Sarah Palin’s Analysis Of The State Of The Union Speech

Today we turn to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page to read her thoughts on President Obama’s State Of The Union Address.

While I don’t wish to speak too harshly about President Obama’s state of the union address, we live in challenging times that call for candor. I call them as I see them, and I hope my frank assessment will be taken as an honest effort to move this conversation forward.

Last night, the president spoke of the “credibility gap” between the public’s expectations of their leaders and what those leaders actually deliver. “Credibility gap” is a good way to describe the chasm between rhetoric and reality in the president’s address. The contradictions seemed endless.

He called for Democrats and Republicans to “work through our differences,” but last year he dismissed any notion of bipartisanship when he smugly told Republicans, “I won.”

He talked like a Washington “outsider,” but he runs Washington! He’s had everything any president could ask for – an overwhelming majority in Congress and a fawning press corps that feels tingles every time he speaks. There was nothing preventing him from pursuing “common sense” solutions all along. He didn’t pursue them because they weren’t his priorities, and he spent his speech blaming Republicans for the problems caused by his own policies.

He dared us to “let him know” if we have a better health care plan, but he refused to allow Republicans in on the negotiations or consider any ideas for real free market and patient-centered reforms. We’ve been “letting him know” our ideas for months from the town halls to the tea parties, but he isn’t interested in listening. Instead he keeps making the nonsensical claim that his massive trillion-dollar health care bill won’t increase the deficit.

Americans are suffering from job losses and lower wages, yet the president practically demanded applause when he mentioned tax cuts, as if allowing people to keep more of their own hard-earned money is an act of noblesse oblige. He claims that he cut taxes, but I must have missed that. I see his policies as paving the way for massive tax increases and inflation, which is the “hidden tax” that most hurts the poor and the elderly living on fixed incomes.

Read the rest of this entry

Another “F” For Obama

All along, I thought that the grade that President Obama gave himself was pretty generous.
First the WMD commission, and now these folks agree with me.

As expected, Barack Obama’s 70 minute State of the Union address focused heavily on the economy and the domestic political agenda. This was hardly surprising in the aftermath of last week’s catastrophic defeat for his party in the Massachusetts special Senate election, where the Republicans scored an historic victory. American voters are turning strongly against the president’s health care reform package as well as his big government vision for the economy, which has contributed to spiraling public debt and mounting unemployment, now standing at over 10 percent.

But the scant attention paid in the State of the Union speech to US leadership was pitiful and frankly rather pathetic. The war in Afghanistan, which will soon involve a hundred thousand American troops, merited barely a paragraph. There was no mention of victory over the enemy, just a reiteration of the president’s pledge to begin a withdrawal in July 2011. Needless to say there was nothing in the speech about the importance of international alliances, and no recognition whatsoever of the sacrifices made by Great Britain and other NATO allies alongside the United States on the battlefields of Afghanistan. For Barack Obama the Special Relationship means nothing, and tonight’s address further confirmed this.

Read the rest of this entry

Obama And Biden Say That Was Then, This Is Now

Filibuster?
We don’t need no stinkin’ filibuster.
And we sure can’t let the Republicans have it.

Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts is propelling Democratic discussions of resorting to reconciliation to evade a Republican filibuster on their healthcare bill — prompting conservative accusations of hypocrisy.

Only 51 votes are needed to pass a bill under reconciliation, which was designed for deficit reduction.

But Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., suggested, on the eve of Brown’s election as senator Tuesday, that Democrats could use the maneuver to dodge an expected Republican filibuster.

Brown’s victory deprives the Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority, but they could rely on the Senate’s two independents — Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut — who caucus with their party to cut off debate. Both voted in favor of cloture on the healthcare bill last month.

Concern about the reconciliation tactic arose before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered her own bombshell Thursday, when she acknowledged that she didn’t have the votes to pass the healthcare measure as it stands.

Meanwhile, Heritage Foundation Senate expert Brian Darling told Newsmax that Durbin’s suggestion about using reconciliation contradicts the spirit of the Senate and his own remarks from the 2005 debate over changing Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster.

Durbin defended the filibuster during a floor debate on Apr. 15, 2005, saying he had not been elected to serve as a rubber stamp for the majority. He also argued then that the filibuster is an essential part of the U.S. system of checks and balances.

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The White House Declares War On Both Fox News AND Congress

In it’s latest childlike maneuver, the White House attempted to exclude Fox News from a press pool interview of White House “Pay Czar” Kenneth Feinberg.

The Treasury Department attempted to make Feinberg available to all of that day’s participants in the pool except Fox News.

That scheme failed when the Washington bureau chiefs of the other five television networks taking part came to the conclusion that if Fox News was not included, none of them would conduct an interview with Feinberg.

The interview took place, with Fox participating, in spite of the fact that the White House did not want to invite them.

This is the sort of behavior one expects to see at a day-care center, not in our nation’s Capitol.

It appears that despite the White House urging the other major networks to boycott Fox News and not to treat them as a legitimate news organization, some members of the media still understand the meaning behind the words “a free and unfettered press.

Showing his usual disdain for a subject he does not want to be held accountable for, President Obama had this to say about his administration’s portrayal of Fox news as illegitimate:

“I think that what our advisers simply said is, is that we are going to take media as it comes,” 
“And if media is operating, basically, as a talk radio format, then that’s one thing. And if it’s operating as a news outlet, then that’s another. But it’s not something I’m losing a lot of sleep over.”

So rather than be kept awake at night by the questions raised by such Fox News commentators as Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, our President would rather be lulled to sleep by the praises of such unbiased reporters as Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

Funny, but any time that I think of those three passing themselves off as legitimate journalists, it tends to keep me awake at night!

However, Fox News isn’t the only thing that President Obama is refusing to allow to interrupt his nap time.

Another is Congress.

The White House has told Congress it will reject calls for many of President Obama’s policy czars to testify before Congress.

The fact that Congress has a Constitutional mandate to investigate the actions of any Presidential administration is something else that the President is not loosing any sleep over.

In spite of the fact that not one of the multitude of “Czars” that President Obama has appointed has gone through any sort of Senate confirmation process, White House counsel Greg Craig told members of congress this week that none of the Czars would be made available.

Mr. Craig did explain that the White House is not attempting to circumvent Congress.

“We recognize that it is theoretically possible that a president could create new positions that inhibit transparency or undermine congressional oversight. That is simply not the case, however, in the current administration,”

In other words Congress, take our word for it.

Otherwise we may be forced to pull a Fox News on you.

How to Get Your Name On The White House Enemies List

You could get a job with Fox News.

That one is pretty much a no-brainer.

However, there are a multitude of other methods.

You could take part in a Tea Party event. (That way, not only will you make the enemies list, you’ll be a racist as well.)

You could be someone from a small town bitterly clinging to your guns and your religion.

According to Obama, if you oppose amnesty for illegal aliens you are a “demagogue.”

I almost forgot, again. if you are a Tea Party protestor, you are also part of an “angry mob” as well as being a potential terrorist.

If you oppose underhanded, backroom Chicago-style wheeling and dealing, you probably will make the cut.

You could be a “dishonest and partisan” Republican who opposes his health care plan.

And if you don’t fall into any of those categories, don’t despair, there are many ways to get yourself listed as an enemy of Obama.

You could be a capitalist, a pro-lifer, a supporter of the Second Amendment, a global-warming skeptic, one of those “Drill Here Drill Now” people, even something as simple as being a patriotic American can help you make the grade.

The President has also said that “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking.”

So if you don’t want your name on Obama’s enemy list, you better keep your mouth shut.

Some members of Congress seem determined to make the list, despite our advice.

Speaking about the White House call for a boycott of Fox News, Representative Jason Altmire had this to say:

“I think it’s beneath the White House to get into a tit for tat with news organizations.”

While America faces a growing list of problems, Representative Eric Cantor complained about the loss of focus while the White House “bickers with a cable news network.”

I can hear President Obama now:

Axelrod! Put their names on the list!

Naturally, this is not the first time in world history that a nation’s leader has kept an eye on anyone who speaks out against him.

Just a few of the people from the past who kept the same sort of list that Obama seems to be patterning his on were such fair-minded individuals as former paranoiac-in-chief President Richard Nixon, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and, last but not least, the personal favorite of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, one her favorite political philosophers, Mao Zedong

A few of you are feeling pretty smug right now, thinking that currently,  only in America, the land of opportunity, could someone from any walk of life get their name on their country’s leader’s enemies list.

Sorry to break this to you, but President Obama is far from being the only world leader who keeps a list of those who dare oppose him.

Some of the others are:

North Korea
Iran
Cuba
Equatorial Guinea
Saudi Arabia
Liberia
Sudan

The leaders of these countries, along with President Obama, keep track of anyone who doesn’t care for the way they do things.

I wonder what George Orwell would have to say about this?

Gun Ownership As A Cost Of Health Care Reform

The National Institute Of Health (NIH) recently began studying the relationship between gun ownership and health issues.

At one time, this sort of research was done by the Centers For Disease Control (CDC) until Congress cut funding for the program, after it was found that the flawed research done by the CDC was shown to be biased against gun ownership.

Since it has been ten years since the CDC lost it’s funding for this program, why is there suddenly renewed interest in this type of research?

Some of us, (myself included) see this as yet another backdoor ploy by the “gun grabbers” in Congress and the Obama administration for yet another attack on the Second Amendment.

They will tout the implementation of stricter gun control laws as a means of reducing health care costs, due to the reduction in violent crime that would be the result of additional restrictions on firearms ownership.

They will attempt to make their case by presenting statistics showing that gun violence causes health care resources to be spent in ways that could be better utilized in other areas.

Of course, many of the American public will fall for this gibberish, not realizing that it is simply another ploy by the Obama administration to drum up support for an increasingly unpopular health care reform bill, while having the added bonus of being an assault on Second Amendment rights as well.

However, anyone who, rather than simply believe what they are told, would take the time to study the relationship between gun ownership and it’s resulting effect on health care costs would find quite a different answer than what they would assume to be the case.
Anyone holding the opinion that less gun ownership would result in less violent crime and therefore less of a strain on health care resources would learn that just the opposite is the case.

There is a direct correlation between an increase in firearms ownership and a decrease in violent crime.

Several countries that have enacted some of the strictest gun control laws in the world have seen their rates of violent crime increase.

Great Britain, after enacting laws banning the private ownership of handguns, saw their rates of violent crimes more than double.

Australia, after banning the private ownership of nearly all types of firearms, has seen their rates of violent crimes increasing by an average of nearly thirty percent per year.

Turning closer to home, the story is much the same here in the United States.

A study done by the Institute For Legislative Action, a division of the National Rifle Association shows that a 2008 study, using statistics from research done by the BATFE, the FBI and other agencies shows that increases in gun ownership lead to reductions in violent crime.

For those of you who feel that a report from the NRA is bound to be biased towards gun ownership, take a look at this synopsis of a study done by Harvard University explaing how, when it comes to restrictions on firearms ownership leading to less violent crime, and therfore reduced health care costs, the Harvard study comes to the conclusion that Gun Control Is Counterproductive.

Along with a link to the original Harvard University study, this report also mentions the overturning of the ban on firearms ownership in our nation’s capitol, Washington D.C., an area that, in spite of some of the strictest gun control laws in America, also had one of the highest rates of violent crime.

Yet everyone promoting health care reform will claim the fewer firearms will result in less violent crime, and thus treatment funds will be saved.

When all of the evidence is to the contrary.

Oh well, when has lying ever bothered anyone in the Obama administration?

To them, it comes as naturally as breathing.

  

What Is More Important? Universal Health Care Or The War In Afghanistan?

It was recently leaked to the Washington Post that General McChrystal requested more troops be deployed to Afghanistan by President Obama.

McChrystal asked for 40,000 additional soldiers, much like the troop surge that helped us regain the momentum in the war in Iraq during the Bush administration.

The General is so adamant about the need for more troops for the war in Afghanistan to be brought to a successful conclusion that if they are not forthcoming, he has threatened to resign.

In recent days, President Obama has stated that he has not taken this matter under consideration because he has not received a written request for additional troops from the McChrystal.

However, it turns out that statement is not factual.

In the first major “leak” to come from the Obama White House, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post just broke the story that not only has McChrystal made the request through the proper channels, it was made weeks ago!

For those of you who wish to see it, we have an unclassified report that you can read here.

This is going to be a major embarrassment for the Obama administration.

The question is, why not be forthcoming, rather than deny having seen such a document?

Some have speculated that President Obama has an ulterior motive.

When a troop surge was first proposed during the war in Iraq, the hue and cry could be heard all across the United States.

And some feel (we here at the Freedom Medium being among them) that this is the last thing President Obama wants right now.

Such a nationwide debate would take the focus off of the President’s top priority, the passage of a health care reform bill.

So by claiming that he has not received a request for additional troops, Obama would not have to deal with the public discussion, Congressional debate, etc. that would take away health care from being a front page issue.

It will be interesting to see just what sort of spin the White House attempts to put onto this story.

However, anyone with an ounce of common sense will know that there had to be a reason that the President would deny the existence of the request.

Perhaps there is a plausible reason for the President’s actions. (Or lack therof.)

Until such time (if ever) legitimate reasons are forthcoming for Obama’s denial, we will continue to speculate:

What has a higher priority on the President’s agenda?

Winning the war in Afghanistan,and ultimately the war against terrorism?

Or socialized medicine?

How ACORN Sowed The Seeds Of Their Own Destruction

Just how nutty is ACORN?

Very, say longtime watchers of the extreme leftwing group that sprouted out of a radical 60s anti-government movement.

For decades ACORN has presented itself as a grassroots network dedicated to improving the lives of the poor.

But there’s more to ACORN than its do-gooder veneer.

Just ask the banks, corporations and politicians who’ve been the target of ACORN’s shameless shenanigans over the past 40 years.

Here’s how the tiny seed of 1960s radicalism blossomed into a well-funded, national organization with political connections reaching all the way to the White House:

THE BEGINNING

*ACORN is rooted in extreme far-left activism that wants to shut down the US government by overwhelming it with demands for welfare benefits and other forms of assistance.

“They don’t like the American system of government, and would love for it to be overthrown,” said ACORN expert Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at the conservative Capital Research Center in D.C.

“The whole goal is to transform America into a socialist country, or some form of socialist democracy. This group is dangerous.”

*Founder Wade Rathke was a student at Williams College in 1969 and a member of the leftist Students for a New Democracy group when he dropped out to protest the Vietnam War full-time.

*Rathke began working for fiery activist George Wiley, a black radical who started the National Welfare Reform Organization in 1969. NWRO was created to help poor people sign up for more welfare benefits, with the goal of clogging and eventually grinding down US government…Read the rest of this entry

Bring Some Acorns To The Next Tea Party

The next time there is a Tea Party event in your area, urge everyone attending to bring a bag of acorns.

And put someone in charge of providing some large trash cans.

Then making sure that someone from the media is nearby, have everyone walk up to the trash cans and throw the acorns in.

And when some liberal, biased pinhead from the MSM asks: “Why are you racists doing this?”, you can expain how President Obama may have a fondness for nuts, but that you don’t care for them.

Then you can refer them to this:

While ACORN remains riddled in scandal, lawmakers have voted to cut off federal funding to the group, the U.S. Census Bureau has severed ties to the organization – and the White House has blasted its behavior as “unnacceptable.”

But just how extensive are President Obama’s personal ties to ACORN?

The following is a timeline outlining some of the purported connections between the president and ACORN through the years:

1990s: Obama meets ACORN

ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, first noticed Obama when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project . A March 2, 2008, Los Angeles Times article by Letta Tayler and Keith Herbert, titled “Obama Forged Path As Chicago Community Organizer,” explored Obama’s pre-law school days as a community organizer in Chicago and his efforts to build a partnership with Chicago’s “Friends of the Parks.”

“Obama’s task was to help far South Side residents press for improvement,” the Times article explained.

National Review Online noted, “Part of Obama’s work, it would appear, was to organize demonstrations, much in the mold of radical groups like ACORN.”

The Times article reveals that Madeleine Talbot, who at the time was a leader at Chicago ACORN, was thoroughly impressed with Obama because “he got people to vote with their feet.”

“At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and initially considered Obama a competitor,” the article stated. “But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff.”

Talbott personally led Chicago ACORN’s campaign to intimidate banks into…Read the rest of this entry

WHO Says Our Healthcare System is 37th?

The World Health Organization (WHO), that’s who. A report released in 2000 by the WHO that ranks the United States healthcare system at 37th in the world is responsibe for the current misinformation being spread by the President and congressional Democrats.

In the World Health Report 2000 the WHO set out to rank the healthcare systems of 191 countries from best to worst. For many, myself excluded, the first time the results of the WHO report gained their attention was during Michael Moore’s propaganda film SiCKO. Moore used the US’s ranking of 37th on the WHO index to try and convince viewers that Cuba has a far superior healthcare system to the United States. Some people actually believed it.

What Michael Moore, President Obama, and congressional Democrats fail to provide along with the rank number when promoting government-run healthcare is what the WHO used to arrive at these numbers. In 2008 Glen Whitman of the Cato Institute released a paper that explains the WHO’s methodology in terms that average Americans can understand found here: http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp101.pdf.

The explanation of the WHO’s report is not very difficult to understand. Think “redistribution of health”. The index uses five factors to come up with an “Overall Attainment” rank for the countries: Health Level, Responsiveness, Health Distribution, Responsiveness Distribution, and Financial Fairness. The first two factors are legitimate, but the last three make no sense in measuring quality of healthcare.

Notice that I highlighted the word Distribution in two of the above factors. These two factors are included to measure how healthcare is distributed to the population of a given country. That’s right, they don’t measure the quality of the healthcare, they measure if poor people have the same health level and responsiveness as the rich.

The example used in the Cato paper is as follows:

Suppose, for instance, that Country A has health responsiveness that is “excellent” for most citizens but merely “good” for some disadvantaged groups, while Country B has responsiveness that is uniformly “poor” for everyone. Country B would score higher than Country A in terms of responsiveness distribution, despite Country A having better responsiveness than Country B for even its worst-off citizens. The same point applies
to the distribution of health level.

So how exactly does measuring a country’s distribution of healthcare help when measuring healthcare quality? And how does this show that the United States has inferior healthcare to Costa Rica? Your guess is as good as anyone’s.

The next factor is Financial Fairness which attempts to determine what a “fair” level of healthcare expenditures is for households based on their income. This factor is also tied to distribution because if there is a wide diversity of income levels and healthcare expense levels distributed throughout a country (as is the case in the United States) then the Financial Fairness grade is worse. The Financial Fairness grade (25% of the overall grade) of the ideal country would be one where the percentage of household income spent on healthcare would be the same for all income levels. This can only happen when “the rich” pay more for healthcare even when they use the same amount or less than the poor. An outcome like this is more easily attained when a country’s government distributes payments for healthcare using tax dollars. Tax dollars which come from the country’s rich citizens, not the poor. The global bureaucrats behind the WHO have essentially tipped the scales of their index to favor countries with a single-payer healthcare system because of their  definition of what “fairness” is. Again there is no measurement of the quality of healthcare received, just the equality or inequality of healthcare distribution. So much for shifting “from an ideological discourse on health policy to a more [scientific] one,” as the WHO has claimed to have done with this index.

The final aspect of the WHO ranking that gets the US to 37th is the performance of our healthcare system based on how much money is spent.  One more time here, the quality of healthcare is not measured, the performance of the healthcare system based on the amount spent is what is measured. Glen Whitman uses the following example:

When Costa Rica ranks higher than the United States in the OP ranking (36 versus 37), that does not mean Costa Ricans get better health care than Americans. Americans most likely get better health care—just not as much better as could be expected given how much more America spends.

Anyone paying attention has heard President Obama or some other Democrat say that we pay more in this country for healthcare than any other country and yet we are still ranked 37th in the world. However, when looking at how the rankings were determined, it becomes clear that the global bureaucrats at the WHO are telling the United States our ranking did not suffer in spite of the amount spent on healthcare expenses, rather it suffered because we spend so much and they think our system should still be better. This is Obama’s basis for pushing to overhaul our entire healthcare system?

It is pretty bad when the Democrat party and the President of the United States start using the same points as an America-hating propagandist to try and move their agenda forward. The World Health Organization’s rankings are clearly ideologically based and were intended to be embarrassing to the United States, yet the WHO index is cited by leading Democrats and the President all the time. Still Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer have the nerve to call people questioning them unamerican!

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