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Obama’s Point of No Return

Aug 19

Posted by admin in Commentary, Opinion | No Comments

American Thinker

by J.R. Dunn

There comes a moment in a failing presidency where the incumbent, through some single gesture, action, or statement, crosses a certain line from beyond which there is no return. Through his own will and behavior he so underlines his failings, so frames his negative image, that no further action can ever erase it. Fate, accident, and circumstance have nothing to do with it. It is the president himself who puts the period at the end of his own sentence.

Such moments are obvious in retrospect, though not always at the time. With Richard Nixon, it was the “eighteen-minute gap.” An oval office tape recording turned over to Judge John Sirica, who was overseeing the investigation of the Watergate incident, turned out to have a lengthy period of silence smack dab in the middle of a conversation between Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman. The White House claimed that Rose Mary Woods, the president’s secretary, had inadvertently hit the wrong button for those eighteen minutes. This might well have been true, but in light of Nixon’s long reputation as Tricky Dick, it sounded like the cock-and-bull story to end them all. Nixon had been holding his own in the Watergate battle up to that point. The voting public viewed the uproar with bemusement rather than indignation. But the tape gap finished him. In less than a year, he was forced into resignation.

For Jimmy Carter, it was the “malaise speech” of July 15, 1979, in which he attempted to shuffle the blame for his tepid performance as president from his own administration onto the shoulders of the American people. Carter claimed that a national “crisis of confidence” (he never actually used the word “malaise”) made it impossible for him to adequately grapple with the country’s problems. It was America’s fault, not Jimmy Carter’s. The public reaction was open disgust and the abject collapse of any support for the Carter presidency.

With Obama, we have an abundance of riches: the multiple vacations, the legal harassment of the state of Arizona on behalf of illegals, the clownish response to the Gulf oil blowout. But when historians come to select the moment when Obama went over the edge of the world, I think they’ll find the great Iftar mosque speech of August 13, 2010 hard to beat.

During a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan the president found it appropriate to come out in favor of religious freedom. Not in support of Christians being attacked by janjaweed gunmen, or Bahais tormented by Iranian mullahs, or Jews being stalked by assassins, or even American citizens being told that they cannot pray in public, but in favor of a shadowy foreign foundation with suspicious financing and disturbing Jihadi connections that wishes to build some kind of victory monument congruent to the site of the 9/11 massacre.

Freelance graphic designers from UpstackThese doomsday statements work by putting previous suspicions and surmises about the president — always negative — into sharp relief, acting as verification and confirmation. Nixon had suffered a reputation as a conniver since his knock-down, drag-out 1950 battle against Helen Gahagan Douglas (it was Douglas who coined the “Tricky Dick” nickname). The tape gap fit so perfectly into that narrative as to crowd out everything else. Carter’s inept performance as president was rendered even harder to bear by his continual sanctimony and moral preening. The malaise speech merely added the patina of a whiner.

With Obama, suspicions have involved his status as an American. The foreign parentage, the registration in an Indonesian school noting him as a Muslim, the uproar over the birth certificate, aroused misgivings that, despite media scorn heaped upon those noting them, he has never quite been able to put to rest. As of last weekend, his opportunities to do so are ended. Impressions trump arguments, and for most of the country, Obama will, from here on in, be a strange and untrustworthy figure — a man who does not understand what Ground Zero means to America, who utilizes American law and custom to support foreign interests, who speaks to strangers more clearly than to his own.

Nothing either Nixon or Carter did enabled them to recover from their faux pas. Even as the tape gap story broke, Nixon was supervising a massive airlift of supplies and ammunition to Israel, which was involved in life-or-death struggle against massive Arab attack in the Yom Kippur War. It gained him nothing, scarcely earning a mention amid all the public speculation about Watergate. Less than three months after the Carter speech, Iranian “students” (actually professional revolutionaries under the control of the Ayatollah Khomeini) sacked the American embassy in Tehran, taking nearly a hundred American hostages. I can attest that I was not alone in thinking, “Great — and we’ve got Mr. Malaise is charge.” The year-and a-half-long hostage crisis, climaxed by the disastrous Eagle Claw rescue mission, hastened the collapse of the worst presidency of the later 20th century.

The past two years are the best Obama will ever see. The real crises of his presidency are still to come, and are easily visible as they move toward us — Iran, terrorism, the economy, the collapse of the national health care system hastened by his own policies. He will meet them under a cloud of his own making, attempting to overcome them as a president who takes endless vacations, who will not defend his country’s borders, who sat out the Gulf oil crisis, who overlooks the sacrifices of his own countrymen in favor of dubious foreign figures.

The tide has gone out for Barack Obama. It is all epilogue from here on in.

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Our Patrick Henry Moment Is Here

Aug 3

Posted by admin in Commentary, Economics, Opinion | 1 Comment

American Thinker

By Monty Pelerin

Freelance graphic designers from UpstackObama’s election was supposed to transform America, at least in his mind.

This country’s first socialist president strode into office confident that he would remake this country. Fortunately for the country, the timing of his election was twenty, if not fifty, years too late. Socialism has failed in its pure form wherever it has been tried. Now it has failed in its modified form. While much of the world realizes this, President Obama is either ignorant or has more sinister plans for the country.

In the 1920s, Ludwig von Mises demonstrated via economic reasoning why socialism could not work. His argument was that without market prices, there was no way to properly allocate resources. About ten years later, Friedrich Hayek supported Mises’ conclusion from a different angle. He approached it as a “knowledge problem” and argued that no central authority, regardless of how intelligent, could possess enough information to make proper and efficient decisions for tens of millions of people and businesses.

History validated the theory of the two Austrian economists. Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and North Korea produced inevitable the misery, poverty, and brutality. The two countries that continue the system are amongst the poorest countries in the world, held together only by totalitarian rule and outside economic support.

With the recognition that socialism did not work, “do-gooders” changed their efforts to a system that would be part capitalism and part socialism. They believed that capitalism could be used for resource allocation while the “caring nature” of socialism could ensure equitable distribution of wealth. President Clinton expressed interest in what was then referred to as a “third-way.” Western Europe had adopted this approach decades earlier.

Interestingly, Mises argued that a “third way” could not work, either. In the 1940s, Mises demonstrated that one intervention begets additional interventions. A so-called mixed system is nothing more than capitalism with interventionism imposed. Mises showed that any such system eventually degenerates into full-fledged socialism. In a collection of essays entitled “Planning for Freedom,” Mises concluded:

There is no other alternative to totalitarian slavery than liberty. There is no other planning for freedom and general welfare than to let the market system work. There is no other means to attain full employment, rising real wage rates and a high standard of living for the common man than private initiative and free enterprise.

The countries of Western Europe have, as Mises predicted, deteriorated into social welfare states likely never imagined or intended at their inceptions. As full-blown socialism approached, these countries became insolvent. Soon all will be forced to either dismantle their welfare states or incur sovereign defaults. The U.S., while never formally adopting either socialism or the mixed system, drifted into the mixed system by gradually adopting many socialist programs. As a result, the U.S. faces the same future of insolvency as its European counterparts.

In terms of history, the mixed system dates back only to Bismarck in the 1880s. It was initiated in a few countries in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Its widespread acceptance occurred after World War II, when several countries chose not to return to the decentralized economies that existed prior to the war. England was the prime example. Industries nationalized for the war effort remained nationalized after the war. England rapidly devolved into a third-rate economy as a result. Prime Minister Thatcher reversed the decline by re-privatizing most of these industries.

It took only about fifty to seventy years for the mixed systems to fail. That is literally a moment in terms of history. Many people are still reluctant to admit that socialism is a failure despite the theoretical warnings and the actual failures themselves. With socialists, it is never the system and always the people that are the cause of failure. “If only we had better leaders.” As Hayek and Mises pointed out, it has nothing to do with leadership. There is a fatal flaw in the concept.

As a result of attempting to extend the socialist myth, governments and their populations are now burdened with debt, much of which will never be paid. We are on the verge of a worldwide depression that will hit as governments run out of resources. It is likely that politicians will continue to play the game of “extend and pretend.” But we have reached Ms. Thatcher’s end-point: “The problem with socialism is that you run out of other people’s money.”

How ironic that President Obama’s first major achievement was ObamaCare. In May, Greece was ordered to privatize its health care system. This month, it was reported that England was going to overhaul their health care system. England was frequently referenced as a model of affordable, efficient health care by ObamaCare advocates. Apparently, the English government and its people view it differently.

These instances are not one-time events. Nor will they be limited to health care. The welfare states of Europe will soon be dismantled in part or whole. So too will the entitlement programs in the U.S. The laws of economics and physics are immutable. They are above legislation. Countries do not have the resources necessary to honor their commitments, period!

Our Founding Fathers, without using the term socialism, designed a Constitution to protect against such incoherent schemes. Over time, the Constitution was vitiated by “living document” interpretations, penumbras, and other nonsense. Now, the U.S. stands on the precipice of failure just as Western Europe. It is insolvent, and there are no other alternatives than to default or dismantle.

The world is at a very dangerous inflection point. We are about to enter a depression. Politicians are not going to back away from socialism willingly. They and large numbers of other beneficiaries will do whatever they can to retain the status quo. Despite the unequivocal failure of the modern welfare state, it is unlikely to disappear quietly. The status quo is always difficult to change. It becomes especially so in desperate economic times and for people who believe they are entitled to be taken care of by others.

The welfare state is headed for the dustbin of history. That is certain because it is no longer sustainable. The critical question is what will replace it. As Mises pointed out, there are only two alternatives: freedom or totalitarianism. There is no middle ground. There is no political compromise that can bridge this gap.

Regardless of which side of the issue you are on, the battle will be bitter and likely last a decade or more. Economically, everyone will be hurt, including many of the “well-off.” Whether our moral and ethical code is strong enough to get through this together is moot. We are not like our ancestors in the sense of their strong commitment to community, responsibility, forbearance, and integrity. We are the pampered generation, entitled to gratification now and willing to cut corners to get it.

In many ways, this problem is more serious than that faced by our Founding Fathers. After all, King George had little control over their lives or fortunes. Yet these principled men risked both rather than accept even a little bit of tyranny. Theirs was a fight of principle; ours is one of survival. The fight is made more important when it is coupled with a depression. We know what monsters rose to power during the last depression and their effect on the world.

We will either get liberty or totalitarianism. There is no middle ground. For me, the choice is clear and was stated by Patrick Henry more than two centuries ago: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

I am willing to sacrifice just as much as our Founding Fathers did so that my grandchildren and their grandchildren can live in the same country I grew up in. I hope enough others feel the same.

Monty Pelerin blogs at www.economicnoise.com.

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Former Congressman Says Obama A ‘Threat’ And Must Be Impeached

Jul 26

Posted by admin in Abuse of Power, Commentary, Impeachments, News, Opinion | 2 Comments

WND

By Bob Unruh

We have a man in White House who brazenly disregards his oath of office

A former congressman and GOP presidential candidate says for current members of the House and Senate to uphold their oath of office that includes the defense of the United States against enemies “foreign and domestic,” they need to be filing impeachment charges against Barack Obama.

Former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., joined what has become a growing surge of those recommending the ultimate solution for a president they believe not only has disagreeable policies, but is participating in actions that damage the nation.

TancredoTancredo wrote in a opinion piece in the Washington Times that, “Mr. Obama’s refusal to live up to his own oath of office – which includes the duty to defend the United States against foreign invasion – requires senators and representatives to live up to their oaths. Members of Congress must defend our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Today, that means bringing impeachment charges against Mr. Obama.”

The ultimate guide to Obama’s radical agenda – and how to stop it!

Tancredo is not the first to raise the idea of impeachment against Obama, who has implemented legislation and policies effectively nationalizing financial institutions, automobile companies, health care and many other previously private interests.

In fact, he was not even the only person on this particular day. Times columnist Jeffrey T. Kuhner, who also is president of the Edmund Burke Institute, wrote at the same time, “President Obama has engaged in numerous high crimes and misdemeanors. The Democratic majority in Congress is in peril as Americans reject his agenda. Yet more must be done: Mr. Obama should be impeached.”

Kuhner continued, “He is slowly – piece by painful piece – erecting a socialist dictatorship. We are not there – yet. But he is putting America on that dangerous path. He is undermining our constitutional system of checks and balances; subverting democratic procedures and the rule of law; presiding over a corrupt, gangster regime; and assaulting the very pillars of traditional capitalism. Like Venezuela’s leftist strongman, Hugo Chavez, Mr. Obama is bent on imposing a revolution from above – one that is polarizing America along racial, political and ideological lines. Mr. Obama is the most divisive president since Richard Nixon. His policies are Balkanizing the country. It’s time for him to go.”

Tancredo’s arguments aren’t complicated. During his brief presidential run in 2008 he focused on the border security issue of the United States, and he still is concerned that the failure to secure the U.S. boundary – especially with Mexico – will lead to tragic consequences at the hands of border-crossing terrorists.

Tancredo appeared on Fox News today to defend his position from skeptics, saying Obama’s responsibility is to protect and defend the Constitution and the United States, not “fundamentally transform” them.

“Our president is an enemy of our Constitution, and, as such, he is a danger to our safety, our security and our personal freedoms,” Tancredo warns, affirming his belief that Obama is more dangerous for the United States than al-Qaida.

“He is more dangerous simply because he is inside,” he said. “Few people took him seriously about fundamentally transforming America. That is what he is all about. That is what he has set about doing. He is a committed ideologue. When you have someone like that in the White House, it is a scary proposition.”

He cited the president’s lack of action to adequately secure the border with Mexico.

“He’s putting his country in danger,” Tancredo said. “The country the Founders put together, that’s what’s in jeopardy.”

“Barack Obama is one of the most powerful presidents this nation has seen in generations. He is powerful because he is supported by large majorities in Congress, but, more importantly, because he does not feel constrained by the rule of law. Whether he is putting up the weakest possible defense of the Defense of Marriage Act despite the Justice Department’s legal obligation to support existing law; disenfranchising Chrysler and GM bondholders in order to transfer billions of investor dollars to his supporters in the United Auto Workers; or implementing yet a third offshore oil-drilling moratorium even after two federal courts have thrown out two previous moratoriums, President Obama is determined to see things done his way regardless of obstacles,” Tancredo wrote in his op-ed.

“To Mr. Obama, the rule of law is a mere inconvenience to be ignored, overcome or ‘transcended’ through international agreements or ‘norms.’”

Tancredo wrote that the “dedicated Marxist who lives in the White House” holds power over budgets, the judiciary, national defense and health care. As such, “his regime and his program are not just about changing public policy in the conventional sense. When one considers the combination of his stop-at-nothing attitude, his contempt for limited government, his appointment of judges who want to create law rather than interpret it – all of these make this president today’s single greatest threat to the great experiment in freedom that is our republic.

“Yes, Mr. Obama is a more serious threat to America than al-Qaida. We know that Osama bin Laden and followers want to kill us, but at least they are an outside force against whom we can offer our best defense. But when a dedicated enemy of the Constitution is working from the inside, we face a far more dangerous threat. Mr. Obama can accomplish with the stroke of his pen what bin Laden cannot accomplish with bombs and insurgents.”

Tancredo, who served five terms representing Colorado and now is chairman of the Rocky Mountain Foundation, was joined by Kuhner, who accused Obama of abusing his office and violating his oath.

Kuhner cited Obama’s demand that all Americans buy health insurance.

“The federal government does not have the right to coerce every citizen to purchase a good or service. This is not in the Constitution, and it represents an unprecedented expansion of power,” he wrote. “Yet Obamacare’s most pernicious aspect is its federal funding of abortion. Pro-lifers are now compelled to have their tax dollars used to subsidize insurance plans that allow for the murder of unborn children. This is more than state-sanctioned infanticide. It violates the conscience rights of religious citizens.”

He further cited Obama’s actions regarding the BP oil spill.

“There is a legal process for claims to be adjudicated, but Mr. Obama has behaved more like Mr. Chavez or Russia’s Vladimir Putin: He has bullied BP into setting up a $20 billion compensation fund administered by an Obama appointee. In other words, the assets of a private company are to be raided to serve a political agenda.”

He also wrote about the takeovers in the auto and financial industries, and the New Black Panther case.

“Under Mr. Obama, the Constitution has become a meaningless scrap of paper,” he said. “As president, he is supposed to respect the rule of law. Instead, his administration has dropped charges of voter intimidation against members of the New Black Panther Party. This was done even though their menacing behavior was caught on tape: men in military garb brandishing clubs and threatening whites at a polling site.”

Tancredo nearly two months ago broached the subject of impeachment, suggesting an “impeachment file.”

“I believe there is a growing body of evidence of impeachable offenses sufficient to warrant a formal impeachment resolution in the House, followed by a trial in the Senate,” he wrote at the time.

And the suggestion even has come from onlookers at a presidential appearance. CNN has documented when Obama made a surprise visit to a crowd on a shuttle bus, one onlooker shouted, “When are you going to quit. When are you going to be impeached?”

The issue even has appeared among online gamers, when Microsoft told an Xbox user the signon name “Impeach Obama” was not allowed because, “If you were President Obama, how would you feel if someone wanted to impeach you?”

Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, in a column on WND, discussed the ImpeachObamaCampaign.com that they launched.

They reported that many, instead of examining the evidence, attacked the messengers.

    “We expected these attacks,” they reported. But they said the unresolved issues include:

  • Gerald Walpin, inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service, investigated Kevin Johnson, a big buddy of the president, for misuse of funds from an AmeriCorps grant. Obama did not like Walpin’s investigation and findings, whereupon he vindictively fired Walpin to cover for his friend, Johnson. A subsequent investigation vindicated Walpin’s judgment in the matter.
  • Barack Obama oversaw the effective takeover by government of banks, the largest insurance company (AIG), General Motors and Chrysler – the bulk of the U.S. auto industry – thus stripping bondholders, shareholders and others of their personal property.
  • Barack Obama is actively pursuing cap-and-trade legislation. Instead of taxing the very air we breathe, it will instead, in a manner of speaking, tax the air we exhale, giving the government unprecedented control over the economy and American businesses. Those taxed businesses will then pass the fees onto the American people.
  • Spending American citizens’ money, Barack Hussein Obama is running up our debt at an alarming rate. In just the nine months since Obama assumed office, our national debt has gone up by over a trillion dollars. To put that figure in perspective, it took George W. Bush eight years to add $4.8 trillion to the national debt.
  • And, to add insult to injury, Obama is printing money like it’s going out of style. The effect will be hyperinflation, a crippling of our economy and, quite possibly, personal hardship on a scale that has not been experienced since the Great Depression.
  • Barack Hussein Obama appointed countless “czars” to oversee everything from the closing of Guantanamo to the food we eat. These czars don’t have to be approved by the Senate. The czars have unprecedented power and report only to Obama. Members of both parties are disturbed by these extra-constitutional excrescences. Sen. Robert Byrd said: “The accumulation of power by White House staff can threaten the constitutional system of checks and balances.” Rep. Jack Kingston called the czars a “parallel government.”
  • And finally, Obama consistently refuses to approve the release of his actual birth certificate, college transcripts and his medical records. Is he trying to hide something that will threaten his presidency?

Retired U.S. Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely, a noted military leader who now is a presence on the Internet with his Stand Up For America and Veterans Defenders websites, told WND he would like Obama to resign.

Vallely, who served in Vietnam and retired in 1991 from the U.S. Army as deputy commanding general for the Pacific, said, “We now must call for the immediate resignation of Barry Soetero (AKA President Barack Hussein Obama) … based on incompetence, deceit, fraud, corruption, dishonesty and violation of the U.S. oath of office and the Constitution.”

“We can wait no longer for a traditional change of power and new government,” he has warned.

“‘We the People’ have had enough. Enough is enough. The Obama White House and identifiable members of Congress are now on a progressive socialist, treasonous death march and are bankrupting and weakening the country. We have watched them violate their sacred oath of office. ‘We, the People’ cannot wait for and solely rely on the next round of elections in November of this year. It is now and each day that these public servants must put the citizen’s interests above self-interest by resigning immediately,” he said.

Peter Ferrara, on the American Spectator website, also has predicted Obama’s resignation.

“I am now ready to predict that President Obama will not even make it [to 2012],” he wrote. “I predict that he will resign in discredited disgrace before the fall of 2012,” Ferrera said.

Opinion by ImpeachCongress: Fellow Americans, we are at a crossroads here in America. We either stand up for our country as the founding fathers bequeathed it to us or we roll over and give up our Liberty. It is our choice. There are “designing men” as George Washington put it that want to destroy the very Liberty that America stands for and our forefathers fought for to further their own personal power.

We are a nation of free individuals. We cannot succumb to the progressive onslaught on our freedom. We must stand up, united, against the tyranny of the federal government and send the message this November that the progressive liberals in Congress are done. Once Constitutional Conservatives have gained control of both Houses we must begin to dismantle the past 110 years of progressive influence on our Country.

The first order of business will be to either impeach Obama or force his resignation followed by the criminal trials he so deserves. Second, we bring impeachment proceedings against any remaining Representatives and Senators, that were not voted out in November, that have been complicit in this great fraud on the American People. And, finally, we begin the arduous task of undoing the mess of laws and bureaucracies that have strangled our Liberty for one hundred years. Close the department of education and the IRS. Repeal the internal revenue code and replace it with a fair and simple flat tax. Put education back into the hands of State and Local government. Repeal the seventeenth amendment and scale federal government back to the seventeen enumerated powers granted it in the Constitution. We must unite around these principals and take back our country!

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