The choice

Opposition to raising debt limit

"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 US Government cannot 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. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to raise America's debt limit."

Senator Barack H. Obama, March 2006

Correctly Attributed

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/debtlimit.asp

 

Obamacare description

"So let me get this straight. We are going to be gifted with a healthcare plan that we are forced to purchase and fined if we don't, which reportedly covers ten million more people without adding a single new doctor, but provides for sixteen thousand new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman doesn't understand it, passed by congress, that didn't read it, but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese and financed by a country that is broke. So what the blank could possibly go wrong?" Barbara Bellar, candidate for Illinois State Senate

Foreign Aid

I recently heard Steve Forbes say that we ought to stop sending money as foreign aid and just send each country a copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

Remember Steamboat Willie

 

 

Why are terrorist prisoners being released merely because we have their word or or the promise of their host country that they won't do any more bad stuff? The men in Saving Private Ryan learned this lesson the hard way when they felt a twinge of compassion for their captured German prisoner (known as Steamboat Willie) and released him. The next thing they knew he had rejoined his unit and was firing bullets at them. There are now reports that the ring leader of the attack against our consulate in Bengazi was led by a former Gitmo detainee who had been returned to Lybia under the promise that he would be kept in prison. So much for the word of an enemy. It reminds me of the story about the rattlesnake who promised a man he wouldn't bite him if he would only carry him down from the mountain heights before the temperature dropped below freezing. At the bottom of the mountain the snake bit the naive Samaritan, who exclaimed, "Hey, you promised you wouldn't bite me." To which the snake replied. "You knew what I was when you agreed to carry me down." Our enemies are our enemies, and once caught, we must never let them go." This is not the first time someone released from Gitmo has returned to the battlefield to do us hard. In the war on terror, compassion is equal to stupidity.

Classic Leftist hyperbole

News Flash: Spain's conservative government has provoked a storm among women's groups with plans to tighten abortion laws to make the procedure illegal in cases where the foetus is deformed. About 100 people took part in a rally in Madrid's central Tirso de Molina square on Sunday to protest against the proposed reform which they argue will take Spain back to the era of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. The crowd, mostly women, chanted "We give birth, we decide" and "Not one step backwards. It seems to us to be a throwback to the Franco dictatorship and we are not willing to accept under any circumstances measures that will take away our rights," said Justa Montero, member of the Feminist Assembly, one of the women's groups that organised the protest. Comment: The Left will never give an inch without putting up such an excessively hyperbolic rhetorical fight that you would think they were battling to save the earth from total annihilation. The sooner the Right accepts that this is just the way it's going to be, the sooner we might be able to get started on dismantling the Leftist state we now live in.

"Cool is now America’s holy grail that allows the elite and the rich not just to pursue and enjoy nice things, but to damn others who do the same." Victor Davis Hanson (May 23, 2012) To read full article, go to http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300700/power-cool-victor-davis-hanson?pg=1

Read the bill

“They get up and say, ‘Read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” (Congressman John Conyers on the Affordable Healthcare Act)

A 2,700-page law is not a “law” by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there’s no equality: Instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy. It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.(MS,3/31/12)

Will Obama rejoice?

During the 2008 campaign, President Obama argued strenuously against the individual mandate. In a debate in South Carolina, he said: "A mandate means that in some fashion, everybody will be forced to buy health insurance. ... But I believe the problem is not that folks are trying to avoid getting health care. The problem is they can't afford it. And that's why my plan emphasizes lowering costs." In February 2008, he said that you could no more solve the issue of the uninsured with an individual mandate than you could cure homelessness by ordering people to buy a home.

In light of Obama's earlier position, I'm wondering if the poor performance by the Solicitor General arguing for the "individual mandate" may have been intentional. Could it be that Obama reluctantly went along with the mandate? After all, the Affordable Health Care act was more of a Pelosi-Reid creation than an Obama creation. Maybe Obama never really wanted the mandate and is secretly hoping the Supreme Court will overturn it. After all, it could hardly be argued that the new health care system is bringing down costs.

Kennedy has it right!

Obamacare "changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in a very fundamental way."