Obama is full of himself

H/T Rick Moran at AT.

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom. (Proverbs 8:2)

Persecution of the Day

Right here in the the Good Ol’ U.S. of A.

Jeff Johnson - OneNewsNow:  A professional counselor has been fired for referring a homosexual patient to another counselor for relationship advice. The counselor who was dismissed is a Christian. 

Marcia Walden is a professional counselor who worked for Computer Sciences Corporation, a government contractor that provides Employee Assistance Program counselors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But Walden was suspended and subsequently fired when she referred a homosexual CDC employee to another counselor for advice on the woman’s same-sex relationship.  

Jim Campbell, litigation counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), says employers are required by law to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs, when doing so would cause no hardship. “Employees should not be forced to check their religious beliefs at the door,” he argues. Campbell says Walden was motivated by her religious and ethical beliefs, and she felt she was unable to offer the employee counsel. “…[S]he did what was ethically reasonable. She referred this employee to another counselor who was able to do the job,” he explains.

Hey, at least no one’s killing us or attacking our churches … yet.

Homecoming

Two years later, and dead, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev are finally home after being kidnapped by Hizballah.

Israel launched a pitiful war attempt in response to their abduction, a war which ended up worsening Israel’s image in the world while strengthening and emboldening their Islamist enemy in Lebanon.  And the release of 5 still-kicking terrorists in exchange for Goldwasser’s and Regev’s remains will only serve to embolden Hizballah further, along with the rest of her enemies.

A millenium-and-a-half of subservience must have altered the DNA of today’s Jewish people (at least the ones with high seats in Israel’s government), as the leaders in the land of this once-proud people is pushing the nation and populace into acts and attitudes of head-hanging penitence and appeasement.

It can only get worse from here.

H/T Jihad Watch.

Update: Make that dead, and mutilated

“the verification process yesterday was very slow, because, if we thought the enemy was cruel to the living and the dead, we were surprised, when we opened the caskets, to discover just how cruel. And I’ll leave it at that.”

Also, Dr. Bulldog reminds that these men were captured and verified ALIVE, which means that Hizballah murdered these men, ostensibly prisoners of war, and are thus guilty (TRULY guilty…not like the accusations tossed at Israel…Israel returned living people) of war crimes.

Drying up the trough

One of the recurring themes during the Primary season (and one which will continue to resurface during the general campaign) is the impassioned pleas for health care coverage for everyone.  Universal health care will solve one of the major problems for the poor, namely the accessibility of doctors and treatments.

 

Again and again, the question is raised – rarely answered – of how a program of this nature is to be paid for.  Reason indicates decreased government spending on other programs in order to pay for this one, along with an increase in taxes just to make sure it gets off on a steady footing.

 

But what happens when the monetary well runs dry?  How many governments in the West are operating on a budget surplus, or even at break-even? 

 

We know that OUR government has been in the red for years, and that our debts are unfathomably enormous.  Perhaps we can start a new entitlement for health care…but when the tax base shrinks (and it will), what then?  Cuts, of course.  Cuts like this one, in the UK, which has had a socialized medicine program for decades.

 

A Down’s syndrome man and Special Olympics champion who has been working for free for years is now being charged a fee to wash councillors’ dishes.

 

Virgil Taylor has been helping to wash up, wipe tables and set up trolleys in a restaurant used by town hall staff for 17 years as part of subsidised adult care services.

 

Every week Mr Taylor - who won a gold medal at the Special Olympics in Glasgow in 2005 - has attended 10 sessions run by the William Knowles Centre in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset.

 

But now savage cuts have ended the subsidies and the 34-year-old will have to pay £2.50 per session for the ‘privilege’ of cleaning up after councillors.

 

We already have trillions of dollars of debt that we have no reasonable way of repaying.  And one candidate in particular has as part of his platform a hugely expensive socialized healthcare idea (on top of the $850 billion he wants to give away overseas).  What ever happened to fiscal responsibility?  And what happens to those like Mr. Taylor who have depended on their subsidies for subsistence when those payments have to stop?

 

The creditors aren’t going to wait forever.  The piper must be paid.  The deeper the debt hole gets, the more precarious our economy and security get.  How long before the oil-rich countries in the ME buy out America’s infrastructure because we no longer have the means to support it ourselves?

 

Who will be the big dog then?  And what will be the fate of the weakened, deposed alpha-male?

 

Hope and Change

That is, I HOPE  you don’t notice how often I CHANGE my position.

Another Lying Bastard Alert™, courtesy of You-Know-Who.

H/T:  The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler

[Obama advisor Anthony Lake] stressed that Mr Obama, even after withdrawing troops from Iraq over 16 months as he has promised, would maintain “a residual presence for clearly defined missions”. These would include military training, and “preparedness to go back in if there are specific acts of genocidal violence”.…

Highlighting a parallel with his first posting as assistant to Henry Cabot Lodge, a US ambassador in 1960s Saigon, he said: “It is common sense that we could not leave Vietnam successfully unless we left behind a government in Saigon that could govern successfully.

“It seems obvious in retrospect; it was not obvious enough to too many politicians at the time. In Iraq it’s the same problem.”

So not only has his “immediate withdrawal” become a 16-month process, the “complete withdrawal” has become a “residual presence” in case, among other things, we have to “go back in there” in cases of genocidal violence.

Oh, and we can’t leave Iraq at all unless we’re sure that the government we leave behind is capable of governing successfully.

Even if that takes 100 years, right Senator?

Nobama, Part 6,247

From the comments at AT.

Can we now call the demagoguery we used to impune Hillary over NAFTA simply “overheated rhetoric”…..

“YES WE CAN”!

Can we reverse our support for gun control laws, and their concomitant ideology…..

“YES WE CAN”

Can we reverse our position on the death penalty….

“YES WE CAN”!

Can we reverse our position on public financing of political campaigns, and offer a series of lame excuses that insult our intelligence…..

“YES WE CAN”!

Can we throw anyone who we have previously allied with, for political expedience, under the bus, once they become embarrassing, unpopular, or simply are no longer useful…..

“YES WE CAN”!

Can we suddenly decide that we must have preconditions before meeting with Ahmedi-Najad; WHEN WE PUBLICLY STATED THAT NONE WERE REQUIRED BEFORE…….

“YES WE CAN”!

Can we do whatever it takes to gain power in the fall……

“YES WE CAN”!

Can we do everything in our power to conceal our Marxist agenda, with the help of the mainstream media, by appearing to be a moderate…….

“YES WE CAN”!

Money quote follows:

What a pusillanimous, palavering, popinjay….

And the call to action.

Can we do all we can to defeat comrade Obama in the fall……

“YES WE CAN”!!!!!!!

 Pusillanimous, Palavering Popinjay - hilarious.

Free Speech Victory

Another bit of good news on the Individual Freedom front, this time from Ezra Levant.  Sure, the motive is wrong, but the outcome still works.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission, like any petty tyranny, has a strong instinct for survival. As I predicted last week on the Michael Coren Show, that instinct would cause them to drop the complaint against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s. And so they did.

With an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation and a pending Parliamentary investigation, they’re already fighting a multi-front P.R. war, and losing badly. Not a day goes by when the CHRC isn’t pummelled in the media. Holding a show trial of Maclean’s and Steyn, like the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal did earlier this month, would be writing their own political death sentence.

So they blinked. Against everything in their DNA, they let Maclean’s go.

[...]

Here’s Maclean’s reply, which is far more polite than I would have been:

…Though gratified by the decision, Maclean’s continues to assert that no human rights commission, whether at the federal or provincial level, has the mandate or the expertise to monitor, inquire into, or assess the editorial decisions of the nation’s media. And we continue to have grave concerns about a system of complaint and adjudication that allows a media outlet to be pursued in multiple jurisdictions on the same complaint, brought by the same complainants, subjecting it to costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the inconvenience. We enthusiastically support those parliamentarians who are calling for legislative review of the commissions with regard to speech issues.

Maclean’s and Steyn are still under the gun with the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, but at least the Canadian Human Rights Commission backed off.

Nod: American Thinker

Constitutional Victory

Coming on heels of the ridiculous decision yesterday in Kennedy vs. Louisiana (not to mention the disaster of Boumediene), today we got a Victory for the Constitution (as written) and individual American citizens.

In their ruling on DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA ET AL. v. HELLER, the SCOTUS determined (finally) that the Framers of the Constitution did, indeed, intend that Americans have the right INDIVIDUALLY to keep and bear arms.

In his dissent, Justice Stevens wrote that:

the majority “would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.”

He said such evidence “is nowhere to be found.” [H/T American Thinker]

However, a person of his intelligence should be able to READ.  The 2nd Amendment states “…the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”  Whenever the Constitution, and the Framers’ writings, refer to a “right of the people”, they invariably describe rights held individually.  Additionally, the last four words provide the evidence Justice Stevens says is lacking: SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.

Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia wrote:

The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government—even the Third Branch of Government—the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges’ assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future judges think that scope too broad.

Our Constitution was devised by men too familiar with tyranny to allow the Federal government to usurp powers over the People and States which were not expressly granted.  That was the whole point.

For the record, here’s how the decision went:

• Dissenting:  Stevens, Souder, Bader Ginsburg, Breyer
• Majority: Chief Justice Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito

Note that Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito were the dissenters in Kennedy.

Also note that McCain has vowed to nominate (conservative, constructionist-leaning) Justices like Roberts and Alito - whom he helped confirm.

Obama, OTOH, would nominate someone with “the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. [1]“, and with the outlook that “it’s not just the particular issue and how they rule, but it’s their conception of the Court. And part of the role of the Court is that it is going to protect people who may be vulnerable in the political process, the outsider, the minority, those who are vulnerable, those who don’t have a lot of clout.   . . . [S]ometimes we’re only looking at academics or people who’ve been in the [lower] court…people who have life experience and they understand what it means to be on the outside, what it means to have the system not work for them…[2 , 3]“

Hey, Obaman - Harvard LAW grad, and former instructor on Constitutional (of all things) LAW - what about a strong grasp of LAW? Since when is Law about FEELINGS?  YES, JUDGE, I DID RAPE THAT CHILD, BUT I FEEL REALLY BAD ABOUT IT…WHERE’S YOUR EMPATHY FOR MY SITUATION?

Flight 93 Blogburst

Text of a message from Alec Rawls:

Last week’s email campaign is putting some serious hurt on the Memorial Project. Superintendent Hanley and Park Service Director Mary Bomar are both issuing replies that are loaded with boiler plate but evade the simple question that was asked: WHO broke our peaceful American circle and turned it into this giant Mecca oriented crescent? [You can see this boilerplate response in one of my previous posts - GdB]

They are refusing to even think about their OWN explanation for the crescent design. Let’s nail ‘em.

Let’s hope there are some people who are actually listening, thinking through this, and taking action.

Park Service refuses to say who broke the circle

The planned Flight 93 memorial is described as a circle “broken in two places,” with the unbroken part forming a giant Mecca-oriented crescent (originally called the Crescent of Embrace).

Since last week, the Park Service has been inundated with hundreds of emails, demanding to know WHO is being depicted as breaking the circle.

It can only be the terrorists. The circle is a symbol of peace, and only the terrorists can be charged with breaking the peace on 9/11.

Thus the planned memorial shows the terrorists breaking our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant Mecca oriented crescent (which remains completely intact in the so-called redesign). In other words, it’s one giant: “ALLAHU AKBAR!” (heard on Flight 93’s flight recorder as the doomed flight careened towards the ground).

Superintendent Hanley’s reply

Response

An update on this post: I got a (non)reply from the Parks Service.

Dear Mr. White: [Form letter - I'm not Mr. White]

Thank you for your e mail of June 23, 2008, in which you expressed concerns
that the Flight 93 National Memorial treats the terrorists as victims.  The
National Park Service (NPS) is keenly aware of these concerns,  and took
steps in 2005 to investigate this issue. In doing so, the NPS consulted
with university and religious scholars, all of whom have concluded that the
memorial design does not imply or depict any religious iconography. In
light of those findings, the National Park Service and all three of its
partner organizations continue to support the final design for the Flight
93 memorial.

You also had questions about “who broke the circle.”  The natural
topography of the site upon which the memorial sits is in the shape of a
bowl, or a circle.  This “circle of embrace” follows the geography, and
points your attention down to the Sacred Ground, the crash site where the
40 heroes of Flight 93 gave their lives combating the terrorists. The trees
surrounding this “circle of embrace” are missing, or broken, in two places;
first, where the flight path of the plane came overhead (which is the
location of the planned memorial overlook and visitor center) and second,
where the plane crashed at the Sacred Ground (depicted by a ceremonial gate
and pathway into the Sacred Ground).
                                                                                           

Your Tax Dollars

Excerpts from the overwhelmingly approved 2008 Farm Bill (lauded by Obama, criticized by McCain) at redstate.com. 

First…American farmers should be supported, but not necessarily subsidized…especially very successful ones

`(B) FARM LIMITATION- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a person or legal entity shall not be eligible to receive a direct payment under subtitle A or C of title I of the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 during a crop year, if the average adjusted gross farm income of the person or legal entity exceeds $750,000.

and perhaps even the not-so-successful ones

Title I, Sub. F, SEC. 1621. GEOGRAPHICALLY DISADVANTAGED FARMERS AND RANCHERS. What, you ask, is a “geographically disadvantaged farmer”? Apparently, it’s somebody who started a farm so far off in the middle of nowhere that it’s too expensive to transport the crops to anybody who will buy them. You know, that should usually be a sign to go into another line of business, like maybe drilling for oil or telemarketing or something. But no - Congress will pay your shipping costs with taxpayer money!.

and most especially the DEAD ones.

Title I, Sub. F, SEC. 1611. PREVENTION OF DECEASED INDIVIDUALS RECEIVING PAYMENTS UNDER FARM COMMODITY PROGRAMS. Asks the Secretary of Agriculture to implement federal regulations to stop paying dead farmers. The necessity of this provision speaks volumes about these programs.

A few more lovelies:

Title I, Sub. A, SEC. 1104. AVAILABILITY OF COUNTER-CYCLICAL PAYMENTS. Provides for payments to farmers of specified crops “if the Secretary [of Agriculture] determines that the effective price for the covered commodity is less than the target price for the covered commodity.” For example, if the price of Oats falls below $1.44 per bushel, the oat farmers get to make up the difference with taxpayer money. Don’t you wish Congress did this for your business?

Title I, Sub. C, SEC. 1303. AVAILABILITY OF DIRECT PAYMENTS FOR PEANUTS. Yes, the bill also provides “direct payments” (i.e., regardless of the market price of the crop) for some specified crops, to make sure that if you grow peanuts, you get taxpayer dollars, win or lose! And you still get to sell the peanuts! Win-win!

Title VII, Sub. D, SEC. 7415. CONSTRUCTION OF CHINESE GARDEN AT THE NATIONAL ARBORETUM. A vital national security interest, I am sure. [Hey, I thought this was a FARM bill, not a garden bill] 

You get the picture.  Now Pay UP!

Oh yeah…Nod to Hot Air.

More Dishonesty

LYING BASTARD Alert™ (jeez, that’s two in one day), again courtesy of the Obamonster.

Barack Obama declared that “my party” will not take money from lobbyist PACs. However, the lobbyist ban apparently doesn’t apply to personal donations from lobbyists, as Obama’s campaign has proven repeatedly during the primaries. The ban on PAC donations also doesn’t apply to Obama’s party:

To rousing applause, Barack Obama formally announced this afternoon that the Democratic National Committee will follow his lead and begin refusing donations from registered lobbyists and special-interest political action committees.

“They do not fund my campaign,” the presumptive Democratic nominee told a small-town southwest Virginia crowd, after delivering a standard refrain that blames drug and insurance interests for blocking universal health care. “They will not fund our party. And they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I’m President of the United States.”

Well, at least not on the presidential level.

The Obama campaign confirms that two other arms of the national party - the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee - will continue to accept lobby and PAC money this election. That’s the same position as presumptive Republican nominee John McCain and every affiliate of the Republican National Committee, who all accept lobby and PAC dollars.

To make this clear, lobbyist PACs will continue to fund the Democratic Party, regardless of what Obama claimed earlier today. That has to be the fastest flip-flop since Hillary Clinton changed position on illegal-alien drivers licenses within 120 seconds last November. Obama clearly intended people to believe that the entire party had orders to turn down these donations, which even they acknowledged was false from the beginning.

Nod: Front Page