When B. Hussein Obama was first elected to the Presidency, I and my co-writers here at Hard Astarboard really did determine to give the man a chance without any pre-inaugural condemnation such as that received by George W. Bush from the fraction of a second he was elected until… actually, they’re still blaming Dubya for everything from an act of nature to the decades old shooting of J.R. (remember that?). More extreme tinfoil hatters even, to this day, sccuse him of complicity in the destruction of the Twin Towers.

But back on track — we tried, seriously tried, to cut the far left product of the Chicago Machine some slack. Neither Wolf, Chuck nor myself wanted to display disunity of American citizens in the face of the rest of the world, like that which the Democrats have displayed through three wars, their opportunistic, not-very-patriotic patrons on the Hill currying their favor by turning these wars into political circuses, resulting in prolonged conflict, boosts to enemy morale and the deaths of U.S. service personnel as a bi-product of it all.

The problem was, Mr. Obama declared, in his every word from the time he was elected, that the Constitution was irrelevant as it conflicted with his own agendas for America, which have been much, much nearer to the propogation of marxism than to the concepts upon which this great country was founded.

The programs this president has pushed from the start have been so anti-American as most of our countrymen understand that to mean that the three of us saw no option but to abandon our “wait-and see” attitude in a so-called New York minute.

The “community organizer” provides a veritable smorgasbord of targets for anyone with even a drop of patriotic blood, so…

Unlike Bubba Clinton, whom we learned had a multitude of uses for interns, the Obama Administration has few to none.

The Obama administration’s top law enforcement officer at the Labor Department, M. Patricia Smith, is targeting companies that give young people unpaid internships. She claims that internships are rife with abusive practices and that serious violations of labor law are widespread. Arguing that interns should get paid at least minimum wage, Ms. Smith and the White House risk destroying a valuable steppingstone that gives many young Americans training they need to get jobs they want in the future.

Unpaid internships are valuable for many reasons. Most simply, they help people test whether they are a good fit for a particular industry. If interns like the type of work at particular companies, internships can help them get the training and contacts they need to make their career aspirations a reality. The short time that interns spend at jobs - often just two to three months - makes it difficult for firms to both train these young people and get much work out of them. From manufacturing to nonprofits to media companies such as The Washington Times, hands-on opportunities open through internships are almost endless.

Change, indeed.

Basic economics teaches that if the price is raised, demand falls. If companies have to pay wages, they will take on fewer interns. If these youngsters were actually benefiting companies more than it costs to train them, companies would pay them. Profit-seeking companies compete against each other for employees. If untrained students were such valuable workers, firms would gladly offer money to beat out the competitor next door to get them.

Some statements by the administration suggest that their actions are not simply motivated by the welfare of the kids who get internships. The O Force worries that unpaid internships might disadvantage less-affluent students, who might not be able to afford to spend their summers at unpaid jobs. But the administration’s solution risks eliminating many internships at for-profit companies so that no one gets them.

The Obama administration, which is full of rhetoric about improving education, actually views education extremely narrowly. In the real world, people gain a lot of practical knowledge on the job. Eliminating training opportunities will only mean worse careers and lower future earnings for those President Obama’s team is claiming to protect.

Ah, sweet Utopia. These lefties are clueless about the marketplace, no matter how many times reality smacks them in the face.

“It hasn’t worked the last ninety nine times, so it should work the hundredth.”

Then again, when Obama sees the results of this one, he can always issue one of those Constitutionally unauthorized royal edicts executive orders, one to the effect that every private concern has to use X amount of interns, like it or not, and compensate them with wages and benefits, including comprehensive health insurance.

While we’re on the subject of Obama, Wesley Pruden writes:

What this country needs, in addition to the elusive nickel cigar, is a president with less presence and more absence. Not just from Barack Obama, but from whoever follows him as well. Celebrities, even presidents, can be too much among us. They, like us, suffer for it.

The jet airplane, the ubiquitous television camera and now the Internet have conspired to illustrate as nothing ever has that familiarity breeds contempt, that it’s absence that makes the heart grow fonder. Women once knew that by female instinct, until they aspired to be men, minus the body odor and whiskers. (Some of them are working on that.) The studio moguls in Hollywood understood that, too, when Hollywood was still Hollywood, populated by movie stars. Now Hollywood, like Washington, is populated only by actors, who compete to see who can look and smell most in need of a bath. Jane Russell, one of the last of the authentic movie stars, once told me how she couldn’t slip out of her house for a quick trip to the supermarket for a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread without her make-up, manicure, heels and hair perfectly in place. It was in her contract. (Meryl Streep, our only surviving movie queen, projects the old star power precisely because she remembers the formula.)

You might think that a president, being the most powerful man in the world, able to start wars on a whim, wouldn’t be so eager to get noticed. Indeed, presidents once carefully rationed their availability, even for photo-ops. FDR, Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower would never be available for a photo-op with Miss Drumsticks of the Ozarks, even for a cause so grand as commemorating poultry plentitude. Barack Obama has not yet descended to the chicken house, but that may be in the works. He never misses an opportunity to take his noisy community activism on the road.

Heh, heh…

Read on…

…I was watching Obama Hatchetwoman Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius give her spiel on C-Span this morning and was struck by the wideness of the spectrum encompassed by Obama’s “Health” Care program.

Unsurprisingly, the thin lipped, angular featured (I don’t want to make disparaging remarks about anyone’s appearance, but she did kinda’ sorta remind me of a hatchet, come to think of it) cabinet member managed to incorporate education, “acceptable” foods, corporate salaries and a few other items in there that I simply couldn’t relate to health care, per se, but maybe that was just me.

My own impression was that she was laying the groundwork for the mega-agenda distribution of the soon-to-be voluminously increased taxes we will behold as the Obama Administration and its Pelosi led, Congressional marxist contingent do their unconstitutional best, under the blanket misnomer of “health care”, to strip us of our liberty and as much of our hard earned money as they possibly can.

…and I’m remembering the joke NASCAR pulled a year ago, when they announced that the Obamunists had forbidden any of the automakers whom the government had bailed out to spend the money entering racing vehicles for NASCAR events.

It was quite the joke, they definitely got over on a few right thinking columnists and other commentators, bloggers and pundits, to judge by the feedback that issued forth from even a few of the better informed and more celebrated among us (not me, simply because I was rather indisposed that day -whew!)

Later in the day, of course, they did the corporate version of grinning and told the truth, that the announcement had been an April Fool’s Day joke.

I’ve been thinking, and realize that the Obama Administration and the far left dominated Congress just might be able to redeem themselves with the American people if they announced that every single thing they’ve done since a) the Democrat majority was sworn in in January, 2009 and b) Obama was ordained sworn in a year later was an elaborate April Fool’s joke and that they really aren’t communists or jihad sympathizers, but Americans who love their country, respect the Constitution and are about to vote unanimously to retract and reverse their every official act.

This is, of course, highly unlikely as it would be too much, for the American people, like waking up from a terrible nightmare to find that all is well in the world.

Unfortunately, all is not, and that is particularly true with the lying lefty loony linx who, through profoundly pounded propaganda from the kommie media and many a shovelfull of malarkey from the politicians both in the White House and on the Hill, finally won in their battle to staff the upper echelons of the U.S. Government with enemies of the state.

The only silver lining to that particular cloud is that we’ll be well rid of Barack Hussein in November 2012, at which time we’ll also have picked up the spares among the Democrat majority — the ones we won’t get to give the bums’ rush in November of this year.

However…

I actually came here to share another great Ann Coulter column, this week’s, which I received yesterday.

On the “Today” show this Tuesday, President Obama claimed the massive government takeover of health care the Democrats passed without a single Republican vote was a “middle of the road” bill that incorporated many Republican ideas.

One Republican idea allegedly incorporated into the Democrats’ health care monstrosity is “medical malpractice reform.” Needless to say, the Democrats’ idea of malpractice reform is less than nothing. Until trial lawyers are screaming bloody murder, there has been no medical malpractice reform.

The Democrats’ “malpractice” section merely encourages the states to set up commissions to “study” tort reform, in the sense that frustrated mothers “encourage” their kids not to slouch. By “study,” the Democrats mean “ignore.”

So we get more taxpayer-funded government workers under the Democrats’ “medical malpractice reform,” but not one tittle of actual reform.

Democrats manifestly do not care about helping Americans get quality health care. If they did, they could not continue to support trial lawyers like John Edwards making $50 million by bringing junk lawsuits against doctors who are saving people’s lives. (At least Edwards has not done anything else to publicly disgrace himself since then.)

At a minimum, any health care bill that purports to improve Americans’ health, rather than trial lawyers’ bank accounts, must include a loser-pays rule and a restriction on damages to actual losses — as opposed to punitive damages, which mostly serve to enrich the John Edwardses of the world, and their mistresses.

LOL!!!!

The Democrats also lyingly claim their health care reform includes the Republican ideas of competition across state lines.

I know they’re lying because — well, first because I read the bill — but also because Democrats are genetically incapable of understanding the free market. You might say it’s a pre-existing condition with them.

The Democrats will lie to anybody about anything if they believe it will help one of their destructive agendas reach fruition.

Democrats want to turn the entire citizenry into welfare recipients.

Amen to that!

Truncating a ways…

A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran an editorial noting the amazing fact that, by the middle of this year, there will be an estimated 6.8 billion people on Earth — and 5 billion will have cell phones! (Even more astounding, at least one of them is seated directly behind me every time I go to the movies.)

How did that happen without a Democrat president and Congress using bribes, parliamentary tricks and arcane non-voting maneuvers to pass a massive, hugely expensive National Cell Phone Reform Act?

How did that happen without Barney Frank and Henry Waxman personally designing the 3-foot-long, 26-pound, ugly green $4,000 cell phone we all have to use?

How did that happen without Obama signing the National Cell Phone Reform bill, as a poor 10-year-old black kid who couldn’t afford to text-message his friends looked on?

The reason nearly everyone in the universe has a cell phone is that President Reagan did to telephones the exact opposite of what the Democrats have just done with health care.

Before Reagan came into office, we had one phone company, ridiculously expensive rates and one phone model. Reagan split up AT&T, deregulated phone service and gave America a competitive market in phones. The rest is history.

The column can be found here, in its entirety.

…that the bad guys really are winning.

The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which posted hundreds of civilian volunteers along the U.S.-Mexico border over the past five years, has disbanded, citing what it called “rising aggression” in the country and decisions by lawmakers in Washington who have “pushed amnesty down our throats.”

“The mental attitude of many Americans is turning meaner … and we are concerned that this could cause problems,” MCDC President Carmen Mercer told The Washington Times on Monday. “You see aggression surfacing even at the tea party marches. We just did not want to deal with the liability anymore.

“We have to protect the ranchers as well as the volunteers,” Ms. Mercer said, noting the killing on Saturday of Robert Krentz, a prominent Douglas, Ariz., rancher who was shot along with his dog on his ranch by a suspected illegal immigrant who fled into Mexico and remains a fugitive.

Nothing like a government run by people who apparently believe that their mission in life is to destroy the country they “govern” by any means they deem necessary.

“From the surveillance videos we have gathered in the field over the past six months, it is more than evident the violators of our borders seem to have been given carte blanche permission to willfully violate our public safety,” the message said.

She also said that the MCDC volunteers would be returning to the border to tell Mr. Obama that his immigration policy is wrong and to send a message to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that she is “an unqualified buffoon who risks the lives of American citizens every day she is the head of DHS.”

Emphasis mine.

…an unqualified buffoon who risks the lives of American citizens every day she is the head of DHS. Spot on!

Read on.

Depends upon what you mean by “care”, here.

Wolf here.

I ran across an interesting article by retired constitutional attorney Michael Connelly, who writes:

Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.

To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.

The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled.

However, as scary as all of that it, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated. If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.

The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people and the businesses they own. The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with. I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.

I hope all the mulletheads who voted in both the lefty congressional majority and Obama, the traitor and enemy of the state in POTUS’ clothing, read and enjoy reading herein what they are responsible for.

The entire article is here.

…what if there was a revolution? I mean, what if Americans flatly refused to acknowledge laws stemming from the ObamaCare debacle and started cleaning their weapons, so to speak?

How could anyone call it treason, or otherwise condemn it, when all that these rebels would be doing was emulating our nation’s founders?

The American Revolution was fought, after all, to gain freedom from a kind of tyranny that, in truth, was not much different from what we are experiencing now under the Obama regime — yes, I said regime, not administration.

We, The People, are being ruled by officials elected, according to the Constitution, to govern according to the will of the people, not the other way around.

Yet here we are, having come full circle, so in the spirit of America, it seems to me that if there were a revolution, it should ideally be a short one — it would be an act of treason, in my opinion, for any U.S. serviceman, Law Enforcement officer or other American citizen in a position to do so to take up arms against the people if we got it into our heads to do exactly as our founding fathers did in the 1770s, taking our country away from those who would tax us into oblivion and dictate to us.

These politicians have violated the Constitution which is, given their oaths of office and the nature of their jobs, a federal crime in itself.

So, the Obama Administration and the Democrats in the House and Senate, those who voted for the “HealthCare” bill, are technically all felons, no matter what they and their sycophantic arse creepers of the lefty media say about it.

Doesn’t that make the President and his congressional majority a “renegade” criminal government, anyway, and certainly even less valid than that of the late King George?

Chuck reporting for duty.

As I’ve more or less written before, my home is what could arguably be called a small yacht, as she is fifty feet long and fairly luxurious, the good part being that while she cost quite a bit of money, I was fortunate, at the time I acquired her, to possess the means with which to pay for her in full.

This was made possible by the U.S. Armed Forces, since after I retired with twenty, entering the private sector, I brought my experience and skills overseas to help some good guys solve some problems with bad guys and made a couple of good scores along the way.

She’s parked among the pleasure craft, at a marina located within the boundaries of Los Angeles County, California, of a number of individuals whose personal assets make mine look like fly specks, but then, friends of mine tell me I’m essentially a “boat bum” (as opposed to a beach one, I suppose), and they’re not far off the mark: it took practically every penny I had at the time to buy and equip her to my specifications, with a permanent and totally mobile home in mind.

My bank balance is anything but impressive, and my modest pension takes care of my month-to-month expenses.

Even so, I’m the original happy camper as what little I have constitutes, in its entirety, everything I want or need.

Having said that, I’ve been all for the modest, quiet life since buying her and going to live aboard; Entertaining friends or neighbors, taking her out for a cruise either down to Coronado or, still further south, to Mexico, or north for a visit to the Bay Area now and then, or wandering around, landlubber style, in questionable neighborhoods like Venice Beach or Hollywood.

Yesterday evening, a friend and I got together for a Thanksgiving feast at a place on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood. Having nothing planned, other than swinging by a couple of local bars I occasionally visit in nearby Venice, I spent the day wandering around and made an observation I thought I’d share.

I was down in the vicinity of Santa Monica Blvd and Western Avenue, which is as Mexican a neighborhood as you’ll find outside Mexico (along with a significant sized sprinkling of South Americans). There must be one “hellified” number of illegals saturating that community.

While practically every place of business in L.A. County that wasn’t selling food, gas or booze was closed for Thanksgiving, every business in that ‘hood was open as though there were no holiday: even the clothing stores, check cashing establishments, electronics businesses (cell phones, stereo equipment, etc), and the locals were going about their normal routines as though it were just another day.

Thanksgiving is an American holiday, one of the most prominent of American holidays, yet the folks in that Mexican enclave could care less, it was nothing to them, just something the gringos celebrate.

Theoretically, most of these happen to be among those people liberals in our society refer to as “Mexican - hyphen - Americans”.

Here at Hard Astarboard we do not believe in hyphenated Americans.

Either someone’s an American or not, they can’t be both an American and something else.

This hyphenating business came along as a liberal Democrat ploy to maintain differences between white and non-white Americans, the ultimate purpose being to exploit those perceived differences, through race-card politics, to get votes.

One of their primary explanations for this pitiful, very desperately conceived precurser of oppressive political correctness is that they “feel” all people of foreign extraction should, the poor wretches, be able to embrace their respective heritages.

If you are an American, you have the same heritage shared by all Americans. If you don’t, why be here? Wouldn’t it just be cozier to return to the land that you feel is the land of your heritage?

Now, here’s what makes me scratch my head:

Mexican-Americans. Most “Mexican-Americans” are here because they want to be able to find work, earn money, eat. Feed their families.

Back next door in the old country, many of them didn’t have those luxuries, couldn’t find ‘em, so they came up here.

By being “Mexican-Americans”, then, they are able to celebrate their “heritage” of poverty and squalor, hunger and disease in a politically corrupt shithole.

“African-Americans”. Hmmmph! How many American born black people with American born grand parents do you know that can tell you which tribe their ancestors came from and the names of those ancestors?

The reality is that American black folks are 100% American, the same as the rest of us, no different, except that their first generation ancestors paid harder than most of the rest of ours on the way to becoming free men in a free country. Granted, those unfortunates back then hadn’t been given a choice as far as coming over here to begin with, but looking at the way life has always been in sub-Saharan Africa, I hardly think the average black American, or white, yellow, red or brown one for that matter, would want to live there, anyway.

Moving on, though, slavery flourished and died long before any American now living was born, and there has not been a human being in this country alive for decades who even knew any slaves, let alone having been slaves themselves.

It’s over, it is the worst black mark on the history of this nation, but it ended, and it ended on fields covered with blood spilled by white boys and white men. It was time to move on a long time ago.

Liberals don’t want to move on, because they gain votes by pimping guilt to whites and resentment to blacks, using both to keep a wedge between false perceptions and reality, because it’s in the best political interests of the Democrats to keep alive the illusion that we are different. Keep the hate in place as best you can, so the differences remain in plain sight as well.

These are the same Democrats who founded and filled the member roles of the Ku Klux Klan, and the same Democrats who voted solidly against the Civil Rights Bill, yet they have run a hell of a good con, making it “a given” that they are the black man’s best friend.

Most of the blacks I know are pretty smart, which causes me some disappointment when I realize that so many of them are gullible enough to be made asses of by the Democrats decade after decade without waking up and smelling the proverbial coffee.

In summation, the hyphen thing seems to be working, if the people in the Mexican neighborhood I mentioned above don’t even take the fact of Thanksgiving seriously. On the other hand, look for lots of liberals to show up for the next Cinco de Mayo celebration.

After all, we American-Americans must be as multicultural as it takes us being in order to stand our own culture aside for the collective heritages of everyone else, mainly so Democrats can get more votes.

Ciau.

Chuck here, “the boss man” put me back to work. No sweat, friends, I really enjoy this.

So, honesty and liberals.

Apples and oranges. Rocks and books. Pterodactyls and aardvarks. Paper clips and fish.

In today’s Best Of The Web Today, James Taranto writes about some emails industrious hackers wrenched from the hallowed files of your garden variety liberal academics whom, no doubt, would be the first to become outraged/ indignant/ majorly offended (take your pick) if accused of even considering anything like that which Mr. Taranto describes in Settled Science?

“Officials at the University of East Anglia confirmed in a statement on Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and that the police had been brought in to investigate the breach,” the New York Times reports. “They added, however, that they could not confirm that all the material circulating on the Internet was authentic.” But some scientists have confirmed that their emails were quoted accurately.

The files–which can be downloaded here–surely have not been fully plumbed. The ZIP archive weighs in at just under 62 megabytes, or more than 157 MB when uncompressed. But bits that have already been analyzed, as the Washington Post reports, “reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies”:

In one e-mail, the center’s director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University’s Michael E.
Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” Jones writes. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow–even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” Mann writes. . . .

Mann, who directs Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, said the e-mails reflected the sort of “vigorous debate” researchers engage in before reaching scientific conclusions. “We shouldn’t expect the sort of refined statements that scientists make when they’re speaking in public,” he said.

This is downright Orwellian. What the Post describes is not a vigorous debate but an attempt to suppress debate–to politicize the process of scientific inquiry so that it yields a predetermined result. This does not, in itself, prove the global warmists wrong. But it raises a glaring question: If they have the facts on their side, why do they need to resort to tactics of suppression and intimidation?

It is hard to see how this is anything less than a definitive refutation of the popular press’s contention that global warmism is settled science–a contention that both the Times and the Post repeat in their articles on the revelations: “The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument,” the Times claims. The Post leads its story by observing that “few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world’s climate,” and that “nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal.” (As blogger Tom Maguire notes, this actually overstates even the IPCC’s conclusions.)

The press’s view on global warming rests on an appeal to authority: the consensus among scientists that it is real, dangerous and man-caused. But the authority of scientists rests on the integrity of the scientific process, and a “consensus” based on the suppression of alternative hypotheses is, quite simply, a fraudulent one.

Yes, honesty and liberals, rifles and feather dusters, automobiles and coral reefs, steel and rhubarb…

…which, as we know, is their not-too-subtle public relations machine, get their backs up with profound indignancy, if not shock, when anyone infers, even remotely, that Barack Hussein Obama is in any way pro-Muslim, anyone who is unfamiliar with histrionics would take them seriously.

I will admit that I’m both Jewish and pro-Israel, and that I have little use for the “Palestinians”, a collective who have built up a well deserved reputation as a spawn of terrorism and a people who, as Abba Eban once said, “never miss a chance to miss an opportunity”, but even if I entertained totally neutral feelings between both the Jews and the “Palestinians”, I would have to be either completely obtuse or a bald faced liar if I failed to note that the Obama Administration is very much anti-Israel and pro-”Palestinian”.

The “Palestinians”, those fine folks who brought us Hamas.

In fact, there would seem to be a certain almost malevolent tone to Barack Hussein’s treatment of Israel, as is well defined in a column by Caroline Glick.

Once again, US President Barack Obama has demonstrated his intention of “putting light” between America and Israel. His hostility towards Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu during the latter’s visit to Washington this week was breathtaking.

It isn’t every day that you can see an American President leaving the Prime Minister of an allied government twisting in the wind for weeks before deciding to grant him an audience at the White House.

It isn’t every day that a visiting leader from a strategically vital US ally is brought into the White House in an unmarked van in the middle of the night rather than greeted like a friend at the front door; is forbidden to have his picture taken with the President; is forced to leave the White House alone, through a side exit; and is ordered to keep the contents of his meeting with the President secret.

You know, the very blatancy of this move speaks volumes.

I don’t guess the Chicago machine is what you’d call a bastion of discretion where its corruption is concerned — after all, in one of those few large U.S. cities where racketeering, graft and corruption are historically hallmarks of day-to-day reality, there is little need to try and mask what the people expect, anyway, as a matter of course.

Therefore, the Chicago Machine© product B. Hussein Obama brought to the White House is, for lack of any previous need for subtlety, is transparently obvious for what it is.

As a result, no amount of lying, nor third rate subterfuge performed under the nom de guerre of a “transparent administration” could be expected to fool anyone who wasn’t deaf, dumb, blind and brain dead — we’ve learned that nothing Obama says is worth taking seriously, that his actions will tell us the truth long before he will.

The fun part is that the mainstream media, liberal rodents that they are, will go with the program no matter what O says or does.

Knowing this, the president, feeling, I suppose, like any worthy communist party general secretary who knows he is well shielded by a strong propaganda ministry (or, in this case, the MSM), charges ahead with even his most extreme agendas, including that of bringing down Israel, taking the Jewish state away from the Jewish people.

Ahead of Obama’s meeting with Netanyahu, the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama was effectively attempting to blackmail the Israeli premier by conditioning the meeting on Netanyahu’s willingness to make tangible concessions to the Palestinians during his speech before the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America.

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” you exclaim.

Although the report was denied by the Obama administration, if it was true, such a move by the White House would be without precedent in the history of US relations with Israel. And if untrue, the very fact that the story rings true is indicative of the wretched state of US relations with Israel since Obama entered office.

Obama’s hostility was evident as well during his meeting with fifty Jewish leaders at the White House this week. In an obvious bid to split American Jewry away from Israel, Obama refused to discuss Israel or Iran with the concerned American Jewish leaders. As far as Obama was concerned, all they deserved from him was a primer on the brilliance of his economic policies and the worthiness of his plan to socialize the American healthcare industry. His foreign policy is none of their business.

Obama’s meeting with American Jewish leaders was supposed to be a consolation prize for American Jews after Obama cancelled his first public address to American Jews since taking office. The White House claimed that he cancelled the speech because his visit to the Fort Hood memorial service made it impossible for him to attend. But then the conference was a three-day affair. The organizers would probably have been happy to reschedule.

Although the report was denied by the Obama Administration…; Whose word is as good as what?

Uh oh, here’s the kicker!

Instead, as Iran races to the nuclear finish line, America’s Jewish leaders were forced to sit through White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel’s kitschy Borscht Belt schmooze about his bar mitzvah.

When you take all the above into consideration, the entire exercise was a calculated insult to Jews and Israel, a veritable slap in the face!

The ironic thing about Obama’s nastiness towards Netanyahu and his arrogant treatment of the American Jewish community is that while it has made him the first US president to have no credibility among Israelis and has caused a 14 percent drop in his support among American Jews, it has failed utterly to earn him the trust of the Muslim world.

Today the Fatah movement is in disarray. Last week its leader Mahmoud Abbas announced his intention to retire and has placed the blame for his decision on the Obama administration as well as on Israel. Key Palestinian spokesmen like Saeb Erekat have declared the death of the peace process and called for the renewal of the jihad against Israel.

As for the larger Muslim world, a report this week in the New York Timesstated that the US’s key Arab allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia have been perilously weakened since Obama took office. Their diminished influence has been accompanied by the rapid rise of Iran and Syria. Both of these rogue states have been on the receiving end of continuous wooing by Obama administration officials who seem ready to do just about anything to appease them.

And this is the president of what country? The U.S.? My country?

Gadzooks!!!!

Read the rest of the column here.

Having read the book of Revelations before, I wonder how many Christians there are out there who think of the Antichrist in the same context as they do B. Hussein Obama…

Yesterday being Veterans Day, I opted to let this one go until today, as it was a day for lounging around aboard my boat with a few other ‘Nam vets, imbibing heavily, reminiscing and both praying for our brethren who are at war today and honoring those we served with who never made it home.

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John Stossel wrote a column, published yesterday, that I think summed everything up in simple, to the point, “no muss, no fuss” manner where the government’s health care bill, fresh from the leftists in the House of representatives (representative of who is anybody’s guess) is concerned.

As an American, I am embarrassed that the U.S. House of Representatives has 220 members who actually believe the government can successfully centrally plan the medical and insurance industries.

I’m embarrassed that my representatives think that government can subsidize the consumption of medical care without increasing the budget deficit or interfering with free choice.

It’s a triumph of mindless wishful thinking over logic and experience.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The 1,990-page bill is breathtaking in its bone-headed audacity. The notion that a small group of politicians can know enough to design something so complex and so personal is astounding. That they were advised by “experts” means nothing since no one is expert enough to do that. There are too many tradeoffs faced by unique individuals with infinitely varying needs.

Government cannot do simple things efficiently. The bureaucrats struggle to count votes correctly.

They give subsidized loans to “homeowners” who turn out to be 4-year-olds. Yet congressmen want government to manage our medicine and insurance.

And we once thought that the United States Government would always have adult leadership.

Read the rest here.

Who knows what’s next?