After a ringing endorsement from Madonna, the Obama campaign received an endorsement from the hemisphere’s idiot, Venezuela President Hugo Chavez.
“If I were American, I’d vote for Obama,” Chavez said in a televised interview that aired Sunday.
And it gets better . . .
The Venezuelan leader called Obama “a good guy” and said if the U.S. president were a Venezuelan, “I think … he’d vote for Chavez.”
No doubt about it. Well, either that or he’d be running against and to the Left of Chavez.
The official (U.S.) response to the 9/11/12 terrorist attack in Benghazi was quite telling. The storyline began with we’re “still gathering facts.” Despite that, UN Ambassador Rice, Secretary of State Clinton, and President Obama were quick to proffer that the deadly attack in Benghazi was not only ‘spontaneous,’ but that it was in reaction to a YouTube video. They also said the attack was spawned from a “demonstration” in the street outside the safe-house that got out of hand, arguing that it was not a planned terrorist attack.
We now know that all aspects of their story were purposely deceptive. Not true. Lies. It wasn’t a result of the video. There was no demonstration at the “safe house” prior to the attack. And it was a planned terrorist attack by al-Qaeda. Right from the start, and for over a week after, the Obama administration pointed the finger away from them and to a private U.S. citizen.
Why would they say that if they knew it was not true? Because the event wholly exposed the naivete of President Obama’s “new direction” in Muslim/Islamic relations and foreign policy. That, and they aren’t accepting any responsibility for leaving our Ambassador virtually UN-protected in a known haven for al-Qaeda, and on 9/11 no less. A significant anniversary date for al-Qaeda. The spin about who and what was responsible began immediately.
The State Department is responsible for the security for our diplomats. The State Department is run by, and an arm of, the President as part and parcel of the executive branch. The assassination and murdering of our ambassador and three other Americans underscores the failure of President Obama’s so-called Muslim reset policies and apology tour.
It showed that killing bin Laden didn’t end the war on terror and, al-Qaeda still wants to kill us. It also showed the result of what a naive premise to the ‘war on terror’ can lead to.
After the fall of the Gaddafi regime, the administration established a consulate in the new Libya. The State Department, for whatever reason, set up the ambassador with no U.S. Marine security. In fact, they outsourced Ambassador Stevens’ security to a firm in Great Britain. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, and the Ambassador’s concerns for his security (as discovered by CNN, not FBI), our consulate was left to fend for itself, in a country rocked by terrorists, and on 9/11.
From start to finish, this tragedy is one that can’t be blamed on Bush. It is wholly owned by President Obama and his childish, if not suicidal, views about the war on terror and radical Islam. That’s why we’re being lied to. And that’s why we’re having Benghazi-Gate.
No doubt in my mind that, if there was a Republican in The White House, this would be the only story above-the-fold, from now until election day. Not a word from the MSM about lying to the American people for political cover for an election that is just weeks away. No demands for impeachment. Not even any demands for heads to roll.
Link: Benghazi-Gate: New Evidence White House Lied About Libya Terror Attack
Obama inherited a huge debt of $10 trillion in 2008. Under his watch, it has grown to $16 trillion. Between wails from the Obama campaign about Romney’s tax returns, they also want some policy specifics. Let’s look at the specifics of deficits and the debt.
Since so many people are educated in government schools, a definition of terms is needed so you’ll know the difference between a deficit and the debt. You’ll also be able to tell when you are being lied to where the debt and deficit is concerned.
A ‘deficit’ is the shortfall created when the government spends more in a given year than it collects in taxes and fees. Candidate Obama said that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.
The debt, or national debt, is the sum of all the deficits.
Bush’s last year produced a deficit of over $500 billion dollars. Bringing the national debt up to $10 trillion. To keep his promise, Obama’s deficit this year should be about $250 billion. So much for Obama’s “promise” to reduce the deficit by half, by the end of his first term.
Since Obama has been in office, he has had record deficits with each year being over $1 trillion. Between those annual deficits and legislation like Obamacare, the debt has risen from $10 trillion to $16 trillion during his first term.
No surprise that the Obama campaign and their ‘low information’ supporters believe the President when he says he has a plan to solve the nation’s huge debt problem. He doesn’t, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says so.
In a random act of journalism, AP’s Tom Raum hits the specifics of how both candidates plan to solve the debt crisis.
President Barack Obama has proposed bringing deficits down by slowing spending gradually, to avoid suddenly tipping the economy back into recession.
Translation, they don’t plan on ever spending less than we take in. The ‘slowing spending’ means increasing the debt slower rather than faster. The end result is still increasing the debt. Not reducing it.
Republican candidate Mitt Romney would lower deficits mostly through deep spending cuts, including some of the reductions proposed by his conservative running mate Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee.
Republican’s plan reduces deficits by (wait for it) reducing spending on a schedule that eventually arrives at a balanced budget. Which is the starting point to actually paying down the national debt.
Today’s quiz: Who has a plan for reducing the deficit and debt? Romney or Obama?
Link: WHY IT MATTERS: Debt
One would expect President Obama to have already told Egypt’s (and Muslim Brotherhood’s) President Mohamed Morsi that freedom of speech and freedom of religion are among our core values. It’s been that way from the start. So get over it already. That didn’t happen.
But there was some talk about the two meeting sometime during the Star Wars bar scene at the U.N. General Assembly on Sunday.
Now that’s not happening either.
Having already put President Obama on defense by spelling out pre-conditions to a talk between the two, the president finds himself on the short end of the foreign policy stick again.
Morsi pre-conditions . . .
If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, he said, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. He said the United States must respect the Arab world’s history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.
Not that it makes a difference who cancelled who, the result is the same. Like voting present. But Morsi seems to have as much reason to cancel a meeting between the two as Obama.
The Obama Doctrine seems to be in full-meltdown mode when it comes to the war on terror and radical Islam.
Brings to mind how in critical times in history, the right man for the right time comes along. The way the Muslim world is roundly condemning the United States and President Obama, it seems that he is not the right man for this time.
Links: Egypt’s New Leader Spells Out Terms for U.S.-Arab Ties | Obama cancels election-season meeting with Egyptian Islamist Morsi
Remember how gruff and disrespectful the Clint Eastwood bit was at the RNC? I don’t either. It was a reflection of reality. A reality of an empty suit in The White House was parodied as the empty chair. And it wasn’t even a stretch.
Do you remember a national crisis where Americans were attacked and killed, like our Libyan Embassy people on Sept 11, when the American people were not addressed personally by the President on TV from the Oval Office within minutes if not hours of the event? I don’t.
It’s been thirteen days since the terrorist attack on our people and the president is still MIA. But he did characterize the 9/11 attacks as a foreign policy ‘bump in the road.’
Candidate Obama is the one who promised that he could change the hearts and minds of Islamic terrorists with his ‘new direction’ in foreign policy. The reality is that this direction is nothing new, where Barack Obama is concerned.
His ‘new direction’ alienates allies and emboldens our enemies. President Obama is merely doing in foreign policy what he is accustomed to do in law policies. This is his national security version of voting ‘present.’
The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago. But the surfacing of this tape may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about what the consequences of redistribution are.
Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended.
The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.
Continue reading The Fallacy of Redistribution -Thomas Sowell
The recent killing of our Ambassador called a lot in to question. Lack of security at the Embassy and at the ‘safe house’ being only one. What is it about these murdering Muslims? Why do they continue to hate us now? President Obama told us he’s got this under control. Elect him and they will like us. Hope & Change. All that.
Jean Aziz, columnist for the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, believes it’s all our fault. That “the repeated mistakes of U.S. policy in the Middle East and vis-à-vis the Islamic world could lead to another 9/11.”
The most UN-reported news story for today is the disclosing (under FOIA) of emails from the Obama Justice Department to the George Soros-funded ‘media watchdog’ organization called Media Matters.
These emails are not describing what the Justice Department did on such-and-such case. These are emails suggesting stories that would be harmful to Obama’s critics and helpful to the administration. No surprise here. It’s the Chicago way. The law doesn’t matter. Look how they’ve changed their tune.
There’s a BIG problem with this on so many levels.
The Justice Department’s mission is . . .
To enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.
It does not include colluding with a media organization to produce propaganda favorable to the administration.
The Justice Department is not supposed to act like Chicago thugs to intimidate anybody. Like people who follow and report on ‘Fast and Furious.’ The gun-running scheme that armed Mexican drug cartels. It’s just not in their mission statement, and probably illegal.
The tax-free status of Media Matters hinges upon their actions being non-partisan. Colluding with the executive branch on story lines against people, news organizations, or a political party is not included.
Holder, and his boss, have to go. Media Matters’ tax-exempt status has to go with it. There’s plenty enough probable cause to investigate whether other organizations might have similar ties to the administration.
Keep a look-out for the kind of coverage (if any) this story gets. And can I emphasis any more the importance of this administration being thrown out of office in November?
Link: Emails show Justice working with Media Matters on stories that target critics
President Clinton (impeached Dec. 1998) tells us what the Obama campaign wouldn’t tell us four years ago, when everything was “Hope and Change” and “Yes We Can.” Now the message is things were so bad that no one (except Bill Clinton) could have turned the economy around in one term.
And he should know. Bill Clinton’s own administration, “more than any other, promoted an unsustainable housing boom, which eventually and inevitably led to a housing bust that brought down the whole American economy.”
Sounds like a Romney/Ryan endorsement to me. Obama is campaigning as if someone else has been in The White House these last four years. Because it’s not just that things ‘were’ bad. Things still are bad. And Obama has been at the helm for four years blaming everyone but himself for a still stagnant economy and record unemployment. Neither he nor his party have a long-term solution to our nations debt, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. No plans to make a balanced budget and no plans to outline a path towards a balanced budget. His world, his focus, is in the next four years. Not the next forty years.
With the foundation for ‘fundamental change’ already set with the railroading of Obamacare on the American people, Bill Clinton tells you what’s coming in a second Obama administration.
Now — but he has — he has laid the foundations for a new, modern, successful economy of shared prosperity. And if you will renew the president’s contract, you will feel it. You will feel it.
{You won’t like what you feel, emphasis added}
I believe it because President Obama’s approach embodies the values, the ideas, and the direction America has to take to build a 21st-century version of the American dream, a nation of shared opportunities, shared responsibilities, shared prosperity, a shared sense of community.
In his core, Obama will not accept free-market capitalism. Period! There is no one in the country, except Obama and Clinton, saying that America “has to take” a new “direction.” All the shared stuff does not relate to freedom and liberty. There’s less of that, more of government. The kind of America Obama wants is one where the government dictates who gets what of other people’s money. IE. Social Justice.
Creating an environment where people can succeed and won’t need government help is not in Obama’s political or social DNA. He is demoralizing Americans by robbing them of their potential and creating dependency every step of the way. Clinton said it, “to build a 21st-century version of the American dream.” Excuse me but, there’s nothing wrong with the old version. It is timeless. America did not elect him to change the American Dream. He was supposed to preserve it.
Had our country’s founding fathers based America on where they came from, or like twentieth century Europe, America would not be the leader of the free world but, just another miserable place with high prices, high taxes, less freedom and fewer choices. And with a ruler in The White House instead of a President.
Update: Thomas Sowell quote added
Link: The Brass Standard
President Obama finally confirmed what I said four yeas ago about all his complaining about the cost of two wars in his acceptance speech Thursday night. The sleight-of-hand with borrowed money.
President Obama’s acceptance speech 9/6/2012 . . .
I will use the money we’re no longer spending on war to pay down our debt and put more people back to work rebuilding roads and bridges and schools and runways.
Because after two wars that have cost us thousands
of lives and over a trillion dollars, it’s time to do some
nation- building right here at home.
Here’s where he is wrong. The money spent on the war is borrowed. So he wants to borrow more money, another trillion dollars, to pay down the debt (which is now over 16 trillion dollars) and to build roads and bridges. (Like he told us he was going to do with the last ‘stimulus’ spending bill, and didn’t. Remember the ‘shovel ready’ joke?) In the Progressive/Liberal mind, spending your way to prosperity and borrowing your way out of debt makes sense. My calculator tells me the debt will grow by another trillion dollars. It’s time to stop opening new credit cards to pay off old ones, while committing generational theft.
Lunch Counter 9/9/2008, speaking to the cost of war issue . . .
True, the cost of the war is great. Unfortunately, the cost of losing it is greater. Early on in their [Obama and Democrats] chorus of the immense cost of the war, I suspected that they were basically looking at the ‘cost’ of the war as opportunities lost for all sorts of entitlement and other socialistic programs that build (read ‘buy’) voter constituencies.
What is the answer to the enormous cost of the war? When it ends, the cost also ends. Who knows, we might need it again some day.
This from a guy who said it will bankrupt our country, that we can’t afford these wars. How does his arithmetic tell him that we can afford it now providing we spend it? That’s a rhetorical question. It’s Liberal math.