossible to document that Project Vote’s money had been used in a strictly nonpartisan manner. Until the embezzlement scandal broke last summer, Project Vote’s board was made up entirely of Acorn staff members and Acorn members.

Ms. Kingsley’s report raised concerns not only about a lack of documentation to demonstrate that no charitable money was used for political activities but also about which organization controlled strategic decisions…

“As a result, we may not be able to prove that 501(c)3 resources are not being directed to specific regions based on impermissible partisan considerations,” Ms. Kingsley said, referring to the section of the tax code concerning rules for charities.

and…

Project Vote, for example, had only one independent director since it received a federal tax exemption in 1994, and he was on the board for less than two years, its tax forms show. Since then, the board has consisted of Acorn staff members and two Acorn members who pay monthly dues.

But George Hampton, who was listed as a board member from 1994 to 2006, said that while he had been a member of Acorn, he had never heard of Project Vote. “I don’t know anything about this,” Mr. Hampton said.

Cleo Mata, listed as a board member on tax forms from 1997 to 2006, also said she was not aware she was on the Project Vote board. “If that’s what you say,” Ms. Mata told a visitor to her home in Pasadena, Tex. “I tell you that I didn’t realize I was.”

Mr. Slater said he “cannot speak to why Mr. Hampton and Ms. Mata fail to recall their involvement on the Project Vote board.” He noted that Ms. Mata, 63, was “in poor health.”

READ IT HERE

Let me summarize…

Project Vote has been on record of affiliating with ACORN since 1994 (i.e. sharing money/resources)
+
Project Vote’s board has been essentially 100% ACORN members/employees since 1994
+
Project Vote (ACORN-governed) hires ACORN (themselves) to do specifically Democrat voter registration since 1994.
=
This means that Project Vote IS ACORN for all intents and purposes. Project Vote, a federally funded tax-exempt charity is a shell company for Democrat/liberal voter activist group ACORN. The financial transaction alone can only be described as money laundering and federal voter fraud.

RESULT? That’s 1.3 million very likely 100% Democrat-only voters registered THIS YEAR ALONE by Democrat group ACORN (under the name of Project Vote). Sure they still have to vote to steal it, but the effort that went into visiting registering and hyping-up voters on only one side, on federal money, is corrupt.

So where does that leave us? Project Vote/ACORN has been using my money, and your money, to recruit 1.3 million potential voters who want to be the recipients of Obama’s spreading of the wealth.

From where I sit, there’s two options…

Option 1 (send a message, what they deserve): All 1.3 million registrations thrown-out due to fraudulent and partisan collection methods with federal funding.

Option 2 (send less of a message, letting them off easy): We need to first discard a little more than half of all ACORN registrations to compensate for the conservatives they failed to represent or suppressed (the pot/kettle thing) in their federally funded canvassing. Second, the remaining votes that came from ACORN registrations should be triple-checked individually against the strictest identification measures, by Republicans. These groups need to be sent a clear message that we don’t do this kind of corrupt thing in our country. We don’t tolerate stuffing ballot boxes on federal funding like the Southeast Asians and the Africans. We don’t tolerate putting puppets in place like the Russians. We elect fairly and legally according to the word of the people, not just angry partisan Democrats with their hands out. We don’t do those things in this country, that is except when Democrats are in power.

Anything shy of option 2 and Obama’s secret foot-soldiers may steal this election, much like the claims in 2000, only it’ll be true this time.

*As a post-script: I shouldn’t even give them credit. This is evidence of fraud that the New York Times have been forced to reveal for competitive reasons, to keep up with the report that was released. Unlike gaffe’s and questionable statements, even questionable policy by the Obama camp. The NY Times can’t really ignore crimes if it wants to call itself a newspaper (even the newspaper of soiled record). So we can all safely assume that this was simply a bottom line decision by management; that in the age of dwindling newspaper sales the fact remains, that the truth sells more papers even in Manhattan.

Obama and the Tax Tipping Point

Tickler Leave a comment

Another great WSJ op-ed piece…

Other nations have tried the ideology of fairness in the place of incentives and found that reward without work is a recipe for decline. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher took on the unions and slashed taxes to restore growth and jobs in Great Britain. In Germany a few years ago, Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder defied his party’s dogma and loosened labor’s grip on the economy to end stagnation. And more recently in France, Nicolas Sarkozy was swept to power on a platform of restoring flexibility to the economy.

The sequence is always the same. High-tax, big-spending policies force the economy to lose momentum. Then growth in government spending outstrips revenues. Fiscal and trade deficits soar. Public debt, excessive taxation and unemployment follow. The central bank tries to solve the problem by printing money. International competitiveness is lost and the currency depreciates. The system stagnates. And then a frightened electorate returns conservatives to power.

The economic tides will not stand still while Washington experiments with European-type social democracy, even though the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency will buy some time. Our trademark competitive advantage will be lost, and once lost, it will be hard to regain. There are too many emerging economies focused on prosperity and not redistribution for the U.S. to easily recapture its role of global economic leader.

Tomorrow’s children may come to question why their parents sold their birthright for a mess of “fairness” — whatever that will signify when jobs are scarce and American opportunity is no longer the envy of the world.

READ IT HERE

Obama Constitutionally Ineligible To Be President?

Tickler Leave a comment

I found this very interesting. Why would he hide or delay this? I have my birth certificate right here.

Either side you fall on this one, there’s no justification for Obama to not release information and documents that could resolve this instantly. It looks like he’s trying to sneak into the presidency and then sort it out with presidential powers. But this could certainly blow up in his face in a big way if he waits until then.

Biden Makes McCain’s Case against Obama

Tickler 1 Comment

Joe Biden, always reliable for betraying his shallow pool of savvy and power motives through a loose tongue, told his real feelings again, painting a second coat on his ticket-mate for being weak with world and terror leaders. As if it weren’t enough for him to claim Obama needs a second desk in the oval office where Biden will preside as co-president, now he puts another nail it Obama along the very same lines.

Biden’s quote froma speech last week…

“Within the first six months of this administration, if we win… we’re going to face a major international challenge. Because they’re going to want to test him, just like they did young John Kennedy [who by the way largely failed]. They’re going to want to test him. And they’re going to find out this guy’s got steel in his spine.”

Not so much on the steel spine thing Joe.

But he was right on the fact that the rest of the world sees Obama as a media darling and a great motivational speaker (corporate training sessions and kid’s parties can be booked through the campaign), not as a strong leader or leaving certainly alone a strong defender. They know as well as we do that he’s naive and weak, despite his fightin’ words regarding Pakistan. Keep in mind, this is a pacifist at heart, as are all of the left of the left, and he’s saying what you want to hear to sucker your vote. He has no intention of doing anything but talking to our enemies, which has worked so well in the past, ask Carter.

The always candid and often wise John Bolton was on Fox, expanding on the issues that face us if Zero becomes president with this opening salvo “I think [Obama’s] very naive, I don’t think he understands how to represent or defend American interests. And I think we’re going to learn… to great pain if he’s elected how much at risk we really are.”

BOLTON: Well, I think [Obama and Biden are] obviously eager to win, and that’s why Obama has changed his position so many times on key questions like how exactly is he going to get out of Iraq.

I must say my favorite Joe Biden line in that whole speech was when he said, I’ve forgotten more about foreign policy than my colleague — most of my colleagues know, so he better win the vice presidency. I don’t think he can go back to the Senate after that.

HANNITY: Yes. Do you think, for example, that when you — when he said these things about Iran being a tiny country, not a serious threat, how do you think that is perceived?

I mean is that almost like when he talks about waiving — he would have left Iraq, we would have basically waved the white flag of surrender.

Is he an appeaser? Is that a fair word? I used that adjective about him?

BOLTON: Well, I think he’s a kind of a kumbaya guy. He can’t understand why somebody on the other side of the table may not be as reasonable as he is, and those people are prepared to take advantage of him.

Read it here

And here on MSNBC for Obama (the stealth campaign arm)…

Obama Plans To Sock It To Small Business

Tickler Leave a comment
More clear evidence of his advisors’ lack of understanding from another Wall Street Journal article…

Mr. Obama’s tax increase would hit the bottom line of small businesses in three direct ways. First, because 85% of small business owners are taxed at the personal income tax rate, any moderately successful business with an income above as little as $165,000 a year could face a higher tax liability. That’s the income level at which the 33% income tax bracket now phases in for individuals, and Mr. Obama would raise that tax rate for those businesses to 36%…

Second, the Obama plan phases out tax deductions (the so-called PEP and Pease provisions), thus raising tax rates imposed on this group by another 1.5 percentage points. Finally, Mr. Obama would require many small business owners to pay as much as a four-percentage-point payroll tax surcharge on net income above $250,000. All of this would bring the federal marginal small business tax rate up to nearly 45%, while big business would continue to pay the 35% corporate tax rate…

Mr. Obama responds that more than nine of 10 small businesses would not pay these higher taxes. Last Thursday he scoffed in response to the debate over Joe the Plumber, saying that not too many plumbers “make more than $250,000 a year.” He’s right that most of the 35 million small businesses in America have a net income of less than $250,000, hire only a few workers, and stay in business for less than four years…

However, the point is that it is the most successful small- and medium-sized businesses that create most of the new jobs in our dynamic society. And they are precisely the businesses that will be slammed by Mr. Obama’s tax increase. Joe the Plumber would get hit if he expanded his business and hired 10 to 15 other plumbers. An analysis by the Senate Finance Committee found that of the filers in the highest two tax brackets, three out of four are small business owners. A typical firm with a net income of $500,000 would see its tax burden rise to $166,000 a year under the Obama plan from $146,000 today.

READ IT HERE