Posts Tagged ‘Obama’

Obama and Social Security

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

Obama gave a speech on Social Security the other night. It was incoherent. He wants to lift the cap on income that is subject to FICA tax. Right now, that is at $102,000. The bargain that was made when Social Security was passed was that it was not a welfare program. It was supposed to be a program that you paid into and, when you retired at 65, it would provide a minimum income. The more you contributed, the more you got back after 65. The income subject to tax was capped and benefits were capped.

If Obama lifts the cap without increasing the benefits paid to those higher income earners, the bargain that was at the heart of Social Security is broken. It becomes one more welfare program. One of the risks is that the consensus that Social Security is fair may no longer apply. Many years ago, high income people tended to vote more reliably than the poor. The Social Security bargain kept the more prosperous citizens on board politically.

Plus, his arithmetic isn’t very good, either.

No judicial activism here !

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

Anti-death penalty judge 

This Ohio judge ruled the new death penalty law was unconstitutional and ended executions once again in Ohio. I wonder why he would do such a thing ? It couldn’t be his politics.

Oh Oh Bush didn’t lie. What now ?

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Today, we have a look at the famous Rockefeller Intelligence Committee Report. The Democrats took over after the 2006 election and now the Chairman revealed that….What ?

iraq-intelligence-ford.jpg 

Baghdad is strengthening a relationship with al Qeada ? You mean one existed ?  

Does Obama   know about this?

Then there’s this:

A spokesman for Senator Bond this morning told me that the July 2004 report blamed flawed intelligence. The previous bipartisan report did not distort the facts on prewar intelligence unlike last week’s report that blamed the Bush Administration.

The 2004 report gained unanimous support from the committee members. Last week only 2 Republican senators signed on to the report.

The Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee had the same prewar intelligence as President Bush. In this latest Phase II report, the minority was entirely shut out of the process. The Demorats willingly distorted this intelligence report.

The type of partisan gamemanship displayed in the report is disgraceful.

The intelligence committee was sure that Al-Qaeda was operating in Iraq before the war.

Munich all over again

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

American young people are famously ignorant about history. They are also enthusiastic about Barack Obama who promises to talk to every enemy of America without preconditions. That combination probably stimulated a somber column by Thomas Sowell today. I supported John McCain with enthusiasm in 2000 and was disappointed when George Bush defeated him in the primary elections. I thought Bush was minimally qualified, as exemplified by the abysmal interview he gave as a candidate when he could not name the president of Pakistan. Compared to Barack Obama, however, Bush was a master at governance.

I have read extensively in the history of the 1930s. When we read those accounts of well-meaning men and their efforts to keep the peace, we know the outcome. Today, we see the possible election of a well-meaning man with no credentials for office and I wonder if enough people will think about the future.

Obama and Israel

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Obama gave a speech to the AIPAC meeting today. That is a very pro-Israel group which has been accused of various conspiracies over the years. Since the Constitution preserves the right to “petition the government for redress of grievances“, the complaints are baloney tinged with anti-Semitism. The speech is discussed here and some serious points are raised. A lot of the people around Obama are pro-Palestinian and some are openly anti-Semetic. He has some ‘splaining to do.

In his speech, Obama said all the right things, like “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and undivided”

Now he is, as usual, backpedaling. He meant not divided by barbed wire. He also used an ominous word in his speech. He said the Palestinian state had to have “contiguous” borders. The 2000 agreement which Arafat spurned had a corridor connecting Gaza to the West Bank. The corridor crossed Israeli territory. “Contiguous” sounds like a new condition. I don’t trust him.

A preview of the presidential campaign

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Senator Obama’s speech last night, after he gained the majority of delegates for the Democratic nomination even while losing both primaries, is analyzed here and shows a preview of what to expect this fall. His radical associations with Weathermen terrorist BIll Ayers and race-baiting Reverend Wright and Father Pfleger are off-limits. That’s religion which is unfair to consider.

The suggestion that he visit Iraq to see what has happened since his two-day visit in 2006 ? No, McCain needs to tour the US.

Maybe if he went to Pennsylvania and met the man who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one, he’d understand that we can’t afford four more years of our addiction to oil from dictators. That man needs us to pass an energy policy that works with automakers to raise fuel standards, and makes corporations pay for their pollution, and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future—an energy policy that will create millions of new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced. That’s the change we need.

OK. Here are two items before us for consideration. Our addiction to oil from foreign dictators might be reduced if we drilled for oil in our own country, like ANWAR and the coastal shelf. Brazil has leased most of the world’s deep ocean drilling rigs to look for oil off its own shores. Why can’t we drill in our known reserves ?

Nuclear power provides over 75% of France’s electricity. Why are we not building lots of nuclear power plants ?

Canada has vast oil reserves, much of it in oil shale and tar sands. Why aren’t we developing refineries and exploration techniques to use this source from a close and friendly country that is not a “dictatorship” ? The Democrats in Congress have passed legislation that prohibits the government from using alternative fuels that have a larger carbon footprint than conventional oil. Greenhouse gases trump economics.

I wonder how willing the oil companies, which have world-wide operations, will be to turn over their profits to Obama ? I suspect they will simply move away, leaving us to get our energy from president Obama’s speeches.

How much success has Obama had in those states with economic troubles ? Not that much.

Clinton’s popular-vote victories thus far include the three biggest Electoral College prizes: California (a solid Democratic state), New York (another sure bet for the Democrats), and Texas (a solid Republican state). (Although Obama won more delegates in Texas, Clinton’s vote total exceeded Obama’s by nearly 100,000 votes.) However, her victories also include several of the largest swing states that both parties will be battling to win in November: Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as wins in the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries. As a result, Clinton’s 20 states represent more than 300 Electoral College votes while Obama’s 28 states and the District of Columbia represent only 224 Electoral College votes.

Obama won the nomination in caucuses, usually dominated by the more left wing sector of the Democratic Party, and early primaries before his awkward associations came to light. He hasn’t won a primary, except for Oregon, in the last month of the campaign. Oregon is a reliably Democrat state. The question is, can he win Ohio ?

The Left only wants to invade where it doesn’t matter

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

We now have great enthusiasm on the left for an invasion of Burma. While Burma is a humanitarian disaster, it is of no strategic significance to us. George Bush I was pressed to land troops in Somalia in 1991 to protect food that was being stolen by gangs from UN famine relief efforts. The left was wholeheartedly in favor of that invasion.

Then Bill Clinton decided to do some nation building and got his nose bloodied when sluggish generals got too predictable and the Ranger force was ambushed. Clinton quickly beat a retreat and Osama bin Laden decided we were a paper tiger.

Clinton loudly criticized Bush’s reluctance to intervene in Bosnia, although, when it came his turn to use force, US soldiers were ordered to patrol with empty machine guns on their humvees. When three were captured, Clinton decided to avoid ground troops in any subsequent action against Serbia. The result was civilian casualties that no one complained about and bombs hitting the Chinese embassy. Notice that all these stories use “NATO” as the source of the bombs. Do you think the press would have been so delicate if George W Bush had been president ?

Even Foreign Affairs, no right wing source, called the policy what it was: Foreign Policy as Social Work. Democrats do not care about strategy and national security; they want to “do good works.” Consequently, when George W Bush takes on a foreign policy dilemma like Iraq was in 2001 and makes a decision to “cut the Gordan Knot,” he gets hammered by the Left.

Such is politics in the US in the 21st century. God knows what a president Obama would have in store for us. He would probably invade Canada to stop them from refining oil shale.

A pretty good profile of Bill Clinton

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Bill Clinton has been a mixed blessing for his wife’s campaign this year. He draws crowds of Democrats and he is without doubt a brilliant man, but he has been clumsy and, as the author of this Vanity Fair piece says, “he is the bride at every wedding he attends and the corpse at every funeral.” Vanity Fair has declined as a useful publication since the editors got a terminal case of BDS but they are still the best at gossip. Read and enjoy.

An astonishing turnaround at the Washington Post

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

We have been watching a turnaround in Iraq the past six months or so. Now it has spread to the Washington Post !When Mr. Obama floated his strategy for Iraq last year, the United States appeared doomed to defeat. Now he needs a plan for success.That is nothing less than stunning, and a big problem for you-know-who.

Why Democrats don’t think there is a war

Friday, May 30th, 2008

John Kerry, 2004 Democrat candidate says on September 11, 201 we were at peace. He might ask the Cole sailors or the African embassy employees or the pilots enforcing the no-fly zone in Iraq.

This is what it is all about.