dprin339's Blog

Obama Whines that Troops Watch FOX News

This thumbsucker is unbelievable. Click below to watch the video of Obama complaining that the troops only watch FOX." Why is always FOX on? "Obambi whined.  Major Garrett said, "they make the choice" " Obama replied "Is that the commander in chief's choice?"  huh? What a frickin crybaby. (he also complained the Garrett was "always there", i thought he LOVED being surrounded by the media!)

He implies its a Bush conspiracy. Just for knowing, American Forces Radio and Television Service offers all cable channels and mainstream media channels, the troops choose FOX.  It aint a conspricay its called "remote control"! The troops can change the channel.

Expect the Pelosi to introduce a "military fairness doctrine" ....lol.

He complained that everywhere he went FOX was on. What a putz!! And if there is ever a mandate that a news channel be on -- its CNN. Have you ever been to an airport where FOX was on?
One viewer wrote in that at his last visit to Walter Reade Medical Center l CNN was on all the TVs at the hospital, when he  requested they change the channel to FOX, he was told  that it was  hospital policy that the TV could not be changed from CNN" (!) And that's Walter Reade.

To Obama, “Can you ensure that there will be no second Holocaust?”

Jake Tapper has a disturbing but revealing moment during Obama's  to the Holocaust Memorial and Museum Yad Vashem in the Jewish state.

An Israeli journalist called out to Obama: “Can you ensure that there will be no second Holocaust?”

Obama walked into the museum’s main building without responding.

[....]

"This is my second visit to Yad Vashem," Obama told reporters. "I am always taken back to, sort of, the core question of humanity that the Holocaust raises. And that is, on the one hand man's great capacity for evil but on the other hand the capacity to join together and stop evil if we are willing to speak out in one voice."

Obama continued, "and so, despite its record of monumental tragedy this ultimately is a place of hope. Because it reminds us of our obligations and our responsibilities and hopefully creates a better future for our children and grandchildren."

Once again an Israeli journalist asked the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee how he’d help prevent a second Holocaust. "Senator can you assure Israel that there will be no second Holocaust despite Iran's threat to wipe us off the map?" he asked.

Obama demurred, saying that it wasn't appropriate to answer the question there.

"This is Yad Vashem!" the journalist responded.

Obama said he would answer the question at a later press availability.

Needless to say, he did not  (so much for his commitement to the jewish people and their survival...........)

Mr. Obama in Iraq Did he really find support for his withdrawal plan?

 

 

Wednesday, July 23, 2008; Page A14

THE INITIAL MEDIA coverage of Barack Obama's visit to Iraq suggested that the Democratic candidate found agreement with his plan to withdraw all U.S. combat forces on a 16-month timetable. So it seems worthwhile to point out that, by Mr. Obama's own account, neither U.S. commanders nor Iraq's principal political leaders actually support his strategy.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the architect of the dramatic turnaround in U.S. fortunes, "does not want a timetable," Mr. Obama reported with welcome candor during a news conference yesterday. In an interview with ABC, he explained that "there are deep concerns about . . . a timetable that doesn't take into account what [American commanders] anticipate might be some sort of change in conditions."

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has a history of tailoring his public statements for political purposes, made headlines by saying he would support a withdrawal of American forces by 2010. But an Iraqi government statement made clear that Mr. Maliki's timetable would extend at least seven months beyond Mr. Obama's. More significant, it would be "a timetable which Iraqis set" -- not the Washington-imposed schedule that Mr. Obama has in mind. It would also be conditioned on the readiness of Iraqi forces, the same linkage that Gen. Petraeus seeks. As Mr. Obama put it, Mr. Maliki "wants some flexibility in terms of how that's carried out."

Other Iraqi leaders were more directly critical. As Mr. Obama acknowledged, Sunni leaders in Anbar province told him that American troops are essential to maintaining the peace among Iraq's rival sects and said they were worried about a rapid drawdown.

Mr. Obama's response is that, as president, he would have to weigh Iraq's needs against those of Afghanistan and the U.S. economy. He says that because Iraq is "a distraction" from more important problems, U.S. resources devoted to it must be curtailed. Yet he also says his aim is to "succeed in leaving Iraq to a sovereign government that can take responsibility for its own future." What if Gen. Petraeus and Iraqi leaders are right that this goal is not consistent with a 16-month timetable? Will Iraq be written off because Mr. Obama does not consider it important enough -- or will the strategy be altered?

Arguably, Mr. Obama has given himself the flexibility to adopt either course. Yesterday he denied being "so rigid and stubborn that I ignore anything that happens during the course of the 16 months," though this would be more reassuring if Mr. Obama were not rigidly and stubbornly maintaining his opposition to the successful "surge" of the past 16 months. He also pointed out that he had "deliberately avoided providing a particular number" for the residual force of Americans he says would be left behind.

Yet Mr. Obama's account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is "the central front" for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country's strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama's antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

 

What? The messiah is WRONG about something? Well my goodness, how can that be?
Btw PB & Casey, THIS is from one of YOUR favorite sources: The Washington Post! Imagine THAT!

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

By Bill O'Reilly

All many of us want from our government is protection from people who might hurt us. We pay taxes. We obey the law. We try to be good citizens. But our government sometimes lets us down.

That's what happened on 9/11. Thousands of Americans woke up, went to work, and were murdered by terrorists who caught law enforcement by surprise. Now after that, many of us woke up for good, but not all.

For example, the city of San Francisco is completely out of control and now is directly responsible for the murders of three men. On June 22, Tony Bologna and his sons, Michael, 20, and Matt, 16, were shot to death after their car came close to another car driven by illegal alien felon Edwin Ramos.

Police say Ramos, a 21-year-old from El Salvador, simply pulled out a gun and killed the men. Not surprising since Ramos was arrested on a gun charge last March and had two other felony convictions. But San Franciscan authorities did not alert Homeland Security about Ramos because of the city's sanctuary policy, proudly proclaimed by Mayor Newsom.

GAVIN NEWSOM, SAN FRANCISCO MAYOR: We are standing up to say to all of our residents, we don't care what your status is in terms of its legal certification.

So three men are dead and Newsom has now rescinded part of the sanctuary policy. Far too late for widow and mother Danielle Bologna.

MEGYN KELLY, "AMERICA'S NEWSROOM" CO-HOST: Has there been any acknowledgment from Mayor Newsom or the city of San Francisco officials to you of the fact that had they simply reported this guy's deportation or illegal immigration status, your husband and sons might be alive today?

DANIELLE BOLOGNA, FAMILY KILLED BY ILLEGAL ALIEN: If they would have — I feel like they should have said something to me definitely. And also, I have not spoken to the mayor at all in this incident. And it was a senseless crime. And had they done something, this animal would not have taken my family.

I feel that the government should have stepped in. I feel that they allow these immigrants to come in, and how dare they strip our families like this. None of us should ever have to go through something like this. I never thought in a million years that I would be sitting here talking to you, nor having to bury three beautiful loved ones.

Now how many times do we have to go through this? How many times? Mayor Newsom is partly responsible for the deaths of those three men. So are the city's supervisors. So are the folks who continue to support Newsom and his far-left cadre.

But we the people are also responsible for not demanding that the government protect us from harm. There's no way on this earth that millions of people should enter this country illegally. That is insane.

Danielle Bologna is us. She's an American. Her life and the lives of her husband and sons were valuable and should have been protected. But they were not, and no one is taking responsibility.

 

check out this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv4Sia94Cu8

it made all weepy & stuff!  i know, i know, what a surprise huh?

this was beautiful!

Soros: Congress Needs to Learn to Regulate
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 8:28 AM

Billionaire George Soros doesn't mince words.

"It's time to recognize that markets do need to be regulated, and that regulators have failed to fulfill their obligations over the past 25 years," he told National Public Radio.

Soros doesn't want to return to what he describes as the pre-1970s sovereign government regulation of finance — he wants authorities to regulate credit as well as the money supply.

"I think it ought to be part of (regulators) duties to prevent asset bubbles from growing too big. For that, they would have to acknowledge that markets tend to produce bubbles," Soros says.

"We've had a series of small financial crises since 1980," Soros observes.

"Each time, when the real economy was threatened, the Fed stepped in, lowered interest rates, provided monetary fiscal stimulus, so we got out of it."

That, Soros says, reinforced both the credit expansion and the misconception that markets are self-correcting.

Soros would like to see a more subtle brand of regulation, one in which the central bank would act more as an avuncular adviser than political police officer who uses tactics like writing a letter to banks suggesting they refrain from adding more mortgage loans to their portfolios for the time being.

"For more than the past 25 years, we've been in a period of credit expansion and wealth creation. Now, we're in a period of credit contraction and wealth destruction," Soros says.

Investment banks and hedge funds based their calculations of risks on the idea that deviations are random. "We should have learned better years ago," Soros says.

Soros points out that there are now more than $62 trillion in devalued financial products — an amount equal to more than half the entire household wealth of the U.S. and several times the size of the national debt.

"Those instruments were designed on the false conception that markets trend toward equilibrium, and deviations are random," Soros says.

That process became self-reinforcing. "When you have self-reinforcing processes, (deviations) are not random."

Monday, July 21, 2008

By John R. Lott, Jr.

Does government do enough to help the poor? John McCain and Barack Obama could not be more divided on their approach. Obama’s Web site even has a section entitled “poverty,” with a large list of new antipoverty programs, while McCain's doesn’t.

Yet, this is part of a bigger difference between the campaigns in whether to single out specific groups for help.

While Obama’s Web site includes issue headings for “women,” “rural,” “seniors” and “disabilities,” McCain’s Web site generally focuses only on broad "issues" that affect everyone, such as “energy,” “education,” and “economic plan.” Both Web sites have sections on veterans.

On poverty, Obama has a very long list of proposals, including government-created “transitional jobs and career pathway programs,” a “Green Jobs Corps,” money to ensure that “low-income Americans have transportation access to jobs” and provide a large array of new social programs specifically targeted to criminals when they are released from prison.

Those are just his top four proposals. Others include trained registered nurses for home visits to all low-income expectant mothers and first time mothers, a $500 tax credit to all low and middle income people who are working, an affordable housing trust fund, other tax benefits for the poor, a new health care program for the uninsured, and so on. Other proposals -- such as expanding paid sick days for low-wage workers and higher minimum wages -- would have to be paid for by employers.

While Obama talks about personal responsibility, he proposes a government program to be involved in every aspect of people's lives.

By contrast, McCain’s programs are generally not set up specifically to help just the poor. The poor benefit much more from educational choice for their kids, primarily because their children are in the worse schools. Tax credits for individuals buying health insurance give individuals portability and the choice of which insurer suits them best. Both proposals help the poor, but they also help all Americans. Lowering corporate tax rates increases companies' incentives to invest in their workers.

Yet, before figuring out what new programs we should have, it might be useful to re-examine the welfare system we already have.

A new book, "Stealing from Each Other, How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit" by Edgar Browning, an economics professor at Texas A&M University and a world-renowned expert on government finance, has added up the costs and consequences of the existing programs.

By 2005, the Ways and Means Committee in the House of Representatives pointed out 85 separate programs that primarily aided persons with limited incomes. Total federal, state, and local expenditures amounted to $620 billion. That came to $16,750 per person in poverty, or over $50,000 for a welfare family of three, several times higher than the official poverty line for a family of three, which was $15,577 in 2005.

Browning estimates that only 10 percent of these expenditures went to administrative costs. He provides some perspective: “We are already spending more than enough to completely eliminate poverty, even if the poor have zero earnings or other sources of income on their own.” The official government estimates of the number of poor people rarely count the government aid when calculating the poor’s income. Browning also notes that there are so many programs and some are so complicated, “no one understands fully how the welfare system operates.”

Yet even these numbers underestimate how much help the government spends on the poor. For example, Social Security does not provide benefits that are proportional to what people pay into the system. The system provides large transfers from high-income to low-income individuals. Browning estimates the welfare portion of Social Security accounts for $100 billion a year. According to him, adding this to Medicare, other uncompensated medical care, and other costs increases welfare payments to over $1 trillion in 2005.

By comparison, Browning has noted elsewhere that the first five years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars cost $473 billion, less than half what the war on poverty spent in one year.

But the desire to help the poor creates its own problems. Giving more money to people, the poorer they are, also means that the more income these poor individuals make, the more government assistance is taken away from them. Just as higher taxes discourage work, the loss of a significant portion of one’s benefits will also discourage work.

Unfortunately, many of Obama’s proposals learn little from this lesson. Raising the minimum wage at the same time that mandates are put on companies that want to hire poor people will make it so that firms won’t want to hire those workers. And the people who are hired will get fewer fringe benefits and shorter hours. Minimum wage jobs are also the first jobs people get that give them training, which makes better jobs possible in the future. At the same time, expanding the size of income support and housing allowances creates more of an incentive not to work.

Obama’s plans try to offset some of these problems with other new programs that make a complicated and at times contradictory set of programs even more complicated. To offset the disincentives for training, new government training programs will be set up. There is a twist in that many will be set up in politically correct jobs such as the environment. Other subsidies will be set up to attempt to offset the disincentives to work.

The differences between Obama’s and McCain’s approaches couldn’t be starker. While neither Obama nor McCain will eliminate any of the existing programs aimed toward the poor, McCain also doesn’t try to use new programs, subsidies, and taxes to coax people into certain jobs. He wants to let people decide for themselves what choices they like best.

Obama might urge that black Americans take more personal responsibility, but his programs have government agencies trying to micromanage their lives. McCain’s policies fit better than Obama’s do with Obama’s rhetoric.

 

Rice: Iran Not Serious at Nuke Meeting, Could Face New Sanctions

Sunday, July 20, 2008

SHANNON, Ireland —  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Iran on Monday of not being serious at weekend talks about its disputed nuclear program despite the presence of a senior U.S. diplomat, and warned it may soon face new sanctions.

In her first public comments since Saturday's meeting in Switzerland, Rice said Iran had given the run-around to envoys from the U.S. and five other world powers. She said all six nations were serious about a two-week deadline Iran now has to agree to freeze suspect activities and start negotiations or be hit with new penalties.

At the meeting, Iran had been expected to respond to a package of incentives offered in exchange for halting enrichment of uranium, which can be used to fuel atomic weapons. The Bush administration broke with long-standing policy to send a top diplomat to support the offer.

However, Rice said that instead of a coherent answer, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili delivered a "meandering" monologue full of irrelevant "small talk about culture" that appeared to annoy many of the others present at the table in Geneva.

"We expected to hear an answer from the Iranians but, as has been the case so many times with the Iranians, what came through was not serious," Rice told reporters aboard her plane as she flew to the United Arab Emirates. "It's time for the Iranians to give a serious answer."

"They can't go and stall and make small talk about culture, they have to make a decision," she said. "People are tired of the Iranians and their stalling tactics."

Rice's remarks about the Iranian presentation were much harsher than those of the host of the meeting, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who lamented only that Iran had not provided "all the answers to the questions."

On Sunday, Iranian state radio reported that President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad called the talks a "step ahead" and said country's formal assessment would be issued soon.

On Saturday, one member of the Iranian delegation said there was "no chance" Iran would suspend uranium enrichment, again denying assertions that Iran's nuclear program was for anything other than power production. Jalili avoided the suspension issue entirely.

Unless Iran responds positively in the next two weeks, it can expect more sanctions to be imposed by the United States and the European Union as early as late August or September and may then be hit with a fourth sanctions resolution at the U.N. Security Council, Rice said.

"We will see what Iran does in two weeks, but I think the diplomatic process now has a new kind of energy to it," she said. "If they do not decide to suspend then we will be in a situation where we have to return to the Security Council."

Rice was briefed on the meeting by the State Department's No. 3 diplomat, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns, who attended the session in a shift from Washington's previous insistence that it would not meet with the Iranians unless the enrichment had stopped.

High-level contact between the United States and Iran is extremely rare and Burns' presence at the talks may have confused the Iranians, Rice said, acknowledging a tactical change to demonstrate U.S. unity with the other five powers: Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.

"From time to time, it is important to invigorate the diplomacy," she said. "I think that the fact that we went may have been a bit surprising to the Iranians, and they didn't react in a way that gave anyone any confidence."

The offer envisions a six-week commitment from Iran to stop expanding enrichment, during which time no additional sanctions would be imposed. That is intended to create the framework for formal negotiations that, it is hoped, will lead to a permanent halt of enrichment.

Rice was dismissive when asked if Burns or another U.S. diplomat would be present to hear Iran's response in two weeks.

"I think we've done enough to demonstrate that the United States is serious and to assure our partners that we're serious," she said.

Hmmmm now, Bush, Rice, Cheny, McCain, etc all KNEW this was a waste of time & energy.....................how is it Obama didn't know?  Wait! EXPERIENCE!  Aha! That's the difference!

 

An organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists has reversed its stance on climate change. The American Physical Society now says that many of its members no longer believe global warming is caused by humans.

The Society previously declared: "The evidence is incontrovertible. Global warming is occurring." But the Society now says there is no scientific consensus to support that statement: "There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the intergovernmental panel on climate change conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are likely to be primarily responsible for global warming."

Also, just recently, Gore was giving yet ANOTHER stupid speech about this CRITICAL CLIMATE EMERGENCY! (balone) while his entourage of (2) Lincoln's & (1) HUGE SUV were sitting outside the arena IDLING to keep the cars cool for the riders & drivers.  HUGE carbon "footprint" there!  Again, what a hypocrite!

The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless plans to give out movie tickets, passes to the Denver Zoo and the Museum of Nature and Science to homeless people during the Democratic Convention in Denver next month.

The Rocky Mountain News reports that many shelters will also extend their hours of operation and big screen televisions are being donated so that the homeless can watch the convention. And while backers say the plan is a humane way to care for the homeless, critics say it's just a way to hide them from media and visitors.

And some of the homeless are not buying in, either. One homeless woman in Denver said, "that sounds sweet and all, but I would really rather have a laundry voucher or a gift certificate to McDonald's." Another said, "I hate the movies, can't stand the zoo. Buy me breakfast?"

Just another political stunt BY Obama or FOR Obama...........so that his "STAR" wont' be dimmed by poor homeless people. This is, once again, an indicator of how really out of touch & elitist the democrats REALLY are...............

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