Category Archives: Barack Obama

Are BO’s Pants On Fire?

Barack Obama, Democrats, IMMIGRATION, Law, Media, Politics, Propaganda

By federal fiat, US state schools and hospitals must bear the costs of teaching and treating illegal aliens because of federally granted rights. Unless the courts overturn these mandates, Obamacare will uphold federal provisions that are already on the books. By logical extension, Joe Wilson, South Carolina’s Republican Representative, was correct—if indecorous—in asserting, during Obama’s address to the chambers last week, that the president was not being truthful.

This college senior from Charleston is sufficiently savvy to mine the relevant source and deduce what the malfeasant media refuses even to entertain, let alone investigate:

“President Obama just swore that his plan would never include such an element, and there’s no reason for the president to lie. However, Obama has not published his own written plan, and the only written plans currently being considered are those bills in Congress. Therefore, we must test the president’s claim against those plans which do exist, chiefly HR 3200.”

“HR 3200 cannot hold up against some basic scrutiny. Republican-proposed amendments that would explicitly exclude illegal aliens from the legislation were voted down consistently by Democrats in committee hearings. Further, pages 50 and 51 of the HR 3200 legislation clearly read that ‘all health care and related services covered by this Act shall be provided without regard to personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services.'”

“Can proof of legal citizenship be reasonably considered a personal characteristic that is ‘extraneous to the provision of quality health care?’ Yes, it can: someone’s health can be cared for regardless of whether or not he or she is a citizen of a particular country. Reasonably, therefore, it may be concluded that HR 3200 provides care for illegal aliens. So indirectly, perhaps even unintentionally, the president did lie.”

“Hopefully, this exercise gives the health care debate new meaning. Wilson’s outburst, whatever you may think of it, embodies the frustration growing numbers of Americans feel over health care reform: namely, that the message being preached by President Obama and other Democrat leaders is simply not compatible with the dominant legislation at hand.”

On LIVING A LIE. Why the incredulity all around at the suggestion that a politician might lie? Jack Hunter speak to that general issue.

Are BO's Pants On Fire?

Barack Obama, Democrats, IMMIGRATION, Law, Media, Politics, Propaganda

By federal fiat, US state schools and hospitals must bear the costs of teaching and treating illegal aliens because of federally granted rights. Unless the courts overturn these mandates, Obamacare will uphold federal provisions that are already on the books. By logical extension, Joe Wilson, South Carolina’s Republican Representative, was correct—if indecorous—in asserting, during Obama’s address to the chambers last week, that the president was not being truthful.

This college senior from Charleston is sufficiently savvy to mine the relevant source and deduce what the malfeasant media refuses even to entertain, let alone investigate:

“President Obama just swore that his plan would never include such an element, and there’s no reason for the president to lie. However, Obama has not published his own written plan, and the only written plans currently being considered are those bills in Congress. Therefore, we must test the president’s claim against those plans which do exist, chiefly HR 3200.”

“HR 3200 cannot hold up against some basic scrutiny. Republican-proposed amendments that would explicitly exclude illegal aliens from the legislation were voted down consistently by Democrats in committee hearings. Further, pages 50 and 51 of the HR 3200 legislation clearly read that ‘all health care and related services covered by this Act shall be provided without regard to personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services.'”

“Can proof of legal citizenship be reasonably considered a personal characteristic that is ‘extraneous to the provision of quality health care?’ Yes, it can: someone’s health can be cared for regardless of whether or not he or she is a citizen of a particular country. Reasonably, therefore, it may be concluded that HR 3200 provides care for illegal aliens. So indirectly, perhaps even unintentionally, the president did lie.”

“Hopefully, this exercise gives the health care debate new meaning. Wilson’s outburst, whatever you may think of it, embodies the frustration growing numbers of Americans feel over health care reform: namely, that the message being preached by President Obama and other Democrat leaders is simply not compatible with the dominant legislation at hand.”

On LIVING A LIE. Why the incredulity all around at the suggestion that a politician might lie? Jack Hunter speak to that general issue.

Updated: Million-Man March (Fly-Over Obama)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Debt, Healthcare, Liberty, Media

Those of us who’ve shown little confidence in what remains of “the people” may have to swallow some pride. That’s fine, because I have never wished so hard to be in the wrong.

The Daily Mail: “Up to two million people marched to the U.S. Capitol today, carrying signs with slogans such as ‘Obamacare makes me sick’ as they protested the president’s health care plan and what they say is out-of-control spending.

The line of protesters spread across Pennsylvania Avenue for blocks, all the way to the capitol, according to the Washington Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.”

People were chanting ‘enough, enough’ and ‘We the People.’ Others yelled ‘You lie, you lie!’ and ‘Pelosi has to go,’ referring to California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.

Today’s rally, the largest grouping of fiscal conservatives to march on Washington, comes on the heels of heated town halls held during the congressional August recess when some Democratic lawmakers were confronted, disrupted and shouted down by angry protesters who oppose President Obama’s plan to overhaul the health care system.”

Contra the English Daily Mail, American news organizations pegged the number of protesters in the tens of thousands only.

CNN, I am sure, is not the only mainstream media outlet to frame the march as the product of the shenanigans of “The conservative advocacy group Tea Party Express,” which “massed at the U.S. Capitol on Saturday to protest health care reform, higher taxes and what they see as out-of-control government spending.”

The subtle suggestion is that these people have been organized and incited. However, first comes the discontent. Organization follows the discord.

“What they see as out-of-control government spending”: as though the stratospheric nature of Washington’s debt and deficits was not settled but open to debate.

The New York Time leads its online US Section with a story about … “pollutants in drinking water [that] have damaged residents’ teeth.”

Unlike the Times, The WaPo covers the event, under the headline, “Lashing Out At The Capital.” The peons from the provinces are disobeying Rome. Dishonestly the WaPo categorically asserts that the protest is an extension of the Republican Party, a “populist dimension” of it.

Nothing at the Christian Science Monitor, except for an item buried under the headline, “Obama takes on Glenn Beck and ‘tea party’ critics over healthcare.”

Meanwhile, Obama beat a hasty retreat out of DC, to “Democratic-leaning Minnesota.”

Updated (Sept. 14): FLY-OVER OBAMA. I extend our appreciation to Chip for imparting the feel and impetus of the march he attended. We hope to hear more from him. Chip’s “Goebbels” comment: According to the Pew Research Center, “The public’s assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades of Pew Research surveys, and Americans’ views of media bias and independence now match previous lows.”

The underlying process that accounts for the malign and deficient reporting on the rising opposition to statism is suggested in Pat Buchanan’s latest:

“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?”

The answer is: America, for the most, is no longer a nation, but a disparate collection of identity groups supervised and subdued by a massive managerial state intent on dissolving the historical people and electing another. The propositional nation has replaced the nation. America is but “a notion and an idea; not a community of flesh-and-blood people sharing a mother tongue, traditions, history and heroes.”

The New York Times’ JEFF ZELENY has a decent report (which I had failed to locate yesterday, becasue not on the front page):

“A sea of protesters filled the west lawn of the Capitol and spilled onto the National Mall on Saturday in the largest rally against President Obama since he took office … demonstrators came from all corners of the country, waving American flags and handwritten signs explaining the root of their frustrations. Their anger stretched well beyond the health care legislation moving through Congress, with shouts of support for gun rights, lower taxes and a smaller government. … many demonstrators expressed their views without a hint of rage. They said the size of the crowd illustrated that their views were shared by a broader audience.
Republican officials said privately that they were pleased by the turnout but wary of the anger directed at all politicians. … [My emphasis]
Protesters came by bus, car and airplane, arriving here from Texas and Tennessee, New Mexico and New Hampshire, Ohio and Oregon. The messages on their signs told of an intense distrust of the government, which several people said began long before Mr. Obama took office. …
In conversations with demonstrators, people identified themselves as Republicans, libertarians, independents and former. …” Democrats. [Ditto re emphasis]

ON HIS NOT-SO-MERRY way out of the capital, “Mr. Obama … flew over the assembling crowd in Marine One. The helicopter could be seen flying overhead as the demonstrators marched down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Update III: Cass Sunstein: Most Dangerous Czar By Far

Barack Obama, Bush, Constitution, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Free Speech, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Law, Natural Law, Pseudoscience, Reason, Regulation, Religion, Science, The Courts

And very possibly, a future Supreme-Court justice. Sunstein, bosom buddy and intellectual soul mate to Barack, was confirmed the other day by the Senate. Cusses all around. The tenacious Glenn Beck, who forewarned about Van Jones, has been on the case. But WND’s Ellis Washington makes the clearer case (although he fails to appreciate that America IS already regulated to death):

Cass Sunstein: Regulating America to Death
By Ellis Washington

Animals should be allowed to sue their owners.

~ Cass Sunstein

Because people ascribe a degree of respectability to academics, intellectuals, philosophers and scholars, they can disregard the rights of the people much easier than a naked tyrant. In fact, Rousseau, Darwin and Nietzsche can go places Hitler, Stalin, Chavez and Obama could never dream.

As I have written many times, the Obama administration are the masters of misdirection and chaos theory; therefore, while the America people last week were transfixed on the resignation of “Green Czar” Van Jones, another even more dangerous fascist from the academy quietly slipped through the portals of power.

Last Thursday Cass Sunstein, a former colleague and mentor of Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School, was confirmed by a Senate vote of 57-40 as the new director of regulatory affairs and information, an obscure but powerful agency within the Office of Management and Budget. Here is what the “regulatory czar” does: He regulates laws – past, present and future.

Sunstein is a friendly fascist who only “nudges” people to bow to his will. TV host Glenn Beck says of Cass Sunstein that he is “the most powerful invisible man you’ll ever see.”

Are we headed for a Nazi-style totalitarian abyss? Find out in “Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America” Judge Richard A. Posner, an intellectual mentor of mine and former colleague with Sunstein and Obama at the University of Chicago Law School, said the following about Peter Singer, a Princeton professor and a leading scholar on animal rights with whom Sunstein is often associated:

Since the publication of “Animal Liberation” [1975], Singer has received a wide range of philosophical challenges to his formulation of animal rights. … Richard Posner challenged that Singer failed to see the “radicalism of the ethical vision that powers [his] view on animals, an ethical vision that finds greater value in a healthy pig than in a profoundly retarded child, that commands inflicting a lesser pain on a human being to avert a greater pain to a dog, and that, provided only that a chimpanzee has 1 percent of the mental ability of a normal human being, would require the sacrifice of the human being to save 101 chimpanzees.

While Sunstein spent his entire career inventing rights for rats, dogs and pigs that would make the Constitution’s framers spin in their graves, he is even more despicable in casting aspersions against constitutional rights plainly delineated in the Bill of Rights. For example, here is Sunstein views on the Second Amendment right to bear arms:

“My coming view is that the individual right to bear arms reflects the success of an extremely aggressive and resourceful social movement and has much less to do with good standard legal arguments than [it] appears.”

In 2008 Sunstein co-authored “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness” with economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago. “Nudge” discusses how public and private organizations can “help people” to make better choices in their daily lives since apparently Sunstein and his busybody socialist colleagues of the academy think that We the People are too stupid to live our own lives our own way and accept the consequences. Thaler and Sunstein argue that: People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself. Space will not allow me to adequately detail the utter tyranny and naked assault on our constitutional rights Sunstein plans to launch against American capitalism in his new role as regulatory czar.

Here is a summary of the autocracy Americans can expect from Czar Sunstein: * Sunstein advocates a “Second Bill of Rights” even more totalizing and all-consuming than initially proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s. Among these rights are a right to an education, a right to a home, a right to health care and a right to protection against monopolies. * Sunstein notes that personhood need not be conferred upon an animal in order to grant it legal standing for suit. * Sunstein has argued that “we should celebrate tax day.” * Rumor has it that Obama is grooming Sunstein as a future Supreme Court justice.

Last week Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said, “[Sunstein] is to the left of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” The leitmotiv of Sunstein’s entire legal philosophy and worldview is encapsulated in two very evil and failed philosophies of the past: 1) Social Darwinism [evolution], and 2) Moral Relativism – a theory, especially in ethics or aesthetics, that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them.

In other words, nothing has more intrinsic value than anything else. Sunstein’s ideas on judicial minimalism and behavioral economics belie the fact that for almost 30 years he has assaulted the Judeo-Christian traditions of Natural Law so venerated by the Constitution’s framers to preserve America’s republic.

To Sunstein ideas like “liberty,” “freedom” and “Natural Law” are irrelevant and counterproductive to his grand, socialist view of law rooted in moral relativism and social Darwinism. That’s how Sunstein can have a scholarship named after his dead dog while concurrently mandating environmental policies that will put tens of thousands of American farmers out of business by fostering ever expanding environmental, land and water regulations that will de facto make farming too cost-prohibitive.

What Mussolini, Stalin and Mao did in the light to harm their citizens and deny them their fundamental human rights, Cass Sunstein, as Obama’s regulatory czar, will do in the night by slowly, irrevocably regulating America to death. Sunstein reminds me of Shakespeare’s “Othello” when the sinister Iago repeatedly whispered his verbal venom into the receptive ear of Othello (Obama), which lead to his demise. Indeed, Sunstein said it best: “There is no liberty without dependency.”

Update I (Sept. 12): I’m not mad about the cheapened Argument From Hitler (in the Comments Section). So far, Barack is continuing the “work” Bush and others before him began. Few Republicans fussed about the breakneck speed at which the Bush Administration concentrated power in the executive, to give but one example. Or the way it expanded the warfare state, to give another. So far, I don’t see a qualitative difference between Bush and Obama; they exist on the same continuum of accreting statism.

Update II: I wonder if crazy Cass would come for me if he read my defense of Michael Vick: In Defense Of Michael Vick I & In Defense of Michael Vick, Part 2.

Update III (Sept. 13): To the imperious reader who is unhappy with my disinterest in the futile, immaterial evolution debate: We are not about to go off-topic and veer into evolution. Take it behind the scenes with Myron. As for the “not good enough” complaint: More so than most columnists and writers, I have applied libertarian thinking to a wide-ranging array of topics, from intellectual property to antitrust, to Just War, to economy, Hollywood, Islam—you name it, I’ve written about it. Far more important than the idiotic evolution debate has been my defense of the unique, privileged, preeminent nature of humanity in the universe. The articulation of that philosophical position is far more significant than the idiotic debates about evolution, engaged in by the Godless neocons/Republicans and their adversaries. Now, if the bitching reader were a major donor toward my generally thankless efforts at shedding light where darkness is the rule—then I might indulge him. But, alas, he isn’t.

Addendum: Here’s fodder for another fit over my unorthodox positions: Even more disinterested am I in whether God exists or not. I conduct my life with morality and ethics. Some would say that’s godly enough. Others would demand communal worship. Frankly, I don’t care. It makes no sense to assert or fight over the irrational and the supernatural; that which cannot be proven. I respect believers and defend the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition–this is the sum of my work. That’s all that matters. To me, at least. (At that’s what counts.)