American Presidents Do Not Bow

via: humanevents.com

George Washington was 6’4” tall. Not only did he have great height, he was a huge man in general. He had extremely broad shoulders, very wide hips, (most likely the cause for his being the preeminent horseman of his age), and a size 13 boot (though boot size in the 18th century was a bit hard to discern, as there were no left and right feet in footwear in late 18th century America).  General Washington possessed immense physical strength and fortitude, as well, with a stature and presence so impressive that it was said about him that he “put European princes to shame.”

Try as I might, I cannot imagine this man bowing — not to an emperor, king or Middle East potentate. Not, in fact, to anyone.

In representing the nation he was pivotal in creating, it would have been unthinkable to George Washington to shame it by appearing in such a servile manner before another national leader.  He was always an elegant and formal man who was ever conscious of his dignity, and equally conscious that what he did as leader of America directly reflected on his nation.

The unfortunate selection of the present holder of the office George Washington held so brilliantly 220 years ago also understands that what he does reflects on his nation. That is why everything Obama does is either an insult to America and to Americans, or calculated to destroy the nation as created by George Washington and the other founders. The fact that America, as the only experiment that worked, is the only place in the world where a Barack Obama could have been created does not matter to the man; to him America is an evil country that needs to be torn down and rebuilt into an entirely government-controlled entity.  There have been many of these created in the history of the world, all of them unsuccessful societies at best and vicious tyrannies at worst.   

One of the unarguable things said about Obama is that his lack of knowledge of history is stunning.  I think this ignorance is purposeful, as he and those helping him realize his dream of destroying this America care only about ideology; they want nothing to do with fact.  That he can look at Venezuela, look at Cuba, look at Yemen, look at the ‘Palestinian state’, look at Iran, and treat the men who “lead” them as serious world leaders, (those with whom he prefers to consort over our traditional allies), and not treat them like the lunatics they are demonstrates this.  In just one of the hundreds of times Obama has embarrassed America and Americans on the world stage, during the recent protests against the present Iranian government, he gravely referred to the current madman running Iran as “The Supreme Leader” (it is worth noting that Americans, as a freedom-loving people, supported these protests, and Obama, as President of the United States of America, did not). Imagine if the President of the U.S. during World War II in equally sonorous tones made reference to Hitler as “Der Fuhrer?”

The only true transparency of the current administration is the implementation of this radical socialist/communist/tyrannical ideology. Every single domestic and foreign policy move Obama has made since taking office a very long 10 months ago, and the speed with which he is accomplishing his goals, makes this increasingly, and abundantly, clear to Americans, notwithstanding the false platitudes he spouts while destroying America.

This speed may be what saves our nation, because if Obama really wanted to “help” the American people with all these things that he is doing, he would do it according to the rules established in the Constitution, as all the American Presidents have done before him. He and his people are either ignoring or breaking all the rules, the rules so reverently (and at such cost) established by Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Adams, and all the other great men who founded our nation, in their march to achieve the destruction of this America, and his intentions have become obvious to the American people.

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who, in the 19th century, wrote an extraordinary book entitled Democracy in America, in which he describes how he found the America he observed at that time to be a great and inspiring institution. One of his conclusions was that the greatness of America and its ideals could not be destroyed from without, but only from within.  That is exactly what we are seeing President Obama attempting do right now, and he has a lot of help and support from his like-minded ideologues.  They have, for whatever misguided reasons on the part of the electorate, been given a nation to play with, much like Afghanistan was given over to the Taliban, and unless they are stopped and stopped soon, America will never again be what was so special in and to the world.  According to George Washington and the other brilliant men who founded this republic, the people are sovereign in this nation, not the government, nor its leaders. We are alone in all the peoples of the world who understand what real freedom is, its having been inculcated in each and every one of us for our entire history as a nation.

Why should these people be allowed to destroy our great nation?  They should not be, and we need to acquire the strength, stature, courage and resolve of George Washington, as the individuals we still are (not for much longer if Obama has anything to say about it) and as a body, in order to obliterate this threat to our beloved nation and the unique freedoms it used to provide.

At the End of the Day, Diversity Has Jumped the Shark

via: humanevents

It cannot be said often enough that the chief of staff of the United States Army, Gen. George Casey, responded to a massacre of 13 Americans in which the suspect is a Muslim by saying: “Our diversity … is a strength.”
   
As long as the general has brought it up: Never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a problem. Look at Ireland with its Protestant and Catholic populations, Canada with its French and English populations, Israel with its Jewish and Palestinian populations.
   
Or consider the warring factions in India, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, Czechoslovakia (until it happily split up), the Balkans and Chechnya. Also look at the festering hotbeds of tribal warfare — I mean the beautiful mosaics — in Third World hellholes like Afghanistan, Rwanda and South Central, L.A.

“Diversity” is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought. True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at curing cancer and containing pollution. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: “Cancer is a strength!” “Pollution is our greatest asset!”
   
By contrast, the canard “diversity is a strength” has now replaced “at the end of the day,” “skin in the game,” “blood and treasure,” “jumped the shark,” “boots on the ground,” “horrific” (whatever happened to the perfectly good word “horrible”?), “not so much,” “I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here,” and “that went well,” as America’s most irritating cliche.
   
We should start making up other nonsense mantras along the lines of “diversity is a strength” and mindlessly repeating them until they catch on, too.
   
Next time you’re at a cocktail party, just start saying, “Chocolate pudding is dramatic irony” from time to time. Eventually other people will start saying it, without anyone bothering to consider whether it makes sense. Then we’ll do another one: “Nicolas Cage is a two-cycle engine.”
   
Before you know it, liberals will react to news of a mass murder by muttering, “Well, you know what they say: Nicolas Cage is a two-cycle engine,” while everyone nods in agreement.
   
Except mere nonsense makes more sense than “diversity is a strength.”
   
If Gen. Casey’s wildly inappropriate use of this lunatic cliche in the aftermath of the Fort Hood massacre doesn’t kill it, nothing will.
   
Among the worst aspects of America’s “diversity” is that liberals’ reaction to a heterogeneous population is to create a pecking order based on alleged victimhood — as described in electrifying detail in my book, Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America.
   
In modern America, the guilty are sanctified, while the innocent never stop paying — including with their lives, as they did at Fort Hood last week. Points are awarded to aspiring victims for angry self-righteousness, acts of violence and general unpleasantness.
   
But liberals celebrate diversity only in the case of superficial characteristics like race, gender, sexual preference and country of origin. They reject diversity when we need it, such as in “diversity” of legal forums.
   
After conferring with everyone at Zabar’s, Obama decided that if a standard civilian trial is good enough for Martha Stewart, then it’s good enough for the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is coming to New York!
   
Mohammed’s military tribunal was already under way when Obama came into office, stopped the proceedings and, eight months later, announced that Mohammed would be tried in a federal court in New York.
   
In a liberal’s reckoning, diversity is good when we have both Muslim jihadists and patriotic Americans serving in the U.S. military. But diversity is bad when Martha Stewart and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are subjected to different legal tribunals to adjudicate their transgressions.
   
Terrorists tried in civilian courts will be entitled to the whole panoply of legal protections accorded Stewart or any American charged with a crime, such as the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, the right to exclude evidence obtained in violation of Miranda rights, the right to a speedy trial, the right to confront one’s accusers, the right to a change of venue, the right to examine the evidence against you, and the right to subpoena witnesses and evidence in one’s defense.
   
Members of Congress have it in their power to put an end to this lunacy right now. If they don’t, they are as complicit in Mohammed’s civilian trial as the president. Article I, Section 8, and Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution give Congress the power to establish the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts and to create exceptions to that jurisdiction.
   
Congress could pass a statute limiting federal court jurisdiction to individuals not subject to trial before a military tribunal. Any legislator who votes “nay” on a such a bill will be voting to give foreign terrorists the same legal rights as U.S. citizens — and more legal rights than members of the U.S. military are entitled to.
   
In the case of legal proceedings, diversity actually is a strength.

Tell Israel: Cool the Jets!

via: humanevents

by  Patrick J. Buchanan

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who is wired into the cabinet of “Bibi” Netanyahu, warns that if Iran’s nuclear program is not aborted by December, Israel will strike to obliterate it.

Defense Secretary Gates’ mission to Israel this week, says Bolton, to relay Obama’s red light, was listened to attentively, but will not be decisive.

Israel will decide.

One trusts Gates got into the face of Defense Minister Ehud Barak. For an Israeli strike on Iran, which Joe Biden foolishly said was Israel’s call, would drag this country into a third war in the Middle East and destroy a policy that is visibly succeeding.

The Iranian regime is still reeling from the June 12 election, widely perceived in Iran and worldwide as stolen, and its tumultuous aftermath. Hundreds of thousands poured into the streets to protest the election, and then attack the legitimacy itself of the Islamic regime.

The government is gripped by its worst crisis since the revolution of 1979. Members of Iran’s establishment with unimpeachable revolutionary credentials have declared the election a fraud.
    
Ahmadinejad’s selection as first vice president of Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, whose son is married to his daughter, and who has said some kind words about Israel, outraged conservatives.
    
Ahmadinejad was ordered by Ayatollah Khamenei to rescind the Mashaie appointment. For days he balked, then sent a curt note saying he would comply. Ahmadinejad further affronted the ayatollah by naming Mashaie his chief of staff.
     
Teheran is now ablaze over reports that scores of street protesters arrested in June may have been beaten to death in prison.
     
There is talk in Teheran, even before he has been sworn in for a second term, that Ahmadinejad may be impeached or ousted long before he can complete it.
     
America’s policy of patience is working.
     
And as Ahmadinejad is Israel’s bete noire, who Netanyahu cites as the religious fanatic who wants to “wipe Israel off the map” and will launch a nuclear weapon on Tel Aviv as soon as he gets it, why would Israel strike now, and reunite Iranians behind this regime?
     
Why does Israel insist that America has only five months to halt Iran’s nuclear program, or Israel must attack?
     
Says Bolton: “(W)ith each passing day, Iran’s nuclear and ballistic laboratories, production facilities, and military bases are all churning. Israel is focused on these facts, not the illusion of ‘tough’ diplomacy.”
     
Now, Iran’s nuclear “production facilities” may be “churning” out the low-enriched uranium of which it has produced enough for one test bomb. But IAEA inspectors still have their eyes on this pile. None of the LEU has been diverted anywhere.
     
There is no evidence Iran has built the cascade to raise LEU to highly enriched weapons-grade uranium, or that the facilities even exist to do this. The Iranian regime has declared it has no intention of building nuclear weapons, indeed, that their possession would be a violation of Koranic law.
     
And the United States has not rescinded its own National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 that Iran, in 2003, abandoned its weapons program.
     
Israel has been saying for years an Iranian bomb is months away.
     
Where is the proof? Where is the evidence to justify a new U.S. war in the Middle East to destroy weapons of mass destruction that may not exist in Iran, as they did not exist in Iraq?
     
Iran may wish to have a nuclear deterrent, considering what happened to neighbor Iraq, which did not. But the idea that the regime, having built a nuclear weapon, would launch it on Tel Aviv and bring massive retaliation by scores of Israeli nukes on Teheran and other cities, killing millions of Iranians and all the leaders and their families of all factions of this disputatious people, seems like total madness.
     
For Israel to launch a war on such reasoning would seem to meet Bismarck’s definition of preemptive war as “committing suicide out of fear of death.”
     
America lived for decades under a threat of nuclear annihilation. We relied on a policy of containment and deterrence, outlasted the Soviet regime in a 40-year Cold War, and are now at peace with Russia.
     
Ahmadinejad is not so tough a customer as Stalin, Khrushchev or Mao, who talked of accepting 300 million dead in a nuclear exchange. Moreover, Ahmadinejad has no nukes, no authority to take Iran to war, and is looking like a very lame duck before his second term has begun.
     
And when one looks to U.S. and Iranian interests, they coincide as much as they conflict. Iran detested the Taliban before we took them down, and no more wants them back than do we. Iran is even more pleased with the Shia regime we brought to power in Baghdad than we are.
     
Iran needs technology to restore its depleted oil and gas fields, and an end to sanctions to restore an economy whose disintegration helped put the regime in crisis and lose it the support of its young.
     
Obama should tell the Israelis, “Cool the jets!” literally.

How About A National Conversation on Race Hoaxes?

via: humanevents

How About A National Conversation on Race Hoaxes?

by  Ann Coulter

You could not ask for a more perfect illustration of the thesis of my latest book, Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America, than the black president of the United States attacking a powerless white cop for arresting a black Harvard professor — in a city with a black mayor and a state with a black governor — as the professor vacations in Martha’s Vineyard.
   
In modern America, the alleged “victim” is always really the aggressor, and the alleged “aggressor” is always the true victim.
   
President Barack Obama planted the question during a health care press conference, hoping he could satisfy the Chicago Sun-Times, which has been accusing him of not being black enough. He somehow imagined that the rest of the country might not notice the president of the United States gratuitously attacking a cop in a case of alleged “racial profiling.”

Oops.
   
Suddenly, with the glare of the national spotlight being turned on a small local story, it became clear that there was no “racial profiling” involved — other than by the black Harvard professor, who lorded his credentials and connections over a white working-class cop.
   
We wouldn’t have known about this case at all if the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., hadn’t blast e-mailed the universe that he was harassed by racist cops. Gates thought it would be a feather in his cap, not realizing there are huge areas of the country where people don’t think it’s heroic to browbeat cops checking on you after you break into your own house, such as 99 percent of the country outside of Cambridge.
   
Contrary to liberals’ ardent desire, Sgt. James Crowley was not on tape saying, “I know it’s his house, but let’s stick it to this uppity negro.” (Curiously, the tape of Gates’ call demanding to talk to the chief of police to “report” Crowley has been withheld. Some watchdog group has got to demand that tape.)
   
But what if Crowley hadn’t been a model policeman who taught diversity classes and once famously gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a black athlete?
   
What if the 911 caller had identified the suspected burglars as black, which it turns out she did not?
   
What if Crowley hadn’t been fully supported by other cops at the scene, one Hispanic and one black? (Liberals will say cops stick together, but I say liberals stick together.)
   
What if, at some point in his life, Crowley had been accused — falsely or not — of racism?
   
His life would be ruined.
   
Desperate to blame the cop, despite the facts, some liberals have begun making up their own facts. Radio talker Opio Sokoni claimed Crowley told Gates to “shut up” and “I’m going to win, you’re going to jail.” Even Gates doesn’t claim the cop said that.
   
On MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Chris Matthews said that Gates did not say, “I’ll speak with your mama outside,” as stated in the police report.
   
“He didn’t say this,” Matthews asserted as fact. This invented fact allowed Matthews to accuse the cop of engaging in “projection” and to conjure Crowley’s psychological state, saying, this is “what a white guy thought a black guy would say.”
   
Eugene Robinson endorsed Matthews’ invented fact, saying: “I cannot imagine in this universe Skip Gates saying, ‘I’ll speak with your mama outside.’” As proof, Robinson explained that Gates “rolls with kings and queens and Nobel Prize winners.” (I’m not “projecting” what I think a black man would say; he really said that.)
   
And then they both had a laugh about the cop applying racist stereotypes to such an esteemed figure as Professor Gates, who apparently would NEVER use the phrase “your mama.”
   
First, unlike these aesthetes, I don’t consider “your mama” such an implausible expression for someone to use.
   
Second, Sgt. Crowley wrote his police report, including the “your mama” line, long before he, or anyone else, could have imagined the arrest was going to become nationwide, front-page news.
   
Third, there’s a video of Gates using the N-word all over the Internet, and in that short, three-minute video, Gates uses the phrase “your mama.”
   
The only contrary evidence is that Gates recently denied that he told the cop he’d “speak with your mama outside.” He also desperately wants to drop the subject.
   
The left’s last-ditch attempt to defend a powerful black man’s attack on a powerless white man is to say the arrest was improper. In Time magazine, Lawrence O’Donnell factually announced, “Yelling does not meet the definition of disorderly conduct in Massachusetts.”
   
You can argue the facts in court, but there’s no question that the police report described the misdemeanor offense of “disorderly conduct” under Massachusetts law, which includes engaging in “tumultuous behavior” in “any neighborhood,” thereby causing public “inconvenience, annoyance or alarm.”
   
As everyone who’s read the police report knows, Gates is described as going on an extended tirade against the officer, calling him a racist, saying the officer didn’t know who he was messing with, acting irrationally, following the officer outside to continue haranguing him, and engaging in “tumultuous behavior” in and outside his house, drawing a small crowd of alarmed onlookers and police.
   
Suppose a cop didn’t arrest a guy who was ranting and raving — in his own home — and, an hour later, the hothead assaults someone. Policeman: I was as surprised as anyone that he shot his girlfriend! Every liberal in the country would demand the cop’s head.
   
And by the way, try screaming at a judge that he’s a racist and see what happens. Why should police officers deserve less protection than judges? They’re in more danger.
   
The disorderly conduct charge was not dropped because it wasn’t a good arrest. It was dropped, according to Gates’ own lawyer, because of Gates’ connections.
  
Before liberals declare that this a case of racial profiling and move on, how about liberals produce one provable example of racial profiling that isn’t a hoax?

Has Obama’s Luck Run Out?

via: humanevents

by  Patrick J. Buchanan

07/24/2009

The sound alone was worth the $24 billion!”
 
So said fellow Nixon speechwriter Ray Price as the mighty Saturn V rocket lifted Apollo 11 and Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins off the launch pad, three miles away, on the start of their voyage to the moon.
 
It was a splendid moment in that first year of the Nixon presidency, a year that had gone remarkably well for a minority president who had come to office with both houses held by the opposition.

Within weeks of taking office, Nixon had taken a grand tour of the European capitals. He had proposed a Family Assistance Plan, cooked up in Pat Moynihan’s shop, to wide applause. He had announced a withdrawal of 100,000 troops from Vietnam.
 
He would greet the astronauts on the aircraft carrier in the Pacific on their return, travel to Guam to announce the Nixon Doctrine, journey on to Vietnam and visit the troops, thence to Romania — the first U.S. president to travel behind the Iron Curtain.
 
Returning in triumph, Nixon departed for his August vacation.
 
When he returned to D.C., the storm clouds had gathered.
 
In mid-October, hundreds of thousands of protesters surrounded the White House demanding an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, egged on by a media establishment that had cheered JFK and LBJ all the way into liberalism’s war.
 
With David Broder writing of the “breaking of the president,” Nixon went on national television to implore the “great silent majority” to stand with him for peace with honor in Vietnam.

The networks trashed the speech. But Vice President Spiro Agnew launched a counter-attack on media power and prejudice. By December, after another 500,000 had marched on Washington, Nixon was at 68 percent approval and Agnew, after Nixon and Billy Graham, was the third most admired man in America.
 
Though elected in November 1968, it was November 1969 that made the Nixon presidency and produced the New Majority Republicans would rely on for decades. Obama is approaching such a moment of truth.

The universal health insurance plans being advanced all appear too complex, costly, and non-credible to pass both houses. The cap-and-trade carbon emissions bill, with its huge costs to be passed on to U.S. producers and consumers, as China opts out, seems an act of national masochism.

The $787 billion stimulus bill has done zip to stimulate the economy. Less than 10 percent of the money has gone out the door, which makes one wonder why it was called a stimulus package. Unemployment is at 9.5 percent, well above what the Obamaites predicted, and rising.

As worrisome is the situation in Afghanistan. The United States has 66,000 troops in country or on the way, as our NATO allies look for the exit ramp.  We are seven and a half years in and the Afghan army is not remotely capable of defending the nation or regime.

Afghanistan is now Obama’s war. He made the decision to deepen U.S. involvement as we headed out of Iraq. Yet, it is unclear how many U.S. troops will be needed, for how long, to create a stable government and army that can secure the national territory and prevent a return of Al Qaeda.

Moreover, Kabul continues to protest U.S. air strikes that continue to kill civilians, as Pakistan protests the Marine offensive in Helmand that is driving the Taliban into Baluchistan, where a secessionist movement is developing.

Pakistan also seems more worried about shifting its army away from the border with India than about defeating an Afghan Taliban with whom it had a working relationship before 9/11.

We are thus today pushing the Afghan regime to do what it is not capable of doing, and the Pakistani government and army into doing what it would prefer not to do. This does not appear a formula for victory.

Also looming is the issue of Iran’s nuclear program.

Obama has moved up from December to September the deadline for serious discussions to begun. If they have not begun by October, will Obama go to the U.N. for sanctions? If the Russians and Chinese object, will Obama and NATO impose sanctions of their own? Will Obama step on an escalator leading inexorably to war? Or authorize Israel to launch an attack?

Does Obama have the authority to take us to war against a nation that has not attacked us? If so, where did he get this authority? While Congress would readily agree to sanctions, would it sign off on yet another war?

From North Korea to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Honduras, and from the economy to health care to carbon emissions, things are not going Obama’s way. He is 10 points below where Nixon was after a full year, and on economic issues — unemployment, the deficit, spending — he is under 50 percent.

This presidency is not yet in trouble. But it is sure headed that way.

Take Two Aspirin And Call Me When Your Cancer is Stage 4

via: humanevents

Take Two Aspirin And Call Me When Your Cancer is Stage 4

by  Ann Coulter

07/22/2009

All the problems with the American health care system come from government intervention, so naturally the Democrats’ idea for fixing it is more government intervention. This is like trying to sober up by having another drink.

The reason seeing a doctor is already more like going to the DMV, and less like going to the Apple “Genius Bar,” is that the government decided health care was too important to be left to the free market. Yes — the same free market that has produced such a cornucopia of inexpensive goods and services that, today, even poor people have cell phones and flat-screen TVs.

As a result, it’s easier to get your computer fixed than your health. Thanks, government!

We already have near-universal health coverage in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ hospitals, emergency rooms and tax-deductible employer-provided health care — all government creations.

So now, everyone expects doctors to be free. People who pay $200 for a haircut are indignant if it costs more than a $20 co-pay to see a doctor.

The government also “helped” us by mandating that insurance companies cover all sorts of medical services, both ordinary — which you ought to pay for yourself — and exotic, such as shrinks, in vitro fertilization and child-development assessments — which no normal person would voluntarily pay to insure against.

This would be like requiring all car insurance to cover the cost of gasoline, oil and tire changes — as well as professional car detailing, iPod docks, and leather seats and those neon chaser lights I have all along the underbody of my chopped, lowrider ‘57 Chevy.

But politicians are more interested in pleasing lobbyists for acupuncturists, midwives and marriage counselors than they are in pleasing recent college graduates who only want to insure against the possibility that they’ll be hit by a truck. So politicians at both the state and federal level keep passing boatloads of insurance mandates requiring that all insurance plans cover a raft of non-emergency conditions that are expensive to treat — but whose practitioners have high-priced lobbyists.

As a result, a young, healthy person has a choice of buying artificially expensive health insurance that, by law, covers a smorgasbord of medical services of no interest to him … or going uninsured. People who aren’t planning on giving birth to a slew of children with restless leg syndrome in the near future forgo insurance — and then politicians tell us we have a national emergency because some people don’t have health insurance.

The whole idea of insurance is to insure against catastrophes: You buy insurance in case your house burns down — not so you can force other people in your plan to pay for your maid. You buy car insurance in case you’re in a major accident, not so everyone in the plan shares the cost of gas.

Just as people use vastly different amounts of gasoline, they also use vastly different amounts of medical care — especially when an appointment with a highly trained physician costs less than a manicure.

Insurance plans that force everyone in the plan to pay for everyone else’s Viagra and anti-anxiety pills are already completely unfair to people who rarely go to the doctor. It’s like being forced to share gas bills with a long-haul trucker or a restaurant bill with Michael Moore. On the other hand, it’s a great deal for any lonely hypochondriacs in the plan.

Now the Democrats want to force us all into one gigantic national health insurance plan that will cover every real and mythical ailment that has a powerful lobby. But if you have a rare medical condition without a lobbying arm, you’ll be out of luck.

Even two decades after the collapse of liberals’ beloved Soviet Union, they can’t grasp that it’s easier and cheaper to obtain any service provided by capitalism than any service provided under socialism.

You don’t have to conjure up fantastic visions of how health care would be delivered in this country if we bought it ourselves. Just go to a grocery store or get a manicure. Or think back to when you bought your last muffler, personal trainer, computer and every other product and service available in inexpensive abundance in this capitalist paradise.

Third-party payer schemes are always a disaster — less service for twice the price! If you want good service at a good price, be sure to be the one holding the credit card. Under “universal health care,” no one but government bureaucrats will be allowed to hold the credit card.

Isn’t food important? Why not “universal food coverage”? If politicians and employers had guaranteed us “free” food 50 years ago, today Democrats would be wailing about the “food crisis” in America, and you’d be on the phone with your food care provider arguing about whether or not a Reuben sandwich with fries was covered under your plan.

Instead of making health care more like the DMV, how about we make it more like grocery stores?  Give the poor and tough cases health stamps and let the rest of us buy health care — and health insurance — on the free market.

How to Handle Sonia

via: humanevents

by  Patrick J. Buchanan

Republicans have been given fair warning.

Should GOP senators treat Sonia Sotomayor as contemptuously as Democrats treated Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, they should expect Hispanic hostility for a generation.

The chutzpah of this Beltway crowd does not cease to amaze.

They archly demand that conservatives accord a self-described “affirmative action baby” from Princeton a respect they never for a moment accorded a pro-life conservative mother of five from Idaho State, Sarah Palin.

Pundits here gets hoots of appreciation for doing to a white Christian woman what would constitute a hate crime if done to a “wise Latina woman.” But, as no Republican who followed the script of the mainstream media ever won a national election, why should the party pay them mind?

The imperative of the GOP is not to appease a city that went 93-7 for Obama, but to win back its lost voters.

In 2008, Hispanics, according to the latest figures, were 7.4 percent of the total vote. White folks were 74 percent, 10 times as large. Adding just 1 percent to the white vote is thus the same as adding 10 percent to the candidate’s Hispanic vote.

If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent.

But even Ronald Reagan never got over 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. Yet, he and Richard Nixon both got around 65 percent of the white vote.

When Republican identification is down to 20 percent, but 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives, do Republicans need a GPS to tell them which way to go?

Why did McCain fail to win the white conservative Democrats Hillary Clinton swept in the primaries? He never addressed or cared about their issues.

These are the folks whose jobs have been outsourced to China and Asia, who pay the price of affirmative action when their sons and daughters are pushed aside to make room for the Sonia Sotomayors. These are the folks who want the borders secured and the illegals sent back.

Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled.

And McCain might be president.

McCain soared a dozen points when he picked Palin, who seemed to Reagan Democrats to be “one of us.” They came roaring back, but left for good when McCain declared the economy fundamentally sound and rushed to D.C. to persuade Republicans to vote for a huge bank bailout opposed by Americans 100 to 1.

How, then, to handle Sotomayor?

As Republicans have never brutalized a Supreme Court nominee — Ruth Bader Ginsburg got 96 votes and Stephen Breyer 87 — they need no lectures on decency or decorum.

What they must do is expose Sotomayor, as they did not in the case of Ginsburg, as a political activist whose career bespeaks a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males to the degree necessary to bring about an equality of rewards in society.

Sonia is, first and foremost, a Latina. She has not hesitated to demand, even in college and law school, ethnic and gender preferences for her own. Her concept of justice is race-based.

Testifying to Democrats’ awareness that America does not want liberal justices for whom affirmative action is holy writ, Sotomayor is being promoted as a practitioner of judicial restraint who faithfully follows the Constitution and the law.

Yet here is a judge who ruled that New York state, by denying felons the vote, violated their civil rights.

How so? As there are disproportionately more blacks and Hispanics in prison, denying convicts the right to vote has a disparate impact on minorities.

The New York law does discriminate, but not on the basis of race, but whether or not you raped, robbed or murdered someone.

Even if Sotomayor is confirmed, making the nation aware she is a militant supporter since college days of ethnic and gender preferences is an assignment worth pursuing. For America does not believe in preferences. Even in the blue states of California, Washington and Michigan, voters have tossed them out as naked discrimination against white males.

As Sotomayor would be a colorful personality in a bland liberal lineup of Ginsburg, Breyer and John Paul Stevens, she would stand out, like the co-ed-chasing “Wild Bill” Douglas in the 1960s and 1970s.

And if Republicans, in 2010 and 2012, can point to the court and say Sotomayor is their kind of justice, and Scalia, Roberts, Alito and Thomas are our kind of justices, that will not be all bad.

Justice Douglas, Ramsey Clark and Jocelyn Elders, after all, did a whale of a lot of good for the Republican Party in days gone by.

Dems to GOP Nominee: Will the Defendant Please Rise?

via: humanevents

by  Ann Coulter

Every time a Democrat senator has talked during the Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor this week, I felt lousy about my country. Not for the usual reasons when a Democrat talks, but because Democrats revel in telling us what a racist country this is.
   
Interestingly, the Democrats’ examples of ethnic prejudice did not include Clarence Thomas, whose nomination hearings began with the Democrats saying, “You may now uncuff the defendant.”
   
Their examples did not include Miguel Estrada, the brilliant Harvard-educated lawyer who was blocked from an appellate court judgeship by Senate Democrats expressly on the grounds that he is a Hispanic — as stated in Democratic staff memos that became public.

No, they had to go back to Roger Taney — confirmed in 1836 — who was allegedly attacked for being a Catholic (and who authored the Dred Scott decision), and Louis Brandeis — confirmed in 1916 — allegedly a victim of anti-Semitism.
   
Indeed, Sen. Patrick Leahy lied about Estrada’s nomination, blaming it on Republicans: “He was not given a hearing when the Republicans were in charge. He was given a hearing when the Democrats were in charge.”
   
The Republicans were “in charge” for precisely 14 days between Estrada’s nomination on May 9, 2001, and May 24, 2001, when Sen. Jim Jeffords switched parties, giving Democrats control of the Senate. The Democrats then refused to hold a hearing on Estrada’s nomination for approximately 480 days, shortly before the 2002 election.
   
Even after Republicans won back a narrow majority in 2003, Estrada was blocked “by an extraordinary filibuster mounted by Senate Democrats” — as The New York Times put it.
   
Memos from the Democratic staff of the Judiciary Committee were later unearthed, revealing that they considered Estrada “especially dangerous” — as stated in a memo by a Sen. Dick Durbin staffer — because “he is Latino and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.”
   
Sandy Berger wasn’t available to steal back the memos, so Durbin ordered Capitol Police to seize the documents from Senate computer servers and lock them in a police vault.
   
Led by Sens. Leahy and Chuck Schumer, Democrats ferociously opposed Estrada, who would have been the first Hispanic to sit on the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. They were so determined to keep him off the Supreme Court that Leahy and Schumer introduced legislation at one point to construct a fence around Estrada’s house.
   
In frustration, Estrada finally withdrew his name on Sept. 5, 2003.
   
At the time, liberal historian David Garrow predicted that if the Democrats blocked Estrada, they would be “handing Bush a campaign issue to use in the Hispanic community.”
   
Alas, today Democrats can’t really place Estrada — James Carville confuses him with that other Hispanic, Alberto Gonzales. On MSNBC they laugh about his obscurity, asking if he was the cop on “CHiPs.” They also can’t recall the name “Anita Hill.” Nor can anyone remember African-American Janice Rogers Brown or what the Democrats did to her.
   
Only the indignities suffered by Justices Taney and Brandeis still burn in liberal hearts!
   
So when Republicans treat Sotomayor with respect and Sen. Lindsey Graham says his “hope” is that “if we ever get a conservative president and they nominate someone who has an equal passion on the other side, that we will not forget this moment,” I think it’s a lovely speech.
   
It might even persuade me if I were born yesterday.
   
But Democrats treat judicial nominations like war — while Republicans keep being gracious, hoping Democrats will learn by example.
   
Sen. Teddy Kennedy accused Reagan nominee Robert Bork of trying to murder women, segregate blacks, institute a police state and censor speech — everything short of driving a woman into a lake! — within an hour of Reagan’s announcing Bork’s nomination.
   
To defend “the right to privacy,” liberals investigated Bork’s video rentals. (Alfred Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers’ movies and Ruthless People — the last one supposedly a primer for dealing with the Democrats.)
   
Liberals unleashed scorned woman Anita Hill against Clarence Thomas in the 11th hour of his hearings to accuse him of sexual harassment — charges that were believed by no one who knew both Thomas and Hill, or by the vast majority of Americans watching the hearings.
   
But when the tables were turned and Bill Clinton nominated left-wing extremist/ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Republicans lavished her with praise and voted overwhelmingly to confirm her, in a 96-to-3 vote. (Poor Ruth. If Sotomayor is confirmed, Ginsburg will no longer be known as “the hot one in the robe.”)
   
The next Clinton nominee, Stephen Breyer, was also treated gallantly — no video rental records or perjurious testimony was adduced against him — and confirmed in an 87-to-9 vote.
   
As Mrs. Sam Alito can attest, the magnanimity was not returned to Bush’s Supreme Court nominees. She was driven from the hearings in tears by the Democrats’ vicious attacks on her husband’s character. The great “uniter” Barack Obama voted against both nominees.
   
Even Justice Ginsburg recently remarked to The New York Times that her and Justice Breyer’s hearings were “unusual” in how “civil” they were.
   
Hmmm, why might that be?
   
To the extent that the Sotomayor hearings have been less than civil, it is, again, liberals who have made it so, launching personal attacks against the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions, and even the fireman whose complaint started the Ricci case.
   
But it was a nice speech.

It Can’t Happen Here

via: humanevents

So grave was the crisis in western China that President Hu Jintao canceled a meeting with President Obama, broke off from the G8 summit and flew home.

By official count, 158 are dead, 1,080 injured and a thousand arrested in ethnic violence between Han Chinese and the Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs of Xinjiang. That is the huge oil-rich province that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and several Central Asian countries that seceded from the Soviet Union.

Uighur sources put the death toll much higher.

The Communist Party chief in Xinjiang has promised to execute those responsible for the killings.

In 1989, fear that what was happening in Eastern Europe might happen in Beijing produced Tiananmen Square. The flooding of Chinese troops into Xinjiang bespeaks a fear that what happened to the Soviet Union could happen to China. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, the Chinese, as they showed in Tibet, will wage civil war to crush secession.

Already, Beijing has struggled to ensure perpetual possession of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet — half of the national territory — by moving in millions of Han Chinese, swamping the indigenous peoples, as they did in Manchuria.

The larger issue here is the enduring power of ethnonationalism — the drive of ethnic minorities, embryonic nations, to break free and create their own countries, where their faith, culture and language are predominant. The Uighurs are such a people.

Ethnonationalism caused the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, triggered World War I in Sarajevo, and tore apart the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Ethnonationalism birthed Ireland, Turkey and Israel.

Ethnonationalism in the 1990s tore apart the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and broke up Czechoslovakia, creating two-dozen nations out of three. Last August, ethnonationalism, with an assist from the Russian Army, relieved Georgia of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Russia has its own ethnic worries in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, whose Moscow-installed president was nearly blown to pieces two weeks ago and where a Chechen convoy was ambushed last week with 10 soldiers killed.

The ethnonationalism that pulled Ireland out of the United Kingdom in 1921 is pulling Scotland out. It split the Asian subcontinent up into Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Iran, Iraq and Pakistan are all threatened.

Persians are a bare majority against the combined numbers of Azeris, Kurds, Arabs and Baluch. Each of those minorities shares a border with kinfolk — in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

Turkey has fought for decades against Kurd ethnonationalism.

If one were to wager on new nations, Kurdistan and Baluchistan would be among the favorites. And Pashtun in Pakistan outnumber Pashtun in Afghanistan, though in the latter they are the majority.

In Africa, the savage attacks on the Kikiyu by Luo manifest a resurgent tribalism, as did the horrors of Rwanda, where Tutsi in the hundreds of thousands were massacred by Hutu.

President Clinton may have apologized to the Africans for not sending troops to stop the genocide in Rwanda, but if the America of Obama is into interventionism to protect human rights, Africa in the 21st century should provide us plenty of opportunity.

Evo Morales in Bolivia, Ollanta Humala in Peru and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez are stoking the embers, goading the Indian populations, the indigenous peoples, to take back what the white man took 500 years ago. They have met with no small success.

The contrast between insouciant America and serious China today is instructive. China is protectionist; America free trade. China is nationalist; America globalist. China’s economy is export-driven; America’s base is consumption. China saves; America spends. China uses its foreign exchange to lock up overseas resources; America uses foreign aid for humanitarian assistance to failed states. Behaving like ruthlessly purposeful 19th-century Americans, China grows as America shrinks.

Where Beijing floods its borderlands with Han to reduce indigenous populations to minorities, and stifles religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity, America, declaring, “Diversity is our strength!” invites the whole world to come to America and swamp her own native-born.

Observing the lightning breakup of the Soviet Union, the Chinese take ethnonationalism with deadly seriousness. American’s elite regard it an irrelevancy, an obsession only of the politically retarded.

After all, they tell us, we were never blood-and-soil people, always a propositional nation, a nation of ideas. Our belief in democracy, diversity, and equality define us and make us different from all other nations.

Indeed, we now happily predict the year, 2042, when Americans of European ancestry become a minority in a country whose Founding Fathers declared it set aside for “ourselves and our posterity.”

Without the assent of her people, America is being converted from a Christian country, nine in 10 of whose people traced their roots to Europe as late as the time of JFK, into a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural Tower of Babel not seen since the late Roman Empire.

The city farthest along the path is Los Angeles, famous worldwide for the number, variety, and size of its ethnic and racial street gangs.

Not to worry. It can’t happen here.

Obama on the Wrong Side of History

via: humanevents

Barack Obama has decided to align our nation’s foreign policy with its enemies. It should come as no surprise to those of us who have paid attention to him, but it is sad nonetheless.  On the matter of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, our national policy puts us on the same side as Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and a host of South American drug cartels.

The Hondurans are so concerned about Latin America’s history of despots, they wrote their constitution to ensure no despots could grow there.  Article 239 of their constitution states that any President who proposes extending his term in office is automatically removed from office.  Article 313 of the Honduran constitution allows their Supreme Court to deputize the Honduran military to carry out its orders, including removing politicians from office who seek to extend a President’s term.

Undeterred by their constitution, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya sought a constitutional referendum to keep himself in office.  The Honduran Constitution is clear — only the Congress can take such an act. The Honduran Supreme Court reiterated that and denied Zelaya his actions. That did not stop him.  He ordered the military to help him carry out the referendum.

As Sen. Jim DeMint recently noted, “For weeks leading to his arrest, Zelaya flouted the constitutional authority of the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court, and claimed for himself extra-constitutional control of his nation’s military and political institutions. Every institution from the Electoral Tribunal to the Supreme Court ruled that his actions were unjustified and illegal. Zelaya’s open defiance of democratic norms has set Honduras on a path toward violence, instability, and tyranny.”
 
Honduras has no impeachment process as we know it.  The Supreme Court, pursuant to the laws of Honduras, deputized the nation’s military to oust Zelaya for his actions.  In a letter last week from  DeMint and over a dozen other senators to Secretary of State Clinton, the senators noted that Honduras has very clearly spelled out that Zelaya’s ouster was handled constitutionally and the Obama administration has yet to cite any evidence refuting the Honduran government’s claims.

Nonetheless, Barack Obama declared the Honduran government’s actions a coup — never mind the government was preserving its democracy instead of overthrowing it. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “The action taken against Honduran President Mel Zelaya violates the precepts of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and thus should be condemned by all.”  She called on Hondurans to uphold their constitutional processes, the very thing they were doing by ousting Zelaya.

The Hondurans have acted according to their constitution. Sources in the State Department tell me that, privately, even Hillary Clinton thinks the administration got this wrong. What’s more, Barack Obama has now publicly taken a position putting him on the side of men, not laws.  Though a foreign policy decision, Obama siding with men, instead of laws — something he also did siding with the Blank Panthers against the Justice Department — has startling implications in this country.