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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Hillary Plans to Accept Secretary of State Position

    According to the Guardian, Hillary will accept the role of senior diplomat for Obama.

    Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.

    Obama’s advisers have begun looking into Bill Clinton’s foundation, which distributes millions of dollars to Africa to help with development, to ensure that there is no conflict of interest. But Democrats do not believe that the vetting is likely to be a problem.

    If true, this would be very interesting on several levels. Getting her approved by a Democrat Senate would obviously be no problem. The press, after vilifying her in the primaries, will prop up her non-existent experience (sorry folks, being a wife is not evidence of experience of what the husband did) and proclaim her uniquely qualified. She will sail through.

    But why would she? What is her plan?

    It is true that several former Secretaries of State were also Presidents including Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Quincy Adams, and Van Buren. But that string stopped in 1849 when James Buchanan left the post as a totally unremarkable Secretary and eventually became the only President in history that was worse than Jimmy Carter.

    Does Hillary think she can reverse 160 years of history or does she have a different agenda? And spare me people, Hillary does have an agenda and Obama is residual at best in that.

    If her plan is to make her and Bill enormously wealthy, this position is perfect for that but it is not a good position if she plans another Whitehouse run.

    Only time will tell.

  • Obama’s Dignity Battalions

    I picked this up from Hot Air, by way of Ace of Spades. It’s a three minute interview with Rahm Emanuel in which he discusses his perception of this Civilian Defense Force.

    Now, I’m no conspiracy theorist, but Emanuel seems pretty focused on this concept of a civilian paramilitary force. He tries to make it sound innocuous, but you look at the pool of people from which he wants to draw this force (college kids), it’s almost as if he wants the cultural opposite from the people who enlist in the military. People more ideologically aligned with Democrats trained and armed. These are the same Democrats who opposed the draft for our military, but see it as useful tool for building a civilian force with the same amount of training, the same weaponry, the same skills. To “teach them what it means to be American”, in Emanuel’s words.

    Now for those of you too young to remember the Dignity Battalions, it was a trained paramilitary force in Panama who owed allegiance to Manuel Noriega. Noriega shuttled them around the country during elections to vote multiple times in May 1989. When the election didn’t go the way Noriega wanted it to go, he sent Dignity Battalion members to beat the crap out of the President-elect Guillermo (Billy) Ford with lead pipes. The attack was so blatant, the Dignity Battalion members so bold, so fearless, that a CNN cameraman captured it and beamed it around the world.

    Hugo Chavez has his own Popular Defense Units, civilian supporters of Chavez, trained in military techniques, who have been used to quell protests in Venezuela, some using gunfire on unarmed civilian opponents.

    The Left admires Chavez’ brand of socialism, his ability to shut down opposition media and now his solution to crush dissent. I’m just sayin’….

    I thought ya’all’d like to discuss this one.

  • Why we lost

    The American people trusted Republicans enough in 2002 to give us back Congress after the Leftists essentially undermined the will of the voters in the 2000 election with their double-dealing and convincing Vermont’s James Jeffords to jump across the aisle giving Democrats a majority in the Senate.

    Senate Republicans squandered that second chance by allowing their own political ambitions to get in the way of doing their jobs for the country. Acting like their Democrat predecessors, they feathered their political nests with political goodies for their constituents and wasted their opportunity to make a real mark in the four years they had control of Pennsylvania Avenue.

    Hagel, Lott, Frist, Chaffee, Voinivich, Snowe and Collins all let their personalities dominate the Senate rather than their duty. Instead of convincing Americans that we can do the job better than the government in our own lives, they bought our votes and stood against the party and the American people at every chance.

    When fighting the war, enforcing our laws and cutting government should have been the focus of the Senate, instead every day became a new battle between the White House the Senate.

    The Democrats turned it into a battle for the last two years between Congress and the White House – folks just gave up on it all. Congress did absolutely nothing except pass legislation they knew would fail – and, oh, they passed a minimum wage hike that immediately caused the unemployment rate to rise.

    With Obama, people hope they can forget about politics for a while. He’s promised to take over all of the annoying little things they worry about – the war, the economy, the poor, the health insurance, gas prices, their mortgages, the banks – all of the things that crowd their simple little lives with darkness and discomfort.

    They made the choice they didn’t have to think about. They only have to look at the visage of Obama and see a reason to vote for him without listening to a word he says. They’re so intellectually shallow that they think their stupid 52 to 48 websites will make us feel better about losing our country’s soul. They think we’re just as shallow as they are.

    The argument against Obama was too complex for them to understand, but when couched in terms like “historical”, it was easy to understand. When Obama made it clear that they’re absolved of further responsibility by simply pulling the lever for him, it all seemed so easy to do, too hard to not do.

  • Too little too late

    A shocking bit of news from the Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell this week. It seems she thinks that the Post was a little too easy on Obama over this year.

    But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama’s acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

    Oh, no kidding? Ya think? Spend a little too much time trying to dig up crap on the Republican candidates that on the guy who was paling around with terrorists, felons and racists? Oh, and maybe they weren’t tough enough on on Joe Biden, too;

    One gaping hole in coverage involved Joe Biden, Obama’s running mate. When Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, reporters were booking the next flight to Alaska. Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right; it was a serious omission.

    And, as Newbusters Matthew Balan wrote, other reporters are starting to mention how creepy the Obama culture of personality suddenly seems – but they didn’t notice until he gave his victory speech.

    I suspect between now and January we’re going to see a bunch of admissions of bad behavior from the media – but they’ll trickle out and they’ll be empty admissions with no apologies. But will they change their behavior?

    Found at doubleplusundead.

  • Emanuel skips out on taxes?

    Lawhawk wrote yesterday that Rahm Emanuel is steeped in the mortgage crisis at Freddie Mac as a member of the board of that entity;

    Emanuel was on the board of Freddie Mac when Freddie Mac was cooking the books. He didn’t blow the whistle on the situation or the fact that the entity was about to go broke over the subprime mess, which he and his fellow Democrats chose to ignore for years in the name of affordable housing. As ABC News now reports:

    President-elect Barack Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, served on the board of directors of the federal mortgage firm Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at the troubled agency and the board failed to spot “red flags,” according to government reports reviewed by ABCNews.com.

    According to a complaint later filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie Mac, known formally as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002.

    No one has accused Emanuel of wrongdoing in those complaints, but one really ought to question his judgment and inability to note the serious problems facing Freddie Mac.

    Reading it reminded me of a piece that Rurik emailed me the other day, so when I went to the article I had just read yesterday, I bumped into this;

    Through the magic of the internet, though, I tracked down a cached copy;

    (more…)

  • How times change

    Remember when this was hip;
    DSC_0096

    That was a picture I took just this last March.

    This was in April;

    DSC_0028

    And this was in July;

    Ron Paul 069

    Upside down flags were the way the Left showed their displeasure with the Bush Administration.

    Over at Gateway Pundit, Jim discovers that it’s not so cool any more since Tuesday;

    Veteran Lou Schrader of Las Cruces, New Mexico flew his flag upside down on Wednesday in protest of Barack Obama winning the presidency.
    This alarmed his liberal neighbors.
    The Sun-News reported:

    “Now that there’s an African-American president, he’s protesting the U.S., and I think it’s funny because, if you love your country, you love it no matter what.”

    Kollaros said he backs freedom of speech, but flying the flag upside-down shouldn’t be done lightly because it could send the wrong message.

    “We’ve got to be careful about how we do that, because we don’t want to offend people,” he said.

    I’m not saying I support Mister Schrader’s flying the flag upside down, but I think it’s pretty hypocritical of the Left to pick and choose when they’re going to get a bout of patriotism. The flag represents the people, the nation, not the party that resides at the White House.

    Stable Hand at The Jawa Report writes about similar sentiments in Seattle of all places;

    I shall now call them phony f’n patriots.

    “Red, White & True Blue: City Hoists Old Glory

    Barack Obama’s presidential win held a poignant significance for liberal Seattleites: This is their America, too.

    The feeling was evident in jubilant partying in the streets, in quiet moments of reflection and in blossoms of red, white and blue.

    With newfound patriotism, Seattleites want to wave the flag, hang it from their homes and stick it on their cars.

    I wonder what Skye will encounter in West Chester, PA this weekend.

  • Coming for the children

    Gateway Pundit writes this morning that Obama has outlined his plan to indoctinate the children into community service (so they, too, can be President someday) by requiring 50 hours every year for elementary and high school students and 100 hours every year for college students.  Again, more examples of what IS NOT charity – government-mandated work is not service to the community.

    The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America,

    JammieWearingFool also writes that Rahm Emanuel is on the same sheet of music with what Emanuel calls “The Real Patriot Act”

    Here’s how it would work. Young people will know that between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, the nation will enlist them for three months of civilian service. They’ll be asked to report for three months of basic civil defense training in their state or community, where they will learn what to do in the event of biochemical, nuclear or conventional attack; how to assist others in an evacuation; how to respond when a levee breaks or we’re hit by a natural disaster. These young people will be available to address their communities’ most pressing needs.

    What do I have against “community service”? Nothing. Anyone who volunteers their time is an exceptional person and commands my respect. But forced service? In the name of the community? It’s nothing short of collectivism – it assumes that we’re all the same, that we all just lay around watching TV and playing video games. That we all react the same way to the blessings of the Obama Messiah.

    And what happens when the shine wears off the new program – when people stop showing up for their mandatory charity? Fines? Jail time? Re-education camps? Another aspect of our lives regulated? Will we then have to form an enforcement agency and a network of tattletales to inform on shirkers?

    What have we created here?

  • The shallow end of the Obama Brain Pool

    Back in May, MSNBC floated the idea of John Kerry for Secretary of State for the Obama Administration;

    Kerry aides insist he’s not angling for the job and point to his long involvement in foreign affairs. It started with his famous testimony as a 27-year-old veteran questioning the Vietnam War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It continues today, at age 64, as the No. 3 Democrat on the same panel.

    But envisioning him in the post would hardly be a stretch given Obama’s chances at securing the Democratic nomination, a general election shaping up as a “change” campaign and Kerry’s relationship with the Illinois senator.

    Political floated the same rumor later that week, but Kerry dismissed the rumors;

    Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) dismissed media reports that he is angling to become America’s top diplomat, saying Monday that rumors linking him to the secretary of state post in a potential Obama administration were nothing more than “silly talk.”

    Silly talk indeed. His qualifications include unauthorized negotiations with our enemies North Vietnam and Nicaragua. Why would we ant to legitimize that behavior? Not to mention his tendency for “failed jokes”.

    McQ of Q and O said just a few weeks ago;

    Can you even begin to imagine Kerry as Secretary of State with Joe Biden as VP and those two making up the foreign policy brain trust for Obama?

    No, I can’t. Making Kerry Secretary of State would be just like making Sandy Berger the Archivist of the United States. However, there is an upside to Kerry leaving his Senate post, in that Kerry would leave his Senate post. Long term, it could be better for the country – even better would be naming him as the US Ambassador to Vermont.
    Crossposted at Four Horsemen of the Obacalypse.