Rolling up his sleeves today, to give another tired-out, cliched, demagoguery-laden campaign style speech at George Mason University:

It was the fourth outside-the-Beltway event Obama has held on health care in the past two weeks, and his last public push for the legislation that tops his domestic list. He postponed until summer an overseas trip to stay in Washington to help ensure passage and rolled his shirtsleeves up to wade into his delivery. With so much riding on the outcome – from the policy changes he wants to his own political standing – Obama spoke at top decibel levels and, rare for him, ad-libbed considerably from his prepared remarks, filling them in with folksier language and additional dire warnings.

The first-come-first-served crowd of 8,500 responded with vigor, punctuating Obama’s speech with loud cheers. A handful of people booed and interrupted, with one yelling “No socialism,” but the vast majority appeared supportive of his goal.

So many stupid, “wtf” lines in all his speeches….

I don’t believe we should give the government or the insurance companies more control over health care in America.
-President Obama, George Mason University today

And he says it with a straight face, folks. “I don’t believe in big government”, he says. Does he realize how foolish he sounds?! Does the man honestly believe the things coming out of his mouth? Or expect us to?

Then again, there still appears to be a significant number of my fellow citizens who are still enthralled under the rapture of the snake oil salesman prez.

Apparently, this received the loudest applause from the students at George Mason:

starting this year, if you don’t have insurance, all new plans will allow you to stay on your parents’ insurance policy until you’re 26 years old.

Selfish, selfish, selfish. Infantilizing….nanny-government.

“What we’re talking about is commonsense reform,” he said. “You’ve been hearing a whole bunch of nonsense.”

Yup…everytime you open your mouth, Mr. President. “A whole bunch of nonsense”….

Read the rest of this entry »

Independent investigative journalist, Michael Fumento, has done the yeoman’s work on what appears to be the latest “Balloon Boy” hoax, Jim Sike’s runaway Prius escapade on San Diego’s Interstate 8. Just as a mesmerized nation watched a solitary balloon supposedly containing a young boy, made all the more dramatic with hushed voices of talking heads expressing their horror, again the media dominated the airwaves with a runaway Prius and 61 year old Realtor®, Jim Sikes, at the wheel, on his cell with 911 responders.

Still, there were a few detecting a distinct aroma about the affair. 911 repeatedly told Sikes to utilize the NHTSA recommended, and amazingly simple solution in case of SUA (sudden unintended acceleration)… either shift to neutral, or turn off the engine.

In both cases, Sikes refused to respond, or indicated he would not take that advice.

Over a 23-minute period the 911 dispatcher repeatedly pleaded with Sikes to shift into neutral. He simply refused and then essentially stopped talking to her except to say that he thought he could smell his brakes burning.

“I thought about” shifting into neutral, Sikes said at a televised press conference the day after the incident. But “I had never played with this kind of a transmission, especially when you’re driving and I was actually afraid to do that.” Sikes, who has driven the car for two years, also said “I figured if I knocked it over [the gear knob] the car might flip.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The other day a friend and I were having a conversation(to protect the innocent, I’ll call him Steve).  Somehow, the conversation drifted off into politics.  During our political discussion Steve said to me “why do you even care about politics?  Why even try to stop this stuff? There’s nothing you can do.  You should just live your life and go with the flow.”  I told him “that’s exactly why I care.  I just want to live my life.  I don’t want the government involved in every aspect of my life.  Who are they to tell me how to live my life?  Who are they to tell me what to do with my money? … I care because if everyone had this “give in” attitude we would already be living under tyranny.”

The thought of Steve’s “just give in because there’s nothing you can do about it” attitude has been swirling around in my head for a while now.  It’s shameful that any American’s feel this way.  It is infuriating that any man would prefer a life of uninterrupted subservience to government authority  over one of turmoil in defense of their own rights and that of their descendant’s.  Yet it seems that many American’s have this attitude.  Our founding fathers recognized this unfortunate trait that many human beings possess.  They recognized that people would often prefer to do nothing rather than stand in their own defense.  They warned us against this attitude.

I have compiled a list of quotes from the founding fathers warning us against quietly submitting to the will of men in power: Read the rest of this entry »

The summer before leaving for university, I decided to take a pack trip; you could call it my senior trip, except I had never been in a formal classroom. My goal was to visit my cousins and their gold mining ventures in the Yukon Territory. University didn’t really appeal to me and if the truth was known, I was only attending to fulfill the wishes of my father. If I liked gold mining and there was opportunity in the Yukon: why waste four years in school?

My father agreed to the trip, reluctantly: he maintained I should take a pickup and drive straight there without the possibility of disappearing forever in a thousand miles of bush and mountains, never to be seen or heard of again. I assured him I felt way more comfortable on a horse than in a vehicle and persuaded him that a horse was more my style and it might be the last chance I would ever have to really see the wild country. I promised to start home in the second week of July and to keep a journal, so not to lose my famous sense of time.

That spring we had heavy rains with heavy snow melt, the rivers and creeks were raging between the high water marks of their banks, and I was lunging in the traces while waiting to leave. Crossing rivers and creeks while they are in flood stage is suicide, so I waited in the agony of expectation of an exciting pack trip. I loaded up 40 hot rounds for my 8mm Mauser; they were hot, because I wouldn’t fire my weapon except to kill the odd animal for meat or to bail myself out of a Grizzly encounter. I’d pack a 22 rifle for shooting ptarmigan and grouse, sport wing shooting was out of the question, head shots from 30 feet was the order of the day, my apologies sportsmen, but this was a question of survival and eating well on the trail. Read the rest of this entry »

AP’s Andrew Taylor hits the media cyberwaves with the news that today’s CBO analysis of Obama’s 2011 budget plans would generate deficits totalling $9.8 trillion over the next decade…. $1.2 trillion more than predicted. But just as Harry Reid sluffed off a job loss of 36K last month as “a big day in America” Taylor also attempts to soften the blow.

The agency says its future-year predictions of tax revenues are more pessimistic than the administration’s. That’s because CBO projects slightly slower economic growth than the White House.

The deficit picture has turned alarmingly worse since the recession that started at the end of 2007, never dipping below 4 percent of the size of the economy over the next decade. Economists say that deficits of that size are unsustainable and could put upward pressure on interest rates, crowd out private investment in the economy and ultimately erode the nation’s standard of living.

Ignoring the numbers, and keeping in the spirit of the “hope and change” mantra, Taylor razzle dazzles the reader by saying the budget avoided decisions on Medicare and Medicaid cuts that can’t keep up with the rising costs of providing medical services to the elderly and the poor. Of course, none of this is cured in O’healthcare, BTW…

Additionally Taylor expresses his skepticism that the GOP members of the “deficit commission” Obama created by Executive Order when a supermajority Congress rejected the same entity, would agree to going along with proposed tax increases.

Read the rest of this entry »

America has been denied in its thirst for a leader. We are experiencing trying times, engaged in two wars, several states on the verge of economic collapse, a banking system that has a peculiar relationship with our federal government, staggering unemployment, an Executive that is preoccupied with a Health Care Plan that America has rejected, a domestic security departmet that has targeted American Vets and political opposition rather than Terrorists and has told us the system works when a terrorist on an airplane has a failed detonation, an Attorney General who refuses to prosecute obvious election felonies against members of his own race, an illegal alien problem with an un-enforced border that is not being addressed, bizarre and unprecedented nationalization of automakers, a stimulus program that enriched fat cat bankers and union bosses while leaving america with staggering debt and no detectable benefit, and with every foreign policy initiative our President leaves us feeling that our National interests are being pre-empted for a vague notion of International Socialism.

America is reaching out with desperation for leadership: like unfulfilled lovers we are left with the unappealing, sterile, and chaste meanage a trois of Pelosi, Reed, and Obama. Shakespeare portrayed America’s emptiness in its need for a leader and the emptiness when those leaders are unable to fulfill the basic fundamentals of leadership with the example of ‘Venus And Adonis’ and the illustration of unrequited love.

In one of the most sexually loaded poems of English Literature, Shakespeare’s goddess is like a beast in heat and unleashes sexual innuendos at the object of her erotic arousal, Adonis, a teenage boy; while she is in a perpetual state erotic arousal and oozing with desire, Adonis is oblivious to her passion and remains obsessed with himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Byron York writes about Obama railing against the attempts by Republicans to stop his railroading of the United States:

In his speech at a Denver fundraiser yesterday, President Obama repeated what has become a key talking point for Democrats — that the Senate “doesn’t get anything done” and the reason for that is that some Republicans, who “don’t believe in government,” are happy to block the administration’s initiatives because blocking government initiatives is “consistent with their philosophy.” Here’s what the president said:

Look, something you got to understand — for those who don’t believe in government, those who don’t believe that we have obligations to each other, it’s a lot easier task. If you can gum up the works, if you make things broken, if the Senate doesn’t get anything done, well, that’s consistent with their philosophy. It’s a whole lot easier to say no to everything. It’s a whole lot easier to blame somebody else. That politics that feeds on peoples’ insecurities, especially during tough political times — that’s the easiest kind of politics. There’s a long, storied history of that kind of politics.

Read the rest of this entry »

Video highlights from day one
Check C-Span or Town Hall live video feed for more from the conference.

Marco Rubio!
Contribute to his campaign

“America already has a Democrat Party, it doesn’t need two Democrat parties.”

Text highlights from the transcript:
Rubio began talking about his grandfather, who was born poor and grew up disabled by polio in Cuba. He taught young Marco some very important lessons about American exceptionalism.
Read the rest of this entry »

While the US media has been diddling around with political barbs and infighting, teleprompters vs palm’prompters, and spinning the stage show that’s the health care bipartisan summit, my mind has been on our US military and NATO troops… including one of our FA own, Old Trooper. The US, NATO and Afghan military have amassed around the village of Marjah to implement Operation Mushtarak, or “Together,” …one leg of the strategy to again seize three key areas of Afghanistan, and beat back the resurgence of the Taliban since NATO took over security in 2006. The overview of the Afghan strategy includes not only the military strategy, discussed here, but “…political development, economic development, counter narcotics, and the Afghanistan police and justice system.”

The McChrystal plan is a short term (12-18 months) “surge” that changes the prior activities of going after the bad guys, and substitutes an aggressive offense to provide security to the Afghans, whom the Taliban have intimidated and brow beaten into submission. As the LongWarJoural article states:

For the short term, the US does not consider it necessary to control the entire country but rather to secure a few key areas and population centers. The goal is for the people of Afghanistan to first see an opportunity for a normal, better future, and then to start to experience it.

The key areas that General McChrystal has identified are:

• Helmand province, particularly the Helmand River valley
• Kandahar City and the areas surrounding the city
• The provinces of Paktika, Paktia, and Khost

The second part of the strategy is to develop the Afghan National Security Force into a force that is capable of providing security for the country. Although ANSF development will not be completed in 18 months, it needs to demonstrate both substantial progress and that the long term goal of the ANSF providing for security for the entire country is achievable. A major review will be held in December 2010 to assess progress.

The Helmand Province is key, being a fertile agricultural area of Afghanistan serving not to supply much needed food for the nation, but poppies for opium for terrorist funding, it’s refinement and storage. With an unused hydroelectric dam Kajak at the northern end of the river valley, the area offers strategic import for a nation’s food belt.

Read the rest of this entry »

Texas

My friends and family in California may not understand this, but many of us here in Texas believe that Texas is far too liberal for our blood. “But you don’t have a personal state income tax; you let people shoot burglars in other people’s front yards; everyone is Texas drives around with either a concealed weapon or a rifle prominently displayed in the window of your Ford 150’s.” This is all good stuff, I agree, but it is not good enough.

Many Texans believe that, closely tied to freedom is the freedom to own property. We Texans know that we have to pay taxes, and that pisses us off, but we will pay our taxes. However, what has happened here as of late is, property taxes have shot through the roof; they have more than doubled over the past 10 years (even with the reduction of property values), in part to feed a school system which is steadily getting worse, despite their getting a lot more money. Many of us Texas don’t like this. We don’t like to feel as if we are renting our property from the government. When we buy a plot of land, we want to own it; we don’t want to pay rent on it to the government, and that is essentially what has happened here in Texas with our property taxes. Sure, people pay higher property taxes in some liberal states, but this is hand-over-the-heart Texas, where some of us would vote for having a hunting season on liberals, so we don’t want to pay $3000–$5000/year for a house we own free and clear. I know one family who pays the Texas government around $12,000/year to live in their own home.

Here is what’s going on politically. There’s Governor Rick Perry, George W’s former lieutenant governor (or whatever we call ‘em here) who has been governor for about 10 years and is considered the conservative in the race. Read the rest of this entry »

Doesn’t look like it’s going so well:

WASHINGTON – Finding a job got much tougher last year, as the number of available openings fell by nearly one quarter.

At the same time, the unemployed population soared by more than one-third, leaving more laid-off workers competing for fewer jobs.

All told, there were 6.1 unemployed workers in December, on average, for every available position, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday.

That’s a sharp increase from 3.4 jobless workers per opening in December of 2008, and much worse than the 1.7 unemployed people per opening in December 2007, when the recession began. Read the rest of this entry »

Did Scott Brown’s election signal that a GOP victory wave is on the way?

Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) Sworn in…FINALLY!

Vice President Joe Biden, right, reenacts the swearing in of Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass. , left, as Brown’s wife Gail Huff holds the family bibles, Thursday, Feb. 4, 2010,in the Old Senate Chamber on Capitol Hill in Washington. Earlier, Brown was sworn in on the floor of the Senate.

Can GOP Take the Senate?

Even in the days following Brown’s election, Larry Sabato, one of the best political analysts, predicted the GOP would make only a further 3-5 seat gain in November; well short of the ten additional seats needed for the GOP to take control of the Senate. In early February, Larry polished his crystal ball and found fresh data for a more optimistic, yet still cautious takeover scenario:

Keeping Our Senate Sensibility
By Larry J. Sabato, Director, U.Va. Center for Politics
Sabato’s Crystal Ball
February 4th, 2010
Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t hold your breath!

“America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity.”
–Barack Hussein Obama’s State of the Union Address 2010

Prior to that declaration, Obama said:

“That’s why we stand with the girl who yearns to go to school in Afghanistan; why we support the human rights of the women marching through the streets of Iran; why we advocate for the young man denied a job by corruption in Guinea.”

Going so far as to mention concern for a job applicant denied because of corruption in far off Guinea. But how about a little closer to home? How about standing up for the human rights of Venezuelans who are the target of a continuing campaign of violence against the political opponents of dictator Hugo Chavez?

Wizbang has the story and reminds us of this photo:

Obama greets his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez at
5th Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain April 17, 2009.

Government directed violence has increased this week as tens of thousands of Venezuelans have taken to the streets to protest the Marxist policies of Hugo Chavez which have destroyed Venezuela’s once prosperous economy. Electricity rationing in a country with enormous oil wealth is just the latest sign that Marxism doesn’t supply the basic needs of the people.

The images of government storm troopers torturing and beating it’s citizens would outrage the left if it were being perpetrated by a U.S. friendly regime:
Read the rest of this entry »

Here is some fresh new hypocrisy from the Democrats. The video below is of Democrat Sen. Robert Menendez speaking on CNN about the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision:

Another statement from the good Senator:

The stunning decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will allow special interests – including the nation’s largest corporations – to spend an unlimited amount of money to influence political campaigns, drowning out the voice of the American people and rolling back decades of progress to ensure elections are fair.

But wouldn’t ya know: Read the rest of this entry »