Back to Basics

It is clearly unfair to compare, from left to right, Princess Letizia of Spain, Carla Bruni, the wife of France’s president, and Aunt Esther…I mean Michelle Obama, seen here together. That said, one picture is still worth a thousand words.

It’s wrong! Wrong to compare first ladies, but this one is always going on about what we should eat and how much.

President Obama thinks that by recently signing a new bill spending $600 million to beef up border enforcement he will look tough on illegal aliens. But decisions such as today’s lawsuit by the Justice Department against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to stop his policies regarding illegal aliens shows where the administration’s policies are really headed.

The bill Obama signed, which authorizes the hiring 1,500 new border personnel, the deployment of a pair of unmanned reconnaissance drones, and replacing some bases along the border is valuable, but it hardly undoes what the president has done up to this point. With a recent Rasmussen poll showing that 68 percent of U.S. voters support a plan to continue building a fence on the Mexican border, Obama’s change strikes one as a temporary smoke screen.

Up until now the president has worked to cut the number of border agents. 384 border agents were cut last October 1st and in the 2011 fiscal year budget Obama proposed cutting another 180 agents through attrition.

But it isn’t just his record of previously reducing the number of border agents. Obama has strongly opposed the use of fences, whether real ones or virtual ones. In March, he halted funding for the physical fence. Spending on “Total, CBP/Border Security Fencing, Infrastructure, and Technology” (which included the virtual fence) has fallen from $1.05 billion in 2008 at the end of the Bush administration to $800 million in 2010 to $574 million in the coming 2011 budget. That is a $479 million annual cut, something that isn’t going to be made up with a pair of unmanned drones.

Unfortunately, Obama appears to wish for continued illegal immigration as his administration has actively tried to stop states from helping enforce current federal laws. Consider the many actions that Obama has taken so far:

– Just in the last last week two actions by the Obama administration have come to light. A defacto amnesty is being established where deportation cases are being dropped against illegal aliens who have already been arrested. In another case, a non-citizen, who committed several felonies ranging from perjury to voter fraud, was coached by the Department of Homeland Security on how to purge evidence of these actions from his record so that he could still be granted citizenship.

– The Obama administration has brought several lawsuits to try prevent states from discouraging illegal aliens from entering the country. One is well-known and aims to stop Arizona from requiring police to ask for some type of ID — no matter what their accent or looks — of anyone who is “technically ‘arrested’” by police. In May, another lawsuit was brought against Arizona over its law revoking state business licenses for companies that regularly violate immigration laws. The Obama administration’s stance is especially odd since business licenses routinely are conditioned on a crime-free record and such rules have always been determined by the states. The administration hopes to make immigration law the single exception of a law allowed to be broken.

I don’t really want to sit on a throne or even in the Oval Office. But I would certainly like to see a few of my notions become reality.

For openers, I don’t like the way we put people on the Supreme Court. I don’t approve of the partisan grandstanding and I don’t like the way the nominees are forced to parse their answers in order to avoid providing the opposition with ammunition. I am not pleased to see Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan sitting on the bench, but I would have voted to approve them. That’s because I believe the president is entitled to appoint whomever he wishes, whether it’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Robert Bork. If you’re a conservative, it’s a crying shame that within 18 months, Obama got to name two judges, but it’s time we all learned that elections have consequences, and that only those lunkheads who believe that Kagan and Sotomayor are the same as Roberts and Alito will continue to parrot the mantra that there’s no difference between the two political parties.

The other change I would inaugurate is to limit a Supreme Court justice’s term to 10 years. There is no good reason for it to be a lifetime job. Why on earth should a judge be provided with tenure of three or four or even five decades when the person who put him there is long gone after, at most, eight years? On top of which, we get to actually vote for the president. It makes as much sense that a justice gets to determine when to call it quits as it does for politicians to decide how big a salary and how large a pension to give themselves.

Next, I would make it a crime for an elected official to ever call anyone a racist. It is outrageous that the Democrats get to condemn Tea Party members as racists simply because it’s such an easy way to deflect legitimate criticism. I say if you apply that epithet to an individual or a group of individuals, you had better be ready to make your case in a court of law.

Most recently, we had Rep. Maxine Waters accuse the members of the Congressional Ethics Committee of being racists because they had the effrontery of accusing her and Charles Rangel of violating House rules. It didn’t matter to her that half the members of the committee are liberals; all that mattered to her was the color of the two defendants. In spite of the fact that over the years it has most often been white politicians who have been targeted for ethics violations — people like Newt Gingrich, Barney Frank, Thomas Dodd, Joe McCarthy, Austin Murphy, Bob Packwood, Daniel Flood, Gerry Studds and, most recently, Eric “The Tickler” Massa — it only takes one black politician being accused of malfeasance to bring the race card to the top of the deck.

The most aggravating aspect of these congressional investigations is how minor the sanctions are. They range from mere reprimands to censures to expulsion. The last one sounds ominous until you realize that these people are so arrogant they actually think that expulsion from office is the harshest penalty imaginable. If a civilian were guilty of half the charges that have been leveled against inveterate tax cheat Rangel, he’d wind up in the poky, not catching the rays at his Dominican villa.

The thing that has always amazed me is the impunity with which black politicians lie, cheat and steal. Even when I was a kid, I found it mind-boggling that the voters in Harlem would continue re-electing a guy like Adam Clayton Powell. So, was it any wonder that when those voters put a new man in office, it would be none other than Charles Rangel, who, like Powell, loves living it up in the Caribbean and hates paying taxes?

Barack Obama, 2002:

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Barack Obama, 2010:

In a radio interview with CBS News, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said President Obama will emphasize that “We are putting the Iraqis in control of their history and their future. They’ll have responsibility for security and responsibility for providing for the citizens of that country. That is a milestone worth barking.”

Just hours before the president speaks from the Oval Office, Gibbs said the speech would emphasize “the milestone of the end of our combat mission,” and said Mr. Obama will say, “The story of the Iraqis will be written by the Iraqis.”

…While Iraq has seen political turmoil for months, Gibbs insists the caretaker government is stable. He predicts “in very short order” the Iraqis will have a government in place. The spokesman said the president will tell Iraqis, “with our help as allies, you will be able to chart your future and your course as you determine.”

Gibbs also had a terse response to Republicans challenging the president to give credit to the troop surge ordered by former President George. W. Bush — a move opposed by then-Senator Obama.

The challenge: to trivialize this in order to label it as irrelevant:

No simple task.

The best way dismiss the gathering is into a racial issue (no big surprise). This requires proving it’s all about racism, but in order to do so, the media must wade into the crowd, find unwhite people, and patronize them by asking what the hell they’re doing there (it’s been done previously, but they rarely get the answer they’re looking for).

Reporters never seem ashamed of the fact that they’re singling out black people and essentially calling them stupid right to their faces without knowing anything about them (that’s kind of racist if you ask me), and a CBS reporter certainly didn’t shy away from doing so yesterday:

CBS News: “I’m noticing that there are not a lot of minorities here today, why do you think that is?”

Black woman at Glenn Beck rally: “They’re probably over there with Al Sharpton.”

Yeah, she was right:

For all of the socialism and Islamist-appeasement of this administration, the one thing that has bothered me the most about this president (and candidate in 2007-08) is his screechingly perverse antiwar ideology and opportunism. Barack Obama was the most antiwar Senator in Congress throughout 2007 and in 2008 he tried to play both sides of the fence: After opposing the surge he then turned around and hailed its success, while insisting once more that the war was wrong. As noted in his New York Times op-ed in July 14, 2008, “My Plan for Iraq“:

In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.

But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.

I do not hate this president. But he brings deep shame to the role of Commander-in-Chief. And that shame is seen one more time with this weekend’s White House announcement on the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq. IMHO, Obama just lies when he claims to be upholding the “sacred trust” of our fighting men and women. It takes more than winning an election to win that trust — you have to earn it. That said, folks may have different emotions than I do. But I think we can agree that getting the Democrats out of power in 2010 and 2012 will begin the process of restoring American power in the world. I cringe at the thought of this sick ACORN-sleazeball presidential interloper directing the force and capabilities of the U.S. abroad. But time heals all wounds, and the electorate is rumbling:

Remember back in 2008 when left-wing pundits and naysayers were warning America that Sarah Palin as vice president would result in an intellectual melt down in the White House?

Not bright enough to be in a responsible slot they claimed. America needs more brain power in the candidate that could wind up being president.

Remember?

Well, perhaps Sarah Palin is not Mensa material, but she is one hell of a lot brighter than Joseph Biden, the gaffe-prone court jester currently making a mockery of the “Exceptional American” theory which holds that we have the best and the brightest in charge of things in America.

Biden’s latest Oops! moment came this morning when the addled VP reportedly said the following:

“Biden conceded that the economic recovery was not proceeding as fast as the administration had hoped, but claimed there was ‘no doubt we’re moving in the right direction.’”

This idiotic statement at a time when:

• New home sales slumped to slowest pace on record;
• Foreclosures head toward one million for 2010
• Bankruptcies at five year high
• Job losses continue with unemployment still out of control
• Federal deficit at 13 trillion and growing

This is “moving in the right direction,” Mr. Biden?

Thank goodness we have a mid-term election in which voters can diminish the influence of the Obama-Biden comedy act which, by the way, is not all that funny these days!

When SEIU president Andy Stern resigned in April, I noted the jockeying for power between the AFL-CIO and SEIU. I asked:

“Gulp: Are we about to see a re-merger of SEIU and AFL-CIO into a new 21st-century Big Labor Frankenstein?

Question: Are we looking at the death throes of forced unionism — or its resurrection?”

My concerns have been confirmed, via the WSJ today:

“The leaders of the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union have agreed to coordinate spending millions of dollars in the midterm elections to support pro-union candidates, most of them Democrats.

The two labor organizations say they have a combined $88 million or more to deploy in this year’s election cycle. It’s not clear how much of that money they will pool together.

The renewed alliance between the two big labor groups comes as Democrats are battling to retain control of both houses of Congress. The AFL-CIO and SEIU plan to target elections in 26 states, all but five of which they consider battleground territory, including California, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio.”

As I’ve noted over the last two years, it’s going to take a bottom-up revolt by disgusted rank-and-file members to stop the political raid on worker dues.

In the words of Thomas Jefferson: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

***

In related news, from the Marxist People’s World , comes news of an radical joint get-out-the-vote effort with the AFL-CIO:

The AFL-CIO executive committee voted unanimously this morning to join One Nation, Working Together, a new national coalition of labor and civil rights groups that has as its purpose to “reorder America’s priorities by investing in the nation’s most valuable resource – its people.”

The labor, civil rights, environmental, faith and other organizations that have formed the new coalition intend to replace unemployment and economic crisis faced by the country’s majority with “nothing less than a future of shared prosperity for all our people,” the AFL-CIO said in a statement after it voted to join One Nation.

“None of us alone have been able to achieve our priorities,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.

House GOP Leader John Boehner is putting jobs and the Obama economic team on the front-burner today with a major speech at the City Club of Cleveland.

Give ‘em both barrels.

Via WaPo:

Boehner, delivering what his aides billed as a major economic address, will say President Obama’s team lacks “real-world, hands-on experience” in creating jobs, according to a draft version of his speech that was released in advance. The Republican lawmaker plans to cite reports that some senior aides complained of “exhaustion,” including the recently departed budget chief Peter Orszag.

“President Obama should ask for – and accept – the resignations of the remaining members of his economic team, starting with Secretary Geithner and Larry Summers, the head of the National Economic Council,” Boehner says in the prepared remarks, which are scheduled for delivery at the City Club of Cleveland shortly after 8 a.m. The mass dismissal, he adds, “is no substitute for a referendum on the president’s job-killing agenda. That question will be put before the American people in due time. But we do not have the luxury of waiting months for the president to pick scapegoats for his failing ‘stimulus’ policies.”

Via Politico:

In Boehner’s remarks, Geithner and adviser Larry Summers are singled out as having promulgated “19 months of government-as-community organizer.”

“It hasn’t worked,” Boehner will say. “Our fresh start needs to begin now”

Democrats were clearly ready for Boehner’s speech Tuesday — so much so that White House and congressional officials held conference calls in advance of the remarks on Monday to blast Boehner and warn that he wanted to return to Bush-era economic policies.

University of Chicago Medical Center top executive Dr. Eric Whitaker is a busy, busy man.

Here’s a rundown of his schedule since his Chicago pal Barack Obama moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

*Golfed with Obama on his December 2008 Hawaii vacation;

*Played hoops with Obama during a three-day getaway to Chicago in February 2009;

*Attended the Obamas’ first state dinner in November 2009;

*Traveled with Obama to Norway in December 2009 for Nobel Peace Prize ceremony;