Saturday, June 19, 2010

World Sees Obama As Incompetent And Amateur

Shocking, I know ...


Now They Tell Us [Mark Steyn]

From Mort Zuckerman:

World Sees Obama As Incompetent And Amateur

Most of what follows won't come as news to NR readers, but this is the nub of it:
The end result is that a critical mass of influential people in world affairs who once held high hopes for the president have begun to wonder whether they misjudged the man.
I touch on this very subject in my own column. The question is whether these "influential people" are sufficiently chastened to examine in any meaningful way which of their own biases caused them to think a community organizer with no executive experience and more memoirs than accomplishments was just what the world's superpower needed.

'Cause if all these "influential people" aren't up for a bit of self-analysis, golly, they might make the same mistake all over again next time round.

Gaza Flotilla Hamas Terror Supporters Update

"We Con the World" [Andy McCarthy]

PJTV has made available Caroline Glick's "We Are the World" parody, dedicated to the "peace flotilla."

You should watch.

Also:

Video footage taken by shipboard cameras and released by the Israel Defense Forces shows activists suiting up in bulletproof vests and assaulting Israeli commandos with metal bars and clubs as they tried to board the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish “aid” ship Burney describes in his YouTube interview. Other footage, taken from Israeli helicopters, shows the “activists” assaulting an Israeli commando as he is rappelling down to the ship and tossing him off the deck of the ship. The primary weapon the Israeli commandos used during the boarding operation was a Tippman 98 Custom — a paintball gun.

Testimony one of the commandos released later described how the “activists” shot this commanding officer in the leg and stabbed him in the stomach before tossing him off the deck. Other “activists” on the lower deck then dragged the officer inside, taking a knife to expand the wound in his stomach. “They cut his ab muscles horizontally and by hand spilled his guts out,” the soldier said. “When they finished, they raised him up and walked him on the deck outside. He was conscious the whole time. If you are asking yourself why they did all that here comes the reason. They wanted to show the soldiers their commanders’ body so they will be demoralized and scared,” the soldier said. “Luckily, when they walked him on the deck, a soldier saw him and managed to shoot the activist that was walking him down the outside corridor. He shot him with a special non lethal bullet that didn’t kill him. My commander managed to jump from the deck to the water and swim to an army rescue boat (his guts still out of his body and now in salty sea water). That was how he was saved. The activists that did this to him are alive and now in Turkey and treated as heroes.”

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Is Obama simply ignorant ?

If We Don’t Understand Our History, Will We Repeat It? [Burton Folsom Jr.]

“What bothers me,” President Obama told the graduating class at the University of Michigan last month, “is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad.” Only anarchists think all of government is inherently bad. Government has a useful constitutional function in protecting contracts and providing for the national defense. We need a government strong enough to protect our private property.

The problem is when government oversteps its constitutional limits and politicians try to micromanage the economy. That is where President Obama and the Founders disagree. President Obama in his speech defended the government’s interference in railroad building and in the Great Depression. “When we needed a way to reach the Pacific, our government helped build the railroads,” the president boasted. Then he added, “When the markets crashed during the Great Depression, and people lost their life savings, our government put in place a set of rules and safeguards to make sure that such a crisis never happened again.”

Wrong on both counts. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific were poorly built railroads, they went broke, and both cost the nation over $60,000,000 to build — a sum higher than the total national debt just a decade before they were built. By contrast, the Great Northern Railroad, which was built with private money by James J. Hill, never went broke and was arguably the best-built railroad in the nation.

On the Great Depression, government intervention did not rescue the nation. The U. S. had more than 20 percent unemployment in 1939, toward the end of FDR’s second term. On the contrary, government intervention — through the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, the Farm Board, and the income tax hike to 63 percent on top incomes — triggered the depression, and FDR perpetuated it through failed stimulus packages and higher taxes.

Because President Obama, and many others in his administration, do not understand American history, we seem destined to repeat it. President Obama addressed his historical confusion on a college campus; when a better and more accurate version of the American past reaches those campuses, we can raise up a new generation that appreciates the Founders’ dedication to limited government and individual liberty.

Burton Folsom Jr. is professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of New Deal or Raw Deal?

Deficit Effects of the Health-Care Bill

No, it doesn't save taxpayers money ...

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGZkOTQzOWEwNTVlMDNhMDliZTE2ZTQ0NzUxNjM0Y2U=