Tag: politics

116 may be too generous

From Obama’s recent speech to the Chamber of Commerce:

“Auto executives predicted that having to install seatbelts would bring the downfall of their industry. It didn’t happen. The President of the American Bar Association denounced child labor laws as “a communistic effort to nationalize children.” That’s a quote. None of these things came to pass.”

Apparently the moron failed to recall that General Motors filed for bankruptcy on June 1, 2009. Chrysler filed for bankruptcy on April 30, 2009. American birth rates are well below replacement rates when immigrant births aren’t counted, and the federal government explicitly claims a right to children that supercedes the parental claim in many areas, including health and education. One can reasonably argue about whether or not these events can truly be said to have been caused by the specific government policy, but to base an argument on the events not having happened takes a special combination of ignorance and unfounded arrogance.

UPDATE – It takes a real rocket scientist to attempt lying about something one did in public more than 24 times in the last two years.

“President Obama’s assertion on Sunday that he “didn’t raise taxes once” is “blatantly false,” a taxpayer watchdog group says. Obama made the claim in his pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. According to Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), President Obama has signed into law at least two dozen tax increases.”

Neocons aren’t conservatives

Glenn Beck belatedly notices:

Fox News’s Glenn Beck lashed out at Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol on his radio show this morning, accusing Kristol of betraying conservatism and missing the significance of what Beck sees as an alliance between Islamism and socialism.

“I don’t even know if you understand what conservatives are anymore, Billy,” Beck said in his extended, sarcastic attack on Kristol. “People like Bill Kristol, I don’t think they stand for anything any more. All they stand for is power. They’ll do anything to keep their little fiefdom together, and they’ll do anything to keep the Republican power entrenched.”

The pragmatic set will always sell out their professed principles. This should never come as a surprise, after all, their lack of attachment to principle is precisely why they describe themselves as pragmatists in the first place. It’s not as if Bill Kristol has changed because people like him never stand for anything but power. And they’ll be screeching like banshees about the need for American military intervention once the Caliphate that they claim doesn’t exist begins to turn its attention towards Jerusalem again.

Where Beck is wrong is to think that beginning by confronting the ur-caliphate in the Middle East is the right strategy. The strategically correct place to begin is removing its footholds in the West.

A challenge to the separation of powers?

Karl Denninger suspects the Obama administration is on the verge of committing sedition:

The White House officials said that the ruling would not have an impact on implementation of the law, which is being phased in gradually. (The individual mandate, for example, does not begin until 2014.) They said that states cannot use the ruling as a basis to delay implementation in part because the ruling does not rest on “anything like a conventional Constitutional analysis.” Twenty-six states were involved in the lawsuit.

So now we have a White House that has declared its intent to ignore a declaratory judgment. The Administration has no right to do this. Obama’s White House has exactly two options:

Comply with the ruling. This means that any and all activity authorized or mandated by the Statute cease now.

File an appeal and ask for a stay pending its hearing. If said stay is granted, then the ruling is held pending consideration.

That’s it…. This is now a full-blown Constitutional Crisis. The Executive’s willful, intentional and publicly-stated refusal to honor a declaratory judgment is an open act of willful and intentional violation of The Separation of Powers in The Constitution and, if combined with the use of or threat of use of force as is always present when government coercion is employed, treads awfully close to the line, and may cross it, of 18 USC Ch 115 Sec 238.

I tend to doubt that Obama and his crew are actually intending to challenge the separation of powers over health care reform. I suspect they are so accustomed to being able to impose their version of reality on everyone else that it doesn’t occur to them that it’s not always possible; after all they succeeded in convincing most of the nation that Obama is a highly intelligent author instead of the teleprompt-reading dolt with a ghostwriter that he observably is. I also suspect they simply didn’t stop to think about what the consequences of declaring that the executive branch need not pay any attention to declaratory judgments by the courts might be.

You must admit that it would be a rather peculiar objective for which to openly attack the separation of powers doctrine. And, given what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia right now, unusual timing as well.

Consider the name

In which Israeli commentators appear to be genuinely surprised that a man named Hussein who attended madrassahs as a child might take a slightly different tack in the Middle East than his white Episcopalian predecessors:

If Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak is toppled, Israel will lose one of its very few friends in a hostile neighborhood and President Barack Obama will bear a large share of the blame, Israeli pundits said on Monday. Political commentators expressed shock at how the United States as well as its major European allies appeared to be ready to dump a staunch strategic ally of three decades, simply to conform to the current ideology of political correctness….

Who is advising them, he asked, “to fuel the mob raging in the streets of Egypt and to demand the head of the person who five minutes ago was the bold ally of the president … an almost lone voice of sanity in a Middle East?”

Regardless of whether Obama is a Muslim himself or not, he is obviously going to be sympathetic to the various causes of the non-European third worlders because he considers himself one of them. Look at how he behaves towards longtime European allies like the English versus his kowtowing before the Saudi king and the head of the Chinese regime. Obama’s degrees from Columbia and Harvard no more give him a normal American perspective than did the King of Jordan’s attendance at Deerfield Academy and Georgetown.

It’s rather like the Romans being surprised when they support a Teutonic general’s claim to the imperial throne and then see him taking sides in barbarian affairs. If against all expectations he somehow managed to survive and win a second term, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Obama start openly supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Ikhwān against Israel.

UPDATE: I wrote that before I read this article: The Obama administration said for the first time that it supports a role for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist organization, in a reformed Egyptian government. The organization must reject violence and recognize democratic goals if the U.S. is to be comfortable with it taking part in the government, the White House said.

It would be interesting to learn what “democratic goals” are supposed to be, especially in light of how the Muslim Brotherhood is a bigger fan of genuine democracy right now than the Obama administration is.

The political malleability of women

Marriage not infrequently causes even the most elite women to come to their political senses:

Only two years ago Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy had claimed that she was “instinctively left-wing” after at one stage supporting her husband’s Socialist rival in the 2007 presidential elections. She had also publicly opposed Mr Sarkozy’s plan to conduct DNA tests on immigrants…. But in Monday’s interview with Le Parisien newspaper, she said her previous political persuasion was only due to her belonging to a “community of artists.” “We were bobo (bourgeois bohemians), we were left-wing but at that time I voted in Italy (her native country).” I have never voted for the Left in France and I can tell you, I’m not about to start now. I don’t really feel left-wing anymore,” she said.

Not that I’m a fan of Sarkozy, of course, but he is certainly less objectionable than the French Socialists. But the observation points to an obvious problem in the West. As marriage rates continue to decline, we should expect to see women moving even further to the political Left. Since men are moving steadily to the right in the USA, this will likely create a situation where most women, blacks and immigrants are the core of the party opposed to the other one consisting of native men and the minority of women married to them. This is unlikely to make for a stable political system or a stable society.

Of course, the economic Fimbulwinter should render all of that irrelevant long before it becomes an actual problem.

Adios Obamacare

Unconstitutional!

The full text of the decision from Federal Judge Roger Vinson is not available yet, but according to reporters who’ve seen the decision, he’s ruled the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. The ruling favors of the 26 state attorney generals challenging the law. The judge ruled the individual mandate that requires all Americans to purchase health insurance invalid and, according to the decision, “because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void.”

It’s about time the someone in the judiciary began to come to his senses. While it’s true that not buying something is at least potentially an economic activity, it is absolutely absurd to claim that this permits the use of the Commerce Clause to provide constitutional cover for the federal enforcement of mandated purchases of health insurance or anything else.

Of course, now that the Republicans have judicial cover to kill Obamacare once and for all, they’ll probably offer the Democrats a compromise in order to revive most of it.

Trust not in Republicans

Note that this the technological priority of the so-called party of “small government”:

The House Republicans’ first major technology initiative is about to be unveiled: a push to force Internet companies to keep track of what their users are doing. A House panel chaired by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin is scheduled to hold a hearing tomorrow morning to discuss forcing Internet providers, and perhaps Web companies as well, to store records of their users’ activities for later review by police…. Tomorrow’s data retention hearing is juxtaposed against the recent trend to protect Internet users’ privacy by storing less data. Last month, the Federal Trade Commission called for “limited retention” of user data on privacy grounds, and in the last 24 hours, both Mozilla and Google have announced do-not-track technology.

These jokers aren’t going to fix anything. If they leave Ron Paul alone long enough to get some straight accounting out of the Fed, it will only be because the incompetence of the central bankers has put their corporatist gravy train in danger. The division between Democrats and Republicans isn’t based upon ideology or big government vs small government, it is basically a battle between pro-government bureaucrats and pro-corporate bureaucrats. And by “corporation”, I do not mean the small businesses that are a legal shell for the business activity of actual individuals, but the giant, government-created artificial entities that have taken on financial lives of their own.

Killing the Internet

Succession riots in Egypt:

Egyptians are telling me Egypt’s internet has been disabled and that mobile phone service may be next. Twitter, used to coordinate public protests, has already been cut off.

This tends to raise the question… why does Obama feel that he needs a kill switch for the US internet?

A very good start

It’s hard to quibble with this first action by Sen. Paul:

In his first major legislative proposal, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul has proposed cutting government spending by $500 billion in a year, including eliminating the Departments of Energy and Housing and Urban Development and most of the Department of Education. Paul, R-Ky., said the plan he rolled out Tuesday would cut almost 40 percent of the country’s projected deficit by abolishing programs that he said are outside the government’s constitutional scope.

Throw in the DEA and I’m sold.

Calling Obama’s bluff

Arizona looks set to tell Obama to show his cards:

A plan in Arizona to require presidential candidates to prove their eligibility to occupy the Oval Office is approaching critical mass, even though it has just been introduced. The proposal from state Rep. Judy Burges, who carried a similar plan that fell short last year only because of political maneuvering, was introduced yesterday with 16 members of the state Senate as co-sponsors.

It needs only 16 votes in the Senate to pass.

In the House, there are 25 co-sponsors, with the need for only 31 votes for passage, and Burges told WND that there were several chamber members who confirmed they support the plan and will vote for it, but simply didn’t wish to be listed as co-sponsors.

It should be interesting to see how many Arizona and national Democrats oppose this perfectly sensible state law. It should be kept in mind that any opposition to it is a tacit admission that Obama is not, in fact, eligible to be president, so I doubt the New York Times will dare to do its usual hand-wringing about Arizona.