AntiObamaBlog.com » Lies

All the President’s Props

Admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:07:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

Last week’s State of the Union address was a sad and pathetic affair, full of transparent rhetoric and demagoguery, brimming with incandescent hypocrisies, variegated with an expansive assortment of half-truths and lies, palled by a mediocrity that almost seemed intentional, detached from reality like an unmoored hot-air balloon that slowly ascends to the heavens, stuffed with dense and infuriating arrogance, and draped over our nation like a several-sizes-too-small coat with promises and ideas rendered diminutive in the shadow of the historical moment.

All this was clear last Tuesday night. And yet somehow over the past week, the address actually grew worse.

The president’s speech was less a factual information session about the current American condition than it was a mawkish parade of political images and symbols, meant to make us identify with the president’s vision and feel at safe harbor with his leadership. It was less a speech than a play, lavish with props and masquerading actors tasked with immersing the audience in an alternate version of reality. But over the past week, key scenes of the drama have fallen apart. The president now looks less like a seasoned political actor than like Quince at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, farcically fumbling his lines.

One of the supporting thespians was the Indiana-based electric car battery-maker Ener1, whose subsidiary EnerDel received a $118.5 million grant under the stimulus bill. EnerDel was also showered with more than $4 million in federal gifts under the Bush Administration. The scrappy little green boutique was meant to symbolize the flowering benefits of the sort of business-government handshaking that the rest of the civilized world calls “crony capitalism.” “In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries,” Obama declared last Tuesday.

Precisely two days later, Ener1 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company had been an encore actor in the president’s campaign theatrics. Almost one year ago, Vice President Joe Biden visited the Ener1 facilities, effervescent about the administration’s promise to airlift 1 million electric cars onto the road by 2015. That pledge has since crashed on the shoals of reality and the cardboard prop that is Ener1 has blown over.

Watching Ener1 fold, it’s hard not to recall that last great monument to the progress of the green revolution: Solyndra. President Obama lauded that company in his 2010 State of the Union and it promptly imploded last year. One imagines executives at Pepsi placing urgent phone calls to the White House, encouraging the president to mention Coca-Cola in next year’s address. If you’re employed by a business receiving checks from the Department of Energy, you may want to dash off a few copies of your résumé this afternoon.

But the star of the State of the Union show, the leading lady, was Warren Buffett’s Secretary. “Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary,” Obama declared. “Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Or do we want to keep our investments in everything else — like education and medical research; a strong military and care for our veterans?” So central was Warren Buffett’s Secretary to the performance, she attended as the special guest of the president and belle of the ball, standing in the audience as a quiet testament to the grinding, Dickensian class divide that darkens the backstreets and alleys of modern America.

Warren Buffett’s Secretary was played by Debbie Bosanek, who is Warren Buffett’s actual secretary, and who makes between $200,000 and $500,000 per year, according to the calculations of Paul Roderick Gregory over at Forbes. It was a brilliant dramatic portrayal. While Bosanek herself is a creature of the upper classes, she effortlessly slipped into the part of Warren Buffett’s Secretary, a downtrodden proletarian exploited by the tax code, reminiscent of Peggy Olson in Mad Men.

This, by the way, presents a knotty conundrum for progressives. If Gregory’s deductions are correct, then Bosanek is likely a member of that charter club known as the “wealthiest 2%,” a coven of blackhearted plunderers and blue-blooded aristocrats that looted the country for all it was worth in 2008. Progressives have demanded higher taxes on the wealthiest 2%, yet hailed Bosanek as an overtaxed hero. They’ve blamed the wealthiest 2% for all the nation’s ills, but hoisted up this secretary as an emblem of justice in the class wars. Well, which is it? Should we add her image to theTwo Minutes Hate tape, or no? And should we raise her taxes? Lower them? Maybe we should just raise everyone’s taxes.

The overarching themes pervading the president’s State of the Union drama were America’s greatness and stifling inequality. America was great when it allowed for the president’s accomplishments, like killing Osama bin Laden. But when it came to the president’s failures, most notably three years of a doldrums job market, it was all the fault of that yawning canyon of economic class. Wealthy Americans — for whom Debbie Bosanek’s membership application is still pending — were cast as the villains, cackling all the way to their banks with insufficiently punitive Treasury receipts.

The only solution was to sock it to them, specifically with a 30% net tax on millionaires. This (along with solar batteries) was the Big Idea, the great glowing light bulb of the president’s address. And according to an analysis by the Fiscal Times, it would raise $30 billion in revenue — and that’s assuming that the sledgehammer of adding yet another tax didn’t further stall the economy. Of course, $30 billion isn’t immaterial, but the Tea Party Caucus could cut that much from the federal budget during a bad hangover. Meanwhile, the national debt is $15.2 trillion.

And Democrats have already booby-trapped the tax code for the wealthiest Americans. With current tax rates set to expire at the beginning of 2013, taxes on capital gains will shoot up from 15% to 20%. And thanks to a pernicious little slice of the Obamacare legislation, taxes on capital gains will further increase to almost 24% in 2013. All this will happen unless the federal government takes action to prevent it. It’s piquantly fitting, isn’t it? If the president wants to see tax rates tighten for millionaires, his easiest course is simply to get reelected.

But I regret that I’ve disposed of two paragraphs trying to refute the president’s numbers when the numbers are nugatory here. Obama is fully aware that his tax increase would do little to arrest the deficit and less to catalyze the economy. His purpose is to blacken the wealthy into villains and portray himself as the eminently reasonable hero; to siphon all the laws and details of politics and economics into a simple, dramatic dichotomy and cast himself on the side of good. He is, with total self-awareness, jousting with phantoms and trying to bring the rest of us along for the ride. It may make for a spectacular show, but at the end of the day, that’s all it is: cheap lines and theatrics cluttering the stage floor.

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Obama double crosses American Catholics

Admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:31:07 +0000

From WND » Commentary:

At the end of Sunday mass at the church this writer attends in Washington, D.C., the pastor asked the congregation to remain for a few minutes.

Then, on the instructions of Cardinal Archbishop Donald Wuerl, the pastor proceeded to read a letter.

In the letter, the Church denounced the Obama administration for ordering all Catholic schools, hospitals and social services to provide, in their health insurance coverage for employees, free contraceptives, free sterilizations and free “morning-after” pills.

Parishioners were urged to contact their representatives in Congress to bring about a reversal of President Obama’s new policy.

Now, not only is this a battle the Church must fight, it is a battle the Church can win if it has the moral stamina to stay the course.

In forcing the Church to violate its own principles, Obama has committed an act of federal aggression, crossing the line between church and state to appease his ACLU and feminist allies, while humiliating the Catholic bishops.

Should the Church submit, its moral authority in America would disappear.

Now, undeniably, the church milquetoast of past decades that refused to discipline pro-abortion Catholics allowed the impression to form that while the hierarchy may protest, eventually it will go along to get along with a Democratic Party that was once home to most Catholics.

Obama’s problem today is that not only is he forcing the Church to violate her conscience; he dissed the highest prelate in America.

In November, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, held what he describes as an “extraordinarily friendly” meeting with Obama at the White House.

The president assured the archbishop of his respect for the Church, and the archbishop came away persuaded Obama would never force the Church to adopt any policy that would violate her principles.

Ten days ago, Obama sandbagged the archbishop.

He informed Cardinal-designate Dolan by phone that, with the sole concession of the Church being given an extra year, to August 2013, to comply, the new policy, as set down by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, will be imposed. All social and educational institutions of the Catholic church will offer health insurance covering birth control, or face fines.

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Archbishop Dolan, who went on:

“To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their health care is literally unconscionable. … This represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty.”

Where do Obama and Sebelius get the power to do this?

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law on March 23, 2010, the colloquial name for which is “Obamacare.”

NARAL Pro-Choice America is celebrating the new policy. Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, calls it a “health-care issue … based on what’s best for women’s health.” Others have argued that many Catholic women practice birth control.

But that Catholics choose to ignore doctrine does not justify the U.S. government imposing on Catholic institutions a policy that violates Catholic teaching.

Even Washington Post liberal E.J. Dionne, in a Jan. 30 column titled “Obama’s Breach of Faith,” charges that the president “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus. …

“Speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government … the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings.”

Why did Obama do it?

Facing a close race for a second term, Obama chose not to antagonize his left. Yet he must have known that siding with them meant leaving Archbishop Dolan with egg all over his face. Obama, calculatedly, came down on the side of those he believes to be more crucial to his re-election.

This affront should tell the Catholic hierarchy, if they did not already know, where they stand in the party of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Kathleen Sebilius. And where they sit – in the back of the bus.

Yet if the bishops will look upon this crisis of conscience, this insult, as an opportunity, they can effect its reversal and recapture a measure of the moral authority they have lately lost.

Not only should the bishops file suit in federal court against the president and Sebelius for violation of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, they should inform the White House that no bishop will give an invocation at the Democratic Convention.

Then, they should inform the White House that in the last two weeks of the 2012 campaign, priests in every parish will read from the pulpit at Sunday mass a letter denouncing Obama as anti-Catholic for denying the Church its right to live according to its beliefs.

If Obama loses the Catholic vote, he loses the election.

The White House will come around, fast. Rely upon it.

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This Week in Washington – January 30, 2012

Admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:30:00 +0000

From RedState:

Cheers for Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) for standing up to President Obama on his unconstitutional recess appointments.

Secretary Sebelius Scraps Conscience Exception for Health Plans

Admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:30:20 +0000

From RedState:

As the implementation of Obamacare rolls into high gear, we’ve been given insight into how it will be implemented in general. On January 20, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would not exempt health plans provided by non-profit religious employers from the requirement to provide “contraceptive services.”

… Today the department is announcing that the final rule on preventive health services will ensure that women with health insurance coverage will have access to the full range of the Institute of Medicine’s recommended preventive services, including all FDA -approved forms of contraception. Women will not have to forego these services because of expensive co-pays or deductibles, or because an insurance plan doesn’t include contraceptive services.

The cateory of “all FDA-approved forms of contraception” includes the abortifacients like the “morning after pill.” At the same time I couldn’t help but note that the group of health plans provided by “non-profit religious employers” who do not support contraception winnows the field down rather quickly to those provided by either the Catholic Church or one of its social service or medical subsidiaries.

The best is yet to come.

By way of full disclosure, I’m Roman Catholic. I’m a convert who became Catholic with eyes wide open rather than a “cradle Catholic” who was born into the religion. As such I’ve never ceased to be amazed at the antics of many of our Church leadership. I write it off to equal parts cognitive dissonance and a pathological desire to be popular.

The Democrat party has been anti-Catholic in its political positions since George McGovern ran for president yet the priesthood and heirarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in America tend to hail from Democrat constituencies. So on the one hand the Magesterium is teaching very traditional social values while on the other it is embracing without even a hint of credulity every lefty scheme that comes down the pike.

For instance, in 1983, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops declared nuclear weapons to be immoral and weren’t terribly fond of deterrence either. By 1988 they had decided SDI was destabliizing as was the US linking a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan to future arms treaties. When communist terrorists were trying to create a people’s paradise in El Salvador, many of our bishops ignored what was happening to personal libery under the Sandinistas in Nicaragua as they stumbled over themselves to create the “sanctuary movment”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_movement

Without putting too fine a point on it but there was no daylight between the position of the Magesterium and that of the Kremlin on these issues.

Not that they are all commies or anything. But there were MOVEMENTS out there that had freakin Pete Seeger singing protest songs and James Earl Jones and Ed Asner at their rallies. How could you not be in favor of these things?

Similar stampedes took place on global warming and immigration.

This is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. When given the choice between seeming to endorse a religious conservative for office and seeming to endorse a heterodox leftist there is no limit to the contortions a large share of our bishops won’t put themselves through to help the lefty. To wit: by the black letter of the Catechism of the Catholic Church supporting abortion is forbidden. If a public figure does so this failure is compounded by “scandal”, that is, an action that could cause others to question their faith. The fact that there are very few bishops in the nation who have taken steps to discipline pro-abort advocates and politicians especially when they proclaim themselves to be devout.

The second strain is the want to be liked. For most of American history, Catholics were THE OTHER. It was a foreign religion practiced by all manner of foreigners who either couldn’t speak English (Italians, Poles, etc.) or who could barely speak it (the Irish, it goes without saying). What other religion still has amendments to state constitutions directly aimed at its religious schools?

Just when things were going well with JFK (another devout Catholic) in the White House, he gets killed and the whole counter culture begins. If there was anything less cool in the 1960s than being in ROTC it was being a Catholic who believed in monogamy and abstinence until marriage not to mention avowing any religion that did not use mind altering drugs. Being cool is still important and despite his views on abortion Obama, that epitome of coolness, was invited to give a commencement address at a Catholic university.

This mindset was most egregiously on display during the 2008 election. The Catholic heirarchy — and I have to digress here for a moment to emphasize that we have many traditional bishops in this country who have fought the good fight for decades — wanted to catch the Hope-and-Change wave and had a problem: Barrack Obama loves him some abortion. Not just plain vanilla abortion. He is in favor of partial birth aboriton. He is in favor of killing a kid who happens to survive the abortion procedure.

Demonstrating again a contortionist skill that would gain them employment at any county fair in the country the bishops issued a document called “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.”

As first blush it looks like a strong statement in favor of life which would not have helped Obama, or any other elected Democrat for that matter, until one reads deeper.

34. Catholics often face dificult choices about how to vote. This is why it is so important to vote according to a well-formed conscience that perceives the proper relationship among moral goods. A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter’s intent is to support that position. In such cases a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil. At the same time, a voter should not use a candidate’s opposition to an intrinsic evil to justify indifference or inattentiveness to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity.

35. There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.

In other words if you feel like the opposition to the war in Iraq or midnight basketball or furthering the ends of labor unions or any other pet peeve are “morally grave reasons” you can vote for the pro-abort. And they got what they wanted: American Catholics gave a majority of their votes to Obama.

Then came Obamacare which gave the bishops a real taste of what happens when you create a moral equivalence between universal health care and abortion. You get them both.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was heartbroken and gobsmacked, or gobsmacked and heartbroken, when they got the bad news about the elimination of an exemption for religious conscience in health plans.

President Obama telephoned Archbishop Dolan on Friday morning to tell him of the decision, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The pair had discussed the issue during a November meeting, during which the archbishop “got the message that they could work together,” said the spokeswoman, Sister Mary Ann Walsh.

The issue was likely to form the “backdrop to future relations,” she said. “It’s too big to ignore… the elephant is tramping around in the sanctuary.”

An administration official on Tuesday confirmed the call was made on Friday and reiterated comments made by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that the administration is committed to its partnerships with faith-based groups.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.), a Catholic who supports abortion rights and access to contraception, said she thought the White House had handled the decision “very well” by being open to listening to religious leaders. “Contraception is about preventing unintended pregnancy,” she said. “I think that they did what they needed to do.”

So up until November Archbishop Dolan was being led to believe that he and the Obama Administration could work together and there would be a conscience exemption in the health care reform regulations and then he gets a call telling him that he’s been played for a chump.

It is really difficult to understate the cultural significance of this decision. If Congress doesn’t intervene and we end up with a pro-abort in the White House, which seems virtually certain regardless of how Obama fares in November, it is hard to see how this precedent will not be applied first to euthanasia, which seems to be the next big thing, and then to abortion. If left as it is, it really marks the end of independent churches in the United States.

The decision even managed to concern the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, another of the “smells and bells” Catholics on the left, or Catholycs as my friend Tom Crowe terms them, whose collective ass gets tired when confronted with the whole issue of morality.

One of Barack Obama’s great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health care law.

His administration mishandled this decision not once but twice. In the process, Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus and strengthened the hand of those inside the Church who had originally sought to derail the health care law.

Reading all of this I was reminded of one of my favorite jokes, involving a guy in a bar and leprechaun. I won’t retell it here because this is a family website but I will link to one of the many variations here.

And I’d like to ask Archbishop Dolan and a lot of other members of our heirarchy, “You’re how old? And you still believe in leprechauns?”

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Free Birth Control vs. Freedom of Religion

Admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:00:28 +0000

From NRO Articles:

When Pliny the Younger was a provincial governor in the Roman Empire, he wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan asking whether he should execute Christians who refused to burn incense in worship of the emperor. Pliny, in keeping with the customs of the empire, did not care about forcing Christians to believe that the emperor was a god. But in public they had to behave as if they did. Thus, the Christians were in the dock not so much because of their faith in a risen Christ as over their willful refusal to declare themselves part of the reigning social order.

I thought of Pliny when I read that the Obama administration, in creating specific rules to implement Obamacare, will require all employers (with a very narrow exemption discussed below) to offer their employees health insurance that provides FDA-approved contraception, female sterilization, and other “reproductive” services free of charge — even if the employer is a religious organization and doing so violates its doctrine. I also recalled the times that President Obama and other members of his administration have supported “freedom of worship.” However, as in Pliny’s time, “freedom of worship” is not the same thing as “freedom of religion.” The former means that one may believe whatever one wants and worship privately without interference, whereas the latter allows one freedom to live in the world at large consistent with one’s faith tenets, even if they are not endorsed by the state.

Because the administration is knowingly forcing (primarily Catholic) religious organizations to pay for medical services to which they are theologically opposed, the new rules represent a frontal assault on freedom of religion at an institutional level. This is no small matter. To date, public controversies over “conscience” in health care have mostly involved individuals — e.g., doctors, nurses, pharmacists — whose personal morality or religious convictions conflicted with the provision of certain medical procedures or substances. For example, pharmacies in Washington State and Illinois have litigated over the right of owners to refuse to dispense contraception on religious grounds. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the pharmacies and in favor of a state regulation (since withdrawn for reconsideration) requiring them to dispense legally prescribed medications. An Illinois state court took the opposite view in a similar case.

But the free-birth-control rule goes much further than creating a potential conflict between the general law and individual religious beliefs. Rather, the rule targets the right of religious organizations to conduct their public activities consistently with their religious dogma and moral values — except within the narrow confines of an actual church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or monastery.

This isn’t an accident. The preliminary rule, which will remain unchanged in the final version, created a very narrowly tailored religious exemption (page 46,623 of the Federal Register). To qualify for exemption as a “religious employer,” an organization must meet four criteria:

1. The “inculcation of religious values” is “its purpose.”

2. It “primarily employs persons who share its religious tenets.”

3. “It primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.”

4. It is a non-profit organization under sections of the code that “refer to churches, their integrated auxiliaries, and conventions or associations, as well as to the exclusively religious activities of any religious order.”

Lest there be any doubt of the limited nature of the exemption, the proposed rule states, “Specifically, the Departments seek to provide for a religious accommodation that respects the unique relationship between a house of worship and its employees in ministerial positions.”

Thus, the group health insurance covering nuns in a Catholic religious order would probably not have to cover contraception. But insurance provided by the same order’s elementary school probably would. Ditto a hospital established by the nuns.

Even more telling: Despite much screaming from opponents, the Department of Health and Human Services has refused to broaden the religious exemption in the final rule — forcing religiously founded organizations to violate their parent church’s teachings, a frontal assault on the freedom of faiths to operate institutional outreach organizations consistent with their beliefs. If this rule stands, it won’t end there. If Catholic organizations can be compelled by federal diktat to violate their religious tenets, so can other religious organizations in different contexts.

Some have argued that a recent 9–0 Supreme Court ruling allowing a Lutheran church to fire a minister who in a secular organization would have been protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act provides shelter against the free-birth-control rule. I think not. That case was not about “freedom of religion,” as I have defined it here, but “freedom of worship” — the Court ruled that churches are free to decide on the criteria for appointing and releasing their own ministers and individual leaders without interference. But the free-birth-control rule isn’t about the “ministerial exception.” Rather, it imposes a legal duty on faith organizations to comply with the values of the state whenever they engage in public action or charitable enterprise among the general society.

In fact, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declared that the Obama administration intends not only to force churches to do what the state directs, but even to speak as the state directs. From Sebelius’s official statement about the promulgation of the new rule:

We intend to require employers that do not offer coverage of contraceptive services to provide notice to employees, which will also state that contraceptive services are available at sites such as community health centers, public clinics, and hospitals with income-based support.

Thus, the Obama administration is attacking even freedom of worship by forcing exempt organizations to tell their employees where and how they can violate church teaching.

The birth-control rule is the latest and most egregious example of government forcing religious organizations to conform their operations to reigning secular moral values. In this sense, faith organizations are being compelled to participate in a metaphorical Caesar worship. As in the Roman Empire, the government will allow religious organizations general freedom of worship, but, increasingly, not freedom of religion. Pliny would approve.

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Unions & #OccupyWallStreet Reveal Their Hidden Agenda: A Worldwide Financial Tax

Admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:00:13 +0000

From RedState:

If there’s one thing about the Marxists controlling today’s unions, it is that they are

Who Are These Fat-Cat Few at the Top?

Admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:00:01 +0000

From NRO Articles:

First lady Michelle Obama the other day railed at “the few at the top,” who do all sorts of bad things. A few months ago, we began hearing of the “1 percent” who are responsible for the current economic mess. “They” apparently make all their money at the expense of the other 99 percent. Are they the same as last year’s villains, who had not paid “their fair share” while making over $200,000 in annual income?

Do they include the greedy doctors, who, the president once asserted, recklessly lop off limbs and yank tonsils for profits? Is my urologist a dreaded one-percenter? He found out what was causing my kidney stones but probably makes good money. Was a nearby farmer one, too? I bet he makes over $200,000 but, like many other growers in this area, has found a way to produce beef and cotton more cheaply and efficiently than farmers in almost any other part of the world, thereby enriching his county, state, and nation.

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A Time for Statesmen

Admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 05:16:20 +0000

From NewsBusters.org blogs:

Now is a particularly dangerous moment for American national security interests. Not just because threats are growing. Not just because the current administration is making a historic bungle from China to Iraq to Iran to Russia to Europe to Mexico to our historic allies in the Middle East — both Jewish and Muslim. All that would be bad enough.

But the greatest threat to our national security, at the moment, is the manifest indifference of the voting public to these foreign threats — and the silence on them from our alleged leaders. It's understandable.

The devil has our economy by the throat, and Americans (when they think about politics) are focused on what Washington should do — or should stop doing — to defeat our domestic economic threat.

Obviously, the public is in no mood to go looking for foreign devils. Every 27-year-old junior Washington political operative knows this is a political season to advise candidates to talk about jobs, jobs, jobs. And they should.

But it is precisely when the public cries out for taking care at home that true statesmen must stand up and warn the public if there are foreign dangers brewing. A few Republican senators are trying to be heard, warning the public of the consequences of the dangers of a predatory China, the further weakening of our military and the White House's retreat from Iraq. But there is little evidence that the public — even the GOP public — cares much.

For example, in a matter of weeks the congressional super committee assigned to reduce the deficit will determine whether it gets its job done or pulls the trigger that would cut defense spending another $600 billion.

If such a cut were to be carried out, it could by itself determine — adversely to America — the coming geo-strategic struggle between the U.S. and China. To contain Chinese ambitions, we are going to need, among other things, a much stronger Navy, not a much weaker one. Of course, navies take years to build up (they can be sunk or turned to rust more quickly) and such a drastic budget cut would inevitably reduce our Navy to ineffectiveness in East Asia.

Last week, the super committee and the nation should have heard — but did not — a rousing warning cry about China and explicitly connecting it to the $600 billion cut.

What am I talking about, you might wonder? Well last week, as Europe struggled to raise sufficient cash to manage the Greek debt default, they sent an emissary to China to seek money. Der Speigel, the leading German news magazine reported: “One day after European leaders announced a plan to boost their euro backstop fund to 1 trillion euros, China indicated it may attach conditions to any money it invests. One of those stipulations — that Europe stop criticizing Beijing's monetary policy — could strain trans-Atlantic relations.”

The price of Chinese money will be European silence of China's predatory trade practices. The Der Speigel quote suggested that such a demand would strain trans-Atlantic — that is, United States-European — relations.

But not a peep was heard form our government or, to the best of my knowledge, from any senior Washington politician of either party.

This should have sent shock waves across America. It also should have been thrown down at the door of the super committee to not disembowel our defense budget in the face of the coming danger.

The very mention of the idea that Europe, with a quarter of the world's economic activity, might agree to be silenced in what will probably be the No. 1 international issue of the next decade — Chinese economic predation — should have set off alarm bells. It also strongly suggests a greater burden that may fall on our military and naval capacity.

Of course, the Chinese have good reason to expect such passivity. As the British Oxford scholar Nigel Cliff recounts in his current book “Holy War”: “Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming emperors staged a spectacular piece of seaborne theater. Seven floating embassies had arrived in the Indian Ocean under the command of Admiral Zheng He…The First fleet alone comprised 317 ships manned by 27, 870 sailors, soldiers, merchants, physicians, astrologers and artisans. At its head were 62 nine-masted treasure ships, and yet in a display of munificence that would have utterly baffled Europeans, the ships were designed not to receive treasure but to dispense it. As they sailed into the harbors …they disgorged huge quantities of silks, porcelain, gold and silver wares and other marvels of Chinese manufacturing. Such terrifying munificence invariably had the intended effect: In the space of a few years, the envoys of 37 nations rushed to pay homage to the emperor at Beijing.”

It may not be popular at the moment for our elected and aspiring officials to warn a threadbare public that we will have to spend more, not less on our defense if we are to guard our freedoms and future prosperity.

But giving the public hard advice in hard times is what distinguishes temporarily unpopular statesmen from historically reviled political hacks.

Tony Blankley is executive vice president of Edelman public relations in Washington. Email him at TonyBlankley@gmail.com. To find out more about Tony Blankley and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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Jan Brewer Slams Media For Using ‘Race Card’ to ‘Shut Down the Debate’ on Illegal Immigration

Admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 02:56:04 +0000

From NewsBusters.org blogs:

While being grilled by co-host Ann Curry on Wednesday's NBC Today on Arizona's illegal immigration law causing racial discrimination, Governor Jan Brewer hit back and declared: “I believe truly that the media and others have tried to throw out that race card to shut down the debate. It's not about that. It's about illegal immigration.” Audio available here

Earlier, Curry fretted: “Now what would justify such a law that required people, essentially, to carry papers, identification, something that proved that they're American citizens?” Brewer replied: “…it's under reasonable suspicion, it's no different than what law enforcement actually does today….So it's a simple issue, and the press, the liberal media tried to blow that completely totally out of perspective.” View video after the jump

Curry pressed Brewer on whether police in Arizona would racially profile: “You say the people in Arizona are not racist or bigots. And so the question has been raised, why wouldn't an officer…not take into account the color of someone's skin in weighing whether or not to believe that someone might be an immigrant, an illegal immigrant?…wouldn't they weigh in the color of a person's skin in deciding whether or not that person?”

Here is a full transcript of the November 2 interview:

8:44AM ET

ANN CURRY: Illegal immigration is one of the hot button issues in the presidential campaign and the state of Arizona is right in the middle of that debate. More than a year after its Republican governor signed a controversial illegal immigration bill into law. Well now, Governor Jan Brewer has written a book about her struggle called “Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America's Border.” Governor Brewer, good morning to you.

JAN BREWER: Good morning to you, Ann.

CURRY: First, let me ask you about what you wrote about in this book about Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. You describe her as a good friend despite your political differences. As such, she appears to be making a remarkable recovery.

BREWER: She does.

CURRY: Would you like to see her run for re-election?

BREWER: I would like to see what Gabby do whatever she can do and what she wants to do. She's a terrific gal, she's a wonderful elected official in Arizona, and more than that, she's been terrific for Arizona in the United States Congress. So I certainly hope that she can do whatever she chooses to do.

CURRY: Given all that she's endured, I imagine for a lot of people and maybe even for you, there would be sort of a sweet smile if you see her do something like that.

BREWER: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. She's a terrific – she really is terrific and it was such a tragic thing that happened down in Tucson. Our hearts were just broken for all, everybody that was murdered and injured down there. It was just a terrible day.

CURRY: You also write in this book, as we just mentioned, a lot about illegal immigration.

BREWER: I do.

CURRY: Why would you want to write a book about your experiences during this huge controversy that started to rage after the signing of this bill?

ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: “Scorpions for Breakfast”; Controversial Battle to Secure America's Border

BREWER: Well, it was really important to me that I was able to put down what I believe was the truth about what we were doing in Arizona, and what we were more or less forced to do because the federal government wouldn't do their job. We are the gateway for illegal immigration into America, bottom line is, is that we can't afford it, we can't tolerate it, and we are the recipient of a lot of criminal acts. And the bottom line is, if the federal government won't protect our borders then Arizona will.

CURRY: You know, let's be very specific about what the bill said. The bill you signed, which is still being challenged in court, would let law enforcement check the immigration status of a suspected illegal immigrant if stopped during a lawful traffic stop, detention, or arrest. And it would require that suspected illegal immigrants show proof that they're here legally. Now what would justify such a law that required people, essentially, to carry papers, identification, something that proved that they're American citizens?

BREWER: Well, first of all, let me just say, Ann, that, you know, it's under reasonable suspicion, it's no different than what law enforcement actually does today. And you know, if you're here in our country or if you're in any other country, it's your responsibility to carry identification with you. So it's a simple issue, and the press, the liberal media tried to blow that completely totally out of perspective.

So I try to talk about that in my book, I'm trying to explain to people, that the people in Arizona are not racist, they are not bigots. We have tried to do the best that we can given the circumstances that we have been given. They closed down the borders in California, they closed down the borders in Texas, and they funneled everybody through Arizona. And we just can't expect our citizens to continue to pay the price. It's costing us $1.6 billion out of an $8 billion budget a year to take care of that issue.

CURRY: You say the people in Arizona are not racist or bigots. And so the question has been raised, why wouldn't an officer, if he's looking under these words, if he's thinking about a suspected illegal immigrant, are you saying that he would not, he or she would not take into account the color of someone's skin in weighing whether or not to believe that someone might be an immigrant, an illegal immigrant?

BREWER: Well, and in the law, it says, you know, it has to be under reasonable suspicion, meaning they have to have already committed something, another crime or illegal-

CURRY: Or be suspected of, I mean they're not necessarily committed, they may have had a-

BREWER: Of course, they're law enforcement. They've been trained. They know what to look for. But it's reasonable suspicion. You can't just walk up to somebody and arrest anybody. And when I signed this bill-

CURRY: But wouldn't they weigh in the color of a person's skin in deciding whether or not that person?

BREWER: No.

CURRY: Why wouldn't they?

BREWER: Why would they? I mean, we have grown up in the southwest, we have grown up – these are our friends, these are our neighbors, they're part of our families, it's just ridiculous and it's – you know what? I believe truly that the media and others have tried to throw out that race card to shut down the debate. It's not about that. It's about illegal immigration. It's about the spillover from Mexico and we're just asking the federal government to do their job.

And when I signed Senate Bill 1070, I wanted to make absolutely sure that it would work, that it would be constitutional, and nobody's civil rights would be offended. That was my main goal and that's why I wrote the book “Scorpions for Breakfast,” I want to tell the truth. And I hope everybody that reads it, that they get that story and they understand we are just simply trying to do the job the federal government won't do. And if the federal government doesn't want to do it, well then they ought to change their laws.

CURRY: What do you say to the Obama administration, that has put out this information that under President Obama more people have been deported for illegal immigration status than under any other president since Eisenhower?

BREWER: Well, I say that's good, if that's factual and if that's true. The General Accounting Office, the GAO, says 55% of our border is not secured, and only 15% of those illegals that are coming across are arrested. That's not a secure border. That's not doing your job.

CURRY: We know you're feisty, Governor Jan Brewer, and in this book you're a fighter. Thank you so much…

BREWER: Thank you.

CURRY: …for speaking to us, and really it's been a pleasure.

BREWER: Thank you.

CURRY: The book is called “Scorpions for Breakfast.”

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House to Take On China’s One-Child Policy

Admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 02:11:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

A House subcommittee is
set to take up a bill that would restrict travel in the United
States for senior Chinese officials, in a protest over China’s
one-child “family planning” policy.

Republican Representative Chris Smith, a frequent and
fierce critic of China’s human rights record, authored the
legislation going before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on
Immigration Policy and Enforcement.

Smith’s proposal would empower Obama to deny US entry
to any senior Chinese official, or family members of any official
closely tied to policies that set back democratic reforms in
China.

China’s one-child policy has been in the news recently beyond
this new legislation. Joe Biden, you’ll remember, made waves
recently for seemingly dismissing the one-child policy as something
he wouldn’t be “second-guessing.”

View source page.