Jay Cost, in part quoting Dick Morris, wonders why the Democratic Party risks alienating the roughly 20% of the electorate that are senior citizens by rationing health care away from them:
This is the CBO’s analysis of how the Reid bill will cut Medicare. The total reductions come out to $491 billion over 10 years when everything is factored in…
“The elderly see his proposals for what they are: a massive redistribution of healthcare away from the elderly and toward a population that is younger, healthier and richer but happens, at the moment, to lack insurance. (Remember that the uninsured are, by definition, not elderly, not young and not in poverty — and if they are, they are currently eligible for Medicare, Medicaid or SCHIP and do not need the Obama program.) The elderly see the $500 billion projected cut in Medicare through the same lens as they viewed Gingrich’s efforts to slice the growth in the program in the mid-1990s…”
Why are Obama, Pelosi, and Reid doing this? How could they be so foolish as to repeat the most egregious mistake of the Republicans of the 104th Congress? Why are they forcing their vulnerable members to vote on a bill that would cut Medicare in this fashion? Do they dislike their moderate colleagues? Do they find the chore of being the majority party too burdensome? Have they simply gone mad?
Well, no not mad, though we have come to appreciate in these last months how little our views of this country overlap with the left wing of the Democratic Party. No, they’re not mad at all — who would consider taking a $100 million payment for a Yes vote on Obamacare mad (and that’s just what goes to the state, not to the personal account)? It’s just good business, while justifying every sleazy move as a necessary part of remaking the country in the image and likeness of San Francisco once and for all.
Thomas Sowell comments on the KSM-NYC story and doesn’t pull punches:
In the string of amazing decisions made during the first year of the Obama administration, nothing seems more like sheer insanity than the decision to try foreign terrorists, who have committed acts of war against the United States, in federal court, as if they were American citizens accused of crimes…
The last time an attack on the World Trade Center was treated as a matter of domestic criminal justice was after a bomb was exploded there in 1993. Under the rules of American criminal law, the prosecution had to turn over all sorts of information to the defense — information that told the Al Qaeda international terrorist network what we knew about them and how we knew it. This was nothing more and nothing less than giving away military secrets to an enemy in wartime — something for which people have been executed, as they should have been…
In the wake of the obscenity of a trial of terrorists in federal court for an act of war — and the worldwide propaganda platform it will give them — it may seem to be a small thing that President Obama has been photographed yet again bowing deeply to a foreign ruler. But how large or small an act is depends on its actual consequences, not on whether the politically correct intelligentsia think it is no big deal.
As a private citizen, Barack Obama has a right to make as big a jackass of himself as he wants to. But, as President of the United States, his actions not only denigrate a nation that other nations rely on for survival, but raise questions about how reliable our judgment and resolve are
It does seem crazy to give our enemies military intelligence, all the more so since the announced rationale for bringing KSM to New York doesn’t explain the logic of the decision. What is the reason for this nutty decision? Andy McCarthy says it’s politics, but we’ve heard quite a number of people expressing far more troubling thoughts.
This exchange comes from a joint press conference in Japan. President Obama was asked a question by a reporter from Fuji television:
Reporter: President Obama, you are a proponent of a nuclear free world, and you said, if possible, you would like to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki while in office. Do you have this desire? And what is your understanding of the historical meaning of the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do you think it was the right decision?…
Obama:…Now, obviously Japan has unique perspective on the issue of nuclear weapons as a consequence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that I’m sure helps to motivate the Prime Minister’s deep interest in this issue. I certainly would be honored, it would be meaningful for me to visit those two cities in the future. I don’t have immediate travel plans, but it’s something that would be meaningful to me. You had one more question, and I’m not sure I remember it. Was it North Korea?
Reporter: Whether or not you believe that the U.S. dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — it was right?
Obama: No, there were three sets of questions, right? You asked about North Korea?
Operation Downfall was a massive plan for the American and Allied forces invasion of Japan in order to bring the war in the Pacific to a close not more than one year after the surrender of Germany in May 1945. If you would have been one of the tens or hundreds of thousands of American casualties from Operation Downfall, you can thank your lucky stars that the President was named Truman, not Obama. (And if your father or grandfather would have been one of those casualties, you might not even be here today, so you can that Truman for that too.) HT: Powerline
TIME notes some potential problems with the prosecution of KSM:
“The challenge for prosecutors is to try and present a case that is not tainted by evidence that is inadmissible,” says Joshua Dratel, a criminal lawyer in New York who has appealed cases against terrorists on the basis of torture allegations. Holder testified at his Senate-confirmation hearings earlier this year that he believes waterboarding is torture, and any evidence obtained after Mohammed’s waterboarding will likely be inadmissible.
That means the government will likely have to rely on evidence that predates the 2003 waterboarding, as well as Mohammed’s 2002 statement to al-Jazeera in which he took credit for the attack. Holder said at his press conference announcing the trials Friday that he has seen evidence previously unavailable that made him confident the prosecution will be successful…
But even if the government can make a strong case without the tainted evidence, Mohammed’s treatment could cause problems. It’s possible — though not likely — that a court could rule that the government doesn’t have the right to prosecute someone who has been severely abused in custody. (Previously, suspects have been released even when their abuse didn’t prejudice evidence against them, but there’s no clear precedent for terrorism cases.)
Other issues likely to be raised by the defense, says Dratel, are finding a jury that can be considered impartial, especially blocks from the World Trade Center site, and whether Mohammed’s rights to a speedy trial have been violated.
We agree with those who say bringing KSM to trial in NYC is a dangerous and deeply weird decision. Surely it is an invitation for every Hasan wannabe to try his luck. In so many ways, this looks like a decision that will likely be bad for Democrats. As the man said, it really is impossible to caricature this administration. HT: JOM
The AP reports a potential problem for the administration:
A U.N. human rights investigator warned the United States Tuesday that its use of unmanned warplanes to carry out targeted executions may violate international law.
Philip Alston said that unless the Obama administration explains the legal basis for targeting particular individuals and the measures it is taking to comply with international humanitarian law which prohibits arbitrary executions, “it will increasingly be perceived as carrying out indiscriminate killings in violation of international law.”
Alston, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s investigator on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, raised the issue of U.S. Predator drones in a report to the General Assembly’s human rights committee and at a news conference afterwards, saying he has become increasingly concerned at the dramatic increase in their use, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, since June.
He said the U.S. response — that the Geneva-based council and the General Assembly have no role in relation to killings during an armed conflict — “is simply untenable.”
“That would remove the great majority of issues that come before these bodies right now,” Alston said. “The onus is really on the government of the United States to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary executions, extrajudicial executions are not, in fact, being carried out through the use of these weapons.”
Interesting conundrum. Appeasing the UN would take the Biden option off the table for Afghanistan. What will the administration do when it seems unlikely that a real surge will be implemented?
As former Secretary of State James Baker put it, ever so diplomatically, in the Washington Post: “Many agree with a recent analysis by the international law directorate of the Library of Congress that indicates Zelaya was removed from office by Honduras’s Supreme Court and Congress in accordance with Honduran law. In this view, Zelaya provoked the crisis by trying to replace the constitution in a manner that was unconstitutional…Non-interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign country is a cardinal principle of the U.N. Charter. In keeping with it, we should defer to the Hondurans’ interpretation of their constitution.”
On the other hand, via Reuters: “Barack Obama said on Monday the coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and would set a ‘terrible precedent’ of transition by military force unless it was reversed. ‘We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there,’ Obama told reporters.” Sigh.
Our guess is that the piece by Baker in the WaPo is part of an attempt by the adults in the foreign policy establishment to fashion a way out for Obama from his grievous and completely avoidable unforced error. How embarrassing for the US to be in this position.
So much for subtlety. This statement of Rissian military strategy was announced while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Moscow — Russia’s assertion of its right to pre-emptive nuclear strikes, and guess which country is mentioned by name:
Presidential Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev…said a sweeping document on military policy including a passage on preventative nuclear force will be handed to President Dmitry Medvedev by the end of the year, according to Izvestia.
Officials are examining “a variety of possibilities for using nuclear force, depending on the situation and the intentions of the possible opponent,” Patrushev was quoted as saying. “In situations critical to national security, options including a preventative nuclear strike on the aggressor are not excluded.”
The proposed doctrine would allow for the use of nuclear weapons “to repel an aggression with the use of conventional weapons not only in a large-scale but also in a regional and even local war,” Patrushev was quoted as saying. He said a government analysis of the threat of conflict in the world showed “a shift from large-scale conflicts to local wars and armed conflicts.”
“However, earlier military dangers and threats for our country have not lost significance,” he was quoted as saying. “Activity on receiving new members into NATO is not ceasing. The military activity of the bloc is being stepped up. U.S. strategic forces are conducting intensive training on using strategic nuclear weapons.”
Give these fellows an inch and they’ll take a mile, as The New Republic’s editor said below. And meanwhile, back in the good old USA: “The Pentagon is reviewing the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive military strikes with an eye to modifying or possibly ending it.”
Some might think that balooning the deficits out of control, attempting to take over vast swaths of the US economy, and disarming and apologizing in front of our adversaries was the Obama administration’s gameplan and not a series of naive mistakes — but you’d have to be some right-wing nut to imagine that.
A woman named Anne Leary says she ran into Bill Ayers in Washington:
unprompted he said — I wrote Dreams From My Father. I said, oh, so you admit it. He said — Michelle asked me to. I looked at him. He seemed eager. He’s about my height, short. He went on to say — and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties. So I said, stop pulling my leg. Horrible thought. But he came again — I really wrote it, the wording was similar. I said I believe you probably heavily edited it. He said — I wrote it.
Not that we care that much anymore, but it’s sort of an amusing moment. HT: Powerline
Russia has been using its relationship with Iran as leverage against the United States. In the face of the very real possibility of sanctions targeting Iran’s gasoline imports, Russia could continue using Iran to upset U.S. plans by supplying the Islamic republic with gasoline.
The Russians apparently got the message that the US delivered the other day.
Over at the Huffington Post, they liked Obama’s speech at the UN:
“The peoples of the world want change,” Obama asserted. “They will not long tolerate those who are on the wrong side of history.” He sought to harness that yearning for change in much the same way as he did in America during the 2008 election campaign. “The most powerful weapon in our arsenal is the hope of human beings,” he declared.
The president didn’t, however, just talk in abstract terms about the need for change. He also sketched out specific challenges, particularly when it came to the need to promote nuclear disarmament, to move forward on climate change policies; and to carve out a just, durable, peace in the Middle East, critiquing Israel publicly in a way U.S. presidents aren’t wont to often do. America would be doing Israel no favors, he averred, if it didn’t publicly declare that Israel had to respect the rights and legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians.
After years in which America’s leadership viewed the U.N. as an afterthought, an annoying institution to which it reluctantly paid lip service, Obama’s administration has made it clear that it takes the forum seriously.
Then again, there’s this indictment of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, with some lighter moments thrown in for good measure:
the catalogue of Mr. Obama’s embarrassing moments on the world stage, a list which includes:
– giving England’s Queen Elizabeth II an iPod with his speeches on it;
– giving British Prime Minister Gordon Brown a collection of DVDs that were not formatted to the European standard (by contrast, Mr. Brown gave Mr. Obama an ornamental desk-pen holder made from the oak timbers of Victorian anti-slaver HMS Gannet, among other historically significant gifts);
– calling “Austrian” a language;
– bowing to the Saudi king;
– releasing a photo of a conference call with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the president was showing the soles of his shoes to the camera (an Arab insult);
– saying “let me be absolutely clear. Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s”;
– saying the United States was “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world”;
– suggesting Arabic translators be shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan where Arabic is not a native language;
– sending a letter to French President Jacques Chirac when Nicolas Sarkozy was the president of France;
– holding a town-hall meeting in France and not calling on a single French citizen;
– and referring to “Cinco de Cuatro” in front of the Mexican ambassador when he meant Cinco de Mayo.
– Also of note was Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton giving Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a “reset” button with the Russian word for “overcharge.”
Gaffes aside, whether you think Obama’s foreign policy is good or bad depends upon which side of history you think is the right side. When both Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro are praising Obama as “brave,” they certainly seem to have an idea about which side of history the American president is on.
From the President’s speech at the UN we learn that “rising sea levels threaten every coastline,” apparently causing islands to shrink and people to flee their homes as climate refugees:
On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees.
What islands is Obama talking about? Tuvalu, which has seen a negligible 3cm rise in sea level over the last quarter century? Or perhaps dreary Kivalina, which has indeed been shrinking, though not because of global warming.
Apparently sea level increased by an average of 1.8mm a year over the last century. So if you were on an island like Tuvalu, which is 4.5m above sea level, you would be forced to “flee your home as a climate refugee” by the year 3000 or so. Better start running!
The AP, of all things, takes issue with the President’s strange assertion that a tax is not a tax:
It’s a tax. Obama insisted this weekend on national television that requiring people to carry health insurance — and fining them if they don’t — isn’t the same thing as a tax increase. But the language of Democratic bills to revamp the nation’s health care system doesn’t quibble. Both the House bill and the Senate Finance Committee proposal clearly state that the fines would be a tax. And the reason the fines are in the legislation is to enforce the coverage requirement.
“If you put something in the Internal Revenue Code, and you tell the IRS to collect it, I think that’s a tax,” said Clint Stretch, head of the tax policy group for Deloitte, a major accounting firm. “If you don’t pay, the person who’s going to come and get it is going to be from the IRS.”
This Obama is one strange bird. We recommend reading Professor Paul Rahe’s reflections on the man. It is worth pondering what relationship to the world a man possesses that he can that repeatedly declare the inverse of reality to be true. It is worth pondering what relationship to the United States a man possesses when he chooses the 70th anniversary of the USSR’s invasion of Poland to give to Russia the gift of abandoning missile defense for Poland.
(Special fun bonus: you can also go to jail as well as be taxed.)
ABC had some questions on the rather dramatic ACORN scandals, which have been brewing for a very long time among these shake-down artists:
STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the funding for ACORN?
OBAMA: You know, if — frankly, it’s not really something I’ve followed closely. I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Both the Senate and the House have voted to cut it off.
OBAMA: You know, what I know is, is that what I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re not committing to — to cut off the federal funding?
OBAMA: George, this is not the biggest issue facing the country. It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to.
Roger Simon has some pointed commentary on the exchange. For our part, we noted last year the close association of the President and ACORN, including his praise for ACORN, his legal representation of the group, his campaign’s paying the group, etc. Ho hum.
“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” Obama said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” program. “Right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase.”
Gotta love that “just about” caveat, which (a) invalidates Obama’s premise, and (b) is just factually wrong in a number of areas of the country.
We wonder whether Stephanopoulos followed up; on second thought, we don’t wonder.
President Obama gave yet another speech on his healthcare plan before a friendly audience and continues to say the same things that even his most ardent supporters know to be false:
when you’re talking with some of your friends and neighbors, they might say, “Well, that all sounds pretty good, but how you going to pay for it?” That’s a legitimate question, because I inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit when I came into office. That’s the other thing people have been a little selective about. They don’t seem to remember how we got into this mess.
But it’s a legitimate question: How are we going to dig ourselves out of this big financial hole we’re in? So let me try and answer. The plan I’m proposing is going to cost $900 billion over 10 years. That’s real money. Although that’s less than we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It’s less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed during the previous administration. Wars and tax cuts that were not paid for and ballooned our deficit to record levels and didn’t help America’s working families.
We won’t make — we won’t make that mistake again. We will not pay for health insurance reform by adding to our deficits. I will not sign a bill that adds a dime to our deficits, either now or in the future. What we will do is pay for it by eliminating hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud and waste and abuse, including billions of dollars in subsidies for insurance companies that pad their profits but aren’t improving care.
So let’s get this straight: we don’t have the money for Obamacare, but that’s okay because it costs about as much as Iraq and Afghanistan. We don’t have the money for Obamacare, but that’s okay because we couldn’t afford the Bush tax cuts either. Oh, yes, we forgot the part about paying for the plan by cutting fraud and abuse and “subsidies” to fat-cat insurance companies. Huh?
George Will on Obama and those fat cat insurance companies: “His speech to Congress was the 122nd time he had publicly discussed health care…His incessant talking cannot combat what it has caused: An increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says…He suggests health-insurance companies are making excessive profits. But since 1996, profits of the six such companies in the S&P 500 have been below the 500′s average.” It can’t be good news for the administration that Obama has taken to repeating his inanities in campaign style to red-meat audiences.
A Democrat defends Van Jones and argues that he should not have been dismissed for apparently being a Truther, among other things:
Jones was wrong, actually, in disavowing his support for 9/11 conspiracy theory. He signed the document, which can only mean that he supports the idea that 9/11 was planned, or that the Bushies knew something more than they have said, or at least that the charge is plausible enough to require investigation.
But support for that idea is hardly unknown among people of the left – and often gestural in its own way; look one of these types in the eye and ask “Do you really think George Bush and his cabinet engineered the murder of thousands and have kept the secret for eight years?” and watch the nervous pause and the look off into the distance.
Speculations in this vein hardly meant that Jones was not sincerely committed to working within the government to do good.
Another Democrat concurs about Jones: “Now he’s been thrown under the bus by the White House for signing his name to a petition expressing something that 35% of all Democrats believed as of 2007 — that George Bush knew in advance about the attacks of 9/11.”
Where are we in this country when 1/3 of a major political party thinks that the President killed 3000 Americans and covered it up, and respectable commentators don’t think that that opinion is a tad nutty?
Van Jones resigned as the White House’s environmental jobs “czar” on Saturday, after weeks of controversy over his past comments…it was not until recently that some of Mr. Jones’s past actions received broad airing, including his derogatory statements about Republicans in February and his signature on a 2004 letter suggesting that former President George W. Bush might have knowingly allowed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to occur in order to use them as a “pre-text to war.”…
Mr. Jones’s involvement in the 1990s with a group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement had prompted recent accusations by conservative critics that he associated with Communists. The group, according to a post-mortem written by some of its founders, was an anti-capitalist, antiwar organization committed to achieving “solidarity among all oppressed peoples” with “direct militant action.”…
Mr. Jones apologized on Wednesday for derogatory words he directed at Republican opponents of Mr. Obama’s Congressional agenda during a lecture in February, calling his remarks “inappropriate”
We understand that it’s a lot more fun to point out the failings of the other team rather than your own. We know the jolly good fun that the Times has when the shoe is on the other foot. But it is at least a little interesting that the piece excerpted above is the first article that appeared in the Times about the “weeks of controversy” that the NYT previously passed without comment.
Frankly, we don’t care about Jones and we’re bored with Obama. The guy went from being something of an enigma to almost completely predictable in record time. The most interesting element of the Obama administration is the fascinating engagement and polarization of the American electorate. 28% strongly approve of Obama and 41% strongly disapprove of his actions. That means that about 70% of likely voters seem to be really engaged by political issues — and in a non-election year. Which other first year of a President’s term has been characterized by such division and engagement?
“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. — Speech at Clinton, Illinois, September 8, 1854.”
We’ll have more to say about this in due course. HT: American Thinker
Huh? Is President Obama giving a speech to little kids from kindergarten to 6th grade? Why yes he is and here’s a teacher’s guide to the speech presented by the Department of Education:
President Obama’s Address to Students Across America September 8, 2009
PreK-6 Menu of Classroom Activities: President Obama’s Address to Students Across America
Produced by Teaching Ambassador Fellows, U.S. Department of Education
September 8, 2009
Before the Speech:
• Teachers can build background knowledge about the President of the United States and his speech by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama and motivate students by asking the following questions:
Who is the President of the United States?
What do you think it takes to be President?
To whom do you think the President is going to be speaking?
Why do you think he wants to speak to you?
What do you think he will say to you?
• Teachers can ask students to imagine being the President delivering a speech to all of the students in the United States. What would you tell students? What can students do to help in our schools? Teachers can chart ideas about what they would say.
• Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?
During the Speech:
• As the President speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful. Students could use a note-taking graphic organizer such as a Cluster Web, or students could record their thoughts on sticky notes. Younger children can draw pictures and write as appropriate. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following:
What is the President trying to tell me?
What is the President asking me to do?
Is it just us, or do others think this is unseemly and tacky? “Why is it important that we listen to the President?” “What is the President asking me to do?” Powerline has more on this event.
