Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion

Barack Obama speaks at the U.N. today. What an opportunity, to call out all the thugs and dictators, and to defend personal and political freedom which is under attack daily in Venezuela, Iran and elsewhere. A real opportunity.

But if history is any guide, it is more likely that Obama will call out his own country. To the cheers of Hugo and Mahmoud and Daniel and others.

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

Thank you, Honduras

For standing up to the U.S. government's legally dishonest and morally bankrupt attempt to engineer the return to power of Manuel Zelaya, the Hugo Chavez wannabe. You have exposed the lie (are we allowed to say that word?) that the Obama administration supports freedom and the rule of law.

Stay strong, even in the face of Zelaya's (U.S.-backed?) antic of sneaking back into the country as a guest of the Brazilian embassy.

Is it wrong to root against one's own government? When large segments of the Democratic Party hoped we would lose in Iraq and the surge would fail, the consequences would have been dead Americans and victory for our enemies.

Wanting our government's policies to fail in Honduras will not result in a single American death, and will give victory to people who support the U.S.

So I hope Obama falls flat on his face in Honduras, and that Hillary trips over him.

--------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
Beating Up Honduras
Let them come to Tegucigalpa
Hands Off Honduras

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

How oddly circular and ironic that Jimmy Carter believes that most opponents of Obama's policies are racists. In fact, racism is not Obama's main problem. Jimmy Carter is.

In modern politics, the most damaging label a President can receive is to be compared to Jimmy Carter, whose legacy of foolishness and ineptitude is furthered by Carter's post-presidential antics.

In one fell swoop, Carter has demonstrated that rather than supposed racial animosities, what Obama need fear most is being called Jimmy Carter.

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

Barack Obama is flooding the news shows this morning with appearances on five networks (excluding Fox, of course). More of the same, as if an address to a joint session of Congress and "major" speeches almost every day were not enough.

The attitude from the top down is that of a "bunch of cry babies" who can't seem to get it in their heads that a majority of people do not want the Democrats' cockamamie Rube Goldberg-like health care scheme. The supposed simpletons, mocked openly in the mainstream media and left-wing blogs, also know that apology tours, including the upcoming UN Security Council fiasco, gain us neither respect nor security, and that mountains of debt come with a price we cannot afford to pay.

The supposed dummies who oppose the White House on so many issues have more common sense in each of their little pinkies than the collective intellectual heft of the NY Times, Washington Post, and halls of Congress combined. Common sense is not tested on the SATs, so our intelligentsia does not consider common sense a value worth having.

The media smoke, fire and theatrics from the White House mask a feebleness of ideas, a lack of historical appreciation, and a pitiful willingness to become sycophants for the petty and not-so-petty tyrants of the world. Sorry never seems to be the hardest word for this White House.

So ignore the man behind the curtain, and watch someone of true determination, Ronald Reagan. Of course, the mainstream media and precursors to the left-wing blogosphere called Reagan a fool and dummy as well. But his ideas, which are the ideas of the opposition in this country, have withstood the test of time:




--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

If you've noticed, thing have been slow here the past couple of days. Still trying to recover from the flu and tonight starts the Jewish New Year, so I will not be doing new posts until Sunday.

In the meantime, check out the blogs and posts in the toolbar.

Big news in Britain. If you move, you no longer have to drop your physician.

Why would you have to drop your physician, you ask. Because in Britain's nationalized health system, doctors are rationed by geographic area and restricted to serving people in that area. As reported in The Telegraph:

GP practices often run very tight boundaries and refuse to take patients who live even 100 yards too far away or on the wrong side of the road and people who move house are forced to change their surgery.

But within the next year patients will be able to choose to remain with a favoured doctor when they move house or register with one near work or school if they choose.

Under new plans to be announced in a keynote speech in London Mr Burnham will say GPs will not be able to refuse to take patients because they live too far away.

The fact that Brits have not previously known even this fundamental health care freedom, the ability to choose and keep your doctor, says so much about nationalized health care.

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

Chris Matthews is on Hardball right now making the argument that the assassination of John Kennedy was the result of right wing hate speech which incited people to violence. Even though Lee Harvey Oswald was an avowed communist who lived previously in the Soviet Union. According to Matthews, right wing hate speech emboldens even communists to commit violence.

I don't know why I watched.

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

The NY Times has been largely silent on the ACORN fiasco until today, with an article titled Conservatives Draw Blood From Acorn, Favored Foe. The Times befools itself with the following analysis of why no one previously was able to convince the Obama administration to sever ties to and funding of ACORN:

But it took amateur actors, posing as a prostitute and a pimp and recorded on hidden cameras in visits to Acorn offices, to send government officials scrambling in recent days to sever ties with the organization.

There was a time when the NY Times did investigative reporting. No more, unless there is an opportunity to embarrass former Bush administration officials or expose some element of our intelligence apparatus.

A couple of amateurs with a video camera did more to expose fraud and corruption in Obama's base than the entire staff of the NY Times. And The Times doesn't see the irony in criticising such people as "amateurs."

UPDATE: More on the NY Times and ACORN from Don Surber and Hugh Hewitt.

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

The increasingly hysterical use of the the race card by liberal columnists, bloggers and politicians reflects the last gasps of people who, being unable to win an argument on the merits, seek to end the argument.

While the false accusation of racism is not a new tactic, it has been refined by Obama supporters into a toxic powder which is causing damage to the social fabric of the country by artificially injecting race into every political issue.

During the campaign, Obama supporters successfully ended scrutiny of Obama's overstated opposition to the Iraq war by accusing Bill Clinton of racism for calling Obama's narrative a "fairy tale." False accusations of racism also were used against Hillary supporter Geraldine Ferraro and against John McCain in order to frame the political debate.

In the 2008 campaign cycle, the race card worked well because it could. The legitimate enthusiasm for an historic black presidential candidacy combined with media bias created an acceptance that there was no way to fight back against the tactic without making matters worse.

Over time, as Obama assumed the presidency and began implementing sweeping plans to restructure society and to run up the national debt to unthinkable levels, opposition to Obama's plans has grown. This opposition has little to do with race, and includes vast numbers of independents who voted for Obama.

The American people, while they still mostly like Obama on a personal level, increasingly oppose his policies and plans. Democrats know that the debate on the merits of initiatives such as health care and cap-and-trade has been won on the merits by the opposition.

Not surprisingly, the pace of racial accusations has picked up as opposition has grown. Just in the past few days the usual and not-so-usual suspects have been seeking to out-do each other in making accusations of racism including Eugene Robinson, Maureen Dowd, Jimmy Carter, Rep. Hank Johnson, Chris Matthews, a wide range of Democratic politicians, and of course, almost all of the mainstream media.

The effect of these accusations is poisonous. Race is the most sensitive and inflammatory subject in this country. By turning every issue, even a discussion of health care policy, into an argument about race, liberals have created a politically explosive mixture in which the harder they seek to suppress opposing voices, the harder those voices seek to be heard.

The stresses this situation has created were exposed at the town hall hearings this summer. The voices of ordinary Americans who never protested anything before in their lives resembled steam forcing its way through the lid of a tightly closed political lid.

But it will not work this time for the effete intellectual bullies for whom the race card traditionally has been the trump card.

Everyone understands that Obama was not subject to the same scrutiny as other candidates because of the fear of being called a racist. That lack of scrutiny gave us a president whose moderate campaign rhetoric belied an underlying agenda which, if revealed during the campaign, would have resulted in an electoral landslide for McCain-Palin. The vocal opposition we are witnessing has everything to do with a sense of being betrayed not just by a candidate, but by a process which was rigged by the use of the race card.

We are seeing for the first time a strong push-back against the race card players. And that reaction is visceral, much like an allergic reaction, from people who have been stung before.

UPDATE: Jules Crittenden also has a good take on the subject: Race Card. And, a Rasmussen survey finds that people are not buying into the race-card tactic:

Twelve percent (12%) of voters nationwide believe that most opponents of President Obama’s health care reform plan are racist. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 67% of voters disagree, and 21% are not sure.

--------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
Health Care Race Card Played From Bottom of Deck
Joker-ology
The Big Smear
"Race" As Political Weapon
Is "Gobbledygook" Racist?

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

This video (h/t Tim Blair) carries a certain satisfaction. It shows the premature detonation of a roadside IED, taking out the bad guys planting the devide before the good guys had to fire a shot. That alone makes it worth posting.

But listen to the video, don't just watch it. The American soldiers watching the scene unfold repeatedly hold fire as a child carrying supplies to the bombers enters the target area, "My only concern is that child right now" one of the soldiers says (at 2:20 descending).

After the child leaves, the soldiers move towards the firing sequence, but the child reappears: "Is that a kid, damn it." (at 1:15) Then "go away kid, go away kid." Not a shot is fired.

And that is the real point of the video. Not the bad luck of the bombers, but the good luck of us all to have soldiers with the decency to hold fire to avoid civilian casualties.



--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

In John Hawkins' latest quarterly ranking of Best Conservative Blogs, I have moved up to #16, from my previous #18 spot. Thanks John!

Please remember, these rankings are based upon scientific consensus, so the results may not be questioned (at least not this quarter).

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

One of the hallmarks of an Obama health care speech is to pick one or two or three anecdotes of people who have had trouble with their insurance company as proof that we need to overhaul the entire insurance industry and health care system. These anecdotes may be true [sometimes they are not], and the underlying problems may need to be addressed, but Obama never has explained why getting government involved in a restructuring of the health care industry is the solution.

In fact, the overwhelming evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, is that government involvement in micromanaging industry has disastrous negative unintended consequences.

Here is an anecdote from the Wall Street Journal about how congressional legislation regarding lead paint in children's toys has had enormous unintended consequences. Read the whole thing.

The bottom line is that the law ends up devastating small businesses and resellers who were not involved in creating the problem, whose products may not even contain lead, while creating lobbyist-induced breaks for big toy companies like Mattel which did create the problem (emphasis mine):

This law has saddled businesses with billions of dollars in losses on T-shirts, bath toys and other items that were lawful to sell one day and unlawful the next. It has induced thrift and secondhand stores to trash mountains of outgrown blue jeans, bicycles and board games for fear there might be trivial, harmless—but suddenly illegal—quantities of lead in their zippers and valves or phthalates in their plastic spinners....

Why did Congress rush to pass this bill, and why is it so reluctant to amend a law whose burdens fall mostly on products that have never been linked to poisoning? One reason is the skill of antibusiness groups claiming to speak for consumers. Groups such as Public Citizen and the Public Interest Research Group seized on and promoted the Chinese toy panic for their own legislative ends and have taken credit for some of the law's most extreme provisions. (The tracking-labels provision was added by then-Sen. Barack Obama.)

So I hope President Obama will mention this anecdote in his next speech or interview when he is telling us how he and Congress are so wise as to be trusted with restructuring our health care system. I would like this anecdote mentioned when we are told that lobbyists are not allowed to influence the legislation.

Most of all, I would like to hear this anecdote mentioned when we are promised that thousands of pages of legislation, to be followed up by multiple thousands of pages of regulations, will not have the unintended consequence of trashing our best doctors, health systems and medical technologies.

--------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
It's Still All About Him, Except That It's Not
Senate To Fix Joe Wilson's Imaginary Loophole

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

Barack Obama was interviewed tonight on 60 Minutes by Steve Kroft. This little nugget had been previewed in pre-interview press hype. Obama states that he will be held accountable by voters if health care restructuring fails, but in fact just the opposite is true:

I have no interest in having a bill get passed that fails. That doesn't work. You know, I intend to be President for a while, and once this bill passes, I own it. And if people look and say, "You know what? This hasn't reduced my costs. My premiums are still going up 25 percent, insurance companies are still jerking me around," I'm the one who's going to be held responsible. So I have every incentive to get this right.

Kroft immediately went on to another topic. Was Kroft even listening? Didn't he know that as good as this statement by Obama sounded, it actually made no sense at all?

The new health care plans and restructuring will not take place until after the 2012 Presidential election. Obama will go into the 2012 election without anyone having experienced directly the impact of his plans. Obama will not be eligible to run again in 2016, regardless of whether he is held "accountable" for ruining our health care system.

If Obama's motivation is to be "President for a while" as he says, then the ultimate success or failure of the health care restructuring plans will have absolutely no impact.

We, not Obama, will be held accountable for Obama's failure and our own mass delusion.

The mainstream media still is too smitten to care.

UPDATE: Commenter Melanie asks why the new plans don't take effect until after 2012. Here is the explanation given by Obamacare supporter Ezra Klein:

Most of the major provisions in the House's health-care reform bill begin in 2013....The slow start is a way of holding down costs in the 10-year budget window. If the bill begins in 2010, but the subsidies don't kick in until 2013, then that's three years that are under the budget but aren't costing much money. That means the new health-care system can really cost an average of $140 billion each year, as opposed to $100 billion, and that means you can afford a better system.

It's just a budget game so Obama can keep the 10-year cost (which is the time frame used in these budget estimates) down, since there really are only 6 years of costs build into the 10 year projection, but 10 years of tax revenue. Of course, Klein doesn't understand that this doesn't mean you "can afford a better system," it means you are putting yourself into the same situation as homeowners who take mortgages that are fixed artifically low for a short time then revert back to higher rates. And we know how that worked out.

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

That some people have taken it upon themselves to use the death of a student from swine flu as a cause for mockery and snark.

Pat at And So It Goes In Shreveport has the run down: Editor of HuffPo's Health Unit Mocks Death of Cornell Student



--------------------------------------------
Related Post:
Cornell Loses Student To Swine Flu

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

When I first started this blog just under a year ago, I was ignorant of who was who in the blogosphere. Believe it or not, Memeorandum is not the world.

But I did know about Little Green Footballs. I'm not sure why.

Over the months, it became obvious that no one provokes or responds to blog wars better (or worse, depending on your perspective) than Charles Johnson who runs LGF. Given the legend of "don't cross Charles Johnson" I stayed out of those things because ... who cares and what's the point?

But the blog war started yesterday by LGF against Robert Stacy McCain of The Other McCain deserves comment.

Robert Stacy McCain is someone I never have met or even spoken with, but I do read his blog, some of his posts at American Spectator, and sometimes we link to each other's posts. I have not devoted my life to studying McCain's life or writings; rather, in college I studied Bolshevism and other "isms" which remain fashionable among the Left in America in substance if not name.

So imagine my surprise to read yesterday that LGF has declared McCain to be a racist and white supremacist. McCain's responses are here, here and here (and multiplying by the hour)[added: something of a summation here]. But Johnson's post didn't ring true to me for several reasons independent of McCain's responses.

First, nothing I had read over the past year written by McCain supported such a conclusion.

Second, the snippets of sentences and clauses quoted in Johnson's post smelled like the type of truncated, piecemeal plucking of words out of context which is de rigeur these days when the race card is to be played.

It reminded me of a screen shot Johnson posted when Barack Obama bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, purporting to show George Bush also bowing to the Saudi King. In fact, as I posted at the time, the screen shot was deceptive because it did not reflect that Bush was bowing, but merely lowering his head to have a medal placed around his neck. Johnson later changed the post text to reflect the medal placement, without acknowledging what had been done.

A small incident, perhaps, but the point is that what you see in a snippet or out of context not always is accurate or fair.

Third, so much of the charge revolved around guilt by association. Not the "you sat in his church for 20 years" type of association Barack Obama had with Jeremiah Wright. The "you write articles for a magazine, the owner of which" .... blah blah blah. Or you linked to someone who once did this or that.

Guilt by linkage hardly persuades me of anything. I mean, I have linked to LGF and The Other McCain, so what does that make me?

Fourth, the LGF attack appeared to be payback for McCain's defense of Pam Geller when LGF attacked her. Payback attacks always are suspicious.

Last for this post, but not necessarily least, the attack does seem to reflect what McCain calls "anti-Southern prejudice, especially among the intellectual elite." We do not treat the history and cultures of ancient Egypt, various modern North African Arab ethnic groups, various black African tribes, the Europeans, and others, all of whom owned or traded in slaves, as being restricted to that history of slave ownership and racism.

But the "South" has become political. Having gone through Northeastern liberal public schools, college and law school, I know almost nothing about the history and culture of the South other than slavery and segregation.

In the last 40 years, as the South moved from Democratic to Republican, the equation of racism with Southern Republicans has been pounded into the heads of multiple generations even though the segregationists mostly were Democrats. How many 20-somethings do you think are aware that George Wallace was a Democrat and was shot while running for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party?

The point is not that we should not acknowledge and own up to the negative aspects of the history of the South. We have spent the past half-century trying to make amends and deal with the fall out, and should continue to do so. But to equate pride in one's Southern heritage with being a racist is not fair unless there is something more. And there doesn't seem to be "more" in the case of Robert Stacy McCain, or if there is, Charles Johnson hasn't made the case.

I detest the use of the race card in American politics and on the blogosphere. As I have said before, "suppression of legitimate political expression through false accusations of racism" is the defining theme to emerge from the 2008 political campaign. We see it every day, even when we debate health care.

With good reason, being tagged a racist is about as damaging a tag as exists because the damage is caused once the accusation is made.

And that is the point. If you want to ruin someone's reputation, just keep posting the words "racist" in close proximity to their name on the internet so that web search engines associate the person and the accusation. That is what some people tried to do to Glenn Beck recently by making accusations of past criminal conduct in the form of a question for the very purpose of influencing Google and other search engines.

The false accusation of racism is a despicable tactic. It damages the person against whom it is made and the victims of true racism.

And that is why I felt it necessary to speak up this time.

--------------------------------------------
Related Posts
Health Care Race Card Played From Bottom of Deck
Saturday Night Card Game
"Race" As Political Weapon

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook