Quote of the day – Quin Hillyer

The truth is, it’s a sad day in America when Joe Biden’s blarney would be a marked improvement in Oval Office leadership.

Read more at the American Spectator

Obama continues to vote present because he just likes Being There

Obama has not only diminished the nation in the eyes of the world but he’s diminished the office of president in the eyes of the American people.  It’s a shame when Americans have lost all pride in the POTUS and the first family. It’s sad that he’s such a bumbling fool, which reflects on all of us.

From bowing to foreign leaders:

from AmericanThinker.com

to denying American  exceptionalism to escorting the Dalai Lama past the garbage and out of the White House via the back door,

from FrugalCafeBlogZone.com

Obama has weakened our position on the world stage.

So, when the president is selling $5 raffle tickets from his living room in the White House for a dinner with him or Joe Biden, it’s obvious to all that the prestige of the office is in the basement. It’s on par with the sleaziness of selling the Lincoln bedroom.

 

Let’s hope a dinner with a common American goes better than this one did:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The Obamas are totally out of their element as the First Family of America.

~~~ooOoo~~~

Obama has the Alinsky community organizer job down very well: give the idea and incentive and then delegate so if (or when) it doesn’t work out, he has clean hands. It’s really nothing more than a continuation of voting “present” by just Being There.

Just Being There (in the White House) is all he really wants anyway: the perks and the private concerts with super stars, the private jet and personal chef. Honestly, after reading Michael Barone in the National Review today, I can see why BO wants to be president again. Being There is just so easy.

Which past leader does Barack Obama most closely resemble? His admirers, not all of them liberals, used to compare him to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

[…]

But there is another comparison I think more appropriate for a president who, according to one of his foreign-policy staffers, prefers to “lead from behind.” The man I have in mind is Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie Being There.

Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardiner in Being There. And many believe that just like Chauncey, Obama walks on water, too.

As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well in the garden.”

“First comes the spring and summer,” he explains, “but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.” The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, “There will be growth in the spring.”

Kind of reminds you of Barack Obama’s approach to the federal budget, doesn’t it?

[…]

On all these issues, Obama seems oddly disengaged, aloof from the hard work of government, hesitant about making choices.

That doesn’t sound like Lincoln. Or Roosevelt. Or even Jimmy Carter. More like “then we have fall and winter.”

 

Just a few words on hypocrisy and stupid

I just have a couple of things I’d like to drop here:

High speed commuter rail:  One word – Amtrak. And if it were so profitable, why isn’t Union Pacific building them?

Black supremacy groups: see Jill Scott (whoever the hell she is) or Common who are against inter-racial marriage. Pop quiz: What’s the difference between Black Americans who hold those opinions and the Aryan Nation? And don’t tell me it’s guns. One need only look at the Black on Black crime in this country to see that’s not true.

Racial bigotry: see Jill Scott and Common, again. Let a white entertainer say those same things and you’d be seeing the end of a career.

Joe Biden. ‘Nuff said.

Our transparent government, locking reporters in closets

I have to wonder if anyone is going to have to answer for this or if the media will remain silent and accept this kind of treatment. Be sure and go to Drudge and check out the picture of this pool reporters confinement quarters. This really is unacceptable but expected from the democrats.

From the Drudge Report:

Staffers with Vice President Joe Biden confined an Orlando Sentinel reporter in a closet this week to keep him from mingling with high-powered guests gathered for a Democratic fundraiser.

Reporter Scott Powers was the designated “pool reporter” for the vice president’s Wednesday visit to the massive Winter Park, Fla., home of developer and philanthropist Alan Ginsburg. The veep hadn’t arrived yet but most of the 150 guests (minimum $500 donation) had. They were busy noshing on caprese crostini with oven-dried mozzarella and basil, rosemary flatbread with grapes honey and gorgonzola cheese and bacon deviled eggs, before a lunch of grilled chicken Caesar and garden vegetable wraps.

Not so for Powers. A “low-level staffer” put Powers in a storage closet and then stood guard outside the door, Powers told the DRUDGE REPORT. “When I’d stick my head out, they’d say, ‘Not yet. We’ll let you know when you can come out.'”

And no crustini for Powers, either. He made do with a bottle of water to sip as he sat at a tiny makeshift desk, right next to a bag marked “consignment.” Powers was closeted at about 11:30 a.m., held for about an hour and 15 minutes, came out for 35 minutes of remarks by Biden and Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, and then returned to his jail for the remainder of the event.

Powers’ phone didn’t work in the closet, but his Blackberry did, so he fired a picture of his impromptu prison to his editors, who posted a short blog item on the lack of freedom of the press under the veep’s control.

Powers didn’t mention his confinement in either of his pool reports that day, saying only that “press coverage was limited to a single pool reporter, filing on behalf of all local media, who was allowed to listen to the remarks but not given an opportunity to talk with anyone at the event.”

On Friday, Powers said, the home’s owner called him. “He said he had no idea they’d put me in a closet and was very sorry. He said he was just following their lead and was extremely embarrassed by the whole thing.”

It’s beginning: the first Catholic hospitals for sale due to ObamaCare

This is a story that will be ignored by the msm because it will require a little digging and the need to ask some hard questions. But I can promise that when David Limbaugh writes his second volume of “Crimes Against Liberty” it will be heavily covered.

In a nutshell, 3 Catholic hospitals are for sale and will be closing in VP Biden’s hometown – Scranton, PA – all because of ObamaCare. The CEO of these hospitals was apparently strong armed by Obama operatives, behind the scenes, to walk back his original statement that ObamaCare “absolutely” was a major cause for these closures and sales.

Arm twisting by this regime is not a new thing:

As listed by the Wall Street Journal, those unintended consequences [of the passage of ObamaCare] included 2011 premium increases shooting up as high as 9%; “multibillion-dollar corporate writedowns by Verizon, AT&T, Caterpillar and others”; the disruption of insurance markets, a show-down with McDonald’s, the imposition of price controls on premiums, insurers withdrawing from Medicare Advantage.

In what appears to have become a pattern, the response from the Obama Administration has been repeatedly swift and harsh — compared by one critic as an episode straight out of the Sopranos, the famous HBO mobster series.

Henry Waxman, at first demanded that there be a congressional hearing in an attempt to intimidate these big businesses. But then he was informed that “hey, they were actually abiding by the law” when they informed their employees and insured of what was in store for them thanks to the new health care bill. Pigface Waxman had to back off and crawl back under his rock.

In Scranton “a town that is heavily Catholic, the realization that three hospitals that did not perform abortions could be sold to owners who would allow the procedure is infuriating.”

The abortion allowance in ObamaCare is tantamount to why these closures are happening. You will read this story and the flimsy change of heart by Joe Sestak (the one hold out on the ObamaCare vote because of his so-called pro-life position) will become clear. Sestak and other Catholics, including Sister Carol, have sold out to the Obama administration.

Obama’s Recovery Summer Vacation

From the Heritage Foundation:

From Drudge: Biden says he’s 2nd in line to be president

Biden never lets us down.

Burt Prelutsky – good column

Obama and the Jews

By Burt Prelutsky (Archive) · Monday, April 12, 2010

During the presidential campaign, a lot of people insisted that Obama was really a Muslim pretending to be a Christian. I wasn’t one of them. I did figure, though, that if my name was Barack Hussein Obama and I was going to run for president a mere seven years after 9/11, I wouldn’t admit I was a Muslim, either. On the other hand, I, personally, would have sooner trusted a Muslim who’d been attending a mosque in Dearborn for 20 years than a Christian who’d been attending a racist, anti-American church in Chicago for all that time.

Anybody, after all, can claim to be a Christian. The proof, in the words of that fabulous effing wordsmith, Joe Biden, is in the pudding, and when I learned that among Obama’s friends and mentors were such notorious anti-Semites as Rev. Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Rashid Khalidi and Father Pfleger, it certainly kick-started my suspicions about his religious convictions. Still, as I saw it, when in Chicago, you do as Chicagoans do. And, that being the case, I figured that in such swampland, even if a saint were to wade into Chicago politics, he would eventually be knee-deep in snakes and alligators named Tony Rezko, Richard Daley and Bill Ayers.

Can you think of anything scarier than this?

Well, aside from an Obama second term?

Another self admitted “progressive” on the Supreme Court.

It really doesn’t sound all that far-fetched after you read the opinion piece from The Daily Beast:

Last week, ABC News reported: “Lawyers for President Obama have been working behind the scenes to prepare for the possibility of one, and maybe two Supreme Court vacancies this spring. Court watchers believe two of the more liberal members of the court, Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, could decide to step aside for reasons of age and health. That would give the president his second and third chance to shape his legacy on the Supreme Court.”

…

Some have suggested Hillary play musical chairs with Joe Biden in a second term. Biden actually wanted to be secretary of State more than he wanted to be vice president. So, he’d probably be game. The problem with this scenario is that in terms of power and influence, the veep slot would be step down for Hillary. And Team Obama never liked the idea of giving Bill Clinton entrée to meddle around the familiar old 18 acres.  On the other hand, the surest route to a party nomination is to launch your candidacy from the cat bird’s seat of the vice presidency.

…

But if in the end if it’s about what is realistic, and how Hillary could have the greatest impact on society, most would agree she could have the greatest political influence by hanging around for a couple of decades casting votes and writing opinions on the Supreme Court.

… why would Obama consider her?

One possibility: legacy. As popular as Obama is, and as many votes as he received in 2008, he still stepped over Clinton to get to the throne.  And a lot of woman haven’t forgotten or forgiven. In one stroke, he would eliminate any remaining bad feelings and would become a Hillaryland hero.

Stripping away the drama, the politics and psychobabble, she’d be a great choice for Obama and the Democrats.  She’s as smart and as qualified as any prospect her party could nominate.

~~~ooOoo~~~

It takes a Village to get on the Supreme Court?

Steyn: In Obama’s America you’ll all work for the government

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The world turns. In Indonesia, the principal of a Muslim boarding school in Tangerang who is accused of impregnating a 15-year-old student says the DNA test will prove that a malevolent genie is the real father.

In New Zealand, a German tourist, Herr Hans Kurt Kubus, has been jailed for attempting to board a plane at Christchurch with 44 live lizards in his underpants.

In Britain, a research team at King’s College, London, has declared that the female “G-spot” does not, in fact, exist.

In France a group of top gynecologists led by Monsieur Sylvain Mimoun has dismissed the findings, and said what do you expect if you ask a group of Englishmen to try to find a woman’s erogenous zone.

But, in America, Barack Obama is talking.

Talking, talking, talking. He talked for 90 minutes at the State of the Union. No matter how many geckos you shoveled down your briefs, you still lost all feeling in your legs. And still he talked. If you had an erogenous zone before he started, by the end it was undetectable even to Frenchmen. But on he talked. As respected poverty advocate Sen. John Edwards commented, “After the first hour, even my malevolent genie was back in the bottle.”

Like any gifted orator, the president knows how to vary the talk with a little light and shade. Sometimes he hectors, sometimes he whines, sometimes he demands. He hectored the Supreme Court. He whined about all the problems he inherited. He demanded Congress put a jobs bill on his desk. Or was it a desk job on his bill? No matter. He does Nixon impressions, too: “We do not quit,” he said.

Boy, you can say that again!

So he did: “We don’t quit. I don’t quit,” he said. Throughout the chamber, Democrats were quitting. “I quit,” says Rep. Marion Berry of Arkansas, declining to run this November. “I quit,” says Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, doing likewise. “I quit,” says Bo Biden of Delaware, son of Vice President Joe Biden, choosing not to succeed to his father’s seat in America’s House of Lords.

But not Barack Obama: “I don’t quit.” So on he went. As my colleague Rich Lowry put it after the Massachusetts vote, the public thinks Obama doesn’t get it, and Obama thinks the public doesn’t get it. And as he’s got the microphone he’s gonna keep talking at you until you do get it.

The ever tinnier, more perfunctory sophomoric uplift at the start and finish can’t conceal the hope-killing, jobs-slaying, soul-sapping message in between, which is perfectly consistent, and has been for two years. As President Obama sees it, whatever the problem — from health care to education, banking to the environment — the solution is more Washington.

Simply as a matter of internal logic, this is somewhat perplexing. After all, when he isn’t blaming George W. Bush, Obama blames “Washington” — a Washington mired in “partisanship” and “pettiness” and “the same tired battles” and “Washington gimmicks” that do nothing but ensure that our “problems have grown worse.” Washington, Obama tells us, is “unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems.”

So let’s have more Washington! In our schools, in our hospitals, in our cars, in everything!

Which raises the question: Does even Obama listen to Obama’s speeches?

The public does — at least to this extent: They understand that, when he’s attacking the tired old Washington games, he’s just playing the tired old Washington games. But, when he’s proposing the tired old Washington solutions, he means it; that’s the real Obama, the only Obama on offer. And everything the president proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy’s spending means, at some point down the road, either higher taxes or total societal collapse.

Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.

That’s why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president’s proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of “health” “care” “reform” that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they’re being made up as they go along — and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon’s new corporate tax.

In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? Obama can bury it in half a ton of leaden telepromptered sludge but the world has got the message: More Washington, more microregulation of every aspect of your life, more multi-trillion-dollar spending, and no agreed rules in a game ever more rigged against you.

Obama and the Democrats have decided, in the current clinch, to “double down.” That hardly does justice to what the president’s doing. In effect, he’s told embattled congressmen and senators to strap on the old suicide-bomber belt and self-detonate for the team this November.

That’s a lot of virgins to pass out, but, with this administration, budget restraints aren’t exactly a problem: Untold pleasures will await every sacrificial incumbent in paradise, or at any rate the coming liberal utopia.

What’s the end game here? President Obama gave it away in his student-loan “reform” proposals: If you choose to go into “public service,” any college-loan debts will be forgiven after 10 years.

Because “public service” is more noble than the selfish, money-grubbing private sector. C’mon, everybody knows that. So we need to encourage more people to go into “public service.”

Why?

In the past 60 years, the size of America’s state and local workforce has increased five times faster than the general population. But the president says it’s still not enough: We have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine.

Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured or marketed any product other than himself. So, quite reasonably, he sees government dependency as the natural order of things.

And in his college-loan plan he’s explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you’re a schmuck and a loser. In the America he’s building, you’ll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama’s proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It’s the audacity of hopelessness.

In Massachusetts, enough voters got the message. And the more speeches this one-note politician inflicts on the nation the louder they’ll hear it.