ObamaNation

This Cartoon Says It All about the Occupy "Movement"

2011-11-19T11:01:00.002-05:00

Broken System: LIRR Pension Scam is the latest Public Employee / Union Criminal Abuse

2011-10-29T16:34:00.002-04:00

Endless corruption in the public employee sector: LIRR, NYPD ticket fixing scandal; Congressman Rangel, Congressman Meeks, Dept. of Energy / Solyndra ... it is just unending.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/281597/public-employees-busted-retirement-scheme-nathaniel-botwinick

Public Employees Busted in Retirement Scheme

October 28, 2011 4:12 P.M.

By Nathaniel Botwinick

Employees of the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) have defrauded that organization of over $1 billion over the last seven years. In as many as 500 cases, LIRR employees falsely claimed disability benefits to supplement their pensions, employing a sophisticated scheme involving special “facilitators” and doctors operating “disability mills.” Eleven defendants have been named so far, including a former president of the railroad union; each has been charged with conspiracy to commit health-care fraud and mail fraud.

There were three doctors who participated in this scheme, and in return they received cash payments between $800 and $1,200 — along with millions in health-insurance fees for unnecessary procedures. These procedures, which included X-rays, MRIs, and physical therapy, were used to bolster their patients’ files for later claims. Afterwards, they provided patients with falsified medical assessments, claiming that it would be impossible for them to continue working. The LIRR employees would then immediately retire with both their regular and disability pensions.

The LIRR employees also collaborated with a few “facilitators,” who helped falsify disability applications and coordinated with the doctors’ offices. One of these facilitators, Joseph Rutigliano, was a former LIRR union president who had also falsely claimed disability benefits. Before retiring, he worked over 500 hours of overtime and took no sick days, yet applied for disability benefits due to back pain immediately upon retirement. His condition did not prevent him from playing golf several times a month.

Other brazen disability claims included that of Gregory Noone, who collected $105,000 a year; he claimed that “he suffered severe pain when gripping and using simple hand tools and pain in his knees, shoulder, and back from bending or crouching.” Yet this pain did not slow down his post-retirement tennis and golf games. Similarly, Steven Gagliano’s “severe and disabling pain in [his] back, shoulder and legs,” which rendered him “occupationally disabled,” did not prevent him from participating in a 400-mile bike trip across northern New York.

The structure of the LIRR’s pension system encouraged this massive scam. As early as age 50, a LIRR employee can retire and collect a LIRR pension, but has to wait until the age of 65 before he or she can claim a federal Railroad Retirement Benefit (RRB). However, if the employee is declared disabled immediately upon retirement, then that employee is entitled to both the LIRR pension and the RRB. This allows for the collection of an income equal to his or her previous base salary. In other words, the system created the incentives for deception by employees.

The high rate of disability claims at the LIRR relative to Metro North, a comparable regional railroad that does not have retirement at 50, illustrates this situation: Seventy-nine percent of LIRR employees over 50 claimed disability benefits, while only 15 percent of Metro North employees did.

Thus, while the LIRR scandal is a story of fraud, the real lesson lies in the dangers for abuse in entitlement systems.

The NY Post is also all over this LIRR story ...

Constituents Not Happy w/ OWS being supported by local NYC politicians

2011-10-29T16:28:00.002-04:00

Elected local pols such as Scott Stringer, Margaret Chin and Daniel Squadron, all do nothing left-leaning politicians, come under fire from Downtown Residents, as does Community Board 1.

The above are supposed to represent people living in the area, not the Zuccotti Park squatters.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/281566/wall-street-s-community-board-sides-against-its-residents-avik-roy

Wall Street’s Community Board Sides Against Its Residents

October 28, 2011 12:44 P.M.

By Avik Roy

I wrote last week about how Wall Street–area residents were beginning to stir against their occupiers. Last week, over the objections of these residents, the members of Community Board 1 passed a resolution recommending that the Wall Street Occupiers be allowed to remain in Zuccotti Park indefinitely.

Here is a statement that Linda Gerstman, one of those residents, made to the Community Board:

We live in a community that was finally rebounding from September 11th. My fellow neighbors and I chose to live here despite many inconveniences (like limited car access) due to national security.
The protesters have driven our neighborhood into the proverbial toilet (pun intended). Not only does the occupation impact the park and the adjacent streets – where it smells like rotting food and raw sewage – but also impacts us blocks away.
Barricades have been erected in order to block their access to landmarks and terrorist targets. These barricades also prohibit residents from walking freely in their own neighborhood.
Children are frightened, the elderly are forced to walk blocks out of their way to fill a prescription, and our sidewalks are soiled because dogs don’t have access to the curbs.
Local retailers and restaurants are reporting drops in foot traffic and sales. Real EstateBrokers are seeing decreased activity in terms of responses to listings – which has a direct impact on our property values. Several of my neighbors have fled the neighborhood and are selling their apartments.
Our building has been burgled three times by protesters – once to wedge all access doorsopen (likely for future break-ins), once to hang a protest banner from a window and once to vandalize our building in the name of “art”. So now, not only are we significantly inconvenienced, we are now in fear of our safety and security.
Quite frankly, we are not interested in a “good neighbor policy”. These occupiers are not our neighbors. Our neighbors don’t beat on drums while children are napping, our neighbors do not verbally attack people on their way to work, our neighbors do not break in and vandalize buildings, our neighbors do not urinate and defecate in the street. The occupiers need to vacate our neighborhood.
This is our home. We are not the enemy. Many of the protesters go home at night to their homes in outside neighborhoods and live peacefully while our home life has become unbearable.
I support free speech, free expression, and equal justice for all, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of innocent bystanders. An unfortunate consequence of this is that these individuals are clearly stating that their rights should be taken more seriously than our rights. And that isn’t a fair tradeoff. Why should our basic rights of living peacefully in our homes be trampled on by those who don’t reside in the neighborhood, create unsanitary conditions, cause undue safety issues, and commit crimes. Where is the justice in that?
The question the elected officials must ask themselves is whether they stand for the individuals who have knowingly decided that the law does not pertain to them and side with out of towners or enforce the law and adequately protect those that put them in office. The answer to this question will be apparent in their actions and the members of the community will judge you in this light on election day.

Margaret Chin, who represents the Financial District in the New York City Council, andDaniel Squadron, who serves the same role in the New York State Senate, have been among the leading advocates of their district’s continued occupation. It’s not clear what will change (other than the weather), until and unless someone decides to run against them.

Occupy Wall Street -to real Homeless people - the 99% excludes You !

2011-10-29T16:15:00.006-04:00

The 300-500 wussy, free-loader anarchists, leftists and assorted professional complainers were enjoying a free lunch - literally - with gourmet meals provided free by symptathetic chefs.

That is, until unwanted rabble, who most likely thought that they too were part of the 99%, started showing up for some free grub.

The protestors, it seems, don't care much for the homeless and ex-cons showing up in Zuccotti Park for some free food. The Nerve of the Homeless to think that this "movement" would be truly representing them too !

Listen Up You Vagrants - Get Thee to a Soup Kitchen Instead !

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/zuccotti_hell_kitchen_i5biNyYYhpa8MSYIL9xSDL?CMP=OTC-rss&FEEDNAME=

Instead of sharing, OWS "will provide directions to local soup kitchens for the vagrants and other freeloaders who have been descending on Zuccotti Park".

Hey, aren't they all Freeloaders down there ??

Obama Pivots Again - To His Re-Election Campaign

2011-10-09T12:45:00.005-04:00

Forget about the economy, forget about jobs, President Hopey Dope has given up hope and is out electioneering and fundraising pretty much full time.

Maybe he should just spend more time on the golf course ...

Bruce Krasting says his "pass my jobs bill" is all about getting re-elected by trying to buy some 2012 votes - and he's probably right: http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/politics-money-and-ows

Michael Goodwin: Aimless Obama Walks Alone

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/aimless_obama_walks_alone_OAa6YHbZSGVDc1c4wjyh6L

And Scandals are Lurking out there: Solyndra, and Fast & Furious. When Does AG Eric Holder (he of the Marc Rich pardon, the New Black Panther Party whitewash and assorted other fiascos, get perp-walked, or at least fired ?? http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/no_justice_from_justice_QBY3tMJGtJbaI5DjVLoTDM

Kyle Smith: Why is Obama making bad bets w/ our money ?

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/know_when_to_fold_em_qgVdRrmk38NpRrOR4e97RO

UN Theater of the Absurd Week is now over

2011-09-24T16:07:00.005-04:00

Thanks, and good riddance ! My regard for this fine institution is even below my regard for the current occupant of the White House and Congress.

As noted by Israel's Netanyahu, only in the corrupt cesspool known as the United Nations,

Well, this is an unfortunate part of the U.N. institution. It's the -- the theater of the absurd. It doesn't only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi's Libya chaired the U.N. Commission on Human Rights; Saddam's Iraq headed the U.N. Committee on Disarmament.

You might say: That's the past. Well, here's what's happening now -- right now, today. Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon now presides over the U.N. Security Council. This means, in effect, that a terror organization presides over the body entrusted with guaranteeing the world's security.

You couldn't make this thing up.

Lowlights:

Abbas (aka "Arafat in a suit") & Palestinian Rejectionist Theater:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/palestinian_leader_rejects_int_peace_w77M6eLRgV39hy7UChy16M?CMP=OTC-rss&FEEDNAME=

and

Achmedinijad, the apocalyptic leader of Iran.

Joel C. Rosenberg writes: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/278195/ahmadinejads-apocalyptic-address-joel-c-rosenberg

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not a world leader worthy of the world stage. He is the evil leader of an Iranian death cult. A new U.N. report indicates that he is making progress in building nuclear weapons. He has predicted the arrival of the Twelfth Imam and called for wiping Israel “off the map.” He aspires to be a mass murderer beyond the scale of history’s great dictators. He deserves to be in prison, or an insane asylum. His speech on Thursday before the United Nations General Assembly was further proof, if any more were needed.

Did you see Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic address, or read the full text? You should. It’s instructive. Unfortunately, you won’t find Ahmadinejad’s full speech reprinted in the major newspapers. It was pitifully covered by the mainstream media. It should have been carefully analyzed.

Highlights:

PM Netanyahu's masterful speech: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/netanyahus-un-speech_594122.html

An Excerpt:

Today I hope that the light of truth will shine, if only for a few minutes, in a hall that for too long has been a place of darkness for my country. So as Israel's prime minister, I didn't come here to win applause. I came here to speak the truth. (Cheers, applause.) The truth is -- the truth is that Israel wants peace. The truth is that I want peace. The truth is that in the Middle East at all times, but especially during these turbulent days, peace must be anchored in security. The truth is that we cannot achieve peace through U.N. resolutions, but only through direct negotiations between the parties. The truth is that so far the Palestinians have refused to negotiate. The truth is that Israel wants peace with a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians want a state without peace. And the truth is you shouldn't let that happen.

Mark Steyn on Obama's joke of a jobs "bill"

2011-09-18T20:57:00.002-04:00

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/277492/pass-jobs-bill-mark-steyn

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011 7:00 A.M.

‘Pass This Jobs Bill!’
There is no bill, it won’t “create” any jobs, and it will be paid for with money we don’t have.

The president has taken to the campaign trail to promote his “American Jobs Act.” That’s a good name for it: an act. “Pass this bill now!” he declared 24 times at a stop in Raleigh, N.C., and another 18 in Columbus, Ohio, and the act is sufficiently effective that, three years into the Vapidity of Hope, the president can still find crowds of true believers willing to chant along with him: “Pass this bill now!”

Not all supporters are content merely to singalong with the prompter-in-chief. In North Carolina, a still-devoted hopeychanger cried out, “I love you!”

“I love you, too,” said the president. “But . . . ”

Oh, no, here it comes: conditional love. “But, if you love me, you’ve got to help me pass this bill!” You’d be surprised how effective this line is: I tried it on Darlene in the back of my Ford Edsel when I was 17 and we didn’t get home till two in the morning.

Pass this bill now, or I’ll say “Pass this bill now!” another two dozen times! With this latest inspiration, Obama has taken the post-modern phase of democratic politics to a whole new level. “Pass this jobs bill”? Simply as a matter of humdrum reality, there is no bill, it won’t “create” any jobs, and it will be paid for with money we don’t have. But the smartest president in history has calculated that, if he says the same four monosyllables over and over, a nonexistent bill to create nonexistent jobs with nonexistent money will be yet another legislative triumph in the grand tradition of his first stimulus (the original Dumb and Dumberto the sequel’s Stimulus and Stimulusser).

The estimated cost of the non-bill is just shy of half a trillion dollars. Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that Washington was in the grip of a white-knuckle, clenched-teeth showdown over whether a debt-ceilingdeal could be reached before the allegedly looming deadline. When the deal was triumphantly unveiled at the eleventh hour, it was revealed that our sober, prudent, fiscally responsible masters had gotten control of the runaway spending and had carved (according to the most optimistic analysis) a whole $7 billion dollars of savings out of the 2012 budget. The president then airily breezes into Congress and in 20 minutes adds another $447 billion to the tab. That’s what meaningful course-correction in Washington boils down to: Seven billion steps forward, 447 billion steps back.

This $447 billion does not exist, and even foreigners don’t want to lend it to us. A majority of it will be “electronically created” by the Federal Reserve buying U.S. Treasury debt. Don’t worry, it’s not like “printing money”: We leave that to primitive basket cases like Zimbabwe. This is more like one of those Nigerian e-mail schemes, in which a prominent public official promises you a large sum of money in return for your bank-account details. In the case of Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, one prominent public official is promising to wire a large sum of money into the account of another prominent public official, which is a wrinkle even the Nigerians might have difficulty selling.

But not to worry. On Thursday night, the president told a Democratic fundraiser in Washington that the Pass My Jobs Bill bill would create 1.9 million new jobs. What kind of jobs are created by this kind of magical thinking? Well, they’re “green jobs” — and, if we know anything about “green jobs,” it’s that they take a lot of green. German taxpayers subsidize “green jobs” in their wind-power industry to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars per worker per year: $250,000 per “green job” would pay for a lot of real jobs, even in the European Union. Last year, it was revealed that the Spanish government paid $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar-panel assembly line. I had assumed carelessly that this must be a world record in terms of taxpayer subsidy per fraudulent “green job.” But it turns out those cheapskate Spaniards with their lousy nickel-and-dime “green jobs” subsidy just weren’t thinking big. The Obama administration’s $38.6 billion “clean technology” program was supposed to “create or save” 65,000 jobs. Half the money has been spent — $17.2 billion — and we have 3,545 jobs to show for it. That works out to an impressive $4,851,904.09 per “green job.” A world record! Take that, you loser Spaniards! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

So, based on previous form, Obama’s prediction of 1.9 million new jobs will result in the creation of 92,000 new jobs, mostly in the Federal Department of Green Jobs Grant Applications.

Just to put it in perspective, the breezy $447 billion price tag for the Pass My Jobs Bill jobs bill is about 20 times higher than the most recent Greek government deficit currently threatening the stability of the entire eurozone. Indeed Greece’s projected 2011 deficit — $24 billion at last count — is little more than half of just one of Obama’s boutique, niche “green jobs” programs. As Churchill almost said, never in the field of human con tricks has so much been owed by so many to so little effect.

Fortunately, there is no “American Jobs Act.” Indeed, the other day, tired of waiting for Obama to turn his telepromptered pseudo-bill into a typewritten actual bill, the Texas congressman Louie Gohmert waggishly introduced an “American Jobs Act” all of his own. But back on the campaign trail the chanting goes on, last week’s election results in Nevada and New York notwithstanding. America has the lowest employment since the early Eighties, the lowest property ownership since the mid-Sixties, the highest deficit-to-GDP ratio since the Second World War, the worst long-term unemployment since the Great Depression, the highest government-dependency rate of all time, and the biggest debt mountain in the history of the planet. And the president has just announced to the world that he’s checked the more-of-the-above box. The Pass My Jobs Bill jobs bill proclaims that this is all he knows and all he wants to know.

In my new book, I point out that Big Government leaves everything else smaller — and, when it’s bigger than anything ever attempted, the everything else is going to be way smaller. Maybe if you’re a “public service” worker or a tenured professor at Berkeley or a green-jobs racketeer or a New York Times columnist married to an heiress, you can afford Obama. But, if you’re not, look at your home, look at your savings, and figure out what’ll be left after another four years of “stimulus.”

“I love you!” squeals the Obammybopper in North Carolina. “I love you, too,” says Obama. “But . . . ”

But: You gotta take this half-trillion-dollar bill, and the next one, and the one after that. Like Al Gore says in Love Story, love means never having to say you’re sorry.

The Solyndra Scandal - and it is a scandal

2011-09-18T20:18:00.005-04:00

The more that slowly comes out, the uglier this looks ...

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/277537/solyndra-scandal-widening-andrew-c-mccarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/277512/solyndra-fraud-andrew-c-mccarthy

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/solyndras-whorehouse-lender

Obama’s Solar Scandal
The Solyndra scam on taxpayers.

Michael Barone Comments (33)

The Solyndra Hearings, Part I

The Solyndra Hearings, Part II

Stiles: Solyndra in the Spotlight

Malkin: O’s Big Green Boondoggles

Von Spakovsky: Nonpartisan Civil Service Myth

Solyndra Scandal Widening

September 18, 2011 11:39 A.M.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

My column this weekend is about the Solyndra scandal, and why I think it should be investigated as a criminal fraud. That would include a significant securities fraud angle: President Obama’s speech at Solyndra on May 26, 2010, was grossly misleading at a time when it was known that independent auditors had issued dire warnings about the failing solar-panel business’s chances of survival and when Solyndra’s Obama-connected backers were trying to sell the company’s stock on market.

Now there’s more: The Daily Caller reports that Solyndra actually sought a second federal loan in the astronomical sum of $469 million (which would have aggregated to well over $1 billion in taxpayer financing, for a company that was gushing red ink and was careening toward inevitable bankruptcy). The Daily Caller got the info from Solyndra’s SEC filing — and the site reports that the filing does not make clear whether the company got the second loan … and that Solyndra did not return the Daily Caller’s call to inquire.

One other thing: I did a ton of research for my column, and Andrew Stiles has done the best reporting you’ll find anywhere. There are links to it on the home-page (start here) and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand what the controversy is all about.

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011 7:00 A.M.

The Solyndra Fraud
The solar-energy company was a con game.

The Solyndra debacle is not just Obama-style crony socialism as usual. It is a criminal fraud. That is the theory that would be guiding any competent prosecutor’s office in the investigation of a scheme that cost victims — in this case, American taxpayers — a fortune.

Fraud against the United States is one of the most serious felony offenses in the federal penal law. It is even more serious than another apparent Solyndra violation that has captured congressional attention: the Obama administration’s flouting of a statute designed to protect taxpayers.

Homing in on one of the several shocking aspects of the Solyndra scandal, lawmakers noted that, a few months before the “clean energy” enterprise went belly-up last week, the Obama Energy Department signed off on a sweetheart deal. In the event of bankruptcy — the destination to which it was screamingly obvious Solyndra was headed despite the president’s injection of $535 million in federal loans — the cozily connected private investors would be given priority over American taxpayers. In other words, when the busted company’s assets were sold off, Obama pals would recoup some of their losses, while you would be left holding the half-billion-dollar bag.

As Andrew Stiles reported here at NRO, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee say this arrangement ran afoul of theEnergy Policy Act of 2005. This law — compassionate conservatism in green bunting — is a monstrosity, under which Leviathan, which can’t run a post office, uses your money to pick winners and losers in the economy’s energy sector. The idea is cockamamie, but Congress did at least write in a mandate that taxpayers who fund these “investments” must be prioritized over other stakeholders. The idea is to prevent cronies from pushing ahead of the public if things go awry — as they are wont to do when pols fancy themselves venture capitalists.

On the Energy Policy Act, the administration’s malfeasance is significant, but secondary. That’s because the act is not a penal statute. It tells the cabinet officials how to structure these “innovative technology” loans, but it provides no remedy if Congress’s directives are ignored.

The criminal law, by contrast, is not content to assume the good faith of government officials. It targets anyone — from low-level swindlers to top elective officeholders — who attempts to influence the issuance of government loans by making false statements; who engages in schemes to defraud the United States; or who conspires “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof, in any manner or for any purpose.” The penalties are steep: Fraud in connection with government loans, for example, can be punished by up to 30 years in the slammer.

Although Solyndra was a private company, moreover, it was using its government loans as a springboard to go public. When the sale of securities is involved, federal law criminalizes fraudulent schemes, false statements of material fact, and statements that omit any “material fact necessary in order to make the statements made . . . not misleading.” And we’re not just talking about statements made in required SEC filings. Any statement made to deceive the market can be actionable. In 2003, for example, the Justice Department famously charged Martha Stewart with securities fraud. Among other allegations, prosecutors cited public statements she had made in press releases and at a conference for securities analysts — statements in which she withheld damaging information in an effort to inflate the value of her corporation and its stock.

That’s exactly what President Obama did on May 26, 2010, with his Solyndra friends about to launch their initial public offering of stock. The solar-panel company’s California factory was selected as the fitting site for a presidential speech on the virtues of confiscating taxpayer billions to prop up pie-in-the-sky clean-energy businesses.

By then, the con game was already well under way. Solyndra had first tried to get Energy Act funding during the Bush administration, but had been rebuffed shortly before President Bush left office. Small wonder: Solyndra, as former hedge-fund manager Bruce Krasting concluded, was “an absolute complete disaster.” Its operating expenses, including supply costs, nearly doubled its revenue in 2009 — and that’s without factoring in capital expenditures and other costs in what, Krasting observes, is a “low margin” industry. The chance that Solyndra would ever become profitable was essentially nonexistent, particularly given that solar-panel competitors backed by China produce energy at drastically lower prices.

Yet, as Stiles reports, within six days of Obama’s taking office, an Energy Department official acknowledged that the Solyndra “approval process” was suddenly being considered anew. Eventually, the administration made Solyndra the very first recipient of a public loan guarantee when the Energy Act program was beefed up in 2009 — just part of nearly a trillion dollars burned through under the Obama stimulus.

For a while after Solyndra tanked, the administration stonewalled the House subcommittee’s investigation, but we now know that minions in the Energy Department and the Office of Management and Budget had enormous qualms about the Solyndra loan. They realized that the company was hemorrhaging money and, even with the loan, would lack the necessary working capital to turn that equation around. Yet they caved under White House pressure to sign off in time for Vice President Joe Biden to make a ballyhooed announcement of the loan in September 2009. An OMB e-mail laments that the timing of the loan approval was driven by the politics of the announcement “rather than the other way around.”

Why so much pressure to give half a billion dollars to a doomed venture? The administration insists it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Solyndra’s big backers include the George Kaiser Family Foundation. No, of course not. George Kaiser, an Oklahoma oil magnate, just happens to be a major Obama fundraiser who bundled oodles in contributions for the president’s 2008 campaign. Solyndra officers and investors are said to have visited the White House no fewer than 20 times while the loan guarantee was being considered and, later, revised. Kaiser, too, made several visits — but not to worry: Both he and administration officials deny any impropriety. You’re to believe that the White House was just turning up the heat on OMB and DOE because Solyndra seemed like such a swell investment.

Except it didn’t seem so swell to people who knew how to add and subtract, and those people weren’t all at OMB and DOE. Flush with confidence that their mega-loan from Uncle Sam would make the company attractive to private investors, Solyndra’s backers prepared to take the company public. Unfortunately, SEC rules for an initial public offering of stock require the disclosure of more than Obama speeches glowing with solar power. Companies that want access to the market have to reveal their financial condition.

In Solyndra’s case, outside auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) found that condition to be dire. “The company has suffered recurring losses from operations, negative cash flows since inception, and has a net stockholders’ deficit,” the PWC accountants concluded. Even with the gigantic Obama loan, Solyndra was such a basket case that PWC found “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

The “going concern” language is not boilerplate. As Townhall finance maven John Ransom explains, it is a term of art to which auditors resort when there is an extraordinary need to protect themselves and the company from legal liability. Angry investors who’ve lost their shirts tend to scapegoat the loser company’s accountants. In truth, even if the accountants affixed a neon “going concern” sign to the company’s financial statements, investors would have no one but themselves to blame. But it is unusual: The language is absent from the statements of many companies that actually end up going bankrupt. Auditors reserve it for the hopeless causes — like Solyndra.

With no alternative if they wanted to make a play for market financing, Solyndra’s backers disclosed the auditors’ bleak diagnosis in March 2010. The government had thus been aware of it for two months when President Obama made his May 26 Solyndra speech — the speech Solyndra backers were clearly hoping would mitigate the damage.

As president, Obama had a fiduciary responsibility to be forthright about Solyndra’s grim prospects — in speaking to the American taxpayers whose money he had redistributed, and to the American investors who were about to be solicited for even more funding. Instead, he pulled a Martha Stewart.

The president looked us in the eye and averred that, when it came to channeling public funds into private hands, “We can see the positive impacts right here at Solyndra.” He bragged that the $535 billion loan had enabled the company to build the state-of-the-art factory in which he was then speaking. He said nothing about how Solyndra was continuing to lose money — public money — at a catastrophic pace. Instead, he painted the brightest of pictures: 3,000 construction workers to build the thriving plant; manufacturers in 22 states building an endless stream of supplies; technicians in a dozen states constructing the advanced equipment that would make the factory hum; and Solyndra fully “expect[ing] to hire a thousand workers to manufacture solar panels and sell them across America and around the world.”

Ten Years Gone ...

2011-09-11T00:24:00.001-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9bP-LbR8u8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b-zxmuhfS8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOm-uIPzqpI&feature=related

I "Fully Understand" that Joe Biden is an embarrassment and an idiot

2011-08-24T21:32:00.002-04:00

Perhaps the worst Vice President in my lifetime. Such a poor representative for our country.

The odds of him remaining on the Obama ticket (assuming Obama runs) keep getting lower and lower.

Mr. Vice President, Can You Second-Guess Yourself on UNFPA Funding Now?

August 24, 2011 2:45 P.M.

By Reggie Littlejohn

Blasted with criticism, Vice President Biden is trying to take back what he said in Sichuan, China: that he “fully understands” China’s one-child policy, but is “not second-guessing” it. Chastened, Biden now says that China’s coercive population-control program is “repugnant.” Indeed, his spokeswoman insists that the entire “Obama administration strongly opposes all aspects of China’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization.”

Words spoken before the world in an official capacity cannot be unspoken. The bell, once rung, cannot be un-rung.

However, the Obama administration now has publicly admitted it knows that China practices forced abortion and sterilization. This is progress.

Should we believe that this administration “strongly opposes” these practices?

If the Obama administration “strongly opposes” forced abortion in China, then why did they restore funding to UNFPA (United Nations Family Planning Fund), an operative “abortion provider” in China? In 2001, the U.S. cut funding to UNFPA because an investigation, headed by then–Secretary of State Colin Powell, found that UNFPA was complicit in the coercive implementation of China’s one-child policy. In 2008, the U.S. State Department reaffirmed that determination, and yet the Obama administration resumed funding in 2009. President Obama’s FY 2012 budget requests $47 million for UNFPA.

The current administration also funds the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The IPPF works hand in hand with the coercive Chinese Communist population-control machine. Their website declares, “The China Family Planning Association (CFPA) plays a very important role in China’s family planning programme. It supports the present family planning policy of the government . . .”

Funding UNFPA and IPPF is not “strong opposition” to coercive family planning. It is support. At issue are the true aims behind the actions of the Obama administration. Are they “pro-choice,” as they say, or is their real aim population control, even if coercive?

Earlier this year, U.S. citizens voted to cut UNFPA funding under the new YOUCUT program. Because of this vote, Rep. Renee Ellmers (R., N.C.) will introduce legislation to cut UNFPA, saving $400 million over the next ten years.

If the Obama administration is sincere in saying it “strongly opposes . . . forced abortion and sterilization,” then it will either insist that UNFPA and IPPF cease operation in China, or it will defund these organizations.

— Reggie Littlejohn is president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers.

Mr. Vice President, Be a Leader

August 24, 2011 3:12 P.M.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

Also grateful that a spokesman for Joe Biden says he is opposed to forced abortion, former Tiananmen Square democracy activist Chai Ling calls the Chinese one-child policy “an ongoing Tiananmen massacre every hour.” In response to the Biden clarification, she writes, as president of All Girls Allowed:

Where are the political left in this modern-day freedom movement? Forced abortions and mass gendercide certainly call for action from both sides of the aisle. The challenge: End the cruel One-Child Policy. The Obama Administration has yet to issue a clear call to end the Policy, which is harmful both to the Chinese and American people.
The political right is exposing the injustice, calling on leaders, and pushing a new bill to act on China’s repugnant policy. The ”China Democracy Promotion Act of 2011” (H.R.2121), would give the President authority to deny entry into the U.S. of Chinese officials and individuals who participate in human rights abuses, including China’s coercive birth limitation policy. The political left has been conspicuously silent.
Democrats, we know you also stand for justice. We know that you love freedom, that you are willing to put aside differences and work alongside others to protect the oppressed. We know that you believe women deserve a choice when it comes to their own bodies. Where are you in this movement? Will you stand alongside your fellow Americans to call for an end to the One-Child Policy?

‘The White House has checked a political box on this side of the Pacific’

August 24, 2011 4:00 P.M.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

And John Boehner urges White House action to go along with a vice presidential aide’s talk. The Speaker of the House actually raised the issue of human-rights abuse with Chinese President Hu Jintao when the Chinese president was in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.

Meanwhile neither the president nor vice president has taken leadership on the matter — when Hu Jintao was here and when Biden was in China this weekend. To the contrary, as Chai Lingand Reggie Littlejohn have pointed out.

Boehner writes:

If the Obama Administration truly opposes the one-child policy and truly cares about undoing the damage the Vice President’s comments have caused, the Vice President himself – or his boss, the President of the United States – should personally go on record immediately and unequivocally right the wrong.
Secondly, if the Obama administration is serious about its opposition to the one-child policy, the President should immediately halt U.S. contributions to the U.N. Population Fund, which has been linked in China to the one-child policy. President George W. Bush stopped U.S. contributions to the UNFPA in 2002, but they were resumed by President Obama when he took office in 2009, on the grounds that the fund doesn’t “directly” support abortion.
Until these two basic actions have been taken, the effect of the Biden incident is that the perpetrators of the one-child policy – the people with the power and authority to reverse it, and end the forced sterilizations and coercive abortions the policy has spawned – have been given further reason to believe that the United States government does not object to the one-child policy and doesn’t mind if it continues. They have been left with the impression that while some American leaders strenuously object to the policy – such as Speaker Boehner, who raised concerns about the one-child policy directly to Chinese President Hu Jintao in a meeting earlier this year – there are other American leaders, including the Vice President and President of the United States, who are willing to offer a wink and a nod, and let the Chinese government simply carry on with its reprehensible business.

President Downgrade's Excellent Vacation w/ Millionaires & Billionaires Begins

2011-08-20T15:26:00.002-04:00

While our Economy, the Stock Market, Europe, the Middle East, and his Presidency are all in free fall.

Don't worry, there is golf to be played on the Vineyard, and after all, none of what's going wrong is his fault ! It's all just "Bad Luck" & Republicans (and of couse, GWB)

Hah !

Here are some good reads that explain it all:

Mark Steyn, as always, is a must read:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/275101/imperial-presidency-mark-steyn

So is Charles Krauthammer:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/274999/bad-luck-bad-faith-charles-krauthammer

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/274963/incredible-inconsistency-obamas-foreign-policy-mario-loyola

And lst's throw in a little Warren Buffett for good measure:

Koch Responds to Buffett’s Call for Tax Hikes

August 19, 2011 4:58 P.M.

By Daniel Foster

I’ve received the following statement from Charles G. Koch in response to Warren Buffett’sNew York Times op-ed, which called on government to “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.” To my knowledge, you’re reading it here first:

“Much of what the government spends money on does more harm than good; this is particularly true over the past several years with the massive uncontrolled increase in government spending. I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington. — Charles G. Koch, Chairman and CEO, Koch Industries, Inc.

I would only add, as others already have, that if Buffett and his “mega-rich” friends don’t think private philanthropy will do as much good as public spending, they are free to send as much money to the Treasury as they like.

President Downgrade & The Stock Market Crash

2011-08-09T20:44:00.003-04:00

Heckuva Job, Barack Obama ! The USA's AAA credit rating is downgraded on your big government high spending watch (its not all your fault, but you played a big, big part).

While you golf, go to fundraisers, throw parties for yourself (Big 5-0 must be celebrated) and prepare to take the rest of the month off on the Vineyard, here's what you've been up to.

- Debt Ceiling standoff -- hold economy hostage to demands for more taxes on people who pay them (you cave), threaten us with "better get this done b4 the Asian markets open"; offer no plan of your own.

This followed up with:

A Stock Market CRASH. Which didn't happen on your "better get this done b4 the Asian markets open", but since you did plant the seed, it happened immediately after an agreement with Congress was reached.

And what did you do about the CRASH and DOWNGRADE ? Well, nothing, except, give another lame speech while blaming everyone else, including:

The TEA PARTY

Millionaires and Billionaires

Corporate Jet Owners

The Rich

Congress

The Republicans

Japan Earthquake

Arab Uprisings

S&P

Did I miss anyone ?

I don't think I am the only one who sees Obama's failures as a President and as a Leader, who offers nothing more than the same old tired, failed ideas (tax the rich, build roads) while blaming everyone for whatever has gone wrong with his agenda.

Here are a few other commentaries on President Downgrade.

Michael Walsh: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/274113/theres-no-there-there-michael-walsh

James Capretta: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/274142/downgrade-rebuke-obama-richly-deserved-james-c-capretta

John Podhoretz: Rhetorical Whiz Fails To Make The Grade

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/what_rhetorical_whiz_fails_to_make_ibAdrJr559ziiRXQehpBmL

THERE'S NO THERE, THERE: Michael Walsh

My New York Post column today examines President Obama’s sad, wan, pathetic speech yesterday. For a hoops-obsessed president who once boasted that he had “game,” there’s really nothing left for Obama at this point. All he ever had was the ability to read the teleprompter, but now even that Wizard of Oz parlor trick has failed him.

With the left starting to edge away and even the compliant national media finally noticing that he’s the Oakland of national politics, it’s the beginning of the end of the Obama presidency:

So much for any hope that Obama would give us something besides his class-warfare, redistributionist ways — which have brought us soaring debt, high unemployment, a falling dollar and the humiliation of S&P’s downgrade of the nation’s credit.

Even as President Downgrade spoke, the stock market continued to crater, losing more than 600 points and signaling a continuing vote of no confidence in the administration’s economic policies.

But, then, where would he get a new approach? He’s been abandoned by every one of his main economic advisers except hapless Treasury Secretary/punching bag Timothy Geithner. So don’t go looking for him to make good anytime soon on his airy promise to have some concrete “ideas” for the special congressional debt-reduction committee.

Instead, he persists in continuing to advocate the same ruinous policies.

It’s bad enough that he can’t deal with the big picture. But even his small-ball “policy positions” are dead wrong:

Yesterday, for example, he called for an extension of the so-called “payroll-tax cut” — which sounds good until you actually think about it.

For the “payroll tax” (as Democrats have taken to calling it) is in this case merely another name for Social Security taxes. And Social Security is set to go completely bust within 25 years or so and is “not sustainable under currently scheduled financing,” according to its own trustees — so reducing receipts hardly seems like a good idea, even if the Social Security system gets “credited” with an amount equal to the tax cut to go into its imaginary lockbox.

Why this madness? It’s not enough that the rich must be forced to pay their “fair share” — although the top 20 percent of filers already pays 70 percent of federal income taxes. Having managed to create an income-tax system in which fully half of the “taxpayers” pay no tax at all, the left is now trying to decouple the failing entitlement from its taxpayer base as well — and no matter that such fiscal follies are what produced the S&P downgrade.

An even worse idea is extending unemployment benefits. Many employers are now telling job-seekers who’ve been unemployed for more than six months to not bother coming in for the interview — the folks getting the jobs are those who already have jobs or who’ve been laid off for only a few months. In other words, extending benefits reduces the chances the “beneficiary” will ever find work again. Is that what we want?

By now it’s clear to all but the bitter-clinger dead-enders that Obama is in way over his head. Yet still they flail about, pointing fingers in all directions while the president dances the night away in the White House or swans off to Martha’s Vineyard. Who’s kidding whom?

“No matter what some agency may say, we have always been and always will be a AAA country,” Obama said. Too bad we don’t have a AAA president.

Debt Ceiling Crap Sandwich Passes House - Senate, Prez next

2011-08-02T00:10:00.002-04:00

Do I really need to add my voice to the noisy din of the last few weeks .... Nah ...

What a mess ...

Here are some links that might be of interest:

John Bolton: Defense and the debt ceiling.

WSJ Editors: The debt deal is a rare bipartisan victory for the forces of smaller government.

Marc Thiessen: How the Tea Party ‘hobbits’ won the debt fight.

Andrew Malcolm: More bad poll news for Obama as debt deal brings smiles to Capitol Hill.

Paul Krugman: The president surrenders.

Ross Douthat: The diminished president.

NYT Editors: Democrats won almost nothing they wanted except avoiding default.

Carson Holloway: The Debt Ceiling and the Constitution.

Michael A. Walsh: Floundering Obama aims for ‘12 miracle.

John E. Sununu: Heroes, sidekicks do what Obama can’t.

Stephen Meister: How to avoid next debt-limit mess.

Fouad Ajami: Barack Obama the pessimist.

Robert Dallek: Even a deal on the debt ceiling will not cover up the fundamental crisis at the heart of American politics.

John Podhoretz: Satan sandwiches and House Democrats.

Lee Edwards: Reagan would approve of today's GOP.

Promises, Promises, oh the Promises of Spending Cuts

2011-07-21T15:38:00.000-04:00

Promises, Promises

July 21, 2011 3:33 P.M.

By J. D. Foster

When is a spending cut a spending cut? When the cut is in law. Everything else is just a promise.

When discretionary spending totals are cut immediately, that’s a spending cut. Such cuts are demonstrably not “pie in the sky,” so it’s fine to tally the effects over the next ten years.

Similarly, when entitlement programs are altered in law, that’s a spending cut. Again, it’s perfectly appropriate to add up the resultant budgetary ramifications for a reasonable period to give some context for budgeteers.

But even statutory spending caps, necessary and beneficial though they would be, are ultimately only promises to cut spending, unless they are backed by inescapable, automatic cuts if the caps are breached. Just about everything else is only a promise, and Washington breaks promises with breathtaking regularity.

Congress has been hashing out a debt-ceiling increase since the start of the year. The House has acted by passing the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act. The Senate, which to date has not even passed a budget for next year, has yet to pass anything on the debt ceiling. Yet somehow it is the Republicans who are “terrorists” threatening financial terrorism, in the words of former Obama adviser Larry Summers.

On the table in the Senate at the moment are two vacuous proposals, full of promises but devoid of certainty. First there’s the McConnell-Reid proposal, which does not even promise spending cuts but only infers them.

Then there’s the Gang of Six quasi-plan. It’s not really a plan because, despite months of work, the plan has so few details one cannot even reliably guess at the net tax hike it would impose. The Gang certainly can’t tell you.

Moreover, according to one of its authors, Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), they have no legislative language. Apparently, then, the real plan is to raise the debt ceiling and promise to take up the Gang’s plan whenever it’s ready.

And what is that promised plan? To enact legislation that would promise to tell certain congressional committees to look for more budgetary savings. And the committees would, by implication, promise to comply — a promise of a promise of a promise.

For anyone who is serious about the soaring deficits and the threat they pose to the nation’s future, the best possible response was offered by the great Dionne Warwick:

Promises, promises,
I’m all through with promises, promises now,
I don’t know how I got the nerve to walk out,
If I shout, remember, I feel free,
Now I can look at myself and be proud,
I’m laughing out loud.

Enjoy, and take heart.

— J. D. Foster is the Heritage Foundation’s Norman B. Ture senior fellow in the economics of fiscal policy.

Politicans dither while Missing the Boat on the National Debt

2011-07-21T12:40:00.002-04:00

This piece is a must read:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/272407/missing-debt-yuval-levin

Obama the Ideologue

2011-07-21T00:26:00.000-04:00

Good column by Jonah Goldberg ... worth reading.

Stating the obvious (to all but the media) that Obama is the ideologue here...

http://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/2011/07/20/the_ideologue_in_the_oval_office

The Debt Limit Saga continues -- good commentary here

2011-07-12T14:09:00.003-04:00

The disingenous spin emanating from Obama and Geithner is truly breathtaking. Obama is deeply committed to the notion of the social welfare state, fiscal prudence be damned. Trillion + annual deficits forever, higher national debt, higher taxes.

Consider the following statements he made yesterday:

He actually said: I will not accept a deal in which I am allowed to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income I don’t need.

ALLOWED TO KEEP ?? Is that what our money is, something the gov't "allows" us to keep ?

He also said that he would rather be doing something else (rather than his job), like worrying about how the NFL strike gets averted.

Who elected this guy anyway ?

He also says a bunch of things that he "won't do" or "won't sign" while also saying that not raising the debt limit is not an option. However, his threats to not agree on being responsible also amount to threats (empty in my view) that he would in fact allow the nation to default on its debt obligations due to his unwillingess to reach certain agreements.

Now that's hypocrisy, DC style.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/271670/republicans-must-not-cave-adam-hasner

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/271683/obama-10-20-30-victor-davis-hanson

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/271705/demint-not-time-republicans-compromise-robert-costa

Krauthammer’s Take

July 12, 2011 12:04 P.M.

By NRO Staff

From Monday night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On President Obama’s Monday morning press conference on the debt ceiling negotiations:

Look, he adopts this position of being the Olympian observer of all this – above all the squabbling. Everyone else plays politics, but he acts in the national interest. …
All of a sudden, he’s decided we have to have a big deal, not a small deal. For months he insisted we have no deal. For months he insisted that we have a debt ceiling increase with no cuts at all. And now all of a sudden [he demands] only a big deal. And he says, “If not now, when?”
How about in February, when he, as president, submitted a budget that increased the deficit? … This is a president who’s kicked the can for two years and all of a sudden has decided it has to be long-term. You know what his definition of long-term is? The day after Election Day. Anything shorter is short-term because it would hurt him politically. This has nothing to do with the requirements of the economy.

On the contrast between President Obama’s warnings on Monday about Medicare’s insolvency and his assertion last summer that Obamacare had “put Medicare on a sounderfinancial footing” for at least a dozen additional years:

Well, you’ve heard of situational ethics? This is situational truth. Obama will say what he needs to say at the time he says it to advance a political agenda — as he did with the individual mandate [in the health-care bill]. Remember, when he needed it to pass in the House and the Senate, he said, ‘This is not a tax.’ And now that he’s in court on the constitutionality of it [the individual mandate in the health-care bill], the administration position is, ‘Oh, of course it’s a tax.’

On Obama’s rationale for increasing taxes on high earners:

I thought the most stunning statement in the whole hour was when Obama said — about insisting on having a tax hike for the rich – he said: I will not accept a deal in which I am allowed to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income I don’t need.
Allowed to keep? Is this his conception of what taxation is? This is the liberal idea that the government owns you and your income, and it will decide in its wisdom what it will allow you to keep — after deciding what you need, what you’re entitled to, and what income is extra.
A conservative position – an American position – is that government taxes you according to what it needs in order to function. …That’s its function, not to decide what you need.
I think this is a huge gaffe that Republicans ought to play again and again. Who owns your income?

The U.S. Economy - Obama Made It Worse

2011-06-05T22:05:00.003-04:00

Recent Economic Indicators, including the June 3rd monthly jobs report showing weak job growth and a still rising unemployment rate, seem to confirm that Obama's (and Bernanke's / Geithner's) economic policies (stimulus, obamacare, energy, jobs, taxes, regulation, etc.) are not working while plunging the nation into crushing debt that likely can never be repaid.

This weekend there are a slew of well reasoned articles on the topic, the general theme being

"Obama has made things worse".

It can be pointed out that Obama did inherit serious problems. He inherited financial collapse, deficits and debt. He inherited a broken political culture. These things weren't his fault. They were the fault of many parties, both political parties and greedy financiers. But through his decisions and ideology, he made them all worse.

To compound matters, he stubbornly refuses to recognize that he is off course, as he continues to advocate for reckless deficit spending, massive government programs and the like.

So, without further ado, ...

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/us-jobs-crisis-here-stay

http://sroblog.com/2011/06/02/peggy-noonan-obama-and-the-debt-crisis-wsj-com/

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/ugly_economy_lfbduyOZWHUqx4UIP9ywcM

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/wrong_again_bam_9vbcSQCQthGRpJNdC08CPL

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2730215/posts

Good point about why the job market sucks

2011-06-05T22:02:00.001-04:00

Via Pension Pulse.
John Talton of the Seatle Times reports, Why the US is in a jobs crisis:
The real crisis behind the jobs crisis in the US and pretty much the rest of the developed world is the leadership crisis. Politicians and policymakers are spewing the same old ideas. Liberals want to increase deficit spending while conservatives want to decrease taxes and cut spending. Same old, same old. There is nothing new in these policies based on ideology. Nobody has the courage to take on interest groups and admit that there is a fundamental problem with the current trajectory.

Immigration Battles

2011-05-26T23:22:00.001-04:00

Some wins for Enforcement; Losses for Obama & Amnesty Crowd:

Immigration Enforcement Wins Big

May 26, 2011 11:14 A.M.

By Mark Krikorian

The Supreme Court has upheld Arizona’s 2007 law requiring all employers to use the E-Verify system for checking new hires.

Of Course They Are

May 26, 2011 11:21 A.M.

By Mark Krikorian

The ACLU is challenging Indiana’s immigration law. Some excerpts:

Under other disputed provisions, police could arrest someone for having a federal immigration “removal order” on file — even if that order is not being pursued by the federal government.

“Removal” here means deportation; former immigration judge Mark Metcalf, in a CIS report published this week, finds that there are 1.1 million unexecuted removal orders — people ordered deported who have just not left. Since the feds aren’t looking for them, I certainly hope Indiana will.

And this:

Something as simple as using a picture ID card issued by the Mexican consulate would be enough to allow police to make an arrest, the ACLU lawsuit claims, even though more than 50,000 cards have been issued locally in the past five years for basic uses such as getting consular services, cashing a check or using a credit card

The “matricula consular” card, issued by Mexican consulates in the U.S. (and generally not recognized in Mexico itself) is useful only for illegal aliens. Foreigners living legally in the U.S. have U.S.-government-issued ID, by definition — usually a green card or an employment authorization document (EAD). If you need a matricula card it’s because you don’t have legitimate ID, because you’re an illegal alien.

Creating Facts on the Ground

May 26, 2011 11:59 A.M.

By Mark Krikorian

The Supremes’ complete repudiation of the Chamber of Commerce/Obama administration opposition to state E-Verify requirements will likely result in such mandates making more progress in the states’ next legislative sessions; Georgia passed a mandate this year, and the Chamber’s strategy of scaring lawmakers away from E-Verify with the bogeyman of Arizona’s SB1070 won’t work any more.

Of course, the point of the push for such state E-Verify mandates isn’t really to get all 50 states to sign on separately, but to move Congress to pass a national E-Verify mandate, something House Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith would very much like to do. The state mandates help this along in two ways: First, they obviously create political momentum. But in a more practical sense, as more states require use of E-Verify — whether for all employers or just state agencies and/or state contractors — a larger and larger share of the nation’s hiring will be run through the system, increasingly making it a standard part of the employment process. In other words, the goal is to make E-Verify a fait accompli, so that when Congress finally gets around to passing the national requirement, it will be more of a mopping-up operation than the imposition of an unfamiliar requirement on unsuspecting employers. And I think we’re already getting close to that tipping point.

More on the Magnitude of the E-Verify Win

May 26, 2011 12:11 P.M.

By Mark Krikorian

A lawyer friend writes:

By the way, an interesting tidbit – the administration not only supported the Chamber, but had Neal Katyal — the Acting SG [Solicitor General, who represents the federal government before the Supreme Court] — argue the case. The SG normally argues only one, maybe two, cases per sitting, and that’s reserved for the cases the gov’t sees as the most important/prominent.

The reason the administration and the Chamber of Commerce saw this case as so important is that they want to hold back mandatory E-Verify as their main bargaining chip for what they really want out of a “comprehensive” immigration deal — amnesty for the Obama administration and massive increases in imported captive labor (“guestworkers”) for the Chamber. The decision makes it more likely Congress will be able to pass such a mandate on its own, not bundled with any amnesty or guestworker provisions. In other words, it’s not just a win for enforcement but also a setback for amnesty and increased immigration.

Wisconsin back in the news - activist judge

2011-05-26T22:48:00.001-04:00

The tyranny of the left in action yet again ...

Wisconsin Collective-Bargaining Law Struck Down (Updated)

May 26, 2011 4:32 P.M.

By Christian Schneider

Dane County judge Maryann Sumi today struck down Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s new collective-bargaining law, arguing that its passage by the state senate on March 9 violated the state’s open-meetings law. Sumi’s decision (PDF) isn’t a surprise, though the timing was surprising in that it came earlier than expected.

Sumi argues that the state senate violated the open-meetings law by failing to provide 24 hours’ notice of a legislative meeting — in this case, the conference committee meeting that forwarded the bill to the full senate. Yet, in her order, she doesn’t address the clear exemption to the rule provided in Senate Rule 93, which allows for no notice of proceedings for conference committee bills. The state statutes clearly give precedence to legislative rules in the case of conflict; Sumi simply believes no conflict exists, ignoring the fact that the bill was, in fact, a conference committee bill.

Naturally, unions and their legislative allies are celebrating. Assembly minority leader Peter Barca called Sumi’s ruling “a huge win for democracy in Wisconsin.” Of course, in this case “democracy” is when two duly elected branches of the legislature pass a law, the state’s popularly elected governor signs it, and then it gets struck down by one of 17 judges in one of 72 state counties. (In the decision, Sumi laughably casts herself as a champion of taxpayers, haranguing legislative leaders for “the needless expenditure of taxpayer money to continue this lawsuit.”)

Sumi’s position was never really in doubt — she repeatedly denied all attempts to discard the lawsuit, and issued a restraining order to keep the law from taking effect. Her order today is simply an appetizer to the inevitable supreme court battle ahead (which made the election of conservative justice David Prosser last month so critical). Otherwise, legislative leaders could add the invalidated provision to the pending budget bill and re-pass it — an option they have not ruled out.

— Christian Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.

Update: This might explain the timing of Sumi’s ruling. Just yesterday, the state Department of Justice wrote a letter to Sumi warning her that they may seek her recusal based on a brief she had filed with the state supreme court last week. In her brief, Sumi argued an act of the legislature can be voided through a violation of the state’s open-meetings law — an issue which was before her court in the collective-bargaining lawsuit. DOJ attorneys charge that judges should recuse themselves from a proceeding in which they have made a public statement that “commits, or appears to commit” the judge to any issue or controversy in the case. By issuing her ruling today, the issue of her recusal is moot.

Obama vs. Israel - Obama would throw Israel under the bus if he could

2011-05-26T22:38:00.004-04:00

Obama just doesn't get it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/268168/we-don-t-ask-your-sons-and-daughters-die-our-soil-david-french

AndrewCMcCarthy

Obama proposes leaving Israel indefensible. http://tinyurl.com/3g28eya

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/268034/obamacare-israel-andrew-c-mccarthy

Obama screws up Israeli policy w/ controversial and unwelcome comments; Bibi strikes back

2011-05-22T20:08:00.004-04:00

Much has transpired over the past few days after Obama stuck foot firmly in mouth by loudly proclaiming that any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians should be based on the [indefensible] 1967 lines. Not only is this in fact a major change in stated US policy; Obama continues to deny [i.e. lie] that this is in fact a change in policy. Moreover, Israel was completely blindsided on the eve of PM Netanyahu's visit to DC to meet Obama, and both were due to speak days later at the AIPAC conference.

There is much else wrong with what Obama said and how he said it...

Max Boot (may 21) said it very well: "Boy, did President Obama screw up !"

How, you may ask ?

Boy, did President Obama screw up! He gave two-thirds of a great address on Thursday, abandoning his pinched, Realpolitik orientation and promising to put the United States on the side of democrats in the Middle East. It was a ringing call that should have received wide attention, but didn’t. Why not? Because of the final third of his speech, which contained the now-infamous call for a future Israeli-Palestinian peace to be “based on the 1967 lines.”

The president went on to add a caveat to this statement, adding that there would be “mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” He also tossed some other rhetorical concessions Israel’s way, for example decrying “antagonism toward Israel,” warning that “efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure,” and telling “Palestinian leaders” that they “will not achieve peace or prosperity if Hamas insists on a path of terror and rejection.” He even eschewed his previous call for an Israeli settlement freeze.

None of it mattered. All of the headlines were about Obama becoming the first U.S. president to declare that the 1967 borders—meaning the 1949 cease-fire lines—should be the basis of any peace treaty.

This is a gratuitous insult to our closest ally in the region and an unearned gift to the Palestinians at a time when they are eschewing talks with Israel. It is all the more puzzling because the entire focus of the region has been on the Arab Spring—not on Israel and Palestine. The only people who want to put the focus back on Israel are dictators like Bashar al-Assad who want to deflect popular anger among their own people. Why is Obama playing their game at the same time that he rightly denounces human-rights abuses by Assad, Qaddafi, and their ilk?

And why is he insisting on putting the focus back on the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” at a time when prospects for a settlement have never been bleaker because of Fatah’s willingness to form a unity government with the genocidal terrorists of Hamas? Obama even agrees with Prime Minister Netanyahu, at least in public, that Israel cannot negotiate with Hamas until that group renounces violence and recognizes Israel’s right to exist—conditions that are likely to be met around the time that cows start jumping over the moon. So, why, then did Obama upend his own pro-democracy speech with a totally unnecessary and counterproductive foray back into the thickets of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking?

I don’t know, but can only conclude that this is a mania that he came into office with, and no amount of hard experience can disabuse him of it.

I commented a few days ago on Obama’s ability to learn from his early blunders on many issues. The fact that he is now taking a harder line with Iran and Syria, while embracing the pro-democracy forces in the region, is evidence of his maturation in office. But when it comes to Israel, Obama just can’t seem to escape his ideological straightjacket. He still seems to believe that an Israeli-Palestinian accord is not only of overarching importance but also something that can be accomplished during his term of office. Many presidents going back to the days of Richard Nixon have fallen prey to the same illusion. In Bill Clinton’s case he was still trying to squeeze out a deal even as his last minutes in office ran out.

I had figured that Obama was smarter than that—that he might have learned from experience. Apparently not.

Below I have included many links addressing what has transpired regarding this completely unnecessary and avoidable mess that Obama made.

Obama's May 22nd speech at AIPAC conference:

http://www.israellycool.com/2011/05/22/barack-obamas-aipac-speech/ video of speech, text of speech & commentary

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/obama-double-downs-at-aipac/2011/03/29/AFhx9C9G_blog.html#pagebreak

http://bigpeace.com/jpollak/2011/05/22/obamas-three-lies-to-aipac/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/22/obama-aipac-speech-2011-p_n_865198.html Obama's Aipac speech

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2011/05/in-oval-office-bibi-offers-history-lessons-to-obama.html

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2011/05/whats-irking-bibi-and-the-war-powers-act-todays-qs-for-os-wh-5302011.html

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/267784/hamas-attacked-you-mr-president-tevi-troy

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/267797/israel-peril-rick-santorum

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/21/obama-insults-israel-upends-prodemocracy-speech/

Here is what started this whole brouhaha:

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/05/19/obama_alters_us_policy_tells_israel_to_start_with_67_borders?sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4dd56a5e9c314239,0

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2011/05/president-obama-talks-more-about-israels-borders-with-bbc-as-republicans-attack.html

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/267691/hed-tk-charles-krauthammer

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/world/middleeast/20policy.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post:

That’s when the boos came. It is not “well known” what the deal will be because the right of return, the demand to flood Israel with the children and grandchildren of Arabs who fled during the war of aggression on the infant Jewish state, and the security arrangements are the core of the matter. Moreover, Obama misquoted himself by insisting he said the parties “will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.” No, he said it was U.S. policy that the deal would stem from the 1967 lines.
He then disingenuously said he’d always meant “it is the right and responsibility of the Israeli government to make the hard choices that are necessary to protect a Jewish and democratic state for which so many generations have sacrifice.” And there was some pablum about the current situation not being sustainable, the U.S. commitment to Israel and Obama’s fondness for the nation whose bargaining position he has undermined.
The problems in the speech include: 1) Obama made it clear the United States is willing to give away Israel’s bargaining position for nothing in return; 2) Obama never even mentioned the right of return; 3) He did not reiterate specifically the necessity of a military presence in the Jordan Valley. You see, only Israel’s expected concessions are “well known”; 4) Israel can’t be expected to negotiate with those who want to destroy it, but negotiations need to resume; and 5) if anything Obama underscored that the United States has differences with Israel — but it’s between “friends.”
Obama must be very certain that liberal Jews will enthusiastically support him no matter what. And there is evidence he is right. Josh Block, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former AIPAC spokesman, e-mailed: “It [the speech] was a strong reaffirmation of the US-Israel relationship, and was an important and positive change from his remarks on Thursday. It reflected an important continuity of US policy going back to President Johnson.”
This is the sort of spin that pro-Israel Democrats use to justify voting for Obama. But there is a reality that can’t be avoided. This president once again has proved an apt negotiator on behalf of the Palestinians and a thorn in Israel’s side. Now is a time of choosing for the American Jewish community, for Israel and for Congress. And if Obama should be reelected in 2012 one can only imagine how hostile he will become toward the Jewish state.

Bin Laden: DEAD

2011-05-02T21:14:00.001-04:00

Congrats to our military for delivering ultimate justice to that POS.

Enjoy this video:

Dem Attacks on Paul Ryan vs. your lying eyes

2011-04-29T14:33:00.003-04:00

Watch:

The Backlash That Wasn't (or Isn't) http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/266014/backlash-wasnt-contd-andrew-stiles

Obama's Fantasy Budget - No Leadership; All Politics

2011-04-17T21:52:00.003-04:00

The Hypocrite-In-Chief's (Obama) sad and unserious approach can be condensed as follows:

a) Attack Paul Ryan for putting forth a serious budget proposal that attempts to address some "third-rail" issues like Social Security and Medicare. Paul Ryan is an "extremist" out to kill children and grandma.

b) Put forth some make believe claims that kick the can down the road for a decade or more and do nothing to reduce the nation's debt. Very little in substance.

c) A lot of political grandstanding.

Keith Hennessey gives a detailed analysis here: "Understanding the President's New Budget Proposal

http://keithhennessey.com/2011/04/13/obama-budget-v2/

Analysis

Here are four broad reactions to the new proposal.

First, this is a short-term budget, not a long-term budget. There are three forces driving our long-run government spending and deficit problem:

demographics;
unsustainable growth in per capita health spending; and
unsustainable promises made by past elected officials, enshrined in entitlement benefit formulas.

The President’s proposal addresses none of these forces. It instead spends most of its effort on everything but those factors. His proposed Medicare and Medicaid savings, while large in aggregate dollars, are quite small relative to the total amount to be spent on those programs, and he lets the largest program in the federal budget (Social Security) grow unchecked. While Bowles and Simpson focused their efforts on the major entitlements and also addressed other spending areas and taxes, the President’s proposal does the reverse, focusing on other mandatory spending, taxes, and defense. That’s a short-term focus.

Second, this proposal “feels” to me like the recently concluded discretionary spending deal. It’s the size of a typical deficit reduction bill that Congress usually does every five or so years. I’m sure the affected interest groups are even now preparing to invade Washington to explain how a 3-5% cut will devastate them. The problem is that our fiscal problems are now so big that they require much larger policy changes.

Third, while framed as a centrist proposal, the substance leans pretty far left. It’s deficit reduction through (triggered) tax increases on the rich, plus defense cuts, plus unspecified other mandatory cuts and process mechanisms that might cut Medicare provider payments. Centrist Democrat proposals do all of these things, but they also reform Social Security and Medicare, usually through a combination of raising the eligibility age, means-testing, and raising taxes.

Fourth, the President’s speech was campaign-like in its characterization of and attacks on the Ryan plan.

The President’s proposal could be the opening bid in a negotiation with Congressional Republicans. When you combine this substance with the President’s aggressive partisan attacks and framing of the Ryan budget, however, it’s hard to see how this leads to a big fiscal deal this year or next. A small incremental bill, which “cuts” spending by a couple hundred billion dollars over the next decade, is possible. But the chances of a long-term grand bargain in the next two years just plummeted from an already low starting point.

Michael Goodwin: O's in Fiscal Fantasyland

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/in_fiscal_fantasyland_Zv3ID2mIbVbl2hMuVpKkCM

Elections have conse quences, we are told, but the admonition usually refers to how results shape subsequent events. Yet as last week's huge battle over puny budget trims proved, America already is suffering from an election that is still 18 months away.

Blame President Obama. By waiting until Republicans offered a bold plan to address the staggering debt and deficit problems, then countering with a partisan attack that lacked any serious reforms, he signaled that no major changes will happen until voters speak in 2012.

Indeed, he defined his sketchy financial plan in pure political terms, saying it is "an attempt to clarify the choice that we have as a country right now."

Like many of Obama's claims, this one is both technically accurate and not true. Voters have a "choice" only to the extent that they must choose between fantasy and reality.

Obama's plan resides firmly in the fantasy camp. His vision is that America's financial problems can be fixed by raising taxes on 2 percent of the population. Everything else will take care of itself, or Congress will do something about it down the road.

His is not a plan as much as it is a placeholder while he tries to rally his party's ultra-liberal, anti-business base. He is already in cheap populism mode, telling supporters at a Chicago fund-raiser he "reformed Wall Street so you won't get cheated when you apply for mortgages or take out credit cards."

Contrast that with the more realistic vision of Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. While Ryan's plan, passed Friday by the House, is incomplete and far from perfect, his starting point is honesty: The nation cannot continue on its current path because entitlement spending, especially for health care, will take the country over the cliff. No amount of tax hikes can keep up with the explosion of climbing costs and existing debt, or, as Ryan puts it: "We don't have a problem with our budget because Americans don't pay enough taxes. We have problems with our budget because we spend too much money."

He proposes fundamental changes to save nearly $6 trillion over a decade, including making Medicaid a block-grant program so states can administer it more efficiently. He also proposes a voucher program for Medicare for those under 55. Those already in the program or age 55 and above would not see any reduced benefits.

While both Republicans and Obama are guilty of pushing plans they know the other side won't accept, they are not equally guilty with regard to the fundamental problem. As Ryan argues, comparing his plan to what exists now, as Obama does, is "measuring us against a fiscal fallacy . . . against a future that's not going to happen."

NY Post Editorial: "Daring To Demonize"

President Obama was the spirit of full bipartisan cooperation in discussing Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to reform Medicare and other fiscally challenged entitlement programs.

Fifteen months ago, that is.

“We’re not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterized . . . as, well, you know, that’s — the other party is being irresponsible; the other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens,” the president told House Republicans back in January 2010.

“If we’re going to frame these debates in ways that allow us to solve them,” he said, “then we can’t start off by figuring out: a) Who’s to blame? b) How can we make the American people afraid of the other side?

“Unfortunately, that’s how our politics works right now,” Obama lamented.

But that was then.

Fast-forward to Wednesday, when Obama again tackled the question of budget and debt — demonizing Ryan by accusing him and the GOP of trying to hurt (if not outright kill) senior citizens.

Ryan’s entitlements plan, Obama charged, “says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors . . . It says [that], instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy insurance, tough luck.”

He accused the GOP of trying to reduce the deficit on the backs of “50 million Americans.”

And who are they? “Many are someone’s grandparents, who wouldn’t be able to afford nursing-home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome.”

So much for “serious conversations about Medicare and its long-term viability.”

So much for refusing to accuse the GOP of “trying to hurt our senior citizens.”

So much for not “fighting each other in some sort of political steel-cage match to see who comes out alive.”

Fifteen months ago, Obama warned that “all of us have a choice to make: We have to choose whether we’re going to be politicians first or partners for progress, whether we’re going to put success at the polls ahead of the lasting success we can achieve together for America.”

It’s pretty clear now which choice the president has made.

And it’s not the one in which America wins.

Peggy Noonan:

http://www.peggynoonan.com/article.php?article=569

An excerpt:

We all get stuck in the day-to-day and lose sight of the overarching, but the overarching fact of Mr. Obama’s presidency is that he made a bad impression his first years in office and has never turned that impression around. He spent his first 14 months moving on what he was thinking about—health care—and not what the public was thinking about—the economic crash, jobs, spending. He seemed not to be thinking like everyone else, which underscored the idea that he was unresponsive to the crises they were seeing. It’s hard to get past that.

His speech this week brought together all the strands of his flawed leadership. It was at moments clever, but merely clever, not up to the needs of the moment—and cleverness in a time of crisis comes as an affront. The speech seemed oblivious to recent history, as if the president had just discovered something no one knows about, a problem with spending, and has decided to alert us to the danger. He said other politicians attempt to cut by focusing on “waste and abuse,” but he knows the real secret: The problem is entitlement spending. But addressing entitlements is all anyone serious has been talking about for years; it’s what the Ryan plan is all about!

The speech was intellectually incoherent. An administration that spent two years saying, essentially, that high spending is good is suddenly insisting high spending is catastrophic. The president appealed for bipartisan efforts but his manner and approach leave his appeals sounding like diktats. His attempts to seem above the fray leave him seeming distanced and unwilling to risk anything.

Most important, the speech signaled that the White House, after all this time, sees the question of spending as a partisan tool, a weapon to be deployed in an election, and not an actual crisis. This is disrespectful toward citizens who feel honest alarm.

Because of these flaws, the speech will have no afterlife, and a major speech with no afterlife might as well not have been given.

Libya -- heckuva job Brownie ! (er, Obama, Hilary)

2011-04-16T10:55:00.001-04:00

Time to send another strongly worded email ... or fax ... or op-ed ...

Charles Krauthammer On what’s happening in Libya:

It’s not only Senator McCain who said the United States is not doing enough. It’s obvious that our closest allies and the ones who are nearest to the fight on the ground, the British and the French, are saying exactly that. They are complaining, yes, that the Turks and Germans and others aren’t helping. But what they are really talking about is the United States.
You’ve got Qaddafi defying us, going through the street in an open car the way the president of the United States or prime minister of England would not be able to do. He does that in Tripoli supposedly in the middle of a war that we are pretending he is losing. [Meanwhile,] the leaders of the three great countries of the United States, France, and Britain are penning an op-ed. That’s really going to worry Libya.
You’ve got the meeting of the allies and the Arab states in Doha declaring today that the changing of the regime is an objective. And yet there is a stalemate. We are not doing what we can. We are in fact doing far less than we did early in the campaign, and deliberately.
And again I say, if you are going to enter into a war, you are either serious or not. You don’t enter into a war to defend a UN resolution. You enter into a war to achieve a real strategic objective on the ground. If that is not what you will do, stay out of it.

Natonic Implosion?

April 15, 2011 12:39 P.M.

By Victor Davis Hanson

I think everyone felt some grim, sad irony in watching Qaddafi’s tiny forces hold off a British-French NATO intervention, revealing the once-vaunted rebels to be mostly a Potemkin force — all as the U.S. outsourced its historic leadership role after less than two weeks. But that schadenfreude should have passed long ago, and at some point the U.S. is going to have to decide whether NATO is still a viable organization and worth saving, now that it is on the verge of being utterly humiliated in Libya.

It was always a predominately U.S.-led alliance, but our engagement kept up appearances and seemed at times to provide the Europeans a measure of unity. No longer: The U.S. is detached, the European NATO members are bickering and squabbling, and no one in Washington can explain to them the mission in Libya, the methodology to achieve it, the ultimate results desired, or the extent of NATO commitment in the postwar aftermath. Meanwhile, NATO member Turkey is an open supporter of Hamas and hostile to most of what NATO is for.

We are on the razor’s edge here, and it is not hard to see the alliance disintegrating — all at a time when the traditional supremacy of the dollar is questioned, the financial reputation of the U.S. is still sinking, the traditional use of affordable energy in America seems by intent to be over — and quite abruptly, unless the Obama administration, in its Libyan misadventure, finally decides to take the proverbial Vienna.

Hail To The Campaigner In Chief

2011-04-16T10:51:00.002-04:00

Will the whole country wake up to the facts about Obama that many already know ?

Charles Krauthammer On Obama opening his 2012 reelection campaign headquarters in Chicago:

I think it’s interesting that Obama is setting up his headquarters in Chicago. He wants to give the impression, as he has throughout his time in office, that he is not from Washington. He’s not really a politician. He’s not even a Democrat. He stands above the fray.
Look at the way he acted last week when the deadline approached on the budget. He said: You’ve got to act as grown-ups, addressing Republicans and Democrats in Congress — as if he isn’t a Democrat, he wasn’t behind the resistance to the Republican ideas.
He always does this game — the man who hovers above it all, the transcender who isn’t in the trenches.
It’s not going to work. He’s been the president. He is Washington.

Speaking Truth to Power

April 15, 2011 1:38 P.M.

By Michael Walsh

If you want to understand why Paul Ryan has suddenly become the de facto leader of the sad, pathetic, shriveled thing known as the Republican party, you need look no farther than his response to the classless sandbagging he got from the Bringer of Kinetic Military Action and Vacationer-in-Chief:

“I thought the president’s invitation…was an olive branch. Instead, what we got was a speech that was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our country’s fiscal challenges… What we heard today was a political broadside from our campaigner in chief. This is very sad and very unfortunate. Rather than building bridges, he’s poisoning wells.”

As I said on the radio yesterday, if anyone had spoken like this to the princeling earlier in his life, he very likely never would have become president. Instead, Obama has been coddled and cosseted throughout his glide-path trajectory — maverick Democrat Mickey Kaus justcalled him “the biggest affirmative action baby in history,” and said he was a lousy politician to boot. No one, it seems, has ever sat him down and explained to him how thoroughly mediocre he really is. Call it the audacity of mope.

And yet there he is, partying it up in the White House and launching his billion-dollar reelection bid with a speech that would have made Rosa Luxemburg proud, so maybe believing your own myth can take you all the way from Punahou to the presidency without every having to accomplish a damn thing. As the saying goes, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Which is why it’s important that the handful of Republicans with spine speak sternly to Obama the way Ryan did. Pace all the number-crunchers and crystal-ball-gazers, he won’t be defeated by conventional means, or by hopeful comparisons to Jimmy Carter, or by competing programs, and certainly not by the weak-tea “collegiality” of Boehner & Co. Playing by the rules doesn’t work when the other team is playing a different game entirely.

There’s no there there with Obama, just the legend of his own invincibility. The sooner the Republicans come to grips with that, the sooner they’ll figure out how to beat him.

That is, if they really want to.

Re: As I Was Saying

April 15, 2011 3:39 P.M.

By Peter Kirsanow

It’s difficult to discern an Obama “campaign speech” from any other that he gives. Partisanship is a hallmark of most of his speeches, vapidity a hallmark of all.

By attacking Ryan, who has forced him to address (however ineptly) the $14,500,000,000,000 debt and $1,700,000,000,000 deficit to which he’s contributed so substantially, Obama (further) reveals how profoundly small and frivolous he is.

As I Was Saying . . .

April 15, 2011 2:34 P.M.

By Michael Walsh

This just in, from The Hill:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Friday responded to President Obama’s criticism of Republicans that was caught on a live microphone during a fundraiser.

At a press conference before a vote on a series of budget proposals, Boehner appeared to take a subtle jab at the president.

“I didn’t see his remarks. But I think you mentioned it was a campaign speech,” he said.

Republicans have criticized Obama as the “campaigner in chief” ever since he announced he was officially beginning his reelection bid last week.

Hypocrisy Alert: Obama repudiates his 2006 vote against raising debt ceiling

2011-04-12T00:01:00.002-04:00

Uh Huh.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/264417/white-house-potus-regrets-2006-debt-ceiling-vote-daniel-foster

White House: POTUS Regrets 2006 Debt-Ceiling Vote

April 11, 2011 2:39 P.M.

By Daniel Foster

White House press secretary Jay Carney just told reporters that President Obama regrets his 2006 vote against raising the debt ceiling. To refresh your memories, here’s what then-Senator Obama said at the time:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

But today, Carney said Obama believes his vote was a “mistake” that he regrets, that the debt ceiling is too important to play politics. Carney didn’t say whether it was also too important to vote ‘present’ — something Obama did on debt-ceiling votes in 2007 and 2008.

Obama, the $14 Trillion Debt, the $1.7 Trillion Budget Deficit - The Great Pretender

2011-04-11T23:52:00.003-04:00

In the event there are any suckers still left out there who believe that Obama is capable of addressing this Nation's massive debt in a serious and responsible manner .... well, you are hopeless.

Not that Congress is likely to do much better, but Obama will be dragged kicking and screaming to any meaningful spending cuts; will demonize Paul Ryan and his proposals; will propose again raising taxes (more revenue = more spending !).

Game on.

Read Andrew McCarthy: AndrewCMcCarthy

You’re kidding, right? http://tinyurl.com/6znu9a2

Read Michael Walsh: Bam's Fiscal Feint, The next round of Lip Service

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/bam_fiscal_feint_5URbEBWpinEwDnKOdI3y 6N

Richard Goldstone's kinda sorta mea culpa

2011-04-03T21:51:00.001-04:00

This self hating Jew was the author of the infamous "Goldstone Report" a UN sanctioned hit job on Israel's self defense from Gaza terrorism and rocket attacks on civilians.

File this under "better late than never" and the damage he did cannot be repaired.

Goldstone Reconsiders

April 3, 2011 7:22 P.M.

By Giulio Meotti

The U.N.’s Goldstone report — which forbade Israel to defend itself — has been the hardest blow to Israel’s image in a decade. Now, in the Washington Post, Richard Goldstone himself, a South African judge, writes: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

Unfortunately, Goldstone’s “reconsideration” won’t have a real effect on the NGOs, global forums, and Western parliaments that used the report to blacken Israel’s name. The media that hyped Goldstone’s allegations of Israeli war crimes won’t allocate the same front-page space to Goldstone’s exoneration of Israel. Despite Goldstone’s penitence, Israel will remain a target for the United Nations.

The worst effect of the Goldstone report was giving to Israel’s enemies the impression that they could attack the Jewish state with global empathy on their side. The report has been a gift to terrorism from the United Nations.

Also important were the wave of hatred on behalf of the European and American ruling classes, the headlines from the “mainstream” international press that repeated condemnations without response, and the satisfied hate of academics and student movements. Goldstone’s report was a match falling into a pile of straw.

But there is a positive aspect of Mr. Goldstone’s reconsideration. The judge is reminding all of us that Israel’s struggle is the same as the Western democracies’. It is an unconventional war: a war where there are not two armies fighting each other, but an army fighting fanatic and terrorist militias that believe they have the right, indeed the duty, to use civilian populations to conduct their holy war.

We are still waiting for the moment when these NGOs and United Nations apparatchik will ride on Israeli buses and shelters to experience the truly unprovoked, homicidal nature of terrorism. Till this moment, the West should reject their approach to Israel — including the racist and anti-Semitic U.N. “Durban III” conference that will be held in New York for the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

— Giulio Meotti is author of The New Shoah.

Obama's Excellent Libyan Adventure continues - "A Turd Sandwich" ?

2011-03-30T23:08:00.001-04:00

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/29/3176608.htm

The reluctant warrior

By Craig McMurtrie

Updated Tue Mar 29, 2011 3:29pm AEDT

The abiding impression has been of a president being dragged into a fight against his better judgement. (The White House: Pete Souza)

What do you call it when you have a "kinetic military activity" or a "military operation with multiple partners" or even a "time-limited, scope-limited military action"?

You have Libya.

As the White House tells it, you certainly don't have a war.

The Obama administration has turned itself inside out to avoid using the nasty 'w' word, even as it launched sea and air-based strikes on Libyan air defence systems and forces loyal to Moamar Gaddafi, firing over $100 million worth of missiles on the first day alone.

And while the White House says Gaddafi should go that isn't what the United Nations (UN) Security Council has authorised. The UN says the military intervention can only protect civilian life.

For American defence hawks this is confounding.

The prestige of the United States is being used to bomb Gaddafi's forces, but they can't take out the man himself, they don't know how long it will last and now to add insult to injury - NATO is in charge?

In the Neocon days (remember them?) George W Bush announced his wars on camera. In 2003 he even showed up on the deck of an aircraft carrier to declare major combat operations ended in Iraq. Years later - he was right.

This guy is something else.

When the first missiles were launched, Barack Obama was on an official visit to Brazil. Then he went to Chile and El Salvador. There were pictures of him in a 'secure' tent talking to his national security team over the phone and calling world leaders from Air Force One. At the eleventh hour it was announced that he was cutting the five-day trip short (by two hours) to get back to DC. A planned Mayan ruins sightseeing trip was cancelled.

The abiding impression has been of a president being dragged into a fight against his better judgement.

According to administration leaks it was the senior women, including UN ambassador Susan Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who persuaded him to override the concerns of the Pentagon, to avert a potential humanitarian catastrophe.

Hillary Clinton has publicly acknowledged the scalding impact of Rwanda in 1994, when her husband's administration didn't act and hundreds of thousands died.

But that hasn't stopped veteran US broadcast journalist Ted Koppel asking why Libya was singled out to win "the humanitarian defence sweepstakes of 2011" and not other countries?

Defence secretary Robert Gates acknowledges that the US doesn't have a vital interest in the outcome in Libya. The candid Republican, who will be sorely missed when he decides to retire, also says no-one knows how long the Libyan intervention could go on for.

That's bad news for a president anxious to extricate himself from Iraq and Afghanistan ahead of a re-election year. This Commander-in-Chief isn't about to wrap himself up in the flag and sound the charge on Libya.

In fact NBC White House reporter Savannah Guthrie told her viewers that sources had heard the president label the military action in Libya a "turd sandwich" in a closed-door meeting.

Now that doesn't fit with his icy-cool public demeanour.

So as his critics were lining up demanding explanations, the administration went into overdrive to cede leadership to NATO. Suddenly Sarkozy grabbed the limelight (and didn't he love it) and there was an all-in brawl in Brussels, before eventual agreement.

That only further inflamed some American opinion makers, Rush Limbaugh fuming "this ain't nowhere near what NATO's supposed to do," calling the Obama strategy the "most muddled policy ever" and lamenting to his millions of listeners "we're not a super power any more".

He also claimed that NATO Secretary General (Anders Fogh Rasmussen) reminds him of a James Bond villain, but we don't need to go there.

Over a week after the first missiles were launched the White House website posted a taped message from the president "this is how the international community should work - more nations, not just the United States, bearing the responsibility and cost of upholding peace and security," he said.

Still the reluctant warrior, on the 10th day, when he decided it was time to explain his strategy in a live television address, Barack Obama invited the cameras to a speech at the National Defense University and not into the Oval Office.

Some presidents positively yearn for their chance to make history. On top of the aftermath of a global financial meltdown and the two wars he inherited, this one is now navigating an unprecedented series of uprisings across the Arab world.

Watergate journalist Bob Woodward calls it Obama's 9/11.

Libya could be a watershed moment in world affairs. If Gaddafi goes quickly the intervention might turn out to be a masterstroke, but the veteran newsman also cautions that it's hard "to turn the off switch on war".

Craig McMurtrie works for ABC News in the Washington bureau.

After Wisconsin, Riots in London ... Leftist crybabies

2011-03-28T21:11:00.003-04:00

First Wisconsin, now England ... me thinks we will see more of this thuggery worldwide, including more in the U.S.

By the way, have we ever seen mobs rampaging conservative protestors occupying buildings, destroying buildings, fighting with police, threatening lawmakers ? hmmmm....

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/barbarians_within_Hgv74LXgQnxXQ3MEkJXMIO

They were cleaning up the mess in London yesterday -- replacing the windows at the Ritz, fixing the wooden façade at Fortnum & Mason and attending to a vandalized Trafalgar Square in the wake of Saturday's protests -- and riots -- by trade unionists and anarchists.

Think it can't happen here? Think again.

The British press reports that up to half a million people took part in the demonstrations, 200 were arrested and more than 160 injured -- including 84 police officers, 11 of whom had to be hospitalized.

Why? Because Prime Minister David Cameron announced a $130 billion cut in public spending and this is how the infantile left reacts when its I've-got-mine-Jack gravy train is threatened.

The weekend demonstration was led by Britain's powerful Trades Union Congress, whose leader, Brendan Barber, has been warning for more than a year that "industrial unrest" would greet any Tory government that dared attack Britain's sky-high social spending.

Addressing the gathering in historic Hyde Park was Ed Miliband, the Labor Party's new hard-left leader (his father was a prominent Marxist), who likened the protesters to the suffragettes, the US civil-rights movement and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Which ought to tell Britons all they need to know about their prime-minister-in-waiting.

In the aftermath of the all-too-predictable violence -- in Trafalgar Square, the words "fight back" and "Tory scum" were scrawled on the bronze lions and red paint was splashed on the 2012 Olympics countdown clock -- there was the usual tut-tuting.

Barber, the union chief, said he "bitterly regretted" the violence, then added, "I don't think the activities of a few hundred people should take the focus away from the hundreds of thousands of people who have sent a powerful message to the government today." Right. The government had better get the message -- or else.

Expect more of this in the coming months and years, as countries finally face up to the fact that the money has run out and that tough choices must be made -- not just nickel-and-dime decisions about which programs to cut but the harder issues of whether certain programs should even exist.

We've already seen it, on a smaller scale, in Wisconsin, during the recent battle over Gov. Scott Walker's plan to rein in the public-employee unions. In Madison, the capitol was occupied by hordes of protesters and the lives of some Republican state legislators were threatened.

This is no way to run a democracy. Peaceful protests are one thing, but massed force and ominous warnings about dire consequences are another. Throw into the mix the free-floating anarchists who routinely show up at such events -- most recently at the G-20 summit last year in Toronto -- and you have a prescription for serious trouble.

Yet, all too often, any attempt to open a civil discussion about the future is met with the same dreary charges that "hateful" conservatives want to kill old people and steal candy from babies.

For some on the left, too much is never enough -- because, by definition, it can't be. They operate on a modified version of the old Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated that once a country went communist, it could never go back: Once a government program is in place, it can never be cut or rescinded, only fattened. It doesn't even matter whether it's effective. The self-interested and the self-deluded have too much to lose to give up the fantasy of the perfect nanny state.

The problem is, we no longer have that luxury. "Progress" need not be the exclusive province of the so-called "progressives" -- and thuggery should have no place in our political system.

People of good will on both sides need to stand strong against intimidation and violence and insist that such questions be settled at the ballot box -- and that the results be respected. In any contest, there gets to be two teams on the field, not just one, and the game can only be played if both sides follow the rules.

When one doesn't -- well, just take a look at Trafalgar Square, then brace yourselves.

Michael Walsh, a former associate editor of Time, is the author (writing as David Kahane) of "Rules for Radical Conservatives."

After Teleprompter Speech; Obama Still Incoherent on Libya

2011-03-28T21:01:00.004-04:00

It took Obama almost 2 weeks to come up with his carefully packaged, and in some instances, blatantly false words. All the imagery of his speech cannot hide the reality of the amateur hour that is his administration.

Here are some good columns:

- Refusing to Lead

- Obama sets Bad precedents

- On Syria, Lose Your Illusions O

- Libya: Just Trust Me Sez O

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/263272/obama-libya-stanley-kurtz

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/263271/obama-sets-bad-precedents-alvin-s-felzenberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/263273/obama-still-murky-libya-victor-davis-hanson

http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/263267/obama-libya-look-just-trust-me

Obama Still Murky on Libya

March 28, 2011 9:25 P.M.

By Victor Davis Hanson

President Obama just gave a weird speech. Part George W. Bush, part trademark Obama — filled with his characteristic split-the-difference, straw-man (“some say, others say”), false-choice tropes.

His support for those “yearning for freedom all around the world” was the sort of interventionist foreign policy that a Senator Obama — if his past reaction to the removal of Saddam Hussein is any indication — would have objected to, especially in the case of sending bombers over an Arab Muslim oil-exporting country. Since Saddam was a far greater monster (gassing thousands is far worse than turning off the water to neighborhoods) than the monsters that Obama now wishes to slay, I think he has confused rather than enlightened his audience.

There was no mention of the Congress. Is he going to ever ask its approval? And if not, why the repeated emphasis on asking others such as the Arab League or the UN for their approval — given that their representatives, unlike ours, are largely not elected?

In a speech dedicated to clarifying our policy, it left it even more murky. What was our objective, and what is it now? Obama asserted that “We have stopped his deadly advance.” But is that the aim — the status quo, and a sort of permanent safe zone for rebels in accordance with UN directives? Or are we going beyond that to eliminate Qaddafi, who is the source of the problem? The president now says he won’t overthrow Qaddafi by force, but that is what he hopes, in fact, will happen as a result of our military presence:

Of course, there is no question that Libya — and the world — will be better off with Qaddafi out of power. I, along with many other world leaders, have embraced that goal, and will actively pursue it through non-military means. But broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.

This is reminiscent of George H.W. Bush’s declaration that he wanted Saddam gone, had used our military to save Kuwait, but not to remove Saddam, urged others to remove him — and then ended up solving one problem while creating another more violent and unending.

Constant reference was made to UN sanctions, in contrast both to the costs incurred in Bush’s Iraq, and the dithering by Clinton in the Balkans. He talked of allies, of joint operations, and a diminished American role to come. But again, to fulfill the UN mandate of saving the Libyans, he is going to have to violate — or at least go beyond — it by going after Qaddafi, a task he now seems to have outsourced to the Europeans, after ceasing the Tomahawk attacks on key Libyan ground installations. Why brag that “we targeted tanks and military assets that had been choking off towns and cities and we cut off much of their source of supply” when we are not going to do it any more, in admission that to do so would be going well beyond a UN-sanctioned no-fly-zone?

Translation: It now seems good to have removed Saddam, but too costly. It was good to remove Milosevic, but it took too long. So I will remove Qaddafi much more quickly and at far less cost, but I won’t do it by targeting Qaddafi, but by preventing his aircraft from flying and hoping Qaddafi goes away. Qaddafi deserves our special intervention because he is worse than other dictators, such as an Assad who is a “reformer” or Ahmadinejad whom we won’t “meddle” against. We successfully sought a UN resolution to protect the people, and will stick by it, but hope somehow someone will go beyond it and remove Qaddafi. We are an exceptional nation that has always acted out of humanitarian concerns in a way not true of other countries (“To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and — more profoundly — our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.”), but unfortunately in this case

the United States will play a supporting role — including intelligence, logistical support, search-and-rescue assistance, and capabilities to jam regime communications. Because of this transition to a broader, NATO-based coalition, the risk and cost of this operation — to our military, and to American taxpayers — will be reduced significantly.

Somehow, I don’t think Qaddafi will be impressed enough to step down; the European allies will be somewhat confused over the degree of future American support; the rebels will wonder whether they should take Tripoli or should settle for a zone of sanctuary; critics won’t know whether Obama will ever consult the Congress; we still don’t know why Qaddafi was worse than an Assad or Ahmadinejad — or who or what the rebels are and what the U.S. role will be to ensure something better than Qaddafi.

Other than that, it was yet another well-delivered, split-the-difference, mellifluous Obama speech that said essentially nothing of substance.

Obama on Libya: Look, Just Trust Me On This

March 28, 2011 8:17 P.M.

By Jim Geraghty

Tags: Barack Obama

I’ll have more in tomorrow’s Morning Jolt, but I feel tonight a lot like the night of Obama’s speech announcing the Afghanistan surge to West Point. On paper, I agree with a lot of what Obama is saying. But he’s stringing together a lot of pretty-sounding phrases without really getting at the questions most skeptical Americans have: why intervene here and not in other places? Obama’s caught himself between his comments that clearly suggested regime change (Qaddafimust step down) and a strict adherence to a U.N. mandate that doesn’t include regime change. What is our goal? What do we do when America’s national interest and a United Nations rule conflict? And why are we worrying about what the U.N. says, anyway? Obama seems to be indicating we say publicly that we’re not pursuing regime change military but pursue it through non-military means, which seems like a fine (and perhaps odd) line. (If you’re trying to knock a brutal terror-sponsoring dictator out of power, knock him out of power! Don’t do it halfway!) Finally, what have we signed ourselves on to? Can we trust the Libyan rebels? What are we trying to replace Qaddafi with?

In the end, Obama’s speech amounted to, “Look, I realize none of you understand my decision making, but at the end of the day, you can rest easy knowing I’m right.”

He thinks he’s reassuring us.

NY Post: Refusing To Lead (Libya)

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/refusing_to_lead_dHJNuHKJFZLIBsnLtTRdzK

Syria: Lose Your Illusions Barack

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/syria_lose_your_illusions_barack_DsyNsAjkvtbIAmlcYpEGuK

And then of course there is Hillary Clinton, who ran around all weekend saying Syria is different b/c Assad is a "reformer". Oy vey ...

ObamaCare Update: Still Mega-Unpopular; sold w/ lies

2011-03-21T20:02:00.001-04:00

The Struggle to Sell Obamacare

March 21, 2011 3:28 P.M.

By Veronique de Rugy

Over at Reason Online, Peter Suderman has a chart showing how President Obama’s health-care-reform law remains pretty unpopular one year after its enactment.

Suderman offers several reasons why the bill has failed to become popular. Among other things, he points to this “Fact Checker” column in today’s Washington Post, which looks at claims made by Democratic lawmakers about the law that are either not exactly true or totally untrue. Here is one:

Here, Pelosi is repeating a talking point from the health-care debate. The 4 million figure comes from a report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning group, which estimated that universal health care would add 250,000 to 400,000 jobs a year. Pelosi took the top end of the range and then multiplied it by 10, a numerical sleight-of-hand that Polifact last year labeled “half true.”
A Pelosi spokesman noted she has been using this statistic for 14 months now, but we frown on the reuse of statistics previously found to be suspect.
In this case, since the bill has passed, the Congressional Budget Office has done its own analysis (the one McConnell cited) that cast some doubt on the CAP analysis, written before the bill was passed into law. Presumably, members of Congress should pay more attention to estimates by their own budget agency than think tanks that promote their agenda. Repeating this dubious statistic is worth at least a Pinocchio or two.

Read about the other bogus claims — like that the law will boost insurance coverage among small employers, or that it will reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars — here.