Category: Barack Obama

Obama Hasn’t ‘Evolved’ That Far … Yet

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Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services requested public comment on a proposal to provide taxpayer-funded sex-change surgery, but scrubbed the proposal off their Web site as soon as it was reported by news agencies. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air understands the Obama-logic:

Congress has been arguing over how to limit the current Medicare/Medicaid systems to keep them from going broke and taking the American economic system with them.  Some genius at HHS thinks this is the most propitious moment to talk about sticking taxpayers with sex-change surgery bills?
Smooth move.  But don’t think for a moment this won’t come back later, either.

Of course not: Under the radical dispensation, that which is not forbidden is mandatory, and to say that someone has a “right” to do something will be interpreted to mean that taxpayers are obligated to pay them to do it. This is what the entire fight about “marriage equality” is about: Granting same-sex couples access to whatever government benefits married couples get.

Our national motto has been changed from “E Pluribus Unum” to “What’s In It For Me?”

There is no real opposition to people cohabiting, having wedding ceremonies and calling their unions “marriages” — live and let live, whatever floats your boat — but there is understandable resistance to government action that requires us to treat such pairings as perfect analogs of man and wife. In addition to any traditional moral objections, there is the suspicion that this sort of radical “equality” will end up costing taxpayers money and restricting individual freedom. And one individual freedom that is already being eroded is the right to express traditional moral objections, so that the Family Research Council can be stigmatized as a “hate group” and targeted for terrorism by the sans-culottes of the new Jacobinism.

Remember: Sandra Fluke argued that it is “discrimination” for insurers not to cover sex-change surgery and, last year, a federal judge invoked the Eighth Amendment in ruling that Robert Kosilek, imprisoned for murdering his wife in 1990, has a constitutional right to a  taxpayer-funded sex-change. My reaction at the time:

The Eight Amendment? If a convicted murderer doesn’t have a vagina, that’s “cruel and unusual punishment”? As strange as this sounds, it is entirely logical if you accept the premise of sexual “rights” as understood by liberals.

Please read (or re-read) “The Problem With Sexual Rights.” We are traveling a road paved with weird intentions.

 

 


Mr. Nobel Peace Prize Works His Magic: Israel Now at War With Syria?

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All it took was an Obama trip to the Mideast, and suddenly everything seems to be flying completely sideways:

Reuters is reporting that Israel has fired upon and destroyed a machine gun position in the Golan Heights. It is unclear at this moment whether this is merely spillover from the Syrian civil war or whether this is a new front opening for Israel in the middle east.
Israeli Spokesman Ofir Gendelman stated on his Twitter page, Israeli forces “destroyed a Syrian machine gun nest that fired twice in the last 24 hours on Israeli patrols operating to safeguard the border.”

Meanwhile, there are confused and conflicting reports as to whether Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has been shot by an Iranian bodyguard.

UPDATE: Erik Ortiz of the New York Daily News:

Online reports of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s death appeared greatly exaggerated Sunday.
Arab media said Assad was purportedly shot by one of his Iranian bodyguards Saturday night and was in serious condition.
He was supposedly taken to Al-Shami Hospital in Damascus, where surrounding roads were closed off.
Israel News One’s website even reported that Assad had been “assassinated.”
But online updates said the Syrian leader’s shooting was false and that he  was alive and in high spirits. The conflicting reports highlight the chaos that  continues to engulf the country, which has been mired in a bloody civil war for  two years.

It’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on in this kind of situation unless you can independently confirm the reports, which I can’t.

Meanwhile, it’s hard not to notice that while Obama worked actively to encourage the overthrow of the regimes in Egypt and Libya, he’s been willing to let this situation in Syria — where Assad is essentially an Iranian puppet — linger for two years.

UPDATE II: Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard:

On Friday, President Barack Obama left Israel, after spending a couple days with the leaders of America’s closest ally in the region.
Now today, two days later, Israel has acknowledged that it fired at a military position in Syria. . . .
The sequence of events leads one to ask, what did the two leaders, Obama and Netanyahu, discuss regarding Syria when they met multiple times this last week in Jerusalem? And what did they agree to do to deal with the Syria issue?

Just another wonderful coincidence for the Lightworker.

UPDATE III: Andrew O’Shea at ViralRead is still updating on whether or not Assad has been shot and is or is not dead.

 

#OccupyResoluteDesk: ‘I Take A Balanced Approach To Imbalanced Budgets’

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by Smitty

“Paul Ryan, today, put forward his budget,” says ABC, “and he says, he’s challenging you to come forward with a budget that also reaches balance. Are you going to do that?”
“No,” Obama says. “My goal is not to chase a balanced budget just for the sake of balance,” Obama said. “My goal is, how do we grow the economy, put people back to work. And if we do that we are going to be bringing in more revenue.”

The more full quotation is via The Blaze.

What’s fascinating about this is the attempt to sound reasonable about a fundamentally unreasonable proposition. It’s like telling your spouse: “If I just focus on getting my leg over with enough others to grow sufficiently bored chasing tail, I’ll satisfy myself that there is no one better than you, love.”

Ryan taking 10 years (a decade!) to balance the budget is not a case of “chas[ing] a balanced budget just for the sake of balance”. Such would balancing the budget in one or two years via highly disruptive reforms to, well, everything. This blog bows to Ryans superior wonkiness in terms of knowing what’s possible.

So for BHO to dismiss Ryan on motive, as though balance was somehow a lower priority in its own right, is deeply offensive. May you be hoisted on your mendacious petard, Mr. President.

via JWF and The Weekly Standard

Lying by Euphemism: ‘New Revenues’

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Journalism is supposed to be about truth. Jackie Calmes and Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times are engaged in deception:

With Republican leaders in Congress forswearing budget negotiations over new revenues, President Obama has begun reaching around them to Republican lawmakers with a history of willingness to cut bipartisan deals.

“New revenues” = INCREASING TAXE RATES.

President Obama wants to RAISE TAXES, which Republicans oppose, but these lying bastards at the New York Times — dishonest partisan propagandists, endeavoring to assist their fellow Democrat — realize that the president’s proposal might be less popular if they described it truthfully, and so they begin with this 11-word dependent clause that hides the truth and shifts the blame:

With Republican leaders in Congress forswearing budget negotiations over new revenues . . .

In other words, if you buy what Calmes and Weisman are selling, you believe that the problem in Washington is that Republicans won’t negotiate, and that the ideal way to solve the budget problem is with “new revenues,” which could be had easily if weren’t for those Republicans “foreswearing negotiations.” As far as concerns the economic error in the underlying fallacy of their hidden premise, Ronald Reagan once explained that in a single sentence:

“We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.”

Oh, to be back to the good old days, when the debt was only a trillion dollars! But of course, we can’t cut spending — President Scaremonger won’t let that happen — and therefore the question is how to raise taxes. Never mind that the government could actually collect “news revenues” if it would just stop strangling economic growth with its vicious policies.

No, in the fanatical brains of Democrats, it is necessary as a matter of “social justice” that the rich (however you define that term) be forced to “pay their fair share” (however you define that term). Words have actual meanings, except when Democrats are talking, and then you always have to ask yourself, “What do they really mean when they use words like ‘rich’ and ‘fair’?”

Once you know that someone is attempting to deceive you — and Calmes and Weisman have advertised their deceptive purpose in the first sentence of their article — then all you need to wonder is why they’re lying. Perhaps sinister motives inspire them:

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

 That Orwell fellow was onto something.

 

Power Line Got That Backward

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by Smitty

Power Line points out that the Meteorologist-in-Chief is full of hooey, per this 13-word SOTU passage:

Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all are now more frequent and intense.

But it’s not that this particular crap-shot to the dome is unusual. Even the famous

electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket

was delivered in the context of a discussion of cap-n-trade. What I’d like to see is an analysis of something, anything, on which this guy has been forthright, accurate, or at least honest about the reason that a prediction proved inaccurate.

The nicest thing I can say about this guy is that he reflects a fundamentally unserious country.

via Insty

‘He Would Fain Have Had It’

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“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

“I can as well be hanged as tell the manner of it. It was mere foolery. I did not mark it. I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown (yet ’twas not a crown neither, ’twas one of these coronets) and, as I told you, he put it by once — but, for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again, then he put it by again — but, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time. He put it the third time by. And still, as he refused it, the rabblement hooted and clapped their chapped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked Caesar — for he swooned and fell down at it. And for mine own part, I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.”
— Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2

“President Obama sometimes feels strangely compelled to indicate that he is not the Master of America.”
— James Poulos, Forbes

We have come to expect these protestations of helpless impotence when Dear Leader does not get his way:

“Jessica, I am not a dictator, I’m the president,” he said while speaking to reporters in the White House Press Briefing Room. “Ultimately, if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say we need to go to catch a plane, I can’t have Secret Service block the doorway.”

The stenography pool known as the White House press corps is busy chiseling his immortal words into stone, even as Obama offends sci-fi fans by confusing the Vulcan mind-meld (Star Trek) with “Jedi mind tricks” (Star Wars). But of course, his apologists would plead Obama’s underprivileged Indonesian upbringing as an excuse.

Did I mention he once ate a dog?

This is how it is with a Cult of Personality: Everything must always be interpreted in favor of Dear Leader. His exotic background — the subject of his best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father — can only be praised and celebrated. One is not allowed to interpret the same set of facts as potential evidence that Dear Leader is out of touch with the people he presumes to lead. Any such interpretation is raaaaacist, as is just about any other imaginable criticism of Dear Leader.

This week, Bob Woodward accidentally joined the hate-mob, and if he doesn’t straighten up, he might get listed on the SPLC map right next to the Family Research Council.

When Obama succeeds (and these are always political successes), his press-corps fanboys praise him as transcendent Lightworker — omniscient, super-human, his powers beyond the capacity of mere words to describe — but when Obama fails (and these are always policy failures) his media hagiographers attribute this to the infinite evil of his enemies. And on those rare occasions when Obama’s policy failures are also political failures, as with the allegedly cataclysmic “sequester” cuts that don’t really bother anyone, his journalistic idolators erupt in a fury of confusion.

“And for mine own part, I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.”

 

 

UPDATE (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

David Weigel Just Doesn’t Get That There ‘Leadership’ Thingy

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by Smitty

Peddling his JournoList wares at Slate, Weigel reveals a bit of density, emphasis mine:

Republicans have one goal, running through all of these negotiations. They don’t want sequestration to be replaced by tax revenue. Any tax revenue. Forcing the president to swallow $85 billion in cuts this year would do that. They’ve got no obvious alternatives.
But a plan like this exposes a quirk of Obama-era fiscal hawksmanship. Republicans want specific cuts. Some of them—total repeal of Obamacare!—they’ll put on the record. The rest of them, they try to put on the White House. As soon as the “supercommittee” failed and sequestration looked real, it became “the president’s sequester.”

As I was trying to explain to Mataconis last night, #OccupyResoluteDesk can’t play drums and lead guitar at the same time like that, Dave. Barack Obama is either an über-genius uniter, stopping global warming and bandaging all the scraped knees, or he’s a two-dimensional cardboard standee tooling about the country reciting teleprompted gibberish at great expense.

As President, Obama commissioned the Super Committee, and owns its failure, just as surely as he ignored its report, and can’t even turn in his budget homework on time. Because even BHO can’t point his fingers at Congress while using them to type.

So, David, your use of the passive voice in trying to excuse BHO for the debacle is as ludicrous as all of the petty abuse being heaped upon Americans over his incompetence. Admittedly, 51% of the voters are blamable victims, having returned the jackwagon to office in November. But don’t paper it over: this Sequestration is a pure, epic failure that #OccupyResoluteDesk owns, because, while his campaign prowess is beyond question, he couldn’t lead two nuns in one minute of silent prayer.

Twitter is a having a blast with this, and I’ll sign off with a few sequestration gags that are getting good circulation:

Dodgeball:

Airplane!:

Blues Brothers:

Outlaw Josey Wales: