First, Obama's agenda has been far more extreme than naive well-wishers assumed it would be. Second, his policies have already had disastrous results, which he can no longer credibly pawn off on his predecessor. And third, he has flagrantly thwarted the will of the people in foisting his policies upon us through abuses of power, legislative trickery, unseemly, unethical deals, and worse. He has acted decidedly un-presidential in slandering and bullying his opponents, has repeatedly played the race card, and has misrepresented his signature legislation for all to see.

  -link to article

Had his advice been followed in 2007, there would have been no surge - which Sen. Obama claimed would not "solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse" - and Iraq today would be awash in the blood of rampant terrorism, with al-Qaida and Iran vying for control of the oil-rich power.

  -link to article

Turns out Democrats stopped listening to voters and hardly did what was right for America. On issue after issue, they ignored public sentiment in favor of their ideological agenda. The stimulus bill passed on partisan terms. Cap and Trade was pursued with partisan ideology. The Health Care Bill was passed despite widespread opposition by Americans - including voters in the Kennedy seat and civilian terrors didn't make legal common sense to most Americans any more then suing Arizona for a law that mirrored existing federal law.

  -link to article

The president's Oval Office address wasn't confidence-inducing. Appropriately, he saluted the troops for "completing every mission they were given in Iraq," and he promised Iraqis they will "have a strong partner in the United States." But he spoke particularly forcefully of removing 100,000 troops from Iraq, closing or transferring hundreds of bases, and moving millions of pieces of equipment out of the country - indices of ending a war, not necessarily winning it. He talked up the growing capabilities of the Iraqis, but in the spirit of declaring victory - or, more precisely, the end of combat operations - and coming home. He exhorted us to "turn the page," before arguing that we must honor the troops by uniting around his domestic agenda.

In its failure to credit explicitly Bush's surge for turning around the war, the speech was graceless; in its cursory treatment of Iraq, it lacked strategic vision; and in its attempt to hijack the troops for Obama's domestic priorities ("we must tackle . . . challenges at home with as much energy and grit, and sense of common purpose, as our men and women in uniform"), it was shameless. Altogether a poor performance.

  -link to article

The CBO's Budget and Economic Outlook published this month puts the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom at $709 billion for military and related activities, including training of Iraqi forces and diplomatic operations. The projected cost of the stimulus, not counting interest on the added debt, is $862 billion.

  -link to article

Why are used-car prices rocketing? Part of the answer is that demand is up: With unemployment high and the economy uncertain, some car buyers who might otherwise be looking for a new truck or SUV are instead shopping for a used vehicle as a way to save money.

But an even bigger part of the answer is that the supply of used cars is artificially low, because your Uncle Sam decided last year to destroy hundreds of thousands of perfectly good automobiles as part of its hare-brained Car Allowance Rebate System — or, as most of us called it, Cash for Clunkers.

  -link to article

There's a law known as the law of unintended consequences. It's invoked when you try to do the right thing but overlook other events and occurrences set in motion by your actions. In the case of the drilling moratorium, the consequences were intended.

  -link to article

I have said before and I will say again, Barack Obama does not share the values of Americans. His vision is completely anathema to an America based on individualism, private property rights and Judeo-Christian morality.

  -link to article

The most basic fact is that it is cheaper to remain sick than to get medical treatment. What is cheapest of all is to die instead of getting life-saving medications and treatment, which can be very expensive.

Despite these facts, most of us tend to take a somewhat more parochial view of the situation when it is we ourselves who are sick or who face a potentially fatal illness. But what if that decision is taken out of your hands under ObamaCare and is being made for you by a bureaucrat in Washington?

  -link to article

Recovery summer, opposition to Arizona's immigration law, negative campaigning, and intervention in the Ground Zero mosque dispute-call them Obama's Four Disasters. As policy, they're questionable. As political exercises, they're losers. As clues about Obama, they're evidence he's lost his political knack.

  -link to article

That was the message a spirited, thousand-plus crowd delivered - to New York and D.C. politicians, to imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and to all those who support building a mosque near Ground Zero - during a three-hour rally today that began near the proposed site for the mosque and ended with a short march to Ground Zero.

  -link to article

Here is what we know for sure. 1) Given the state of Iraq in 2006, the country is in a much better place today that any reasonable observer then dared hope. 2) Iraq is better off than it was in the age of Saddam. Now the country has a future, and it rests in the hands of its people. Bonus: The world is rid one of its most dangerous and bloodthirsty thugs. Yes, it was a heavy price. Freedom rarely comes cheap. 3) The surge worked. The surge never promised a land of "milk and honey." It just promised to break the cycle of continuous, unrelenting violence, to give the new Iraqi political process a chance, and to allow the Iraqis time to build the capacity for their own security. It did that. 4) Things didn't turn out the way Bush planned. But the vision - a free Iraq without Saddam - was achieved. Remember, things didn't turn out the way FDR planned either. He said all the troops would be out of Europe in two years.

  -link to article

Bobby Scott is a liberal's liberal... and when he's questioning the secrecy, the lack of transparency (imagine that from this administration), then something is definitely wrong.

Barack Hussein Obama continues his quest to completely redefine America... a redefinition steeped in his radical past.

Hope and change my ass.

  -link to article

How did we get to the point where many people feel that the America they have known is being replaced by a very different kind of country, with not only different kinds of policies but also very different values and ways of governing?

Something of this magnitude does not happen all at once or in just one administration in Washington. What we are seeing is the culmination of many trends in many aspects of American life that go back for years.

  -link to article

It's hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speech roundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you're moved to declare this President Obama's finest hour, his act of greatest courage.

Alas, the next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom -- upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.

You're left looking like a fool because now Obama has said exactly nothing: No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.

  -link to article

This admirable American effort has now given Iraqis the opportunity to govern themselves democratically. We supported the Iraq invasion primarily for reasons of U.S. national security. But a successful war also held the promise that it could create, in a major Arab state, a model for governance that would result in something better than the secular or religious dictatorships that have so often bred brutality and radicalism-which has increasingly reached our own shores. The fact that Iraq has a functioning judiciary, and that Iraqi voters have rejected their most sectarian parties at the polls, is cause for hope that the country is moving in that direction.

  -link to article

Well, it's almost November and the economy still hasn't gotten any better and we have no evidence of those jobs being created. I can only assume that she didn't mean this either

  -link to article

The left passionately supports the most remarkable and radical change in modern social history -- the redefinition of marriage from male-female to include male-male and female-female.

Marriage is the building block of society. Changing its nature will therefore change society.

  -link to article

On Friday night, the President of the United States plunged into the long-simmering controversy surrounding a proposed Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan, mischaracterizing the underlying issues while avoiding a clear position on the project itself. In his carefully prepared remarks to a religious Muslim audience, Mr. Obama chastised opponents of the Mosque for disregarding time-honored principles of religious liberty, and interfering with freedom of worship for Muslims. The next day, he insisted that he never meant to express an opinion on the wisdom or suitability of the specific site for the new center, implying that he might even sympathize with calls for its relocation.

In the process of his unfolding explanations, the president seemed to be arguing with phantoms, or with straw men.

  -link to article

..To me the statement on the New York city mosque is the tip-off. Obama is many things but not dumb. To make a gratuitous statement supporting...purportedly...the right of Muslims to freedom of worship and apply it however tenuously to the New York mosque....tells me that this is the real Obama talking-the lefty ideologue who sees himself as a global leader rather than an American president. No president in his right mind thinking of reelection would take the position that Muslims who blew up the Trade Center and killed 3,000 should be defended, even with the arched language he used.

So my guess is this: If the economy stays stagnant and the polls continue to look hopeless, this guy ain't running.

  -link to article

Obama's embarrassing backtracking highlights a more important lesson about the mosque controversy: It doesn't have anything to do with the free exercise of religion. As Obama spectacularly demonstrated over the last couple of days, you can be a stalwart friend of religious freedom and still not necessarily think the mosque project is a good idea. Indeed, no reasonable opponent of the project contests the right of Muslims to worship as they please in this country - the First Amendment religious rights of Muslims never have been in question, at all. The critics insist only that this particular location for a project led by these particular people - including an imam who cannot bring himself to condemn Hamas - is unseemly and ill-considered. That position in no way implies a disregard for the First Amendment.

  -link to article

We are stunned by the president's willingness to disregard what Americans should be proud of: our enduring generosity to others on 9/11-a day when human decency triumphed over human depravity. On that day, when 3,000 of our fellow human beings were killed in barbaric act of raw religious intolerance unlike this country had ever seen, Americans did not turn outward with hatred or violence, we turned to each other, armed with nothing more than American flags and countless acts of kindness. In a breathtakingly inappropriate setting, the president has chosen to declare our memories of 9/11 obsolete and the sanctity of Ground Zero finished. No one who has lived this history and felt the sting of our country's loss that day can truly believe that putting our families through more wrenching heartache can be an act of peace.

We will honor the memory of our loved ones. We will protect our children, whose lives will never be the same. We will not stand silent.

  -link to article