President Obama trashes President Obama's policy.

When the President cancelled America's missle defense shield designed to protect the eastern seaboard from long-range Iranian missle strikes, he was going against the advice of -- President Obama, who said in April:

So let me be clear: Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran's neighbors and our allies. The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles. As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven.

Or, as we have said so many times before, EVERY PROMISE Obama makes comes with an expiration date.

MIchelle Obama REALLY wants to take over your health care.

Powerline's John Hindraker makes a great observation about Michelle Obama's foray into the Health Care debate:

Today Michelle Obama got into the act, proclaiming that the current health care system "crushes women":

Michelle Obama said women are being "crushed by the current structure of our health care" because they often are responsible for taking care of family illnesses, arranging checkups and monitoring follow-up care.

"Women are the ones to do it," she said to an audience of 140 people, including representatives from groups such as the Women's Chamber of Commerce and the National Council of Negro Women. "Mothers are the ones that do it. And many women find themselves doing the same thing for their spouses."

I really don't understand this. Under Obamacare, will someone other than mothers (or fathers) arrange checkups for their kids? Take care of family illnesses? Make sure the kids are taking their medicine and get follow-up care if they need it? Is there really anything like this in any of the Democrats' proposals? If mothers (and fathers) don't arrange their kids' checkups, who will? Someone else's mother or father, apparently. No doubt they'll care more and do a better job.

The Obama administration seems to be bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase "nanny state."

I have no idea what Michelle is really thinking. However, it seems that she finds it really burdensome to take care of her kids. I hadn't really thought that the drudgery of picking up the prescription for my son's ear infection was really a drawback of the American health care system, but apparently Michelle thinks taking care of her kids is just too onerous, and someone ought to fix that for her.

Seriously, this is exactly why nobody believes President Obama anymore on health care, or anything else. Trying to sell your plan by talking up it's good points, while lying about it's bad points -- that's just dishonest.

But making up an entire class of horrible things your health care plan does nothing about, and suggesting that you will make it all better, is shear desperation.

Next thing you know, Obamacare will be shortening your commute to work, and helping you pick up women at bars.

Meanwhile, be on the lookout for amendments in the Senate providing for government workers who will come to your house and check your child's temperature.

Why do Democrats support $500 billion in Medicare Waste/Fraud/Abuse?

MSNBC's First Read wonders why, if the President can so easily identify over $500 billion in Medicare waste, he hasn't done anything?:

Speaking of health care, how has Obama gone from touting $300 billion in Medicare waste/fraud/abuse savings in June as part of his plan to pay for health care to now claiming the White House has found $500-$600 billion in these savings. The fact is the president still hasn't release a detailed plan in general, let alone gotten into the "how to pay for" weeds when it comes to exactly how they found yet another $200 billion in cuts. This actually gets at the nut of the president's potential credibility problem: If there is so much money in waste/fraud/abuse in the Medicare system, then why do we continue to let it happen? Why are we waiting so long to deal with it? The average cynical voter is thinking, “Well, the president may be well meaning, but the bureaucracy that is the American government let this waste/fraud/abuse happen once, who is to say they won't let it happen again?”

I agree with that sentiment, but I also see this a bit differently.

Obama has claimed that there is over $500 billion being wasted in Medicare. In his speech last Wednesday, he said that he could eliminate this $500 billion in spending without taking a single treatment away from a single Medicare patient.

I think he was lying, which makes me a racist. But let's for the moment assume he was telling the truth. The government is throwing away $500 billion, Obama KNOWS it is happening, he KNOWS how to stop it from happening.

Why hasn't he stopped it already? Most waste/fraud/abuse is because of the law NOT being followed, in which case Obama should be able to stop this without congressional action. So why hasn't he done so? Some might argue it's because he needs to keep the idea as part of the health system takeover plan, but that's wrong. If he actually could show even 10% of that savings now, it would probably win him a dozen republican votes in the house, and a few in the senate.

So maybe it's because he needs a congressional vote. But I can guarantee you that Republicans in the house and senate would show up on a Sunday to vote for a bill that elimated $500 billion in useless spending. So, if Obama is telling the truth, and all we need is a bill, then it must be that the Democrats running congress WANT to waste $500 billion dollars in our medical system.

Of course, it's much easier to believe the most likely truth -- there are no "medicare savings" from waste/fraud/abuse crackdown. Obama might have some idea how to cut payments to doctors and PRETEND it won't hurt the people on Medicare, but it will. The Democrats don't really care if they pay for their bill, they just want to SAY they will pay for it.

But the sad fact is, in this case, deciding the democrats are liars is actually the less critical opinion to have; the alternative is that they just want to waste $500 billion dollars of taxpayer money.

Was "You Lie" Racist? Addressing the "racers".

In a discussion in a Washington Post community forum, EJ Dionne asks a question that deserves consideration:

I’m surprised that it so shocks my friend Ramesh that many Americans – and not just African-Americans -- are asking why it is that only when we have a black man as president has a member of Congress felt he could stand up and shout, “You lie!”

First, I should say Joe Wilson was wrong, entirely wrong, to shout this, or anything else, during the speech. In fact, if Wilson thought Obama was lying, he should have shouted "point of order", and asked the chair if Obama was breaking house rules by saying members of the house had lied about his plan.

Of course, Joe Wilson knew he was wrong, and he apologized immediately to the President.

Second, it is well-known that Democrat members of the house had accused Bush of lying, on the house floor, violating the same rule Wilson was accused of violating. I don't think the rule was why Wilson was wrong -- I think yelling "Preach it" would have been just as wrong.

Third, it is also well-known that Democrats actually booed the President during a state of the union speech -- an act that was certainly as damaging to the "decorum" of the house as shouting at the President. But the Republicans certainly knew that was wrong, and made a big deal of it at the time, even though they didn't have a vote to condemn the Democrats.

But what of the question? Nobody, even in 2005, actually shouted at the President during his SOTU. So why would Wilson do so here?

Well, here is the missing piece -- This is the first time in my memory that a President has requested a joint session of congress for the purpose of making a campaign speech attacking members of the other party, and lying about it. The State of the Union speeches are constitutionally required reports, and generally the Presidents have been well-mannered, giving their priorities but not calling members of the body liars.

The only non-SOTU speech I can think of was Bush's Sept 20, 2001 address to the nation, when he presented the nation's plan of action in response to the 9/11 attacks. There was nothing partisan in that speech for anybody to yell about.

So we don't have to invoke racism to explain this "unique" event -- the shout was an irrational, but not unpredictable, result of the already unique and undecorous use of the solemnety of a joint session of congress for a partisan political speech by a President falling in the polls and struggling to remain relevant.

The idea that Wilson would never have shouted at a President Biden is ludicrous. In fact, I would argue that the attacks on a President Biden, doing exactly what President Obama has done, would be much harsher -- precisely because Obama is black.

Years of invoking racism in our country have made everybody think twice before saying anything bad about a black person, especially in public. Even thrice-removed comments can cost you your job (see Trent Lott's offhand comment at Strom Thurmond's birthday party speaking kindly of his presidential run).

And look around you -- every person who has said anything in opposition to Obama's policies has been called racist. President Jimmy Carter is only the latest to say that if you don't want universal health care and the destruction of our economic system, you must be racist.

So, I guess I must be a racist, because I still love my country, and I think that what is best for my country, for ALL of us, is for Obama's plans to fail. Not because Obama is black, but IN SPITE of it.

AP finds multiple lies in Obama's speech

Call me shocked, but the AP was kind enough to point out some of the lies in Obama's speech. Rather than write my own post about this in depth, go look at this blog, which has a pretty good write-up: AP Fact-Checks the speech -- Obama was pretty much lying through his teeth

The AP's biggest focus was on this whopper:

OBAMA: "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future. Period."
THE FACTS: Though there's no final plan yet, the White House and congressional Democrats already have shown they're ready to skirt the no-new-deficits pledge.

And their argument doesn't include the fact that every government plan costs multiple times what it is said to cost, or that the dems method of taxes to pay for the plan violates Obama's promise not to raise any taxes on 95% of america.

They also note that the house bill doesn't have any verification for illegals, and that Obama can't really promise that you will keep your health insurance because the bills in the house don't stop employers from dropping the insurance, and in fact will pretty much require it over time.

Obama's Problem: We don't trust him, or government

Obama made a speech last night. It was the same speech he's been making for months, full of promises, empty of specifics, laced with personal attacks on people who don't agree with him, and sprinkled throughout with lies.

But in the end, he failed to address the fundamental problem the American people have with his still non-existant "health care plan". Simply put, we do not trust Obama, we do not trust the Democrats, and mostly we do not trust government to do what they say, or accomplish the goals they specify.

Obama said this speech would include compromises with the Republicans. I saw two -- first, he "compromised" about how many americans are uninsured, because he stopped lying about it for one speech. Last month, Obama said 47 million americans were uninsured. Last night, it as 30 million. As one commentator put it, and I paraphrase, "at that rate if we do nothing we'll solve the problem by November".

The second was that he mentioned legal reform. Unfortunately, there is no legal reform in any of the bills being considered, so unless they are going to go re-write the whole thing, his promises otherwise are empty.

On most other points, he fell flat. He called his opponents liars, but then objected when someone called him a lie. He said we were lying about rationing end-of-life care, then acknowledged medical boards which would determine what care was "cost-effective". He said we were lying about illegals being covered, when there is no language in any bill that checks for legal status before giving away health insurance or health care (this is what prompted that "that's a lie" outburst -- it was a lie, but our country doesn't have a system where back-benchers yell during speeches. Better if he had yelled "That's not true", it would have conveyed the same point and not had the "lie" word, which is unacceptable when used by Republicans but fine when Obama says it in his speech).

Obama said we needed to stop the scare tactics, and then said people would die if we didn't pass his health care plan. He said he was trying to be bi-partisan, when he has not invited Republican leaders to the White House since april, and Nancy Pelosi refused to let any Republican amendments come to the floor for a vote.

Here is just one of Obama's outrageous lies, where he claims a man died because his insurance cut off his chemo treatment:

One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn't reported gallstones that he didn't even know about. They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.

Here, in contrast, is the sworn testimony of the man (Otto Radditz) sister, at a hearing in August:

After two appeals by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, Fortis Insurance Company finally overturned their original decision to rescind my brother’s coverage and he was reinstated without lapse. This is after weeks of constant phone calls between myself and the Attorney General’s Office and we were literally scrambling hour by hour to get this accomplished so that my brother wouldn’t lose his 3- to 4-week window of opportunity that he had prepared for and lose his opportunity to have the procedure.

There was no delay, he got the treatment, it just did not work. (Also, it wasn't Chemotherapy, it was a stem cell transplant, one of those non-embryonic ones that are already being used to save lives but are given the boot by the Obama administration so they push untested embryonic research).

But worst of all, he tried ot sell government interference in our health care as some sort of moral imperative, something we owed to our people. He tried to justify it by basically saying the American Ideals of self-reliance were outdated:

Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.

Note how he deftly twists the human imperative to care for one another, into the opposite -- a greedy desire to force others to pay taxes to care for others, using government, so that we the people don't have to be bothered by it.

That is the liberal mantra -- why help someone myself, when I can get the government to take my neighbor's money ot do it, while I get credit for being "compassionate" and my neighbor can be ridiculed for being "cold-hearted"?

Note also the communist belief expressed in the phrase "hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play" -- that is simply a translation of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".

It was never Government's job to "reward" people with personal security from hardship simply because they were "hard-working" or "responsible" (Forget the more obvious fact that millions of the people who are already given free medical care, or will be by this government takeover of health care are neither hard-working nor "responsible"). The hard work is what rewards you, with money, and the responsibility rewards you when you spend the money on important things like your health care.

At it's core, government-forced health insurance is proposed because people are supposedly IRRESPONSIBLE. We are too stupid to buy insurance, so the government will make us do it for our own good.

The idea that government knows best is NOT an American idea.

Why does anybody still read the lying New York Times?

The New York Times has long been the whipping-boy of conservatives, because it regularly lies about what conservatives and liberals are saying, in the first case to make them look bad, in the second to hide how bad they are.

In the latest New York Times serial lying, the Times accused conservative Mark Steyn of comparing Obama to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il. Because the New York Times doesn't deserve a link, being almost as bad as a liberal blog, I'll quote from Mark Steyn's article about the "Omnipresent Leader":

As Times reporters James C. McKinley Jr. and Sam Dillon wrote: “Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.”

Well, that must be true then. After all, the Rush Limbaugh show is broadcast nationally. People tape it, and transcribe it. So if the New York Times is willing to make a direct charge about what Mark Steyn said on the show, they certainly couldn't get it wrong, right?

Really. I have long defended newspapers for being the last bastion of truth. Sure, they bias the news, but when they say something happened, it probably happened. They check, and recheck, and they have editors to double-check.

But, well, this is the New York Times. Two reporters, an editor, and a publisher, along with who knows how many fact-checkers, all could have spent a minute checking the audio. Of course, if this was a left-wing national talk show host, they wouldn't have to -- because I bet the left-wing talk show is played in the offices every day, so they are all familiar with what is being said.

Anyway, here is what Mark Steyn ACTUALLY SAID:

“Obviously we’re not talking about the cult of personality on the Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il scale.”

That's right. Mark Steyn said that you could NOT COMPARE Obama's cult of personality with that of Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-Il.

The funny thing is, once the New York Times told all the other liberal newspapers what Mark said, they all repeated it in their articles. Even foreign papers were talking about how the evil conservative Steyn compared Obama to Hussein.

We just spent a week with daily revelations about a Czar in the white house saying and doing stupid things, things that were so bad that Van Jones had to quit his position. And during that week, the New York Times never bothered to tell their readers what was up.

But they had time to write about Mark Steyn -- oh, except they didn't have time to actually check their story.

Newspapers who trusted the New York Times to tell them the truth should be ashamed. People who by the New York Times should be shocked. The New York Times deserves to be going bankrupt.

More Frightening than an Obama Administration?

Well, maybe not, but King Dominion's Halloween Haunt website is now up:

One of these years, I'm going to try to get a job as a monster.

Harry Reid - Senate better off with Kennedy Dead.

I can't imagine the outrage if an elected Republican tried to say that Kennedy's death was a good thing.

But the mainstream media completely ignores it when Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid makes the argument, as found in the Reno Gazette-Journal:

Q: How will U.S. Sen. (Edward) Kennedy's death affect things?

A: I think it's going to help us. He hasn't been around for some time. We're going to have a new chairman of that committee, it'll be, I don't know for sure, but I think Sen. (Chris) Dodd, (D-Conn.). He has a right to take it. Either him or (U.S. Sen. Tom) Harkin, (D-Iowa), whichever one wants it can have it.

Yes, Reid just said that Kennedy was dead weight in the Senate, and now that he's dead they can get a chairman who will actually be there and get work done.

So, is Reid right? Would the democrats had been better off if Kennedy had resigned last year, allowing them to have a functioning senator now when they need the vote? Is Reid right when he suggests that Kennedy was selfish to hang around even after he couldn't show up and vote?

On the other hand, couldn't Reid have just replaced Kennedy as a chair, if he really thought Kennedy wasn't pulling his weight? What kind of leader lets his whole team suffer when he obviously thinks that one of his captains is letting the side down?

Or was Reid scared to act while Kennedy was alive? He obviously feels no problem speaking ill of the dead.