Quote of the Day: Change is Novelty

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You have less than 48 hours to contact your senators and tell them to oppose Harry Reid’s Health Care Abomination:

I knew that there is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil, annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification, of the object, but, a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and, if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was. – Edmund Burke

via Quotes « DPGI – the aftermath.

Obama: Too Busy for Berlin

The sound and video you are about to encounter comes from the heights of Mount Olympus courtesy of Dear Leader. Listen, accept, obey and feel the HOPE®….

Figures… Obama Skips Anniversary of Fall of Berlin Wall, Sends a Video & Talks About Himself:

One international leader was conspicuously absent at the 20 Year Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall today. Even the Russian President made it there.

Obama sent a video instead.

Even worse- Obama spoke about himself to the crowd:

“Few would have seen on that day that… that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”

And, of course, he did not mention Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher in his speech.

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What a f’ing egocentric a’hole Obama is. He wants to talk about his personal narrative during a celebration of the downfall of a totalitarian regime and its murderous apparatus of control over the German people.

I love Ace’s take on this:

But enough of me talking about myself. How about you talk about me for a while?There is a fallacy in the theory of evolution, often cautioned against, to imagine evolution as one long “march of progress” in which every mutation and selection works, teleologically, to produce the supreme form of being (that would be us). It’s a vanity science has no use of.

On the other hand, there is Obama. 100,000 years of human history have unfolded in just this precisely-right way to contrive in his person the Ultimate Man.

There is no agenda of Obama; rather, physics and history have an agenda leading us to Obama.

The universe has conspired benevolently to bring us him.

What a stupid dick.

Did He Not Show Up Because It Wasn’t All About Him?

Left-wing German paper Der Spiegel seems to have gotten that impression:

There was one world leader absent for today’s commemorations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Surprisingly enough, it’s President Barack Obama, who found time last year to give a campaign speech there last year, which Der Spiegel summed up as “People of the World, Look at Me”.The White House has cited a packed schedule, though looking at it he had nothing much on yesterday (brief chat to reporters about healthcare – by far his biggest priority) and just blah briefings and a bill signing today until a metting [sic] this evening with Benjamin Netanyahu. This time, Der Spiegel has reported it as “Barack Too Busy”.

Pretty much at this point he’ll only be traveling to pick up awards.

I love it.

President Obama’s Busy, Busy Monday

President’s Obama’s critics are being unfair and silly for complaining he didn’t attend the ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Just look at the man’s schedule: He had a 10 a.m. daily briefing from the intelligence community, a 10:30 a.m. economic daily briefing, an 11 a.m. meeting with senior advisers
. . . and then, right after that, at 6:45 in the evening, he had to sign an executive order about hiring veterans, and at 7 p.m. he had a meeting with Israeli prime minister Netanyahu (with preconditions).

In the interim, it’s not like he was just sitting around the Rose Garden and enjoying the weather. Take a look at the White House web site, where you’ll see he was . . . oh. He was sitting in the Rose Garden enjoying the weather.

No award? Not about him? No election? Then, no Obama.

Another epic Obama fail.

Obama votes ‘present’ again, this time in Berlin

Then again, it’s not “present” if you are not even going to attend: Obama Draws Criticism for Sitting Out Berlin Wall Anniversary

President Obama squeezed in a trip to Copenhagen last month to lobby, unsuccessfully, for Chicago to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. He plans to travel to Oslo next month to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, an award that even Obama has said he does not deserve. And this coming week, he sets out on a weeklong tour of Asia.

But the president does not plan to travel to Germany to attend the 20th anniversary celebration Monday of the fall of the Berlin Wall, drawing heated criticism from those who say he’s ignoring a shining triumph of American-inspired democracy.

I guess he no longer needs their votes.

Thankfully, we have presidents in our past who actually valued the Germans, their plight, and supported their desire for freedom.

Lesson to be learned here from Obama?

Games and a trip to Copenhagen, important.

Freedom and liberty for those under totalitarian rule, not important.

Or, maybe the President only celebrates when communism wins, and not when it looses. You pick.

Quote of the Day: Aimless Obama

“I never thought I’d hear myself say it,” one Democrat told me. “But Obama makes you feel that at least with Bush you knew where he was on something.”

via Bloodless President Barack Obama makes Americans wistful for George W Bush.

From the “Best of the Web Today”

Great Moments in Socialized Medicine

“X Factor judge Simon Cowell showed his more generous side [yesterday] when he gave £100,000 [about $160,000] to help save the life of a cancer-stricken youngster,” reports London’s Daily Mail:

The pop Svengali donated the money for 18-month-old Sophie Atay–from Birtley, Gateshead–to fly to the US for pioneering treatment at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York.

He acted after learning the youngster’s family launched a last-ditch appeal for £500,000 to pay for the treatment last week after they were told Sophie was suffering from a rare form of neuroblastoma and needed treatment within days.

Alexandra Burke, last year’s X Factor winner, broke the news to Sophie’s mum Karine, 33, on the telephone today that Simon had now dipped into his own pocket to top up the total to the necessary amount.

Wait, we’re confused! Why does a little English girl have to come all the way to the U.S. to get medical care, and why does this Cowell fellow have to pay for it? We thought Britain had free medical care!

But wait, another Daily Mail story reports on what happens to older people who get cancer in Britain:

Alarming research is showing that elderly cancer patients are missing out on the breakthroughs in chemotherapy and surgery that have dramatically improved the outcome of younger patients.

In fact, up to 15,000 elderly people with cancer in the UK are dying prematurely every year when compared to the rest of Europe and the U.S., according to a report published by the North West Cancer Intelligence Service (NWCIS) which compiles cancer statistics. . . .

A major concern is that the NHS Cancer Plan, introduced in 2000 to improve cancer survival in the UK, has a cut-off point at 70. This results in hospitals having less interest in the elderly. “Yet half of all those diagnosed with cancer are over 70,” says Dr Tony Moran, NWCIS research director. “It’s an area that has been grossly neglected. . . .”

Yet according to former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”

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Obama a tough guy, at least with Fox News

The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander in chief look like a weenie – like “President Pantywaist,” as Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.

The Chicago way? Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight? In Iran, this administration won’t bring a knife to a nuke fight. In Eastern Europe, it won’t bring missile defense to a nuke fight. In Sudan, it won’t bring a knife to a machete fight.

Mark Steyn

Two European Nuclear Scientists Arrested as Al-Qaeda Suspects

“What’s going to happen if al-Qaeda gets their hands on WMD?” the pilot asked.

“They already have,” the defense contractor said. Then he told the story of how, just last January, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) had bungled a WMD experiment using bubonic plague.

“None of you press wrote about that,” the man said, eyeballing me.

I had to correct him because I did write about that story — for Pajamas Media [1]. My article cited two papers, the Sun and the Washington Times; I couldn’t locate any firsthand sources with access to the information. “How do you know that the information was correct?” I asked my fellow banquet guest.

“I was at the military briefing,” he said. Then he added that the briefing was not classified and included several members of the press.

“Why do you think that story wasn’t more widely reported?” I asked.

He said something to the effect of: there are some things the public finds easier to ignore.

I had the same reaction when I returned home from my trip on Friday night to read a single-line item on the Counterterrorism Blog [2]: “Switzerland: Terror cops arrest Collider scientist linked with al-Qaeda,” it said. The Collider is the largest nuclear research facility in the world. For at least the next forty-eight hours the story did not appear anywhere in the U.S. press, despite the fact that the arrested nuclear scientist, a 32-year-old Algerian-born French man named Dr. Adlene Hicheur, was being described by France’s Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence as a “very high-level” operative with AQIM. That’s the same group who’d been experimenting with bubonic plague earlier in the year. Adlene Hicheur had attended Stanford University [3], in California, in 1999 and 2002.

via Pajamas Media

Just keep your head in the sand folks, there’s nothing to see here…

Quote of the Day

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.”- Alexander Tyler

via boortz.com.

Good thing there is no such thing as a “Death Panel”…

or any of that hideous “rationing” in the UK system, technically none anyway…:

AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.

Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.

Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.

via Daughter saves mother, 80, left by doctors to starve

No illusions here…

LONDON (MarketWatch) — In a decision as shocking as Friday’s surprise peace prize win, President Obama failed to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Monday.While few observers think Obama has done anything for world peace in the nearly nine months he’s been in office, the same clearly can’t be said for economics.

The president has worked tirelessly since even before his inauguration to wrest control of the U.S. economy from failed free markets, and the evil CEOs who profit from them, and to turn it over to wise, fair and benevolent bureaucrats.

From his $787 billion stimulus package, to the cap-and-trade bill, to the seizures of General Motors and Chrysler, to the undead health-care “reform” act, Obama has dominated the U.S., and therefore the global, economy as few figures have in recent years.

Yet the Nobel panel chose instead to award the prize to two obscure academics — Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson — one noted for her work on managing collective resources, and the other for his work on transaction costs. See full story on the Nobel winners.

Other surprise losers include celebrity noneconomist and filmmaker Michael Moore; U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; and Larry Summers, head of the U.S. national economic council.

It is unclear whether the president will now refuse his peace prize in protest against the obvious slight to his real achievements this year.

via Obama fails to win Nobel prize in economics – MarketWatch

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.

Quote of the Day

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C. S. Lewis

Time for Obama to Act Like a President

Richard Cohen:

The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a “war of necessity” — and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health-care plan — and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees — and then again maybe he would.

Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health-care legislation — “Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town . . . ” — and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence — meet it or else.

Obama lost credibility with his deadline-that-never-was, and now he threatens to lose some more with his posturing toward Iran. He has gotten into a demeaning dialogue with Ahmadinejad, an accomplished liar. (The next day, the Iranian used a news conference to counter Obama and, days later, Iran tested some intermediate-range missiles.) Obama is our version of a Supreme Leader, not given to making idle threats, setting idle deadlines, reversing course on momentous issues, creating a TV crisis where none existed or, unbelievably, pitching Chicago for the 2016 Olympics. Obama’s the president. Time he understood that.

Quote of the Day

It is not hard to see why a standing ovation awaits the president at Turtle Bay. Obama’s popularity at the UN boils down essentially to his willingness to downplay American global power. He is the first American president who has made an art form out of apologizing for the United States, which he has done on numerous occasions on foreign soil, from Strasbourg to Cairo. The Obama mantra appears to be – ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do to atone for your country. This is a message that goes down very well in a world that is still seething with anti-Americanism.

via The UN loves Barack Obama because he is weak

Quote of the Day

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money. – Alexis de Tocqueville

Hi, we're all giant neo-marxist douchebags.

Oceania Visible On Horizon 25 Years Later

Victor Davis Hanson:

We were once told that military tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act and Predator drone attacks in Pakistan were George Bush’s assault on the Constitution rather than necessary tools to fight radical Islamic terrorists.

Not now. These policies are no longer criticized — even though they still operate more or less as they did under Bush. Guantanamo is still open, but no longer considered a gulag. The once-terrible war in Iraq disappeared off the front pages around late January of this year.

George Orwell, a man of the left, warned us that freedom and truth are not just endangered by easily identifiable goose-stepping goons in jackboots. More often he felt that state collectivism would come from an all-powerful government — run by a charismatic egalitarian, promising to protect us from selfish, greedy reactionaries.

Orwell was on to something.

ObamaCare: Using his own words against him

JustOneMinute: There He Goes Again (Just Don’t Call Them “Death Panels”).

Medal of Freedom for a racist and anti-semite?

Yes we can!

Israel Matzav: Surprise: Mary Robinson wasn’t vetted

Obama Joker Poster Popping Up In Los Angeles

It’s sad because the comparison is very apt. They both want to frack up a good thing….

Obamacare courtesy of Dr. Marx

Who is in Your Wallet?

zeitgeist by drudge, snark by jcrue

He does a better job than most – DRUDGE REPORT

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And they will make us look like idiots….

for committing “progressive suicide” in this nation:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her plan to cut taxes despite the country’s soaring budget deficit as she introduced her conservative alliance’s manifesto ahead of national elections in September.

Lower incomes taxes would “provide motivation” and encourage economic growth, Ms. Merkel told a conference of her party, the Christian Democratic Union, and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union.

“It would be wrong not to do what is right and necessary for growth, and so prevent ourselves emerging quickly from this crisis,” Ms. Merkel said in her conference speech.

via WSJ.com

Hopefully, Obama is watching and that he might learn something useful to our nation.

ReasonTV on healthcare

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