November 05, 2009

DID HE WANT TO WIN OR LEAD?

I've heard and read many discussions on whether Pres Obama has got us in this handbasket on purpose or on accident.  But I think this is an interesting twist to the question:

Jim Vicevich at the link thinks that Obama has a core set of principles that run to the hard Left, but has kept them hidden thus far.  Why?  Jim argues that Obama couldn’t get elected on those principles, and so he has kept them hidden while pushing them through his legislative agenda.

Actually, I think Todd is closer to it.  Obama wanted to be President, not to lead, but just to win.  Now that he has won, he has no core set of governing principles other than what impacts Barack Obama.  He has offered no leadership on any part of his agenda all year long, content to have Nancy Pelosi run it for him.  His foreign policy thus far consists entirely of making himself personally popular with the world.  On Afghanistan, Obama has thus far allowed Robert Gates and David Petraeus to make his decisions, only balking at the moment because the McChrystal strategy puts him at odds with his base, which could erode his popularity.

Does Barack Obama have deeply-held principles that he wanted to apply to the country, or did he just want to be president?

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November 04, 2009

SAY WHAT YOU MEAN AND MEAN WHAT YOU SAY

This is fantastic: Daily Kos sounds just like Glenn Beck.

Tonight proved conclusively that we're not going to turn out just because you have a (D) next to your name, or because Obama tells us to. We'll turn out if we feel it's worth our time and effort to vote, and we'll work hard to make sure others turn out if you inspire us with bold and decisive action.

The choice is yours. Give us a reason to vote for you, or we sit home.

Read the whole thing.  I promise I am not being snarky.  I think this is great.  I want both parties to say what they mean and mean what they say.  I hate how everyone runs as a moderate and tries to tweak their message so it doesn't offend anyone.  Or conversely, when they pretend to have principles and then get in office and abandon all their promises.  I want both parties to stand for different principles and then voters can decide which one they align with, not this election trickery where they all try to out-center each other.

I am 100% certain that I don't agree with Markos on any of the issues that he brings up: "health care, financial services, energy policy and immigration reform."  But he wants a candidate who represents his views and doesn't just pretend to represent them in order to get elected.  I completely agree with this.

Wouldn't it be nice if both parties stopped hiding who they really are and started standing for principles?

Imagine if we really had two distinct choices on election day...

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ALL OF A SUDDEN, HE HAD A POINT OF VIEW

Via a new Facebook friend:  I never get tired of hearing John Stossel's story.

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I DON'T GET IT

Personally, I think many people in our country are just plain goofy.  When Republicans are in office, they want Democrats.  When Democrats are in, they want Republicans.  Look at the Rasmussen generic ballot poll.  Last year, people couldn't wait to have a Dem.  Now they're itchin' for an R.  Is politics just a large-scale case of 'the grass is always greener'?  What happened to voting on your principles?

I mean, a good number of these people in Virginia had to have voted for Pres Obama and then now voted for the Republican governor.  That does not make sense.

I don't get it.

I think Krauthammer makes a good point about the 2008 election:

It tells you that '08 was a charisma election, a one-shot deal, and all this talk about realignment, about a new era, of the death of Republicanism or conservatism is utter nonsense.

 

It was an unusual election last year. All the stars were aligned Democratic, charismatic candidate. Still only a seven point victory. The return to the norm is happening now, and we're going to see it tomorrow night.

I just don't understand voting on charisma, period.  Vote your principles.

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DOUBLE STANDARD

Mark Steyn:

Noor Almaleki, whom I wrote about over the weekend, has died, the latest Western victim of a Muslim honor killing. If there were a Matthew Shepard murder every few months, Frank Rich et al would be going bananas about the "climate of hate" in our society, but you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse, and progressive opinion and the press couldn't give a hoot. Indeed, as The Atlantic notes, it's merely an obsession of us right-wing kooks.

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November 02, 2009

RESTORING ZELAYA

I think if I had to choose the most appalling thing Pres Obama has done since taking office, his insistence on the restoration of Manuel Zelaya would have to be it. It sickens me.

The essential elements of the agreement had largely been worked out months ago by other Latin American leaders. If Congress agrees, Mr. Zelaya will serve out the remaining three months of his term, and the presidential election scheduled for Nov. 29 will be recognized by all sides.

Mr. Zelaya and Mr. Micheletti, both members of the Liberal Party, are not candidates.

Some significant obstacles remain, not least of which is the approval of the nation’s Congress, which voted overwhelmingly to strip Mr. Zelaya of power four months ago and now has to decide whether to reinstate him.

“That is going to be the issue that is most provocative internally,” said Assistant Secretary of State Thomas A. Shannon Jr., who led the American delegation, “and probably where we in the international community are going to have to pay the closest attention.”

I hope the Honduran Congress sticks to their guns.

Can you imagine if in 2000, European countries had gotten together and decided that, despite the constitutionality of Bush's victory, Al Gore should've been the rightful president? And cut off aid and visas to Americans? (OK, aid doesn't really work as well, but for argument's sake.)  I mean really, can you imagine if the rest of the world told us that, our Constitution be damned, we had to do what they all said?

I love this sentence, about the immediate aftermath of Zelaya's booting:

Latin American countries, concerned about the precedent the coup had set in a region where democracy remained fragile, criticized the United States for sending mixed signals to Honduras.

Yes, I'm sure they did. Places like Venezuela would definitely be concerned about the precedent of following the rule of law.

Really, I think this is the most disgusting thing the Obama administration has done.

From the comments:

I wonder: If the people of Zimbabwe managed to throw out Mugabe, would the US also demand he be put back in power simply because it was a "coup"?

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November 01, 2009

"HER INNER VOICE BECAME HER OUTER VOICE"

I actually found myself cheering Hillary Clinton on...

"Her inner voice became her outer voice," Martha Raddatz, a veteran NBC correspondent said on the network, explaining that while many in the administration believed what she said to be true (that Pakistan is coddling terrorists), it was rare for America's top diplomat to say it publicly. Officials in Washington were trying to keep a straight face, but there were a few gasps, she added.

Clinton's blunt remarks came during a pow-wow with half-dozen combative senior Pakistani journalists who harried her about US policy in the region.

"Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002," she finally asserted when challenged about Washington’s tough prescriptions for Islamabad. "I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to."

After having publicly doubted the bona fides of her hosts, she added, as an afterthought: "Maybe that's the case; maybe they're not gettable...I don't know. As far as we know, they are in Pakistan." At one point during the exchanges, when a journalist spoke about all the services rendered by Pakistan for the US, Mrs Clinton snapped, "We have also given you billions."

It's about time somebody told it like it is.

But I also giggled at Mark Steyn's take:

Good thing those arrogant swaggering Texas cowboys aren't blundering around the world screwing up America's global relationships anymore.

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October 30, 2009

TOO NORMAL FOR OUR OWN GOOD



She looks perfect.  Not a thing wrong with her.  The high-risk doctors "graduated" me to Regular Old Pregnant Lady after today's visit.

Which ends up being an interesting catch-22: We've received word that my husband might not get permission to come home for the birth unless it is a high-risk pregnancy.

Oh the irony...all we've wanted is for a healthy, normal pregnancy, and now that might mean it's not important enough to get my husband home from Afghanistan.

But we're not worrying about that today.  We're just counting fingers and toes.


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October 29, 2009

WHY I WATCH GLENN BECK

It's patently obvious why Democrats and people on the left don't like Glenn Beck. But I know plenty of people on the right who don't like him either. Usually they point out that he's a crybaby.

I'd like to point out why I do like Glenn Beck, and why his show, along with the Special Report All-Star Panel, is the only political/news programming I watch on TV.  And why I watch it every day.

Because Glenn Beck comes at us Ross Perot style, with charts and graphs and numbers. He lays out theories about what he thinks the future of our country will look like, and he always says they're just theories and he hopes he's wrong.  He doesn't just do opinion schtick, though there's plenty of that. He doesn't just interview guests and argue about the day's news, which is what every other news/opinion program on TV does. And he doesn't just cry, though there are times when his love for his country and his anguish over what it's becoming do overwhelm him.

He also takes complicated economic problems and explains them to average Americans.  (This clip is crucial to watch if you want to see the difference between The Glenn Beck Program and every other news show out there.)



The Glenn Beck model includes a chalkboard, for heaven's sake.  He spent twenty-one minutes lecturing on inflation.  And gets mega-ratings for it.  I think Americans are starving for this kind of programming.

Beck is the only TV personality I know of who consistently examines the long-term problems the US faces and points out that the "fixes" we're implementing now might end up doing us more harm than good.  Sadly, he also has a pretty good track record of being right.

Is anyone else pointing out long-term problems to average Americans?  Or are they too busy talking about balloon boy and hyping swine flu...

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I'M TIRED OF THE GOOD WAR

My dithering is worse than Pres Obama's.  I don't know what the solution is.  I want to do this until my husband comes home.



I am frustrated on so many levels.

A senior military officer said the developing strategy adopted General McChrystal’s central tenet. “We are no longer thinking about just destroying the enemy in a conventional way,” the officer said. “We must remove the main pressure that civilians live under, which is the constant intimidation and corruption and direct threat from the insurgency.”

Am I missing something here?  I thought we needed this new strategy because only it would deny safe haven to al-Qaeda. Now, we are evidently going to do counterinsurgency despite conceding at the outset that it won't really work because the Taliban is "an indigenous force" (translation: It has too much support among its fellow Afghan Muslims); under "Biden for the country," we are going to cede the vast countryside to the Taliban, which will then be free to give al-Qaeda the safe-haven it was purportedly our objective to prevent (and you know that's what we're doing because a "senior administration official" felt it necessary to tell the Times, "We are not talking about surrendering the rest of the country to the Taliban"); and under McChrystal for the city, while we don't go after the Taliban because “we are no longer thinking about just destroying the enemy in a conventional way,” we're going to focus on solving the real challenge to U.S. national security . . . Afghan corruption.

Ay-yay-yay.

Indeed.

And I still feel like Ralph Peters:

Iraq made sense to me. The stakes there were (and are) enormous. But Afghanistan's a strategic vacuum that sucks in resources and lives to no sensible purpose.

And yet leaving is an even bigger problem.

I get sick thinking about it.

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October 26, 2009

"MAKING SOMEONE ELSE PAY"

My husband and I have paid for car insurance for over seven years.  We have never once filed a claim.

My dental insurance costs about $140 per year.  I have never had any dental work done besides cleanings, twice a year at $70 each.

These two insurances work in remarkably different ways.  The dental insurance covers every time I walk in the door, even just to have some nice lady floss my teeth for me.  The car insurance doesn't cover anything routine and doesn't even cover some big things, like when my windshield broke last year. 

And yet, I think about the dental insurance so much more often, for some reason.  I am always irritated about breaking even.  I keep telling myself that it will pay off once we have kids, or once I need a root canal or something.  In the meantime, I get annoyed every time I break even.  I start to think that I could get by with one cleaning per year and save the remaining $70.  I want to feel more in control of that money, as if I am paying directly for a service instead of paying for insurance.

Maybe, with the car insurance, it's the fact that I don't have a choice to cancel it.  I don't often imagine all the money we threw down that hole, but it's a lot.  What if we could have it all back?

And don't even bring up all the money we've spent in life insurance...

But that's what insurance is: paying small amounts up front so that you will be eligible for the windfall payment at the end if bad luck strikes.  It's a gamble.  In the case of our vehicles, we have lost the gamble so far.  All the money we've paid in has gone to fix other people's cars for the past seven years.

Such is life.

Health insurance seems to be a misnomer then, because it doesn't seem to work like other insurances, at least not car or life insurance.  People seem to want to pay a small amount every month but get a large amount of benefit out every month too.  They want to pay $100 and get $300 worth of prescriptions.  That's not insurance, that's just redistribution.  That's just "making someone else pay", as Patrick McIlheran titled his recent article.  He explains why the proposed Obamacare system won't work:

Some companies noted last week that Congress' plans to mandate that everyone buy health insurance include only weak penalties. The plans also make insurers take on customers who are already sick. If you're young and daring, you pay the low penalty and go insurance-free until your doctor says you've got cancer. You then apply and pay $800-a-month premiums for $10,000-a-month care. Sweet, until the industry inevitably collapses, say insurers.

When stated so succinctly, it should be obvious that this system cannot work.  You cannot pay $800 for $10,000 worth of benefit without having someone else paying $800 for zero, for a long time.  That's how the gamble works in life insurance.

And while we all hate the stories of people who lose their jobs and then get cancer -- and trust me, I hate them pretty bad right now -- the solution, in my opinion, is not that insurers need to cover pre-existing conditions.  The solution is to have health insurance that is independent from your job, just as your car or life insurance is.  Then it doesn't matter when you get cancer; if you've paid in, you have "won" the gamble.

Mandatory insurance coverage is not, by definition, a gamble.  If you can wait to apply until after you have cancer, then why would you ever pay in beforehand?

It seems obvious to me that that system can't work.  So why are we trying to implement it?

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October 25, 2009

THE BADNESS OF OBAMA JUST KEEPS GETTING WORSE

Powerline got an email from Kristofer Harrison, who helped with the Bush administration's Afghanistan review.  He says Cheney was right and that they did loads of work that they passed on, no strings attached, to Obama.

The Chicago mob's behavior is unbelievably unseemly. Here they were given an immense amount of material, a complete strategic review and plan with the author's heading left blank. President Bush felt it was his duty to do so. And all Obama can do is smear president Bush, even after he filled his own name into the author's column.

Read the whole thing.

P.S.  Yes, what airforcewife said.  See comments.

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HIS OWN WORST ENEMY

Victor Davis Hanson nails it in a short post on The Corner:
Whom is Barack Obama Afraid of?—Another Barack Obama

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October 24, 2009

"HOW COULD THIS BE THE SAME BUMBLING KLUTZ?"

Bush vindicated during visit to city

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AMEN

From John Stossel:

In my state, the government tried to put bookies who take bets on horse races out of business by creating a state agency to run off-track betting.  The New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation, which has a Governor-appointed board of directors, has been so incompetently run that it now LOSES $38 billion per year despite its government-granted monopoly. Taxpayers are now on the hook for over $228 million.

An activity that was so lucrative to bookies that they risked arrest to pursue it becomes a money-loser when the state tries to do it.

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October 23, 2009

STICKER BURRS

Tonight I let the dog into the backyard.  I caught sight of him out the window and noticed he was limping.  Another sticker burr, poor fella.  I went to the door and opened it, calling to my Charlie.  He came running right to me, as if to say, "Help me, mommy," and I grabbed his foot, pulled the burr out, kissed his head, and he ran in the house.

And it was such a good feeling, to be needed like that and to be able to be the only one who could help him.  To see the look on his face as he came running to me for help.

I can't wait to be that for my child.

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OBAMA VS D'ANCONIA

Lawrence Auster postulates:

As for the stunning laziness he has showed in certain matters such as the stimulus and Guantanamo, here's another theory: that Obama is like Francisco D'Anconia in Atlas Shrugged. That is, he keeps screwing up, because he doesn't give a damn if things get fouled up or not. He's not putting his intelligence into the system, because he doesn't care about the system, even if his failures make him look bad as well. In other words, in some instance he causes damage deliberately, as with his healthcare plan, and in other instance he causes damage by simply not putting his mind into what he's doing.

Via Amritas, that has kept me thinking all day.  Because you know I'm always up for comparing Atlas to real life.

First, I am not sure I agree with Auster's summary of D'Anconia's strategy.  I do indeed think he "gave a damn."  His actions were deliberate and his method was calculating.  He lost everything to bring about the collapse of the system, including the woman he loved.  His sabotage was intensely personal and heartbreaking.  But it was a deliberate choice because he DID give a damn.  And yes, his failures made him look bad, but the trashing of his reputation was deliberate as well.  He sacrificed everything he was in order to stop participating in a system he abhorred.  At least that's the way I remember D'Anconia. 

Conversely, I don't think Pres Obama would ruin his reputation to achieve his ends the way D'Anconia did.  I think all Obama has is his reputation.  I don't think he would give up money and power and his good name to bring about...whatever it is he is working towards (and there is much debate about that.)  In short, I don't think he has half the integrity or fortitude as D'Anconia did.  What Obama wants is wealth redistribution, which is the moral equivalent of stealing from one man and giving it to another, and then patting yourself on the back for helping, as CVG once said.  He's not sacrificing anything of his own for his goals.  Hell, how many times have people pointed out that he could start by helping his aunt and brother if he cares so much about all people living equally?

My opinion is that Pres Obama doesn't have the moral conviction that Francisco D'Anconia did, and that he wouldn't sacrifice one iota of his own wealth or reputation for his worldview.

Posted by: Sarah at 01:31 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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BABY SAYINGS SUCK

Sig brought up an excellent point about bibs in the comments:

He has another few that were store bought and have annoying sayings on them. "Hello world, I have arrived!" Stuff like that. One says "It's all about me." I hate that one and I always turn it upside down if it's the only one left and I have to use it.

I totally understand where he's coming from.  But I also think he's lucky to have a baby boy, because I've found it's so much worse with girl stuff.

The worst I've seen so far?  I mean besides all the run-of-the-mill stuff that says DIVA and PRINCESS on it?  The shirt that said "Who needs a piggy bank when you have Daddy?"  Second worst: "You're never too young for diamonds."  On a 0-3 month old onesie.

I hate hate hate all the baby crap that says that the baby is the boss, that grandma is wrapped around my little finger, that God personally made me as an angel and then broke the mold, etc.  I want my kid to have self-confidence, but this is disgusting.  No, you are not God's gift to the universe, kid, sorry.  Judging from the state of baby clothes sayings, you'd think we're raising a generation of Eric Cartmans.

I try to stay far far away from shirts and bibs with sayings.  Well, except for the one AirForceWife gave us that says IRS DEDUCTION.  That one's funny.

Posted by: Sarah at 08:04 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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October 22, 2009

BIBI'S BDAY

David points out that I missed it yesterday: Happy Birthday, Netanyahu!
Sixty years old and still so dreamy...

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ANIMATED CHARACTER CROCHETING

Despite having very little energy still, I did manage to get some joke crocheting done lately, specifically a Bender bib and an Underpants Gnome.


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