Andrew Klaven - Why I Don't Like O

I Oppose Barack Obama Because He’s Black

Posted By Andrew Klavan On June 18, 2012

  

Sam Donaldson, who regularly treated President Ronald Reagan with disrespect ^[1], feels he knows exactly why Neil Munro of the right-leaning Daily Caller treated Barack Obama with disrespect ^[2]. During the president’s recent announcement that he had decided to make up laws by himself from now on, effectively granting immunity to some illegal aliens with a wave of his almighty hand, Munro shouted out a question rather than waiting for the president to leave the podium without taking any questions.
Donaldson’s reaction in part:  “Many on the political right believe this president ought not to be there – they oppose him not for his polices and political view but for who he is, an African American!”
Well, the old hairpiece has a point. As far as I’m concerned there are only two plausible reasons to oppose President Obama: either because he’s clearly the worst president in American history, or because he’s black.

For me, it’s because he’s black.

Oh, I know, some of you are suspicious.  You think that secretly I dislike Obama because he’s increased the federal debt by nearly five trillion dollars ^[3] and given us our highest deficits ^[4] since 1946 and yet has made not one serious proposal to reform the entitlements that are clearly causing the problem.
But no, so help me, I just happen to be put off by the whole brown epidermis thing.  It gets to me.

Some on the left have unleashed wild accusations that I harbor a primal animosity toward Obama’s shredding of the Constitution, or his opposition to the ideals of the American founding. They think I look at Obama’s membership in a European-style socialist party ^[5] (about which he lied) or his close relationship with anti-American terrorist William Ayers ^[6] (about which he lied) or his twenty year tutelage under the racist, anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright ^[7] (about which he almost certainly lied) or the several attempts at government encroachments so overweening that they have been struck down 9-0 ^[8] by a normally divided Supreme Court — and see all that as evidence that this president is less committed to the American project than any leader of this continent since King George.

Wrong!  I’m just not down with this whole African-American business.  I mean, the guy’s all, like, dark and stuff.  What’s that about?
Listen, I don’t mind black people in their proper place. I can accept someone like Thomas Sowell, say, as one of the greatest political philosophers of our time, or Congressman Allen West as a shining example of the best and bravest men this nation can produce. But when it comes to running an administration of incompetence, corruption, arrogance and ignorance, well, doggone it, I feel that’s a job for a white man!

So to Sam Donaldson I say: “You got me. I don’t like Obama because he’s black. You I don’t like because you’re an idiot.”

Is O a Pathological LIAR - Of course he is ......

Is President Obama A Pathological Liar?

Posted 06/20/2012 07:01 PM ET

The Obama Record

The Obama Record: The most frightening aspect of this president may not be his radical ideology but his rank dishonesty in selling that ideology. Now he's been caught lying about family racism.

In "Dreams from My Father," his 1995 memoir, Obama used the story of his paternal grandfather's imprisonment and torture at the hands of British colonists in Kenya as an example of white cruelty. He claimed Hussein Onyango Obama was unjustly detained for six months before being released a crippled, lice-ridden "old man."

In fact, none of it is true, according to Washington Post editor and biographer David Maraniss, who traveled to Kenya to investigate the tale. His grandfather was not detained or beaten by his "white rulers," as Obama, writing as a 34-year-old lawyer, claimed.

This is only the latest example of a growing body of fabrications, embellishments and outright lies told by this president, who has a real and possibly pathological problem with the truth.

Stacked up, his whoppers would make even Bill Clinton blush. Here's a sampling:

Lie No. 1: Obama has repeatedly claimed his white grandfather, Stanley Dunham, "fought in Patton's army," when he was a clerk with no combat in WWII.

Lie No. 2: Obama claimed Dunham, a communist sympathizer, signed up for duty "the day after Pearl Harbor," when in fact he waited six months.

Subscribe to the IBD Editorials Podcast

Lie No. 3: Obama claimed his father "fought when he got back to Kenya against tribalism and nepotism, but ultimately was blackballed from the government," when in fact he fought against capitalism and lost his job when he advocated communism.

Lie No. 4: Obama has claimed his late mother's health insurer refused "to pay for her treatment" for cancer while citing a "pre-existing condition," when Cigna paid all her hospital bills and never denied payment.

Lie No. 5: Obama claimed he and a black high school friend named "Ray" were ostracized in Honolulu, when in fact the friend, Keith Kakugawa, was half-Japanese, and neither of them experienced discrimination.

Lie No. 6: Obama claimed the father of his Indonesian stepfather was killed by Dutch soldiers while fighting for Indonesian independence, when in fact the story turns out to be "a concocted myth in almost all respects," Maraniss found.

Lie No. 7: Obama claimed his parents decided to marry in the excitement of the Selma civil-rights march of 1965 — and that he personally has "a claim on Selma" — when in fact they were married several years earlier.

Lie No. 8: Obama claimed his father got to study in the U.S. thanks to JFK's efforts to bring "young Africans over to America," when in fact the Kenyan airlift his father participated in occurred in 1959 under Ike.
 
Lie No. 9: Obama submitted a phony bio to his book publicist claiming he was "born in Kenya."

Lie No. 10: Obama denied being a member of the socialist New Party, when a member roster of the Chicago chapter of the party lists him joining on Jan. 11, 1996.

Lie No. 11: Obama claimed he had only a passing acquaintance with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, when in fact they held a fundraiser for their Hyde Park neighbor in their living room, and years later, while Obama served in the U.S. Senate, hosted a barbecue for him in their backyard.

Lie No. 12: Obama claimed he never heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright spew anti-American invectives while sitting in his pews for 20 years, when in fact Obama was moved to tears hearing Wright condemn "white folks" and the U.S. for bombing other countries and even named his second book after the sermon.

Lie No. 13: Obama claimed he got in a "big fight" with old white flame Genevieve Cook, who after seeing a black play asked "why black people were so angry all the time," when in fact she never saw the play nor made the remark.


In both his autobiographies, Obama paints a false portrait of a still-racist America and West, where he, his friends and relatives are victimized by that racism. Conveniently, his remedy is redistributive justice through bigger government.

Exec. Priv. - Stench of Coverup

Obama's Executive Privilege Has The Stench Of Cover-Up

Posted 06/20/2012 07:01 PM ET

Scandal: The president illegally asserts executive privilege to protect an attorney general who's either a clueless political hack, malevolent or both, withholding answers of who is responsible for a Border Patrol agent's death.
President Obama's contempt for the rule of law hit a new low when, on the eve of a vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, he granted his AG's 11th-hour request to hide sought-after documents on Operation Fast and Furious under the cover of executive privilege.
"I write now to inform you that the president has asserted executive privilege over the relevant post-Feb. 4, 2011, documents," Deputy Attorney General James Cole says in a letter that GOP Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa received just before Wednesday's hearing and vote, a letter that apparently was not mentioned in a last-minute meeting between Issa and Holder Tuesday night.
Or maybe it wasn't the 11th hour at all, but just a long-planned final gambit in the cover-up of who made the decisions in a federally sponsored effort to provide Mexican drug cartels with sophisticated American firearms and who is ultimately responsible for the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry with these weapons?
As Fox News anchor Brit Hume recently noted, speaking of Fast and Furious on the web-exclusive "Panel Plus" segment of "Fox News Sunday," "The stench of cover-up on this gun-running operation is very strong indeed."
Executive privilege, as Issa noted in his opening remarks, can only be asserted when it involves direct presidential decision-making and communications. It cannot be invoked, legally, to prevent others in the chain of command from explaining their actions or responding to requests for information on their decisions in which the president is not involved.
Back in February 2011, Assistant Attorney General Ron Welch, in response to the investigations by Rep. Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley of the Fast and Furious gun-"walking" program run out of ATF's Phoenix office, wrote a letter stating that the "allegation that ATF 'sanctioned' or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons ... is false."
Later, Deputy Attorney General Cole, in another letter to Congress, wrote: "Facts have come to light during the course of this investigation that indicate the Feb. 4 letter contains inaccuracies." In other words, the Department of Justice lied to Congress. The cover-up continues with the invocation of executive privilege.

Subscribe to the IBD Editorials Podcast

Committee member Rep. Patrick Meehan, R-Pa., spoke in written remarks about the active intimidation of ATF agents and potential witnesses in the Fast and Furious probe by high officials at the Department of Justice. As we have reported, some ATF agents have already testified that Fast and Furious and its variants were no accident.
"Allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals — this was the plan," ATF Agent John Dodson told Issa's committee. "It was so mandated." ATF agent Olindo James Casa said that "on several occasions I personally requested to interdict or seize firearms, but I was always ordered to stand down and not to seize the firearms."
Fast and Furious has become worse than Watergate. No one died at Watergate. Just what is in those documents that Obama and Holder so desperately want to hide? Brian Terry's family and the American people deserve answers.

O as "Black Swan"

The Obama Outrages: Government as Black Swan

Posted By Jeff Durstewitz On June 20, 2012 

Incidents of government overreaching have come so “fast and furious” over the past several years that the most recent one seems largely to have gotten lost in the blur.

But if you live in or near farm country, as I do in upstate New York, you may have been amazed to see that the federal government, in the guise of its Department of Labor, recently set about abolishing the family farm.

That clearly would have been the result if 85 pages of new regulations ^[1] proposed by the DOL last year had gone into effect ^[2]. According to my local newspaper, the Saratogian, the proposed regulations ^[3] “would have prohibited teens younger than 16 years old from doing many standard farm chores and limited their ability to work with livestock, which not only threatened 4-H programs, but the future of family farming itself.”

In other words, it would have been a “twofer” for Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and her swashbuckling bureaucrats in Washington — knocking off both family farms and the 4-H in one blow! Farm-country outcry killed the new diktat just before it was to take effect, and it was buried “for the rest of the Obama administration” by the ostensibly embarrassed White House.
As astonishing as this exercise in arrogance is, it’s only one part of a pattern. Consider:

• The GSA scandal, in which bureaucrats charged with improving government efficiency decided to treat themselves to a hugely expensive lark in Vegas, of all places, which the president himself had once made politically incorrect.
• The Secret Service scandal, in which agents got caught, literally, with their pants down among foreign floozies.
• The Environmental Protection Agency scandal, in which one of the agency’s regional bigs was found to have told his minions to “crucify,” like the conquering Romans, gas and oil companies at random to terrify them into submission.
• The Justice Department scandal known as “Fast and Furious,” in which drug traffickers south of the border received lethal firepower in what many believe was a bid to discredit the right to bear arms in this country.
• The National Labor Relations Board’s telling a major manufacturer, Boeing, that it couldn’t open a new plant in a “right-to-work” state.
• The ongoing scandal of the Energy Department’s backing a whole string of losers with taxpayer funds under the rubric of “alternative energy.”
• The ObamaCare overstretch in which the president snapped his fingers at the backlash over his contraception mandate (itself a major and gratuitous blow against separation of church and state) and said, in effect, “the insurance companies will pay for it,” without citing constitutional authority.
• The EPA’s seeking to bankrupt the coal industry apparently on “global warming” authority.
• The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which shocked civil libertarians by ordering colleges to use the relatively lax “preponderance of evidence” standard against males accused of rape on campus or risk losing federal funds ^[4].

The list goes on and on. In the age of Obama, it looks like government increasingly is becoming a kind of “black swan” machine.
Black swans ^[5], as explained in the best-selling book ^[6] by Nasem Taleb, are events so far out of the ordinary as to be massively disruptive because they can hardly be imagined, much less planned for. A recent example was the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 precipitated by securities that were thought to be safe and even “insured” (by the government, in many cases, in the guise of its mortgage packagers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac); a more recent example came last year when an earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused not only massive flooding but a nuclear disaster in Japan.

Note the distinction between these two examples, however; one was largely an outgrowth of government policy while the other was due to an act of God (or nature, or chance, as you prefer). What we’re seeing increasingly with the Obama administration is that black swan events are being manufactured and loosed upon us by our government itself. It’s no consolation that they’re coming in the name of the progressive agenda of “helping” us. It’s of even less consolation to consider that the president apparently believes he’ll have “more flexibility” to do as he pleases after November.

In the case of the fatal farm regulations what’s perhaps most shocking is that such a ham-handed attempt would have been made in the first place. Are there no adults at the Department of Labor to tell the juveniles “This isn’t going to fly, and would create huge problems for the president in an election year anyway. So get back in your room — now!” If the idea behind such moves isn’t disruption for its own sake — or to administer lessons on the power of the government to whatever it wants until we all “get it” — what is it?

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, ^[7] Kimberly Strassel writes that Al Armendariz, the EPA procurator who was going to crucify oil and gas companies just to let them know who’s boss, is hardly the exception to the rule within the Obama administration but rather exactly the kind of federal enforcer the president wants. In other words, Obama considers him a feature — not a bug — in his plan to totally transform America.

But if she’s correct, that would mean that Obama-style government could no longer be considered a “black swan” machine. Why?

Because these disruptions are planned, not random.

06-18 Random Thoughts

Random thoughts on the passing scene:

In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.

Many people may have voted for Barack Obama in 2008 because of his charisma. But anyone familiar with the disastrous track record of charismatic political leaders around the world in the 20th century should have run for the hills when they encountered a politician with charisma.

What is scarier than any particular political policy or issue is the widespread tendency to treat political issues as personal contests in talking points -- competitive skill in fencing with words -- rather than as serious attempts to find out what the facts are and what the options are.

People who are wondering what to get as a graduation present this year should consider "The Passage of Power" by Robert Caro, the recently published 4th volume in his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson. Its revelations of the cynical, fraudulent and vicious politics in Washington should counter the pious graduation speeches that young people hear about the nobility of "public service."

The new French president, a socialist, says frankly that he does not like rich people, that "my real enemy is the world of finance," and apparently he has plans for much higher tax rates on high incomes. Has he not noticed how easy it is for the rich to move to some other country where the tax rates are lower -- or to send their money there?

For a long time, Democrats have gone to Washington to win at all costs, while too many Republicans went to Washington to compromise with Democrats. The rise of the Tea Party may change that.

Increasing numbers of people seem to have convinced themselves that they are entitled to a "fair share" of what someone else has earned. Whole nations now seem to think that they should be bailed out from the consequences of their own reckless spending by nations that lived within their means.

Those who favor huge cuts in military spending seem not to understand that our military exists not simply to win wars, but to present such overwhelming superiority to potential enemies as to prevent having to fight a war in the first place.

Some people who are belatedly seeing what Obama is really like are saying that he has changed. This is probably easier to say than admitting that you were blind to the man's whole history before, and were taken in by his rhetoric and geniality.

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

The visceral hostility of liberals against Sarah Palin is something that liberals themselves ought to be concerned about. After all, she is just someone who has a different opinion about politics and a different social background and style. What I fear the liberals most resent is their perception that she is someone who is talking back to her betters.

When Harry Truman was President of the United States, he had a sign on his desk in the White House that said: "The buck stops here." If Barack Obama had a sign on his desk, it would say: "The buck stops with Bush."

Does anyone seriously believe that short dresses, exposing bony knees, make women look more attractive?

In most discussions of the problems of American public schools, the low intellectual quality of people who come out of our schools of education is the 800-pound gorilla that keeps getting ignored. Such teachers cannot give their students intellectual abilities that they themselves don't have.

Did we have to wait for the Solyndra and other government "investment" disasters to learn what economic nonsense political "investments" are? Reckless spending to win votes, or campaign contributions, from the recipients of government largesse is still reckless spending, regardless of what other words are used to try to dignify it -- whether these words are "stimulus," "jobs," "investment" or whatever.

In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.

O and the Unions Bailout

Sherk and Zywicki: Obama's United Auto Workers Bailout

If the administration treated the UAW in the manner required by bankruptcy law, it could have saved U.S. taxpayers $26.5 billion.

By JAMES SHERK
AND TODD ZYWICKI

President Obama touts the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler as one of the signature successes of his administration. He argues that the estimated $23 billion the taxpayers lost was worth paying to avoid massive job losses. However, our research finds that the president could have both kept the auto makers running and avoided losing money.

The preferential treatment given to the United Auto Workers accounts for the American taxpayers' entire losses from the bailout. Had the UAW received normal treatment in standard bankruptcy proceedings, the Treasury would have recouped its entire investment. Three irregularities in the bankruptcy case resulted in a windfall to the UAW.

First, GM and Chrysler owed billions of dollars to the union's Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA) when they went bankrupt. The union and the auto makers created VEBA in 2007 to assume responsibility for the UAW's generous retiree health benefits. The benefits allowed UAW members to retire in their mid-50s with minimal out-of-pocket health-care expenses for the rest of their lives. GM owed $20.6 billion and Chrysler owed $8 billion to VEBA as unsecured claims.

A bedrock principle of bankruptcy law is that creditors with similar claims priority receive equal treatment. If you owe $1,000 each on two credit cards, in bankruptcy you cannot choose to pay $900 to Citi and only $200 to Chase. Each of the creditors is entitled to an equal percentage recovery.

In the auto bankruptcies, however, the administration gave the unsecured claims of VEBA much higher priority than those of other unsecured creditors, such as suppliers and unsecured bondholders.

At the time of bankruptcy, GM owed these unsecured creditors $29.9 billion, for which they received 10% of the stock of "new" GM, which went public in November 2010, and warrants to purchase 15% more at preferred prices. Yet VEBA got 17.5% of new GM and $9 billion in preferred stock and debt obligations. Based on GM's current stock price, VEBA collected assets worth $17.8 billion—$12.2 billion more than if the administration had treated it like the other unsecured creditors.

The same thing happened at Chrysler, only to a greater degree. Chrysler's junior creditors recovered none of their $7 billion in claims. In normal bankruptcy proceedings, the UAW would have also collected nothing. Instead it walked away owning almost half of new Chrysler and a $4.6 billion promissory note earning 9% interest. Had the stock and note gone to the Treasury instead, the bailout would have cost taxpayers $9.2 billion less.

The administration also insulated the UAW from most of the sacrifices that unions usually make in bankruptcy—at taxpayer expense. Section 1113 of the Bankruptcy Code enables reorganizing companies to improve their post-bankruptcy competitiveness by renegotiating union contracts to competitive rates. In April, for example, American Airlines proposed using this power to bring down its labor costs to the level of its rivals, just as Delta and United had in earlier bankruptcy filings.

The administration decided not to do this at GM. The UAW did accept sharp pay cuts for new hires. But they only made modest concessions for their existing members, like eliminating the much-maligned Jobs Bank that paid workers even when they were laid off.
As a result, GM still has higher labor costs ($56 an hour) than any of its competitors. Indeed, Steven Rattner, the Obama administration's former "car czar," told the Detroit Economic Club last December, "We should have asked the UAW to do a bit more. We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay."

Had bankruptcy brought GM compensation in line with its competitors' (approximately $47 an hour), we estimate the resulting savings would have increased the value of the taxpayers' stake in GM by $4.1 billion. This would still leave UAW members making 40% more than the average American manufacturing worker.
Finally, GM's decision to assume certain pension obligations of Delphi, the bankrupt former GM subsidiary, also increased the cost of the bailout. New GM no longer had an obligation to support Delphi's pensions. Yet it decided to spend $1 billion to top up the pensions of Delphi's UAW retirees. Delphi's nonunion retirees and retirees in other unions did not fare so well. GM gave them nothing.

Why GM gave $1 billion of bailout funds to employees of a different company it owed no legal duty to remains a mystery. The inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program is investigating whether the administration pressured GM to give the UAW special treatment, but the IG lacks subpoena power to force officials to testify. It may take a congressional investigation to establish what happened.

We estimate that these three irregularities increased the cost of the bailout by $26.5 billion. The Treasury expects the auto bailout to ultimately cost taxpayers $23 billion. The funds diverted to the UAW account for the taxpayers' entire net loss.
Avoiding these losses would have been straightforward. If the government treated the UAW in the manner required by bankruptcy law, it could have given the stock and promissory notes to the Treasury instead of to the UAW. Labor cost savings and not supporting Delphi pensions would have increased the value of the taxpayers' shares of GM, while GM would have needed less financing.

Instead, President Obama gave over $26 billion to the UAW—more money than the U.S spent on foreign aid last year and 50% more than NASA's budget. None of that money kept factories running. Instead it sustained the above-average compensation of members of an influential union, sparing them from most of the sacrifices typically made in bankruptcy. Such spending does not serve the common good. President Obama did not bail out the auto industry. He bailed out the United Auto Workers.

Mr. Sherk is a senior policy analyst in labor economics at the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Zywicki is a law professor at George Mason University and a senior scholar at the university's Mercatus Center. This op-ed is adapted from a longer article published this week at Heritage.org.

O - Socialist or Fasciast

Socialist or Fascist

By Thomas Sowell

6/12/2012

 

It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a "socialist." He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.

What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.


Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.


Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous -- something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.


Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the "greed" of the insurance companies.


The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.


One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.


Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely -- and correctly -- regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg's great book "Liberal Fascism" cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists' consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left's embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.


Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.


It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot -- and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.


What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people -- like themselves -- need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.


The left's vision is not only a vision of the world, but also a vision of themselves, as superior beings pursuing superior ends. In the United States, however, this vision conflicts with a Constitution that begins, "We the People..."

That is why the left has for more than a century been trying to get the Constitution's limitations on government loosened or evaded by judges' new interpretations, based on notions of "a living Constitution" that will take decisions out of the hands of "We the People," and transfer those decisions to our betters.

The self-flattery of the vision of the left also gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision, which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left, and regardless of its disastrous consequences.


Only our own awareness of the huge stakes involved can save us from the rampaging presumptions of our betters, whether they are called socialists or fascists. So long as we buy their heady rhetoric, we are selling our birthright of freedom.