10 posts tagged “obama”

Climb by Mark Steyn on National Review Online

            May 09, 2009, 7:00 a.m.

            Climb
            Conservatives must have the courage to defend their convictions.

            By Mark Steyn

            Is conservatism over?

            Well, of course it is. Everyone from James Carville to Colin Powell
            says so. “The Republican party is in deep trouble,” General Powell
            told some group willing to pay him serious money to deliver this
            kind of incisive insight. “Americans do want to pay taxes for
            services. Americans want more government in their lives, not less.”

            Whether or not they want it, they’re certainly going to get it. And
            if you like big government now, just think how big it’ll be once
            both parties are fully signed up to the concept. You’ll recall that
            General Powell voted for Barack Obama, coming out and publicly
            stiffing his “beloved friend” John McCain, after years of more
            discreetly stiffing (in leaks to Bob Woodward and others) his
            not-so-beloved colleagues in the Bush administration. But, in
            fairness to the former secretary of state, his breezy endorsement of
            more government and more taxes is as near as we’ve ever got to a
            coherent political philosophy from him. If the GOP refuses to take
            his advice, I would urge him to run a third-party campaign on this
            refreshingly candid platform.

            One of Powell’s more famous utterances was his rationale, after the
            1991 Gulf War, for declining to involve the U.S. military in the
            Balkans: “We do deserts, we don’t do mountains.” Actually, by that
            stage, the U.S. barely did deserts. The first President Bush’s
            decision, at Powell’s urging, not to topple Saddam but to halt the
            coalition forces at the gates of Baghdad sent the world a message
            about American purpose whose consequences we live with to this day.
            As for the Kurds and Shiites to whom it never occurred that the
            world’s superpower would assemble a mighty coalition for the purpose
            of fighting half a war to an inconclusive conclusion, Saddam quickly
            took a bloody revenge: That’s an interesting glimpse of what it’s
            like to be on the receiving end of Colin Powell’s much-vaunted
            “moderation.”

            So I have no great regard for Powell’s strategic thinking, at home
            or abroad. As the general sees it, the Republican party ought to be
            a “big tent”: Right now, the tent is empty, with only a few “mean
            spirited” and “divisive” talk-radio hosts chewing the limbs off live
            kittens while gibbering to themselves. By comparison, over in the
            Democrat tent, they’ve got blacks, gays, unions, professors, Ben
            Affleck: diversity on parade.

            In fact, the GOP’s tent has many poles: It has social conservatives,
            libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These
            groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians’
            insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don’t get
            the warhawks’ obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist
            hellholes. A lot of the hawks can’t see why the fiscal cons are so
            hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a
            time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various
            poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006
            electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a
            war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless, half-hearted,
            semi-colonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly.
            The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage:
            There are bad times and worse times. And, while social conservatism
            and libertarianism can be principled to a fault, the vagaries of
            electoral politics mean they often wind up being represented in
            office by either unprincipled opportunists like Arlen Specter or
            unprincipled squishes like Lincoln Chafee.

            Meanwhile, over in the other tent, they celebrate diversity with
            ruthless singlemindedness: In the Democrats’ parade, whatever your
            bugbear, government is the answer. Government is the means,
            government is the end, government is the whole magilla. That gives
            them a unity of purpose the GOP can never match.

            And yet and yet . . . Last November, even with the GOP’s fiscal
            profligacy, even with the financial sector’s “October surprise,”
            even with a cranky old coot of a nominee unable to articulate any
            rationale for his candidacy or even string together a coherent
            thought on the economy, even with a running mate subjected to brutal
            character assassination in nothing flat, even running against a
            charming, charismatic media darling of historic significance, even
            facing the natural cycle of a two-party system, the washed-up loser
            no-hoper side managed to get 46 percent of the vote.

            Okay, it’s not 51 percent. But still: Obama’s 53 percent isn’t a big
            transformative landslide just because he behaves as if it were.

            To put it in Powellite terms, the general thinks the Republican
            party is in the desert, when in fact it’s climbing a mountain. All
            things considered, the resilience of American conservatism is one of
            the most remarkable features of contemporary Western politics. It’s
            up against significant members of its own party. It’s up against
            media for whom the Democrats’ positions are the default positions on
            almost anything that matters.

            Consider this cooing profile of Secretary Powell from Todd Purdum in
            the New York Times back in 2002: “Mr. Powell’s approach to almost
            all issues — foreign or domestic — is pragmatic and nonideological.
            He is internationalist, multilateralist and moderate. He has
            supported abortion rights and affirmative action.”

            So supporting “internationalism,” “multilateralism,” abortion, and
            racial quotas means you’re “moderate” and “nonideological”? And
            anyone who feels differently is an extreme ideologue? Absolutely.
            The aim of a large swathe of the Left is not to win the debate but
            to get it canceled before it starts. You can do that in any number
            of ways: busting up campus appearances by conservatives, “hate
            speech” prohibitions, activist judges’ more imaginative court
            decisions, or merely, as the Times does, by declaring your side of
            every issue to be the “moderate” and “nonideological” position —
            even when, in many cases, the “extreme” position is supported by a
            majority of voters. Likewise, to Colin Powell, it’s Ann Coulter
            who’s “vicious,” not Michael Moore, who compares the jihadists who
            blow up Western troops in Iraq to America’s Minutemen and gets
            rewarded with a seat next to Jimmy Carter in the presidential box at
            the Democratic convention.

            It’s a mountain, and it’s getting steeper. Promises of “free”
            government health care will make more voters susceptible to the
            blandishments of the nanny state. The Democrats have plans for talk
            radio and the Internet that will diminish conservative voices.
            Another retirement on the Supreme Court, and the First and Second
            Amendments will start getting nibbled away. Obama’s buddies at
            ACORN, already under investigation in multiple states over
            fraudulent voter registration, will have a prominent say in the 2010
            census.

            But, when the going gets tough, you don’t, as General Powell
            advises, “move toward the center.” You move the center toward you,
            as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did. It’s harder to do it
            that way, but if it’s a choice between more government and more
            taxes, or more liberty and more opportunity, I’ll stick with the
            latter, and so should the Republican party — however difficult it
            is. Unlike Colin Powell, conservatism does do mountains.

            — Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America
            Alone. © 2009 Mark Steyn

National Review Online -
National Review Online

My tag line is: “George W. Bush is LBJ with a human face.” Now this is a take off from Alexander Dubcek the former Premier of communist Czechoslovakia when his attempt at liberalizing his country met with the Soviet invasion in 1968; he wanted to create “socialism with a human face”. Well LBJ was ugly and Bush has become an even bigger socialist than Johnson. Bush was definitely not a conservative, his foreign policy was too far reaching and reckless, his domestic policy was too expensive and tried to create a heaven on earth which is what one would expect from the left.

Thomas Sowell
      

Jewish World Review Dec. 16, 2008 19 Kislev 5769
This holiday season, give the gift of wisdom
By Thomas Sowell

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Good books are especially good to give as
gifts to the proverbial "man who has everything" because he (or she) may not
have heard of a new book that fits their interests.

Good new books are one of the few good things about this past year. Here are
some books that could make fine gifts, obtainable painlessly without battling
crowds at the mall— or even in the bookstores, if you order on-line.

The most outstanding political book of 2008 has been by Jonah Goldberg. It
shoots to pieces the prevailing ideas of who is on "the left" and who is on "the
right."

It can become especially relevant in the coming year, if the new administration
goes further with the government interventions in the economy begun by the
outgoing administration— the kind of economic policies that were at the heart of
fascism.

Fans of economist and JWR columnist Walter Williams will welcome a new
collection of his columns in a book titled "Liberty versus the Tyranny of
Socialism." Spiced with imaginative examples of economic principles in everyday
life, it is vintage Williams.
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It's not all economics, either. Professor Williams' columns are also on
education, law, politics and other subjects, all done in his own inimitable
style.

Another economist and columnist, Robert J. Samuelson of Newsweek, also published
a new book this year— one focused on a topic that is likely to be of growing
interest and growing concern in the years ahead. Its title is "The Great
Inflation and Its Aftermath."

It is an account of how the American economy went from price stability in the
1950s to the beginning of inflation in the 1960s, reaching dangerous levels of
inflation in the 1970s, with inflation then being brought under control with a
lot of tough decisions and painful consequences in the 1980s.

This is the kind of book that may be more fully appreciated by an economist but
it is written in plain English, with no graphs or jargon, so it should be
interesting to a lot of people who are not economists.

"The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath" also has that most uncommon
characteristic, common sense.

Not all the books recommended this year were published this year. "Greatness" by
Steven F. Hayward is an unusual book published in 2005. In its 170 pages of
text, it deftly compares Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan as leaders,
revealing a truly remarkable range of similarities between these two men from
radically different social backgrounds.

Written at a popular level in an engaging style, "Greatness" is also a book from
which scholars can learn— except for those who think they already know it all.

A very different book is a little book of whimsical cartoons titled "Furry
Logic" by Jane Seabrook. It is good for a few moments of real pleasure and cheer
during the holiday season, perhaps especially good for people recovering in
hospitals or at home, but enjoyable by people of all ages and circumstances.

Books about the past can be relevant to the future, especially when the same
kinds of policies reappear under new names. It is good to have an understanding
of why these policies did not work when they were tried before, as a sneak
preview of what to expect from such policies the second time around.

Since so many of the approaches that Barack Obama has advocated under the mantra
of "change" are things already tried out during the 1930s by Franklin D.
Roosevelt, a devastating and very readable book titled "FDR's Folly" by Jim
Powell spells out just exactly what happened in the American economy when such
policies were put into effect.

My own new book this year is "Economic Facts and Fallacies." While I cannot
pretend to give an unbiased evaluation of it, I can point out that it received a
prize at an international gathering in Zurich and has already been translated in
Spain.

Since fallacies flourish during election years, you may already have heard quite
a few of these fallacies this year. "Economic Facts and Fallacies" can help
prepare you for what is likely to happen when those fallacies are turned into
policies in the new administration next year.

FOXNews.com - IgNobels for Obama - Opinion
IgNobels for Obama
Thursday , October 30, 2008
By Steven Milloy

 Seventy-six American Nobel laureates in science endorsed Barack Obama this
week. Despite their scientific successes, their political analysis just doesn’t
make the grade.
Featuring signatories such as James Watson -- the co-discoverer of the structure
of DNA who shocked the world in 2007 with his assertion that blacks were not as
intelligent as whites -- the Nobelists praised Obama in an Oct. 28 letter as a
“visionary leader who can ensure the future of our traditional strengths in
science and technology and who can harness those strengths to address many of
our greatest problems: energy, disease, climate change, security, and economic
competitiveness.”
Although the election is between Obama and John McCain, the letter first
criticized President Bush for “stagnant or declining federal support” of science
and politicizing the scientific advisory process.
But in 2007, Bush asked Congress to double the funding for AIDS programs from $3
billion per year to $6 billion per year. During the Bush administration, the
budget for the National Institutes of Health increased by 38 percent from $17.1
billion to $23.7 billion. Bush increased funding for climate change research by
15 percent from $1.75 billion to $2.02 billion. The National Science Foundation
budget went from $4.4 billion in 2001 to $6.0 billion budget in 2008. The budget
for the National Institute of Standards and Technology increased by 34 percent
from 2002 to 2008 ($692 million to $931).
In August 2007, Bush even signed the so-called “America Competes Act,” a law
that would double federal funding for basic science research by 2016.
Ironically, it is the Democratic-controlled Congress that so far has failed to
appropriate funds to implement the law.
Although the Obama Web site says,“Barack Obama and Joe Biden support doubling
federal funding for basic research over ten years…,” there’s no indication
they’ve made any progress in convincing their fellow congressional Democrats on
this point.
While the Nobelists claim that “Senator Obama understands that Presidential
leadership and federal investment in science and technology are crucial elements
in successful governance of the world’s leading country,” they overlook the fact
that McCain also supported the America Competes Act and, on his web site, says
he “will fully fund” the law.
The Nobelists’ assertion about the Bush administration politicizing science is
also a canard that boils down to their political differences with Bush on
subjects like embryonic stem cell research and global warming.
The Nobelists wrote that, “We have lost time critical for the development of new
ways to provide energy, treat disease, reverse climate change, strengthen our
security and improve our economy.” But what does any of this really mean?
Shouldn’t the 48 signatories who won their Nobels for chemistry and physics
return their prizes for signing a letter that calls for climate change to be
“reversed”? Just how would that be physically accomplished? And, then, reverse
the climate to what point? What it was in, say, 1750, 1850 or 1950? Let’s say,
for the sake of argument, that they actually did reverse climate change; how
would they keep climate from changing the moment after they got it where they
wanted it?
On the other hand, there’s not a single climate expert among the letter’s
signatories -- so maybe they really didn’t understand what they were signing.
The “treat disease” comment in the letter is undoubtedly aimed at the embryonic
stem cell research controversy. But despite limitations in the U.S., the rest of
the world was free to conduct such research. Has there been any progress?
There’s been nothing to speak of except a lot of fraud -- remember South Korean
researcher Hwang Woo-suk?
Is Obama really a science “visionary” as compared to McCain? As liberal-leaning
Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein wrote on Oct.16, “Both presidential
candidates… offer policies farther from the president than they are from each
other. They advocate mandatory caps on the main global warming gas and favor
federal funding for embryonic stem cell research -- positions opposite the Bush
Administration.”
A quick review of the political contributions of the 76 Nobelists revealed that
at least 28 of them have contributed to Democratic politicians, including Barack
Obama. There seems to be no recent record of any of the signatories contributing
to any Republicans.
Contrary to the Nobelists positioning themselves as independent geniuses looking
out for the nation’s best interests, the group appears to be nothing more than a
collection of liberal academics who rely on their elite status rather than
well-reasoned argument to promote a political candidate.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and manages the Free Enterprise Action
Fund. He is a junk science expert and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute.

This is why I voted for the iniative to require voters to show ID when voting in Arizona.

Who Benefits?

If you don’t vote for McCain you will be handing all your money and liberty over to the Democratic Party. I’m beginning to think that Bonito Mussolini is the real “God Father” of the Democrats!

Key Economic Proposals:

H. R. Clinton:

• $60 Billion funding for new National Infrastructure Bank to finance large scale projects.
• $10 Billion funding for emergency Infrastructure Repair Fund.
• $150 Billion funding for green energy technologies over 10 years.
• Tax Credits to spur retirement savings, $20 – 25 Billion per year.
• $110 Billion to expand health insurance coverage per year.

Funding sources: Reverse income tax cuts on high income earners, maintain the death tax and increase taxes on oil companies.

Obama:

• $60 Billion funding – over 10 years through new National Infrastructure Bank to finance large-scale projects.
• $150 Billion funding for green energy technologies over 10 years.
• Making Work Pay Tax Credit of $500 per person.
• $65 Billion to expand health insurance coverage per year.

Funding sources: Reverse income tax cuts on high income earners, maintain the death tax, increase taxes on oil companies, increase the tax rate on long term capital gains and dividends, tax carbon pollution and he “promises” to end the war in Iraq. 

McCain:

• Cut corporate tax rate to 25% from 35%.
• Let business deduct 100% of the cost of equipment in the first year.
• Double the tax deduction per child to $7,000.

Funding sources: End earmarks, budget savings. 

My source for the above was Investor’s Business Daily, Monday April 21, 2008, page 1.

Obama-houston

Fox News HoustonThis is sad, to live in America without any understanding of unchecked power. The communists murdered millions of people. Not just in Cuba, but in every country that they held power: Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia- the list goes on. My request to Obama's volunteers in Houston: Please do some investigation on your own and step back and see the real big picture.

"From the descriptive point of view, the difference between the physician and the veterinarian is that the former treats human diseases or sick people, whereas the latter treats animal diseases or sick animals. From the moral and political point of view, the difference between them is that the physician is expected to be the agent of the persons who are his patients, whereas the veterinarian is expected to be the agent of persons who own sick animals. In proportion, then, as the physician becomes the agent of the State and in proportion as the State is totalitarian, the physician becomes, from a moral and political point of view, a veterinarian- that is, the agent of a State who owns its citizens, just as the farmer owns his animals. This is why killing animals is part of the normal function of the veterinarian and why incarcerating people is, and killing them may yet become, a part of the normal function of the physician employed by the Therapeutic State."

--Dr. Thomas Szasz