Last night I stayed up until 2am here in the Philippines to watch Obama's speech on how he was going to fix the National Security Agency. It was a tedious speech that rambled the long way around the barn before getting to the point. Obama kept curling his lips around his teeth and then smacking them before beginning the next sentence, which about half way through became really obnoxious. The basic problem with it is that there isn't a thing he says that can be trusted, and this speech, when you look closely at what was said, doesn't give any assurance that anything is going to change for the better.
In 2008 Obama campaigned against NSA domestic spying as being criminal. Then he moved into the White House and increased domestic spying a thousand fold. The left has called the NSA practice of listening to and collecting billions of domestic phone records a phony scandal, but it has grown so big now that Obama can no longer ignore it. In his address he laid out a plan to reign in the NSA. Or did he?
He started out with a rehearsal of the spying and intelligence services in American history. He spoke of Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty prior to the American Revolution, the Union army using balloons in the Civil War, the code-breakers in World War 2, and modern technologies that have grown since 9/11. It all sounded so good, but considering how little he seems to know about actual American history, all I could think was, I wonder who wrote this speech for him?
His historical review missed the whole point. The Sons of Liberty were spying on the occupying British troops. Union balloons were used to spy on the Confederate army. The code-breakers in World War 2 were intercepting Japanese messages about war plans. Even the Bush "domestic spying" was on phone calls between known and suspected terrorists and required warrants before they could listen in. None of these were an invasion of American homes or private conversations, which is what is happening now.
Obama listed four changes he is making to the NSA. These are not helpful. Briefly, the first grants Obama more executive power. The second calls for a more transparent NSA. The third puts restrictions on our foreign intelligence gathering, and the fourth puts the Attorney General in charge of overseeing all the collected domestic data. Then he said Congress needs to act because there is little he can do by executive order. As if that's ever stopped him before. Interestingly enough, I listened to the Fox News analysts immediately after the speech and to more comments this morning, and I've yet to hear any of them discuss any of these four items. They need to be discussed because they are dangerous.
Obama has already assumed executive powers that the Constitution does not allow, and is acting more like a dictator than a president. He's only strengthening his hand by assuming more. The NSA more transparent? Coming from the "most transparent" president in history? That's laughable at best, and insulting at worst. Next, he told the world how he is going to restrict our intelligence services from gathering data. He said he would limit the NSA from tracking phone calls to only a party two calls removed from the original rather than a third which they do now. How is that going to help our national security? He talked about the damage Edward Snowden did, but it doesn't even compare. Obama just gave away our intelligence service strategy to the world.
Then, putting the Attorney General in charge of the illegally collected domestic data is like putting the proverbial fox in the hen house. This is the criminal behind Fast and Furious, who won't prosecute black criminals or deport illegal aliens, who is at war with states trying to increase their own security. This is the guy who just yesterday warned public school teachers not to discipline black or other minority students in their classrooms. This is a man who cannot be trusted to do anything in a non-partisan way.
Obama tried to reassure us by saying we "don't spy on ordinary people who are not a threat to our national security." Oh yeah? What about the IRS scandal targeting conservatives and anyone who dares say a word against the administration? Holder has apparently directed the FBI not to investigate the IRS while he puts a very partisan Obama donor in charge of the inquiry. This in itself is a scandal.
Obama concluded that these changes are necessary for the United States to remain true to who we are in a changing world. The truth is we haven't been true to who we are since Obama was elected, and these changes aren't going to help get us there.
Saturday, January 18, 2014
Friday, January 10, 2014
Obama's Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
In 1962, movie director Stanley Kramer had just finished his Oscar winning film, Judgment at Nuremberg, a sobering account of the Nazi war crimes trials. For his next film he decided to do something light-hearted for a change of pace, and for the first time ventured into comedy. Collecting a bevy of the greatest comedians in Hollywood, his creative genius turned non-sensical slapstick into the most spectacularly funny movie ever made.
About a group of greedy treasure hunters, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World takes them from the California desert to the fictional town of Santa Rosita on the coast in search of a fortune buried under a giant W. It starred Jonathan Winters, Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Sid Caesar, and an A-list of jesters. The flick could only have been better if it had included Red Skelton, and Kramer apparently tried to get him, but he wasn't available, and Sid Caesar's role was originally Ernie Kovak's, but sadly he died in an automobile accident shortly after filming began. The only straight man (that is, non-comedian) in the movie is Spencer Tracy, and he got the last laugh.
Funny as it is, the movie is the perfect caricature of the Obama administration. Mad, mad, mad, mad. A bevy of greedy clowns searching for treasure in tax payer's pockets and blaming all its failures on a big W. And Obama, the "straight man," is getting the last laugh increasing his personal wealth by 12 million dollars since moving into the White House, playing 160 rounds of golf, an average of one game every eleven days in the last five years, and spending roughly a billion dollars on extravagant vacations to Europe, India, South Africa, and of course, Hawaii. It would actually be funny if it weren't for the fact that it's real.
Obama's press conference after his return to the White House was comedy at its best:
He chided Congress, particularly the uncooperative Republicans, for going on vacation and not working to get unemployment benefits extended for 1.3 million Americans. Let's see, just like he went on vacation at the cost of about 4 million dollars and did nothing to encourage the Republicans to cooperate with his socialist agenda. I'll bet if Obama had stayed home that 4 million might have been able to help some of those unemployed people.
He then went on to repeat another laughable lie that he had cut the deficit in half. As I seem to remember, the deficit was something over 9 trillion dollars when he came into office and now it is something over 17 trillion, roughly double what it was when he started. I also seem to recall that he increased deficit spending from 450 billion under George W. Bush to 1.3 trillion every year of his "reign of terror" until this year. This year the deficit is projected to be something under 800 billion. So deficit spending has been cut by roughly 39%, a ways short of half, but the deficit itself is still above 17 trillion and growing.
He followed that up with another laugher: extending unemployment benefits creates jobs. Yeah, just like fifty years of the Great Society has won the war on poverty. You don't create jobs by taking money away from employers and giving it to non-working people and increasing their dependence on the government. Actually, if Obama was smart he'd let the benefits end. He did that before and got the unemployment rate down from 10% to 7.2% by dropping the unemployed from the unemployment numbers, even though they hadn't found jobs. If he'd let it end again the numbers would drop below 7%. There wouldn't be anymore jobs but he'd look good to the undiscerning leftist welfare voter.
And then there's global warming, the issue Obama jumped on several months ago to try and distract our attention from Benghazi. Did you hear about the Russian research vessel that went to the Antarctic to find evidence of global warming and got stuck in the ever increasing ice cap at the South Pole? (Remember Al Gore about five years ago predicting the polar ice caps would be gone by 2014?) Now we've had record cold temperatures all across the United States in the last two weeks. Yesterday the White House made a statement about "polar vortexes" and how the deep freeze is actually caused by global warming. Right. I'm sure that in the frozen blood vessels in his one track brain Obama really does believe this.
Of course, there is always foreign policy. Obama, the great communicator, was going to talk the belligerent nations of the Middle East out of their WMD and bring peace. November 1, 2012, he trumpeted that Al Qaeda was decimated. Today Al Qaeda is getting ready to conquer Iraq and Obama is illegally helping the Al Qaeda backed Syrian rebels, and Iran is taking advantage of his naiveté to hurry up its nuclear program. Far from bringing peace, Obama's policies have contributed to the loss of peace in the entire Middle East region, and the loss of the world's respect for America.
BTW, who can't run and who can't hide? And how many people have been held accountable for Benghazi? Not one. Oh, but don't worry about it. The New York Times just ran an exhaustive 7,500 word article on Benghazi and found out it wasn't a terrorist attack, that it was an unknown at the time video that caused it, and that Hillary essentially had nothing to do with it. Talk about government controlled media. The piece sounds like Pravda or Isvestia.
Oh, and the IRS scandal. Did you see that Eric Holder has finally decided to investigate? He appointed a woman lawyer who contributed six thousand dollars to Obama's re-election campaign. Do you suppose there might be a conflict of interest there?
And how could we forget Obamacare? The healthcare.gov website was unable to verify Barack Hussein Obama's identity. Do you think the birthers might have had it right all along? Obama's signature legislation, the thing that is going to define his legacy, this communist disaster, is potentially the thing that could end his extravagant dictatorial reign. That's the biggest laugh of all except one. Nobody on the Republican side, including conservative radio talk show hosts, has the guts to pursue the issue. And the one laughing is Obama.
He told us he was going to change America and he has; spiritually, morally, culturally, and politically, and none of it for the good. Rather than the utopia he promised, he's walked on the Constitution, violated the law, presided over the slowest economic recovery in history, and given us a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
T'ain't funny McGee.
About a group of greedy treasure hunters, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World takes them from the California desert to the fictional town of Santa Rosita on the coast in search of a fortune buried under a giant W. It starred Jonathan Winters, Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Sid Caesar, and an A-list of jesters. The flick could only have been better if it had included Red Skelton, and Kramer apparently tried to get him, but he wasn't available, and Sid Caesar's role was originally Ernie Kovak's, but sadly he died in an automobile accident shortly after filming began. The only straight man (that is, non-comedian) in the movie is Spencer Tracy, and he got the last laugh.
Funny as it is, the movie is the perfect caricature of the Obama administration. Mad, mad, mad, mad. A bevy of greedy clowns searching for treasure in tax payer's pockets and blaming all its failures on a big W. And Obama, the "straight man," is getting the last laugh increasing his personal wealth by 12 million dollars since moving into the White House, playing 160 rounds of golf, an average of one game every eleven days in the last five years, and spending roughly a billion dollars on extravagant vacations to Europe, India, South Africa, and of course, Hawaii. It would actually be funny if it weren't for the fact that it's real.
Obama's press conference after his return to the White House was comedy at its best:
He chided Congress, particularly the uncooperative Republicans, for going on vacation and not working to get unemployment benefits extended for 1.3 million Americans. Let's see, just like he went on vacation at the cost of about 4 million dollars and did nothing to encourage the Republicans to cooperate with his socialist agenda. I'll bet if Obama had stayed home that 4 million might have been able to help some of those unemployed people.
He then went on to repeat another laughable lie that he had cut the deficit in half. As I seem to remember, the deficit was something over 9 trillion dollars when he came into office and now it is something over 17 trillion, roughly double what it was when he started. I also seem to recall that he increased deficit spending from 450 billion under George W. Bush to 1.3 trillion every year of his "reign of terror" until this year. This year the deficit is projected to be something under 800 billion. So deficit spending has been cut by roughly 39%, a ways short of half, but the deficit itself is still above 17 trillion and growing.
He followed that up with another laugher: extending unemployment benefits creates jobs. Yeah, just like fifty years of the Great Society has won the war on poverty. You don't create jobs by taking money away from employers and giving it to non-working people and increasing their dependence on the government. Actually, if Obama was smart he'd let the benefits end. He did that before and got the unemployment rate down from 10% to 7.2% by dropping the unemployed from the unemployment numbers, even though they hadn't found jobs. If he'd let it end again the numbers would drop below 7%. There wouldn't be anymore jobs but he'd look good to the undiscerning leftist welfare voter.
And then there's global warming, the issue Obama jumped on several months ago to try and distract our attention from Benghazi. Did you hear about the Russian research vessel that went to the Antarctic to find evidence of global warming and got stuck in the ever increasing ice cap at the South Pole? (Remember Al Gore about five years ago predicting the polar ice caps would be gone by 2014?) Now we've had record cold temperatures all across the United States in the last two weeks. Yesterday the White House made a statement about "polar vortexes" and how the deep freeze is actually caused by global warming. Right. I'm sure that in the frozen blood vessels in his one track brain Obama really does believe this.
Of course, there is always foreign policy. Obama, the great communicator, was going to talk the belligerent nations of the Middle East out of their WMD and bring peace. November 1, 2012, he trumpeted that Al Qaeda was decimated. Today Al Qaeda is getting ready to conquer Iraq and Obama is illegally helping the Al Qaeda backed Syrian rebels, and Iran is taking advantage of his naiveté to hurry up its nuclear program. Far from bringing peace, Obama's policies have contributed to the loss of peace in the entire Middle East region, and the loss of the world's respect for America.
BTW, who can't run and who can't hide? And how many people have been held accountable for Benghazi? Not one. Oh, but don't worry about it. The New York Times just ran an exhaustive 7,500 word article on Benghazi and found out it wasn't a terrorist attack, that it was an unknown at the time video that caused it, and that Hillary essentially had nothing to do with it. Talk about government controlled media. The piece sounds like Pravda or Isvestia.
Oh, and the IRS scandal. Did you see that Eric Holder has finally decided to investigate? He appointed a woman lawyer who contributed six thousand dollars to Obama's re-election campaign. Do you suppose there might be a conflict of interest there?
And how could we forget Obamacare? The healthcare.gov website was unable to verify Barack Hussein Obama's identity. Do you think the birthers might have had it right all along? Obama's signature legislation, the thing that is going to define his legacy, this communist disaster, is potentially the thing that could end his extravagant dictatorial reign. That's the biggest laugh of all except one. Nobody on the Republican side, including conservative radio talk show hosts, has the guts to pursue the issue. And the one laughing is Obama.
He told us he was going to change America and he has; spiritually, morally, culturally, and politically, and none of it for the good. Rather than the utopia he promised, he's walked on the Constitution, violated the law, presided over the slowest economic recovery in history, and given us a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
T'ain't funny McGee.
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