Awesome: To President Obama, from an American

randy streu

Dear Mr. President,

As you know, millions of individuals have risen up in the past year to protest your designs on our Health Care system in this country. These individuals, and their complaints, were glossed over by your administration, as you doubled down and committed to passing your legislation, your way, because “Americans want it.”

But, Sir, I am an American, and I do not.

Those same individuals rose up before, to protest your designs on our economy. You told the House Republicans that “Americans disapprove of the Stimulus, but like every policy in it.”

But I am an American, and I do not.

Your reactions to the concerns of Americans over your policy have been mixed with scorn and condescension. Your Administration has accused those voters of everything from ignorance to blind partisanship – and even of being bought off by special interests.

You don’t know us very well.

Sir, I am an American. My wife and my parents are Americans. My siblings and friends. You haven’t the knowledge to question our motivation or our patriotism, nor the credibility to question our intelligence. My pockets have never been lined by a special interest group, a campaign never funded, a cabinet never filled. Can you say the same?

I am a married father of four. I have worked in factories and offices, done manual labor and menial tasks. I am educated and well-read. Even, some would say, well-spoken. I have known times of great joy and times of great sorrow. I have known both want and fulfillment.

I am an American, sir – a member of the single most generous nation on Earth. I have been sustained by the kindness of my friends, and have been generous where I could. I was born into neither wealth nor privilege. I have been given neither education nor employment based upon my social status, on that of my friends or family, or on my race.

What I have is mine because I have earned it out of my own blood and sweat, or because it was given freely as a gift by those who love me.

I am an American. A descendent of those who crossed an ocean in search of freedom. A brother and friend to those who have crossed oceans to defend it. I have seen those men and women return from battle wounded in body and in heart, and I have mourned them and loved them and given them comfort, because I am an American. I have been both proud of my country and fearful for my countrymen.

I am an American who has been belittled because of his beliefs and judged, not on the content of his character, but on the color of his skin. But I am an American – and individual built of sterner stuff than to crumble and fall at the merest criticism.

I am an American who believes in the right to live my life, not by the consent of a government, but by a Liberty granted by God alone. I am an American, not by birthright, but by my belief in the inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, and in a government for, by, and of the People.

Sir, you speak for the American people, but it is a people with whom you are woefully unacquainted. You don’t know them, because you don’t know me, nor the people like me. I am an American, and I do not want to be taken care of by government. I want the liberty to take care of myself, and my family, without your interference.

I am an American, Mr. President. You may not like what I have to say, but by God, one way or another, we will be heard.

Read the original article on Red State

Rove:The State of the Union Is No ‘Reset’ Button

By KARL ROVE

Presidential ratings usually drop after the speech.

It was a tense moment in the West Wing. Less than a year into a new president’s term, a Senate seat was slipping to the opposition and taking with it the balance of power in the upper chamber. The president’s agenda was suddenly at risk.

If this sounds like Republican Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts last week, it was actually Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords’s defection in 2001. Mr. Jeffords’s decision to bolt the party cost the GOP not the 60th vote, but a razor-thin majority. Yet following the defection, George W. Bush passed his signature tax-cut package, No Child Left Behind education reform, and a budget that cut in half the growth of discretionary domestic spending from the sizzling 16% rate of President Bill Clinton’s last budget.

As congressional Democrats back away—for now—from Mr. Obama’s health-care agenda, it is worth asking if this president’s agenda is really aligned with what Americans want. This was supposed to be a historic presidency. But if it’s undone by the loss of the 60th Senate Democrat, was Mr. Obama actually prepared for the challenges of governing?

The Massachusetts defeat, Mr. Obama said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” caused him “to try to reset the tone” in his State of the Union address because “we had lost some of that sense of common cause that existed a year ago.”

But that “sense of common cause” wasn’t lost. It was abandoned when Mr. Obama attempted to do things he hadn’t prepared Americans for, such as a government takeover of health care, and when he failed to revive the flagging economy.

Now Mr. Obama wants to hit the reset button with his State of the Union address. But since World War II, presidential job approval ratings have dropped an average of 1.8 points after a president’s first State of the Union speech. Over the past 25 years, presidents have experienced virtually no change—an average drop of 0.1 points in Gallup’s job approval ratings—after giving a State of the Union address. That indicates that last night’s teleprompter special is unlikely to stop Mr. Obama’s decline.

Mr. Obama entered 2010 with 49% job approval, according to Gallup. That’s down from 67% last January. Those who strongly disapprove of his performance outnumber those who strongly approve by 41% to 26%, according to Rasmussen’s latest poll.

Mr. Obama’s slide over the past year has been led by independents (whose support is down 17 points since last January), seniors (down 19 points), those making $60,000 to $90,000 a year (down 19 points), Republicans (down 23 points) and conservatives (down 24 points).

On the generic ballot, a measure of party strength, Republicans lead Democrats by five points in National Public Radio’s latest poll and by eight points in Rasmussen’s latest survey.

These numbers are worse than Democrats faced at this point in 1994. If Democrats fare better this year than they did 16 years ago, it will likely only be because they have fewer open seats to defend and because they are taking their challengers more seriously than they did in 1994.

One of Mr. Obama’s first reactions to last week’s Massachusetts debacle was to install his 2008 campaign manager as an über-election czar for Democrats. But the White House tried to boost Democrats running for governor in New Jersey and Virginia last year. They lost anyway.

It probably didn’t help Democratic morale when the White House complained it was blindsided by Mr. Brown’s victory. Politico reports the White House had the Democratic Party spend $2.2 million on surveys and focus groups in just a 10-month span last year. That money was supposed to let Team Obama see these things coming.

Mr. Obama’s problems are not political management, but policy. They won’t be solved by faux fiscal restraint, mini-ball proposals for the middle class, and angry pretensions to populism.

By his own Office of Management and Budget numbers, Mr. Obama has raised the baseline of discretionary domestic spending by a total of $115 billion since his inauguration, bumping it up midway through the 2009 fiscal year budget and then increasing it again for the 2010 fiscal year.

Mr. Obama is now calling for a spending freeze to save $15 billion for fiscal year 2011. That’s nice, but it freezes in place a 24% increase in discretionary, nonsecurity domestic spending. The president would also exempt from a freeze the $512 billion that has yet to be spent from last year’s stimulus package. To present such a proposal as a serious attempt at restraining spending is to reveal a low opinion of the intelligence of ordinary Americans.

Mr. Obama has squandered the “sense of common cause” he talked about on Sunday that many felt at his inauguration. In the week leading up to his State of the Union, he did little to rekindle that spirit or reverse his sinking fortunes.

Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of the forthcoming book “Courage and Consequence” (Threshold Editions).

Read the Original article The Wall Street Journal

Ban government employee unions

There was a time in America when the typical union member was a blue-collar guy sweating in a Pittsburgh steel mill, screwing together Chevies in Detroit or loading and unloading ships on the San Francisco docks. But things are radically different today because Joe Lunchpail has been replaced by white-collar Todd and Margo Yuppiecrat processing Social Security checks in Baltimore, conducting environmental audits in Denver or keeping the lines moving at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The breakdown of union membership make this change clear: Only 7.3 percent of all private sector employees are union members, while 37.6 percent of all government workers are unionized. Fifty-one percent of all union members are government workers.

As the Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk points out, these numbers ought to be red flags for taxpayers because “government employees don’t strike to get higher wages from a private business — they strike to get higher wages from you.”

“Their pay is funded through your tax dollars,” he adds. “For government employee union members to get more, your taxes need to go up. So that is what unions now lobby for.” And as with so much else in this country, Sherk cautions that what is happening on the West Coast is likely a portent of disturbing things to come for the rest of us:

* In Oregon, public employee unions are funding ballot initiatives to raise personal income and business taxes in order to protect gold-plated medical benefits from state spending reductions.

* In California, the Service Employees International Union spent at least $1 million on a massive television ad campaign demanding that desperate state government officials raise oil, gas and liquor taxes instead of cutting spending.

These actions point to the hard reality that the interests of government employee unions are fundamentally opposed to the interests of taxpayers. The unions are serving their own members, while the government officials who oversee them are serving the public, which usually means delivering the most efficient service at the lowest possible cost.

These diverging interests are perfectly illustrated at the federal level by the political endorsements of the American Federation of Government Employees, which actively backed Barack Obama. For his part, the president is now pushing federal spending to unprecedented heights while expanding the federal work force and working with Congress to raise taxes. Between elections, AFGE, along with other federal employee unions like the National Treasury Employees Union and the National Federation of Federal Employees, constantly lobby Congress against any proposal to rein in the spiraling compensation costs of the federal civil service. Hard-pressed taxpayers shouldn’t have to fight tax-happy congressmen and greedy government worker unions at the same time.

Public service employees should be forced to bargain as 92.7 percent of the work force does — in a way that recognizes the best interests of both sides and does not assume that government is a Daddy Warbucks with limited resources.

Read the original Article Washington Examiner

Magic Numbers in Politics

Back in the days of the Soviet Union, two Russian economists who had never lived in a country with a free market economy understood something about market economies that many others who have lived in such economies all their lives have never understood. Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov said: “Everything is interconnected in the world of prices, so that the smallest change in one element is passed along the chain to millions of others.”

What does that mean? It means that a huge increase in the demand for ice cream can mean higher prices for catchers’ mitts, among other things.

When more cows are needed to produce more milk to make ice cream, then fewer cows will be slaughtered and that means less cowhide available to make baseball gloves. Supply and demand mean that catchers’ mitts are going to cost more.

While this may be easy enough to understand, its implications are completely lost on many people in politics and in the media. If everything is connected to everything else in a market economy, then it makes no sense to have laws and policies that declare some given goal to be a “good thing,” without regard to the repercussions, which spread out in all directions, like waves that spread across a pond when you drop a rock in the water.

Our current economic meltdown results from the federal government, under both Democrats and Republicans, declaring home ownership to be a “good thing” and treating the percentage of families who own their own home as if it was some sort of magic number that had to be kept growing– without regard to the repercussions on other things.

We are now living with those repercussions, which include the worst unemployment in decades. That is the price we are paying for increasing home ownership from 64 percent to 69 percent.

How did we get from home ownership to 15 million unemployed Americans? By ignoring the fact that there was a reason why only 64 percent of families owned their own home. More people would have liked to be home owners but did not qualify under mortgage lending standards that had been in place for decades. Continued…TownHall.com

Keep It Simple- What a Republican health-care plan should look like.

by Jeffrey H. Anderson

The American people haven’t been shy about expressing their views on health-care reform. In the polls and at public events nationwide, they’ve made it clear that they don’t want a behemoth bill that would fundamentally transform a health-care system that works well for most Americans and which offers a level of care that is largely the envy of the world. But they are also understandably concerned about health care’s rising costs, its lack of portability, and the ten percent of Americans who are uninsured. They want to see these pressing problems be addressed, but in a sensible and moderate way.

The bill proposed by Senator Max Baucus does not answer Americans’ call. The Baucus bill is the real health-care bill, the bill on which the Obama administration is implicitly pinning its hopes. But it defiantly turns a deaf ear to the American people.

Seniors have been quite vocal in their concern that health-care legislation would degrade the quality of Medicare, yet the Baucus bill would gut the popular Medicare Advantage program and would pay for its own huge price-tag primarily through cuts to Medicare and related federal health programs. Seniors won’t relish robbing from Medicare to pay for BaucusCare, especially when Medicare is perhaps already the least fiscally solvent program in the United States. But the Baucus bill treats Medicare as if it were a money tree, providing a steady supply of cash to spend elsewhere.

Americans have said that they want more choice and freedom in health care, yet the Baucus bill would mandate that all Americans buy a government-approved insurance plan and would fine them if they don’t. Americans are weary of the federal government’s profligate spending and intrusiveness, yet the Baucus bill is full of Byzantine regulations that only a lawyer could love, and–according to the Congressional Budget Office–it would cost a mind-boggling $2.9 trillion over 20 years while increasing taxes by $2.0 trillion over that same span.

Furthermore, Americans want insurance to be more affordable. Yet the Baucus bill’s requirement that insurers cover all comers–at the same price, at any time–would lead millions to pay the government its fine (still much less than the cost of a premium), quit carrying insurance year-round, and repurchase it only when the immediate need arises. Everyone else’s insurance premiums would skyrocket.

The American people don’t want any of this. They don’t want a huge bill. Instead, they want a small bill that addresses their central concerns without opening the door to far greater..

Read more at the Weekly Standard.com

President Obama's Porpoise Show

By Harold Witkov

I remember the Porpoise Show audience being virtually all teachers and students, and the whole lot of us sitting together shoulder to shoulder like sardines in a can. I remember the porpoise tricks, the leaps, the playing with the ball, and the intentional and playful splashing, all to the delight of the crowd. Most of all, I remember studying the trainer with his voice commands and hand signals to the porpoises awaiting instruction.  I remember the trainer’s nearby bucket and the fish chunk rewards he liberally doled out to each porpoise after every trick.  “How cool to be a porpoise trainer,” I thought.

When the show was over the crowd filed out, passing near the edge of the pool. As fate would have it, I was able to get the attention of one of the porpoises. I raised my right hand to shoulder height and, pretending I had a piece of fish between my closed fingers, I began a horizontal zigzag motion with my wrist.  To my shock and astonishment, the porpoise began vertically rising out of the water.  With my classmates screaming and my teacher turning menacingly to see whom it was causing the commotion, I lowered my hand down by my side as quickly as I could and the porpoise correspondingly dropped in the water.

The excitement was over as fast as it had begun.  But what I remember most of the incident was the porpoise watching me as I filed out of the complex with the rest of my classmates.  I could swear that porpoise was giving me the dirtiest of looks for not having tossed him his duly earned fish chunk.

Looking back at my experience, I see it as a type of metaphor for today’s political situation.  I see the porpoise trainer as President Barack Obama, the audience representing the world, and the porpoises in the pool as the American people.

Plucked from the freedom of some vast ocean and to the cheers and delight of the world, President Barack Obama is taking away our liberties and training us to be world pleasers, rather than world leaders. Look how entertaining we can be with every trick he gets us to perform.  Through his techniques of behavior modification, look how he weakens our military, takes over our banks, our auto companies, and before you know it, our health care! Watch us jump through his hoops and make a big splash. Do what he says and get your fresh stimulus fish chunk handouts. Be careful though. If you do not perform to his liking or choose to cause trouble, you might just go without. 

Read the rest at The American Thinker.com

Obama WH falsely downplaying risks of retreat in Afghanistan: Military, intel sources

by Ed Morrissey

Sources within both the intelligence and military communities tell McClatchy that Barack Obama’s White House has not been honest about the risks of moving away from a robust strategy of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.  Obama and his advisers have begun publicly discussing the Taliban as a moderate alternative to al-Qaeda in terms of enemies, but the latest intelligence shows just the opposite.  Taliban leadership and AQ have integrated even more tightly than ever since 9/11 and act in concert on strategy and tactics:

As the Obama administration reconsiders its Afghanistan policy, White House officials are minimizing warnings from the intelligence community, the military and the State Department about the risks of adopting a limited strategy focused on al Qaida, U.S. intelligence, diplomatic and military officials told McClatchy.

Recent U.S. intelligence assessments have found that the Taliban and other Pakistan-based groups that are fighting U.S.-led forces have much closer ties to al Qaida now than they did before 9/11, would allow the terrorist network to re-establish bases in Afghanistan and would help Osama bin Laden export his radical brand of Islam to Afghanistan’s neighbors and beyond, the officials said.

McClatchy interviewed more than 15 senior and mid-level U.S. intelligence, military and diplomatic officials, all of whom said they concurred with the assessments. All of them requested anonymity because the assessments are classified and the officials weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

Bob Kerrey openly wonders why the White House has begun to tread the ground of retreat, in an op-ed for today’s Wall Street Journal:

Yet despite these setbacks, our leaders must remain focused on the fact that success in Afghanistan bolsters our national security and yes, our moral reputation. This war is not Vietnam. The Taliban are not popular and have very little support other than what they secure through terror.

Afghanistan is also not Iraq. No serious leader in Kabul is asking us to leave. Instead we are being asked to withdraw by American leaders who begin their analysis with the presumption that victory is not possible. They seem to want to ensure defeat by leaving at the very moment when our military leader on the ground has laid out a coherent and compelling strategy for victory.

When it comes to foreign policy, almost nothing matters more then your friends and your enemies knowing you will keep your word and follow through on your commitments. This is the real test of presidential leadership. I hope that President Obama—soon to be a Nobel laureate—passes with flying colors

Read the rest at HotAir.com

Congress’ Secret Plan to Pass Obamacare – CONFIRMED

Leaders in the House and Senate have a plan to pass President Barack Obama’s sweeping health care plan by Thanksgiving without any significant participation by the American public. CNS News has confirmed the details in our September 22nd titled “Passing a Shell of A Bill: Congress’ Secret Plan to Ram Through Health Care Reform.” Nicholas Ballasy reports “a senior aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told CNSNews.com that it is ‘likely’ that Reid will use H.R. 1586—a bill passed by the House in March to impose a 90-percent tax on bonuses paid to employees of certain bailed-out financial institutions—as a ‘shell’ for enacting the final version of the Senate’s health care bill, which Reid is responsible for crafting.”

This story confirms the four part scenario that would railroad the bill through the Senate using a very unusual closed door procedure to craft the bill with no input from the American people.

The four stage plan to pass Obamacare has been publicly confirmed and is ready to be implemented. The following is a comprehensive update:

Step One: “The Senate Finance Committee will finish work on the marking up of Senator Max Baucus’ (D-MT) conceptual framework for legislation by this Friday.” Progress on this had been stalled and the bill was not passed by the end of last week. Foxnews.com is reporting that the Congressional Budget Office score of the bill will be released later today and a high score may further stall progress on the Committee’s Vapor Bill.  Senate Finance Committee’s progress on passing something out of committee – INCOMPLETE

Congress’ Secret Plan to Pass Obamacare – CONFIRMED

• Posted October 7th, 2009 at 12.38pm in Health Care.

ACORN Paycheck Aside, Patrick Gaspard is a Radical

by Kyle Olson

Several days ago, Capital Research Center’s Matthew Vadum published research here indicating an ACORN alumni in the White House (other than the president): Political Director Patrick Gaspard.  As I did three weeks prior at ACORNcracked.com, Matthew used a Wade Rathke blog as the source, which Rathke, the founder of ACORN,  immediately changed after Vadum’s report, citing “memory tricks.”  Politico led the way in poo-pooing the connection once Rathke played cover-up.

Rathke said it not only on his blog, but also at a book signing in New Orleans, which was recently covered in the Fox News Special: The Truth About ACORN.”  While we attended that book signing and were not able to get that portion on tape, the Fox documentary crew did.  Sadly, the remarks apparently ended up on the cutting room floor.

The fact is, Patrick Gaspard, Obama’s “Glue Man,” is more important than Van Jones ever hoped of being.  The fact is, one of the most critical and influential jobs in a White House, the Director of Political Affairs, is occupied by a former SEIU health care lobbyist and ACORN organizer.  To be exact, he was Executive Vice President–the #2–at SEIU 1199 in New York City.

After Gaspard was appointed to the White House, Carribbean Voice quoted him as saying, “I grew up in 1199…and I will always be an 1199er wherever I am.”  SEIU’s luxury is that now taxpayers are paying for it.

Wade Rathke, current organizer with SEIU Local 100 (in New Orleans) and ACORN International (now “Community Organizations International”), called Gaspard a “great friend” on his ChiefOrganizer.org blog. Additionally, Rathke theorized how Gaspard was likely instrumental in working with SEIU to bring “big health care operators” to the table.  [Figuring once scrutiny came to someone high-level in the White House, the evidence would be changed, we turned Rathke's blog posting into a PDF.]

That is curious, given the Obama Transition team’s pledge that Gaspard would refrain from issues he had lobbied previously.  According to the Washington Post, a transition spokesman said, “Patrick and Mark [Gitenstein] have jobs on the campaign that are general in nature, but per the unprecedented ethics policy laid out earlier this week they will recuse themselves from the fields of policy or agencies they lobbied in the previous 12 months.”

So we are to believe the Political Director of the White House—one of the most important players in the administration—is sitting on his hands while Obama attempts to salvage his biggest “reform” yet, and likely ever?  Ethics schmethics.

When Sean Bell was shot by New York City police in 2007, Al Sharpton reached out to Patrick Gaspard (while he was at SEIU 1199) to formulate a response.  According to Politicker NY, “In December 2006, Mr. Sharpton asked Patrick Gaspard to help him assemble an emergency meeting of about 300 activists, black nationalists, union and political leaders to decide on an appropriate response to the police shooting…”

Sharpton used the SEIU 1199 office to hold a protest organizational meeting.  According to The Observer, the union was represented by Gaspard at the meeting.

The People’s Organization for Progress, along with the New Black Panther Party, organized protests against the New York City police department, carrying signs saying such things as “KILL THE PIGS THAT KILL OUR KIDS.”

Read the rest at Big Government.com

The Noble 'Sacrifice' Of Michelle Obama

By Michelle Malkin

It’s hard out there for a first lady of the United States. Take it from travel-weary Michelle Obama. On Tuesday night, she boarded a luxury 757 for Copenhagen. Think of the stairs she had to climb. Oh, the agony of the feet!

Upon arrival, Mrs. O, her “chit-chat buddy,” Chicago-based talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey, and Chicago powerbroker/interest-conflicted real estate mogul/senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett immediately embarked on a grueling, grip-and-grin campaign to secure the Olympics for their hometown. Our smile muscles ache in sympathy.

You will be comforted to know that the gracious FLOTUS feels your pain for her pain. “As much of a sacrifice as people say this is for me or Oprah or the president to come for these few days,” the first lady told a group of fellow Chicago 2016 boosters, “so many of you in this room have been working for years to bring this bid home.” Translation: Thank me, thank you, for all we do.

Never has self-congratulatory gratitude been raised to such an art form, but there was no time for loyal subjects to dwell. The selflessly indefatigable Michelle Obama had to rush off for an 800-meter wine-and-cheese dash with International Olympic Committee members, followed by a rigorous aerobic Heads of State luncheon hosted by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and another high-heeled trek to the IOC Opening Ceremony at the Copenhagen Opera House.

Of course, it’s not entirely clear which “people” out there are saying that the Obamas’ jaunt to Denmark is a “sacrifice.”

Certainly not the families of the 43 American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who have died in Afghanistan since Gen. Stanley McChrystal called for more reinforcements.

Certainly not the families of the nearly 40 children and teens in Chicago who lost their lives on the out-of-control streets of the Windy City so far this year.

The first lady’s slip of self-absorption reminds me of a useful passage in Washington Post writer Liza Mundy’s biography of Mrs. Obama. After graduating from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, the bitterly oppressed Michelle Obama headed back to her native Chicago to join the high-powered law firm of Sidley Austin — the ninth largest in the world. There, Mundy’s book reported, the future first lady griped about having to do the duties of a second-year associate while she was a second-year associate — demonstrating the trademark attitude of entitlement and inflated ego that led the law partner who recruited her to later describe her as “perennially dissatisfied.”

Doing her first job was a burden then. Enjoying the perks of her current job is a “sacrifice” now.

Read the rest of Michelle Malkin on GOPUSA