This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Right on cue

    The other day, I wrote about political leadership, or rather the lack thereof, in the Democrat Party – particular the so-called leaders of the party. Right on cue, they provide us some examples. Pelosi announces, as reported in the Washington Post that she won’t stump for a troop surge in Afghanistan;

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday, adding that she is finished asking her colleagues to back wars that they do not support.

    “The president’s going to have to make his case,” Pelosi told reporters at a year-end briefing on the legislative session.

    You can see the yellow streak running right down her back. Cowardice pure and simple – Pelosi is scared of Code Pink yelling in her hallway and outside her house. We’re supposed to be at war, and she’s hiding behind politics.

    Here’s another example of cowardice; Fox News reports that John Conyers doesn’t have the testicular fortitude to admit that the reason the health care bill is failing is because it’s unpopular among regular Americans who don’t live in the Beltway;

    “The insurance lobby is taking over,” Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., was quoted as saying in Roll Call.

    No, the American voters are taking over you imbecile. And Mitch McConnel explains why voters are so angry;

    this bill has become a political nightmare for them.

    “They know Americans overwhelmingly oppose it, so they want to get it over with.

    “Americans are already outraged at the fact that Democrat leaders took their eyes off the ball. Rushing the process on a partisan line makes the situation even worse.

    “Americans were told the purpose of reform was to reduce the cost of health care.

    “Instead, Democrat leaders produced a $2.5 trillion, 2,074-page monstrosity that vastly expands government, raises taxes, raises premiums, and wrecks Medicare.

    “And they want to rush this bill through by Christmas — one of the most significant, far-reaching pieces of legislation in U.S. history. They want to rush it.

    “And here’s the most outrageous part: at the end of this rush, they want us to vote on a bill that no one outside the Majority Leader’s conference room has even seen.

    “That’s right. The final bill we’ll vote on isn’t even the one we’ve had on the floor. It’s the deal Democrat leaders have been trying to work out in private. “

    Oh, while health care and the war were popular, Democrats bent over backwards to take credit – and now that they face an angry crowd, it’s “rush, rush, rush” and hand responsibility and culpability off to someone else. McConnell quotes Olympia Snowe’s disappointment with the Democrats’ process, too. I hope she summons the courage to admit her fault in this, too.

    But more than likely, she’ll just collapse into the Democrat camp and sell us down the river to prove that spinelessness isn’t a partisan condition.

  • The ACLU on “Gitmo North”

    Mathew Alexander the interrogator emeritus of Vote Vets explains “Why Transferring Detainees to Illinois Keeps Us Safe” over there today.

    I support the President’s decision to transfer detainees to Guantanamo Bay. It’s time to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison and undercut one of Al Qaida’s main recruiting tools. In Iraq in 2006, while overseeing interrogations of Al Qaida foreign fighters, I listened time and time again to their reasons for coming to Iraq to fight — the torture and abuse of detainees at Guantanamo bay and Abu Ghraib.

    Yes, we know, Mathew, that tale is posted all over Washington DC’s subway platforms sponsored by a George Soros-funded organization. It really doesn’t matter what the al Qaeda foreign fighters said to you – they lie, that’s why they’re being interrogated. If they didn’t lie, they’d be leading special forces teams against al-Qaeda.

    But irrespective of Alexander’s absurd pronouncements, he’s currently working for the American Civil Liberties Union, and they aren’t as impressed with the Obama Administration’s actions today, calling Thomson, IL Gitmo, Illinios;

    Reports indicate that Thomson will be the new home for detainees the government has no intention of releasing or bringing to trial. It’s the return of that “fifth category” of detainees President Obama described in his national security speech last May, those “who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.” The Obama administration—like the Bush administration—has maintained that it has the right to hold detainees without charge or trial under the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

    It is estimated that as many as 75 detainees could potentially be part of this fifth category.

    But as we pointed out last year, a policy of indefinite detention is unnecessary and unwise, and would give the president carte blanche to break the law—something we’ve all seen enough of from the past administration.

    So, what the ACLU has advocated is the release of dangerous detainees. They compound this idiocy in a press release entitled “Creating a ‘Gitmo North’ an Alarming Step“;

    “The creation of a ‘Gitmo North’ in Illinois is hardly a meaningful step forward. Shutting down Guantánamo will be nothing more than a symbolic gesture if we continue its lawless policies onshore.

    “Alarmingly, all indications are that the administration plans to continue its predecessor’s policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial for some detainees, with only a change of location. Such a policy is completely at odds with our democratic commitment to due process and human rights whether it’s occurring in Cuba or in Illinois. In fact, while the Obama administration inherited the Guantánamo debacle, this current move is its own affirmative adoption of those policies.

    So, there you have it. The Left and the ACLU want nothing less than the immediate and unsupervised release of at least 75 dangerous terrorists, prisoners from the battlefields of our nation’s war. Regardless of the chance that they’ll kill more innocent people again, the ACLU chooses the rights of criminals over the rights of their prospective victims.

    Nothing can placate the ACLU short of releasing terrorists into our midst, nothing will placate those al Qaeda foreign fighters that Alexander believes joined because of Guantanamo short of returning their soldiers to the ranks of al Qaeda. So why are we doing it? To make ourselves feel better? To make the “civilized world” feel better about us?

    To lead our people to slaughter?

  • Leadership, and the lack thereof

    John Aravosis at AMERICAblog News, a Left-of-center blog, writes, if he’ll allow me to boil it down to it’s simplest elements, that the Democrats are spineless wienies. Aravosis compares what Bush was able to accomplish with only 55 Republican Senators as compared to what the Democrats can’t deliver with their 60 pledged seats. While I agree with some of what Aravosis wrote, he gets some of it wrong;

    What the GOP lacked in numbers, they made up for in backbone, cunning and leadership. Say what you will about George Bush, he wasn’t afraid of a fight. If anything, the Bush administration, and the Republicans in Congress, seemed to relish taking on Democrats, and seeing just how far they could get Democratic members of Congress to cave on their promises and their principles.

    How did they do it? Bush was willing to use his bully pulpit to create an environment in which the opposition party feared taking him on, feared challenging his agenda, lest they be seen as unpatriotic and extreme.

    There was nothing “cunning” about George Bush. He told us what he was going to do, and he did it – just the way he said he’d do it. Republicans and Democrats knew exactly where he stood on every issue. And he explained WHY he was going to do it and how it would benefit us. Whether you agreed with him or not, you understood his motivations. That’s called leadership – not that whiney Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama leadership – where everyone is too loud, everyone is out to get them, and they’re scared of “tones” of the debate.

    Aravosis even points out how before the election, Obama said he was going to vote against FISA and then didn’t. Even Democrats can’t trust him to do what he says. With healthcare, Obama tells us “the system is broken” that “we can’t continue with the status quo” – but that rings hollow when 86% of Americans are happy with their healthcare. When we all know that the poor get the best healthcare in the world and no one can tell us who this healthcare bill is supposed to help.

    See, that’s not leadership. Leadership isn’t standing up in front of the American people and talking about yourself and how things are going to affect you. Leadership is telling everyone why you’re doing stuff and how it’ll help. Saying things that make sense – not making wild sweeping gestures like telling us stupid shit like a government take over over of healthcare will save the economy when there’s no evidence that it’ll happen. Things like committing troops to war and sending them there on lame burros so it takes a decade for their presence to have an effect.

    Honestly, you guys voted for the guy solely because of his skin pigment and didn’t allow any of us to look deeper because you didn’t want to look deeper than his skin.

    So quitcherbitchin’.

  • Biggest tax cheats? Federal employees.

    The other day we learned that Federal employees continue to get cost-of-living pay raises, even though the cost of living doesn’t rise. Today, we learn that Federal employees are some of the biggest tax cheats, too;

    Federal workers owe more than $3 billion in income taxes they failed to pay in 2008. According to Internal Revenue Service documents, 276,300 federal employees and retirees owe $3,042,200,000.

    You’d think the IRS and Congress would be free of this type of fraud, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong;

    The IRS is the only federal agency where employees can be fired for not paying their taxes. The non-compliance rate for IRS employees in 2008 was 0.76 percent — down from 0.89 percent in 2007.

    # Executive Office of the President (includes the White House): 50 employees owe $812,917;
    # U.S. Senate: 231 employees owe $2,469,026;
    # U.S. House of Representatives: 447 employees owe $5,809,631;

    OF course, the Feds claim they can’t fire their employees for not paying their taxes – apparently they don’t make it the least bit uncomfortable for them, either.

  • Gitmo-on-Spring Lake (Updated)

    Rumors over the last few weeks that the Obama Administration is planning on renovating a prison in Thomson, IL to house Guantanamo detainees are proving to be true;

    Administration officials as well as Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin and Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn will make an official announcement at the White House.

    Officials from both the White House and Durbin’s office confirmed that President Obama had directed the government to acquire Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Ill., a sleepy town near the Mississippi River about 150 miles from Chicago. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting Tuesday’s announcement.

    So now the hippies, the ACLU lawyers, Mathew Alexander, Code Pink, Keith Olbermann and the sundry other peawits all have a place they can go camp out to prove their commitment to human rights for subhumans.

    Residents of the small town feel that it’s worth it to house the most terrible criminals in the world so close to the families;

    “This town is slowly but surely dying off, and I mean that literally because the people that are retired are dying off and there’s no young people coming back in to take their place. There’s nothing here to draw them,” said Richard Groharing, a 68-year-old retired Florida corrections officer who was born in Thomson, a farming community about 150 miles west of Chicago.

    The prison was built in 2001 with the promise of thousands of jobs. But because of state budget problems, it has been largely vacant since its completion. It has 1,600 cells, but only about 200 minimum-security inmates are held there.

    I hope Thomson IL residents are ready to assume the mantle as the worse place on earth when Guantanamo is closed. Of course, the ambulance-chasers will probably double the town’s population and bring in some money. At what price?

    ADDED: Of course, dicksmith at VoteVets thinks this is a good idea;

    Outstanding. The Obama Administration is taking a step closer to ending the use of a facility that has been one of the most effective recruiting tools for extremism and terrorism across the globe. Not only that, it’s simply the right thing to do.

    Yes, the rest of the world will automatically think that we’re treating detainees well just because they’re in Illinois now. How the Hell will that change anything? Seriously. If we put them all up in a Las Vegas hotel, THAT would become part of the new recruiting cry from terrorists, you dumbass.

    I swear, is there anyone on the Left with an ounce of common sense anymore? Has every single thing they say become just a knee-jerk reaction?

  • Ignoring allies and cuddling with tyrants

    In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Con Coughlin tries to explain why the Obama Administration treats our staunch ally, the British so poorly.

    Before he became president it was said that Mr. Obama harbored a deep grudge against Britain for its colonialist past. It is alleged that his paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was tortured by the British during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s, when it was controlled by Britain. In his autobiographical book “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama unflatteringly compares the British Empire to South Africa’s apartheid regime and the former Soviet Union.

    Soon after his inauguration, he sent back to the U.K. a bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had been loaned to President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. The sculpture had enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office.

    There is also an important ideological reason that Britain’s leading policy makers find themselves increasingly shunned by the U.S. Key foreign-policy advisers to Mr. Obama are keen advocates of a federal Europe, one in which the European Commission based in Brussels is the main center of power and influence, rather than the individual capitals, such as London, Paris and Berlin. In this context, Britain’s dogged attachment to a “special relationship” with America is regarded as an embarrassing relic of a previous era.

    Yeah, he treats the British poorly because of something may have done before he was born, but he cuddles with the Iranians and Hugo Chavez despite things they’ve done and continue to do during his presidency. That makes sense – especially since he sees history as a record of class struggle.

    Iran tested components that could be used in nuclear weapons just a few years ago. Hugo Chavez calls the US an “overt threat” to Iran and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of the Americas (ALBA). Bolivia’s Evo Morales charges his opponent in the last election with corruption to send a message to his opposition. But the Obama Administration sees Hondurans acting within the confines of their constitution as a threat to human rights.

    Something doesn’t smell right here.

  • Obamaville

    obamaville

    While Obama is inflating his own grade, some Americans are taking a far dimmer view of his administration of the government thus far;

    I’ve had trouble embedding the video, if it doesn’t show here try it at this link.

    Well, Hoover had to deal with “Hoverville” signs, I guess Obama will just have to factor this into his grade. I guess this won’t help though; Reuters reports that Obama’s IRS has hired a battalion of “wealth police”;

    The IRS high wealth unit, part of a broader effort to combat international tax evasion, is focusing on “the entire web of business entities controlled by a high wealth individual,” IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman told a tax conference this week.

    Another IRS official told Reuters “hundreds” of people have already been hired to staff the new unit, including some from within the agency.

    “We have drawn top talent within the IRS that have expertise involving wealthy individuals as well as examination of their related entities,” said Mae Lew, an IRS special counsel.

    Nothing “class warfare” about that, is there? That ought to stop the complaining.

  • Anti-war movement has petered out

    chiroux-and-mckinney

    The anti-war crowd had a protest yesterday at the White House called the “No You Can’t” rally. It’s gone virtually unnoticed by the media (and unnoticed by me, too – I was pimpin’ my crib yesterday). Despite being headlined by the most famous of the moonbat ranks, even the LA Times wasn’t impressed by the 300 participants;

    “People are burned out,” explained the rally’s organizer, Laurie Dobson. As she and other antiwar activists struggle to remake their movement, they also acknowledge there are obstacles.

    “We’re fighting a harder fight right now,” said Dobson, who said antiwar efforts had been upstaged by the battle for healthcare reform and had been hampered by the bad economy. She and others also acknowledge a certain awkwardness: Activists now find themselves up against the same politician many of them helped elect.

    “The peace movement has a new adversary in front of them,” said Tom Hayden, a former California state senator who was a leading critic of the Vietnam War. “He’s intelligent, speaks the language of the peace movement and is trying to reach out to the center-left of the country with his message. It’s much more formidable to argue with Barack Obama than it was with Bush or Cheney.”

    Hayden said many of the activists who once used antiwar protest to convey their contempt of President George W. Bush have been reluctant to criticize Obama, who, while he was a candidate, made much of his opposition to the war in Iraq.

    Some media outlets are pumping up the numbers of protesters to 1500, but even on Matthis Chiroux’ Facebook page World Can’t Wait admits to only 300;

    facebook-protest-numbers

    So Brower is still tossing shoes – that’s so last year, Elaine. But that’s kind of the story of the whole peace movement, isn’t it?