What Difference Does it Make? (video)

Big Government Is Bad Government Because Power Attracts The Corrupt

By Lawrence W. Reed
January 25, 2013

It's a good bet that no matter where you are on the political spectrum-liberal, conservative, libertarian or something else-you want men and women in government to be honest, humble, fair, wise, independent, responsible, incorruptible, mindful of the future and respectful of others.
But you may be holding profoundly contradictory views without realizing it. This is the bottom line: The bigger government gets, the less likely it will attract men and women who possess those traits we all say we want.
Have you noticed how mean and nasty campaigns for high office have become? Lies and distortions are common political fare these days. Why would a genuinely good person subject himself to the ugliness of it all? Increasingly, genuinely good people don't bother, so we are left all too often with dirtbags and demagogues in government. Unless you enjoy rolling in the mud with the hogs, you stay on the other side of the fence.
There are reasons for this disturbing situation and they have to do with the nature of power. Lord Acton famously stated more than a century ago that "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He nailed it, though I would add a corollary of my own: "Power attracts the corrupt."
If you've supported the monstrous expansion of the federal government in recent decades, or if you've got a laundry list of things you want it to do because you think it's not yet big enough, then don't blow smoke about clean and honest politics. You're part of the problem. Big government, by its very nature, is dirty and dishonest. That's the kind of people it attracts and that's what concentrated power is always about.
America's Founders had lots of reasons for wanting to keep government small, reasons the government schools rarely teach these days. One of those reasons was that they knew the wisdom of Lord Acton's warning a century before he wrote it. It would be inconceivable to our Founders that good and honest people could ever stay good and honest if they're swiping and redistributing four trillion dollars every year and regulating almost every corner of life. That kind of power can make a sinner from a saint in no time.
Think ahead to what all this means in the future if the federal government continues to grow unchecked. Some day when it controls 50 or 60 or 70 percent of national income, it'll be stuffed full of arrogant, manipulative, slick-talking but low-character types. They will not be people who are wise enough to realize that they're not smart enough to run everybody else's life. Then when we realize we've put some of the worst among us in charge of a gargantuan machine, it'll be too late. Power attracts bad people and bad people don't go away quietly.

Big government equals bad government. Don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise.

Big Money, Big Protest, Big Muscle: Obama's New Left-Wing Political Machine

 [ed. Evil in human form...]

by Joel B. Pollak 

25 Jan 2013

While Republicans contemplate how to improve their party’s political performance at the Republican National Committee (RNC) winter meeting, which opens today, Democrats are already taking politics to a new level, creating parallel organizations to advocate for President Barack Obama’s agenda and using their political clout to rearrange private business relationships to their liking. American politics has never seen anything like it.

Politico reports today that major donors--including billionaire George Soros (above), bailout beneficiary Citi and others--were approached by Obama campaign veterans to donate millions to Organizng for America, the president’s new 501(c)4 non-profit advocacy group. Under the tax code, 501(c)4 groups do not have to disclose their donors--a provision, ironically, that President Obama spent years campaigning against.
They justify the contradiction by insisting their money is for “good government,”, while money raised by conservative groups is “poision,” according to Obama bundler Alan Solow, quoted by Politico. Still, the organizers maintain the pretense of involving small donors rather than highlighting the large checks that fund existing groups such as Media Matters and Center for American Progress to the tune of $60 million per year, combined.
In addition to Organizing for America, the left has already welcomed another new left-wing organization, the Democracy Initiative, which brings several activist and lobby groups together to agitate for their policy priorities. The Democracy Initiative builds on previous efforts, such as Health Care for America now, which worked with the Obama administration in 2009 to organize demonstrations in support of his heath reform law.
Mother Jones reported earlier this month that the idea for the Democracy Initiative had grown out of conversations between Greenpeace’s Phil Radford, the NAACP’s Ben Jealous, and the Sierra Club’s Michael Brune. They agreed to campaign for “three goals: getting big money out of politics, expanding the voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, and rewriting Senate rules to curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation.”
The Democracy Initiative was partially thwarted--for now--in its attempt to reform the filibuster when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid agreed to a set of modest changes with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell yesterday. The campaign, however, will continue. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club announced its own, independent effort to stop the Keystone Pipeline, which will for the first time use civil disobedience to demonstrate its outrage.
In addition to these new organizing efforts, the left is using political clout it has already won in new ways, applying direct pressure to businesses in order to encourage them to fall in line behind Democrats’ political priorities. Chicago mayor and former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, for instance, is pressuring banks to stop loaning money to gun manufacturers unless those companies support new gun controls.
Since taking office in 2011, Emanuel has failed to the Chicago murder rate, which has surged in spite of restrictive gun control laws. But where his government has failed, his heavy-handed politics may succeed--at least in helping pass further gun controls.
Blinded by its persistent, contrived nightmares about Republicans stealing elections, the left may not yet fully understand what it is becoming: big money, big protest, and big muscle.

[ed. While the right are busy playing by the rules, the left are busy tearing the west apart...]

‘Turn ‘Em All In’: Feinstein’s Assault Weapons Ban Grabs Handguns, Shotguns

[ed. Another crusty-faced soviet-style headmistress insisting we will do as we are told...]

By AWR Hawkins

January 24, 2013 

Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) seemingly endless pursuit of a ban on “assault rifles” since the Sandy Hook tragedy has now led to the introduction of her “Assault Weapons Ban of 2013“–a bill that not only bans “assault rifles,” but numerous handguns and shotguns too.

Here’s a question: When did handguns and shotguns become “assault rifles”?
They didn’t, but Democrats see this as their big chance to take away as many guns as they can, and they’re not about to pass that chance up.
That this move is as shameless as it is unconstitutional is evident in the fact that the vast majority of the weapons Feinstein seeks to ban were not even used in Sandy Hook, the Clackamas Town Center shooting, or the shooting at the Aurora theater. It is a gun grab, pure and simple.
But as I wrote on Dec. 27, 2012, when details were already leaking about Feinstein’s bill, “If we are foolish enough to embrace a ban on any weapon in the coming Congress, then we are unwittingly embracing a ban on every weapon.”
The truth of this is playing out before us today.
We must hold the feet of Republican Senators and House members to the fire on this one so that they stop Feinstein’s bill in its tracks. In 2014, we need to go to the voting booth with the same vigor we showed in 2010, and turn these gun grabbers out of office.

Experts aren’t deities

By: Walter Williams
1/23/2013

Let’s look at experts. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was a mathematician and scientist. Newton has to be the greatest and most influential scientist who has ever lived. He laid the foundation for classical mechanics, and his genius transformed our understanding of science, particularly in the areas of physics, mathematics and astronomy. What’s not widely known is that Newton spent most of his waking hours on alchemy; his experiments included trying to turn lead into gold. Though he wrote volumes on alchemy, after his death Britain’s Royal Society deemed that they were “not fit to be printed.”
Lord William Thomson Kelvin (1824-1907) was a Belfast-born British mathematical physicist and engineer. Kelvin’s major contribution was in thermodynamics, and he is widely recognized for determining the correct value of absolute zero, approximately minus 273 degrees Celsius. In his honor, absolute temperatures are expressed in Kelvin units. Being an expert in one field doesn’t spare one from being an arrogant amateur in others. Based on his knowledge of heat dissipation, Kelvin criticized geologists of his day and claimed that Earth was between 20 million and 100 million years old. Kelvin also said that “X-rays will prove to be a hoax,” but he changed his mind after he experienced an X-ray of his own hand. Kelvin also predicted, “I can state flatly that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
Linus Pauling (1901-94) was one of the most influential chemists in history. He was one of the founders of the field of quantum chemistry and is often called the father of molecular biology. Pauling won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, making him the only person awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes. Later, he was awarded the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples by the Soviet Union. Many of Pauling’s colleagues who admired his scholarly work saw him as a naive spokesman for Soviet communism.
Despite his genius in science, Pauling peddled fringe ideas. In the 1970 edition of his book “Vitamin C and the Common Cold,” he said that taking 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily will reduce the incidence of colds by 45 percent. In the book’s 1976 revision, retitled “Vitamin C, the Common Cold and the Flu,” he recommended higher vitamin C dosages. In his third revision, “Vitamin C and Cancer” (1979), Pauling claimed that high doses of vitamin C may also be effective against cancer. In another book, “How to Live Longer and Feel Better” (1986), Pauling argued that megadoses of vitamins, such as the 12,000 to 40,000 milligrams he took daily, “can increase your enjoyment of life and can help in controlling heart disease, cancer, and other diseases and in slowing down the process of aging.” There’s absolutely no research that backs up any of Pauling’s vitamin C claims.
The take-home lesson is that experts are notoriously fallible outside of their fields of endeavor — and especially so when making predictions. There tends to be an inverse relationship between a predictor’s level of confidence and the accuracy of his prediction. Irving Fisher, a distinguished Yale University economics professor in 1929, predicted, “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Three days later, the stock market crashed. In 1954, Dr. W.C. Heuper of the National Cancer Institute said, “If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one.” Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, in 1943 allegedly said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” “(Research on the atomic bomb) is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.” That was Adm. William Leahy’s prediction in 1945.
The bottom line is that the fact that a person has academic degrees, honors and status is no reason for us to abandon our tools of critical thinking.

[ed. There is, and probably always was, an elite set of 'high priests' who set themselves up as unimpeachable experts in all matters (such as Dawkin). I concur with Mr Williams, let us not rely on credentialism to do our thinking for us and let us not let these people mock us into submission...]

There will be more Hispanics than whites in California by the end of 2013.

by Tony Lee
22 Jan 2013

According to figures revealed in California Gov. Jerry Brown's 2013-14 budget proposal, the number of Hispanics will be equal to the number of whites by July of this year--39% of Californians will be Hispanic and 39% will be white then. By the end of the year, the number of Hispanics will outnumber whites.

In addition, the report found that 80% of Hispanics in California are younger than 50, compared to only 73 percent of whites. The report notes that "as many in the non-Hispanic white population retire, they will be replaced by a more diverse workforce.” Hispanics made up 12 percent of the electorate in 1998. In 2012, though, they represented 20% of the electorate.

Political analysts in California believe that unless Republicans win more of the Hispanic vote, it will be "almost impossible" for the GOP to gain a majority in the state. In 2012, nearly 72% of Hispanics in California voted to reelect President Barack Obama.

[ed. Years and years of an open borders policy, even by 'conservatives' like Bush, have produced this. I don't know how immigration is not one of they key election issues, all over the western world....]

Africa unrest has Obama administration fingerprints

By: Robert Maginnis
1/22/2013

The hostage crises in Algeria and Mali are linked to President Barack Obama’s failed Libya policy and could quickly metastasize across North Africa transforming it into the world’s epicenter for Islamic extremists.
The Islamist group that stormed the Ain Amenas gas facility in southern Algeria claims it was responding to Algiers’ support of the French military invasion of neighboring Mali.  The French went to the aid of Malian forces to battle rebels – mostly ethnic Tuaregs, nomadic Berber people who inhabit the Saharan interior of North Africa and allied with Islamic extremists – who now control much of that country and threaten, according to French authorities, to radicalize the entire region.
Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest magazine and a North African expert, explained in his blog the Tuaregs are the main group that has been in periodic revolt against the Mali government for decades.  Garfinkle states the “catalyst” for the Mali rebellion was the Obama administration’s decision to start a war in Libya as well as our bad judgment about the Tuaregs.
For years the U.S. military provided counterterrorism training to Malian forces and it helped select Tuareg officers to command Mali’s northern units.  Once Obama launched operations against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi many heavily armed Tuaregs, who were Libyan mercenaries, returned to Mali with truck loads of weapons.   Then the American-picked Tuareg commanders with the help of the returning Tuareg mercenaries seized the northern half of Mali.
Now the Tuaregs with their Islamic partners, Ansar Dine and the Algerian al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), who also fled Libya, threaten the Malian capital.  That is the reported reason the French government sent jet fighters and ground troops to the rescue.  But those French forces are totally inadequate for the mission.
There are an estimated 1.2 million Tuaregs living in the region that includes land of several nations, which cover an area several times the size of Texas.  Garfinkle estimates that if only 5 percent of the Tuaregs mobilize to fight that translates to 12,500 “bad guys” which doesn’t include their Islamist allies, which number in the few thousands.  That is why the 800 French now in Mali which is expected to quickly grow to 2,500 are totally inadequate for a classic counterinsurgency mission and the promised 3,300 African fighters from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) which are poorly trained and organized won’t help either.   A classic counterinsurgency mission requires 20 troops to each 1,000 population.
Therefore, unless something totally unforeseen derails the current momentum, expect the Tuareg/Islamist rebellion to spread to Niger, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Chad, Algeria and Libya.  Further Western intervention will only stimulate recruitment and resistance.  Worse, if other Islamist groups like Boko Haram (Nigeria which shares a border with Mali) and Ansar al-Sharia (Libya) join the fight, which are aided by Somalia’s al Shabaab and the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the entire region could blow up.
That threat is especially likely given the regional demographics which favor instability.  Fifteen of the top 20 failed states in the world are in Africa and the continent’s growth is above two percent, and it includes job-poor economies where half of the unemployed are between 15 and 24 years old.  That cohort is especially vulnerable to rebellion and politically inspired Islamic extremism as evidenced across the troubled Middle East.
That is why it is possible Islamic terrorist networks could soon engulf the entire Sahel and sub-Sahara, the area of North Africa running 3,000 miles across the continent from Mauritania and Nigeria on the west to Sudan and Somalia in the east.  That outcome has significant implications for the West.
U.S. General Carter Ham, the top American commander overseeing U.S. operations in Africa, said these Islamist groups subscribe to al Qaeda’s ideology which includes the intent to attack Westerners, overthrow apostate governments like Algeria, encourage local affiliates to take advantage of failed states and install fundamentalist regimes based on Islamic law or Sharia.   Of course, Islamist threats already materialized with the deadly attack in September on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya and Islamic law is already a reality in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.
Further, Islamists will use the region as a sanctuary from which to threaten neighboring countries and reach global targets as has al Qaeda from places like Pakistan.  Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI.), chairman U.S. House Intelligence Committee, warned the success extremists have had in Mali will likely attract extremist militants from other parts of the world as we saw in Iraq and now in Syria, often performing suicide bombings.  “They are very good at selling their success stories,” Rogers said.
So what can we do?
Our ally British Prime Minister David Cameron says the West must direct more of its diplomatic, military and intelligence resources to the intensifying threat emanating from the “ungoverned space” and treating that threat with as much concern as the terrorist challenge in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That effort translates into at least three immediate initiatives.
First, the French already joined the fight and need our help.  The U.S. should provide specialized assistance that includes airlift, logistics and intelligence.  However, Washington and Paris must realize that driving Islamists out of Mali and the greater region should be done by Africans, not the West but with our support.  Otherwise, the fight will become protracted as Islamists flood into the region.
Second, the U.S. must push ECOWAS – ready or not – to join the fight immediately and we must provide help delivering those forces to the battlefield.  Further, the West must be prepared to support ECOWAS’ intervention for years.  Expect this fight to last many years similar to the Somalia war against al Shabaad which currently occupies thousands of troops from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), a regional peacekeeping mission operated by the African Union with the approval of the United Nations.
Finally, enlist Algeria to join the anti-Tuareg/Islamist campaign by taking over from France, a recommendation advanced by Vicki Huddleston, the U.S. ambassador to Mali from 2002 to 2005 and former U.S. defense department official.
Algeria is best suited for the task for two reasons.  “Algeria is the only country on the continent with the military capacity, seasoned officers, counterterrorism experience and geographic proximity to take over from France,” Huddleston wrote for the New York Times.  Further, the Algerians previously negotiated peace with the Tuaregs in northern Mali and it helps that some Islamists have already abandoned the Tuaregs.
The brewing crises in North Africa have American fingerprints thanks to President Obama’s misguided Libya war support.  Now we must act to mitigate the blow-back effects of that failed policy by supporting the French, ECOWAS and encouraging Algeria to take a regional leadership role.  Failing on any of these points could spell a very dangerous future for the region and American security.

David Attenborough - Humans are plague on Earth

By Louise Gray

22 Jan 2013

 
The television presenter said that humans are threatening their own existence and that of other species by using up the world’s resources.

He said the only way to save the planet from famine and species extinction is to limit human population growth.

“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now,” he told the Radio Times.

Sir David, who is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, has spoken out before about the “frightening explosion in human numbers” and the need for investment in sex education and other voluntary means of limiting population in developing countries.

“We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves — and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.”
Sir David, whose landmark series are repeated from Monday on BBC2, starting with Life on Earth, has also spoken out about the change in wildlife documentaries during his lifetime.
The 86-year-old said commentary from presenters like himself are becoming less necessary as camera work is able to tell a story.
“I’m not sure there’s any need for a new Attenborough,” he said. “The more you go on, the less you need people standing between you and the animal and the camera waving their arms about.
“It’s much cheaper to get someone in front of a camera describing animal behaviour than actually showing you [the behaviour]. That takes a much longer time. But the kind of carefully tailored programmes in which you really work at the commentary, you really match pictures to words, is a bit out of fashion now … regarded as old hat.”

[ed. I think it is wrong to link this issue to "climate change" or saving animals. We need to reduce  the population of the planet in order to improve quality of life and eliminate some of the third world burden, not so we can make it comfortable for giraffes. Besides the only people who will actually listen and limit their reproduction are white westerners a group already in serious decline...]

Obama’s Startling Second Inaugural Admission

By Tom Blumer
January 22, 2013

President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address on Monday was mostly what one would have expected: A paean to the wonders of statism and how great America could be if we would just overcome our unhealthy legacy. In Obama’s world, we would all be so much better if we could get over obsessions like rugged individualism and the true meaning of the words contained in our nation’s Constitution, and let a benevolent, all-knowing government take more control over our everyday lives.
But in the midst of his “we know better” exercise, Obama made the most stunning admission of abject failure I have heard a president utter in my lifetime. I’ll have more on that shortly.
In his speech, Obama made a pretense of paying homage to our Founding Fathers, but followed it with a clear indication that he believes their wisdom is passé by claiming that “preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.” Other than our involvement in wars, which he falsely claims will soon be coming to an end, I can’t imagine what he could be thinking of. Obama even added a dose of coldly calculated and contemptuous ridicule to the mix by including an insulting reference to the modern wartime inadequacy of “muskets and militias.”
Though it was indeed, as the Politico’s Glenn Thrush correctly noted, “the most liberal speech he has delivered as president,” it clearly disappointed some of those in the establishment press who wanted to hear Obama go for his opponents’ jugulars. That group includes John Dickerson, who has been Political Director at CBS News since November 2011.
Dickerson put on his best game face at Slate after the speech, but it’s clear from reading his previous 2,000-word battle plan disguised as a column on Friday that Obama didn’t go as far as he would have liked.
The column’s headlines called for Obama to “Go for the Throat!” and “declare war on the Republican Party.” In his content, Dickerson claimed that Republican recalcitrance meant that “Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize,” and that the president “can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP.” Slate was so thrilled with the piece that it amped up its “most popular” tease list title to read: “Why Obama Should Seek To Destroy the Republican Party.” Dickerson’s occupation of such an influential perch at CBS and the presence of so many others like him at other news outlets largely explain why last year’s establishment press coverage of the GOP primaries and the general election was so ruthlessly biased against Republicans and especially conservatives.
Given the content of the rest of his speech, it was astonishing to hear Obama say the following five words: ”An economic recovery has begun.”
Wow.
We’re just three weeks shy of the fourth anniversary of the passage of the February 2009 “stimulus plan.” It was supposed to turn the economy around after the evil George W. Bush ruined everything. Obama’s Keynesian economists told us that without the stimulus plan’s immediate implementation, unemployment would rise to an unacceptable 9 percent by the summer of 2010. But if we would just pass this monstrosity which nobody read, unemployment would peak at 8 percent in just a few months and gradually fall to 5.2 percent by the end of 2012.
What really happened is that despite the plan’s passage (actually, largely because of it), the unemployment rate hit 10 percent before 2009 was even over, stayed above 8 percent for a post-World War II record 43 months, and is still at 7.8 percent. The Obama government, set into fiscal motion by the Democratic Congress of 2009-2010 and running on autopilot ever since, has run up $5 trillion in supposedly stimulative budget deficits and has been the beneficiary of four years of supposedly stimulative near-zero interest rates courtesy of Ben the Betrayer Bernanke’s Federal Reserve.

Now, after all of that ruinous stimulus, the best our president can say is: “An economic recovery has begun.” It’s almost as if he wants us to believe that this strange, uncontrollable beast called the economy has finally decided to get better on its own.
Unfortunately for those who are unemployed, under-employed, and discouraged, there’s still reason to believe that the economy, after so many false starts during Obama’s first term, is once again sputtering.
Economists have been wearing out their erasers and “delete” keys writing down their estimates of economic growth during the fourth quarter of 2012. The rough consensus is that gross domestic product will grow by an annualized 1.5 percent, down from 3.1 percent in the third quarter – if we’re lucky.
Seasonally adjusted job growth has only averaged 130,000 during the past ten months. That’s below the 150,000 jobs needed just to keep pace with growth in the adult population. Additionally, in a sign that the trend is in the wrong direction, the raw number of jobs changes before seasonal adjustment has been lower than that seen in the same month of the previous year during three of the past four months.
Finally, in perhaps the most ominous sign of decay, last week’s report on initial jobless claims told us that the raw number of claims filed (i.e., before seasonal adjustment) was greater than the comparable week a year ago — the first time this has happened in a truly comparable non-holiday week since October 2009.
The way things are going, Obama’s successor may very well use those same five words — “An economic recovery has begun” — in his or her inaugural address four long years from now.

Obama Could Not Pass a Background Check

By Alan Caruba

January 20, 2013 

President Barack Obama could not pass a background check if he was applying for a gun permit or a job. Why has this man been allowed to remain in office or take the oath for a second time?
During the 2008 campaign, it was known that:

• His official, long form birth records were SEALED.
• His Occidental College records were SEALED.
• His Columbia College records were SEALED.
• His Harvard College records were SEALED.
• His College thesis – SEALED.
• His Harvard Law Review articles – SEALED.
• His Indonesian adoption records – SEALED.
• His passport file – SEALED.
• His medical records – Unavailable
• His baptism records – Unavailable
• His papers from his service in the Illinois legislature – Unavailable
• His Illinois State Bar Association records – Unavailable

The birth certificate that the White House released is reputed by document experts to be false.
The Social Security number he has used was issued to someone else. He could not pass an E-Verify test. The first three numbers of his Social Security ID are reserved for applicants with Connecticut addresses, 040-049. The number was issued between 1977 and 1979. Obama’s earliest employment reportedly was in 1975 at a Baskin-Robbins in Oahu, Hawaii.
Many of the “facts” he cited in his two memoirs have turned out to be questionable, if not outright lies; particularly as regards his birth father, a citizen of Kenya at the time of his birth.
A job applicant with Obama’s paper trail would not even pass the smell test, but this man was elected and reelected. The role of journalism is to vet the credentials of anyone running for public office, let alone the highest office in the land. Instead, he has been protected against all inquiries and those making them have been called “birthers” or simply ignored.
Obama so routinely lies that keeping track of them would require a team of full-time archivists.
In August 2009 he said, “I have not said I was a single-payer supporter”, but in June 2003, as an Illinois state senator, he said, “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care system.”
In March 2006, he said “Leadership means the buck stops here…I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.” He is now into his second political battle to raise the debt limit. In July 2011, he said “It is not acceptable for us not to raise the debt ceiling and to allow the U.S. government to default.”
In response to a 1996 questionnaire he said “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages, but in November 2008 he said, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.”
He spent his first term blaming the nation’s economic ills on his predecessor, George W. Bush, saying in July 2008, that “he added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion in debt that we are going to have to pay back. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.” Today, the debt stands at more than $16 trillion because Obama added more to the debt than all previous presidents combined. For the first time in U.S. history, our credit rating was reduced and rating services are warning they will reduce it again.
He has a record of using executive orders to bypass the constitutional powers and duties of Congress. His most recent effort was 23 such orders regarding gun control at the same time Americans are buying guns as fast as they can, fearing the loss of the right to own and bear arms. This is the same President who just signed a law granting him and his family lifetime Secret Service protection.
He used “executive privilege” to cover-up the “Fast and Furious” scandal in which guns were allowed to be purchased and transported for use by Mexican drug cartel members.
He lied about the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed a U.S. ambassador and encouraged members of his staff to spread the lie that it was “spontaneous” and the result of a video no one has seen.
He and the Democratic Party imposed “Obamacare” on the nation and its passage is already undermining the provision of healthcare services, driving up the cost of health insurance, and causing physicians and the providers of testing and other services to leave the profession and close their doors.
He no longer can blame President Bush, so now he blames the Republican Party that has offered solutions to the nation’s economic crisis that has worsened every day he has been in office. His foreign policy has consisted of apologizing for America and standing aside while one nation after another in the Middle East and northern Africa has fallen under the control of Islamist radicals. He is doing nothing to avoid the sequestration cuts that would harm national defense and a range of other government functions.
He has failed us. Congress has failed us.
It has taken four years for a case challenging his right to hold office and the Supreme Court has scheduled a “conference” in February that might decide to ignore a current case.
The mainstream media has failed us and we only hope the courts will not fail us.
He should not be administered the oath of office for a second time.

CBS News Political Director’s Astonishing Advice: Obama ‘Must Go for the Throat,’ ‘Pulverize’ & ‘Declare War’ on the GOP

 by Madeleine Morgenstern

 Jan. 19, 2013

 

President Barack Obama needs to “pulverize” and “destroy” his Republican opponents if he wants to leave any kind of legacy — according to CBS News’ political director.

“Go for the throat!” declares the title of John Dickerson’s latest column for Slate, posted Friday. Its subtitle: “Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.”

In it, Dickerson — who was named CBS News political director in 2011 — says Obama, facing political gridlock and endless clashes with House Republicans, has the challenge of “how to be great when the environment stinks”:

The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat.

How should the president proceed then, if he wants to be bold? The Barack Obama of the first administration might have approached the task by finding some Republicans to deal with and then start agreeing to some of their demands in hope that he would win some of their votes. It’s the traditional approach. Perhaps he could add a good deal more schmoozing with lawmakers, too.

That’s the old way. He has abandoned that. He doesn’t think it will work and he doesn’t have the time. As Obama explained in his last press conference, he thinks the Republicans are dead set on opposing him. They cannot be unchained by schmoozing. Even if Obama were wrong about Republican intransigence, other constraints will limit the chance for cooperation. Republican lawmakers worried about primary challenges in 2014 are not going to be willing partners. He probably has at most 18 months before people start dropping the lame-duck label in close proximity to his name.

Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition’s most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.

Fox News’ Brit Hume took notice of the column Saturday morning, tweeting out the link and noting Dickerson’s affiliation with CBS.

Read Dickerson’s full column here.

Obama Sinks to New Low: Using Kids as Pawns to Push Anti-Gun Agenda… (video)