I guess we’re moving forward with the bad idea of treating terrorists like common criminals, again:
The Obama administration on Monday said it preferred that detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be tried in criminal courts, but that some suspected terrorists in less-prominent cases or in cases with weaker evidence could go before military tribunals.
An interim report by a presidential task force reviewing U.S. detention policy laid out for the first time the means by which Justice and Defense department lawyers will determine whether the 229 detainees remaining at Guantanamo get criminal or military trials. The approach could rile civil liberties groups, which prefer all detainees be tried in criminal courts.
Well, when the next terrorist attack happens on American soil, plotted and executed by one of the former residents of Hotel Gitmo, we’ll know who to blame. Barack Hussein Obama will have American blood on his hands. I hope he can live with that guilt.
As I have said before, we should not treat terrorists the same way we treat criminals. This is really the brilliant plan they are going with to deal with Gitmo? I guess that’s what happens when the president pledges to close the place within a year without a plan.
What’s the end result? Are we going to house them in our prison system? Watch out, that prison rape might just violate their Constitutional rights. But, the truth is, pushing them through the criminal justice system is just a way to release them. Once they are afforded all of the rights that American citizens are, how likely do you think it is they’ll actually be convicted? This is the country that couldn’t put OJ Simpson away after he murdered his wife and her boyfriend.
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Obama’s cracking down on illegal immigrants:
The Obama administration is using its executive powers to change U.S. immigration policies and practices on a range of fronts, not waiting for efforts by Congress to tackle a broader overhaul of the system.
Administration officials say they want to shift the emphasis in immigration enforcement to what the White House calls the demand-side of illegal immigration by focusing on employers, moving away from high-profile raids that resulted in thousands of worker arrests during the Bush years.
The Obama approach also toughens individual enforcement against illegal immigrants with criminal records, but takes a less stringent line with economic migrants and victims of abuse. In some cases, the Obama administration is pushing ahead with plans set under President George W. Bush — such as putting into effect a mandate that all federal contractors and subcontractors use a government employment-verification system called E-Verify.
I agree that we should go after the companies that hire illegals. We have to take away the incentive for them to come here illegally. If they can’t get jobs they won’t be so eager to break into our country. Unfortunately, as I have said before, I think this is just a ploy.
The reason for this crackdown on illegal immigration is just the prelude to “comprehensive immigration reform” that will grant amnesty to illegals already in our country, while encouraging more to come knowing that if they can hold out for 20 years their amnesty will come too.
As the article reported:
Congressional Democrats want to introduce comprehensive immigration legislation by the end of the summer that would offer a path to legal status for some of the estimated 12 million people now in the U.S. illegally. Many but not all congressional Republicans have opposed proposals to legalize undocumented migrants already in the country. President Barack Obama has signaled that he supports offering some form of legalization, but is also pursuing tougher enforcement that could appeal to both Democrats and Republicans on the fence.
This administration is not tough on illegal immigration. They are just buttering up the public in order to pass an immigration bill that they know the public doesn’t support. Obama thinks the way to solve the problem of illegal immigration is by making everyone legal. Great fix! That’s right up there with us spending our way out of debt. Brilliant!
In order to end the problem of illegal immigration we need to secure our border, deport illegals we catch, and bust illegal employees and the companies that hire them. We need to make punishment for companies that employ illegals so severe that the risk becomes too big to take.
States need to stop giving illegal immigrants in-state tuition rates. We need to end our policy of giving citizenship to illegal immigrants’ children just because they are born on our soil. Stop giving them drivers licenses, welfare, health care, etc. and maybe they’ll stop sneaking in. Perhaps, if we stopped rewarding them for breaking the law they would stop breaking it. Perhaps.
Instead, we are going to grant another amnesty, which has already proven ineffective by the fact we are talking about doing it again. It will not be a one-time thing. It will not be a two-time thing. Granting amnesty encourages illegal immigration. First, it will cause a surge in the number of border jumpers as they try to get over here before the amnesty is granted so they can become legal under it and then it will encourage more illegal immigration in the future as the next wave of illegals will know if they wait long enough they’ll be legal, too.
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I guess Michael Steele has to be careful what he says as long as Romney is in the picture:
Michael Steele, chairman of the RNC, doesn’t seem to know the basic terminology of the health care debate.
In a Q&A at the National Press Club just now, Steele was asked if Republicans support an individual requirement to get health care (also known as an individual mandate).
“What do you mean by an individual requirement?” he asked the moderator. After she explained, he dodged the question.
“Again, that is one of those areas where there is different opinions…I don’t do policy,” he said. “My point in coming here today was to begin to set a tone, and a theme if you will.”
I know this isn’t what Republicans stand for now, but they should be against mandated or requierd health care. They are supposed to be about smaller government and personal choice, responsibility, and freedom. The fact that the head of the RNC doesn’t get this or can’t answer this question straightforwardly is a little disheartening. Why didn’t Steele take my suggestion and lead himself to the unemployment line?
(H/T: Memeorandum)
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Government bailouts could cost $23.7 trillion:
Government support aimed at cushioning the effects of the financial crisis in the U.S. could reach $23.7 trillion, a special inspector general overseeing U.S. bailout efforts said in a report to Congress.
In prepared testimony for Tuesday’s hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky writes the figure includes spending and commitments for several agencies that have implemented programs aimed at supporting the economy and the U.S. financial system.
“TARP does not function in a vacuum,” he wrote, referring to the government’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program — its most visible effort to counter the financial meltdown.
But wait, it gets worse, much worse:
Mr. Barofsky in his testimony wrote that Treasury has often rejected his office’s recommendations regarding ways to operate programs in a more transparent manner.
“TARP has become a program in which taxpayers (i) are not being told what most of the TARP recipients are doing with their money, (ii) have still not been told how much their substantial investments are worth, and (iii) will not be told the full details of how their money is being invested,” his testimony reads.
As Michelle Malkin has been saying, “Obama lied, transparency died.”
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It’s never about politics for President Obama:
President Obama accused Republicans of playing political games with health care reform Monday, taking aim at South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint for suggesting a defeat on health care could be a “Waterloo” moment for Obama.
“If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his waterloo. It will break him,” Obama quoted DeMint as saying. “Think about that. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking American families, breaking America’s businesses and breaking America’s economy. We can’t afford the politics of delay and defeat.”
DeMint made the remarks on a call organized by the group Conservatives for Patients Rights.
In his statement, Obama also said the need for “health care reform is “urgent and it is indisputable,” but he did not repeat his August deadline, instead saying it needed to be done by the end of the year.
This health care bill is only about politics. It’s about advancing a liberal political agenda the Dems have been trying to push through for years. How does the guy in the highest political office try to argue that nothing he does is political? This is Washington, DC. America knows that everything is about politics. You’re politicians. That’s what you do. Our president sounds like an idiot when he tries to claim otherwise.
Look, neither political party may be very popular at the moment, but people understand the game we’re playing. They aren’t stupid enough to believe that Democrats are never being political and the Republicans are only about politics. When did Democrats corner the market on wanting to do what’s best for America? I must have been out that day.
UPDATE: Just picked up this little gem off of the White House blog, it is the paragraph that preceded what is quoted up above:
Now, there are some in this town who are content to perpetuate the status quo, are in fact fighting reform on behalf of powerful special interests. There are others who recognize the problem, but believe — or perhaps, hope — that we can put off the hard work of insurance reform for another day, another year, another decade.
What about those people who believe there is a problem, but don’t think that more government is the way to fix it? What about those people who think government tinkering is what cause the problem in the first place? What about those people who have read the Constitution and knows that our government does not have the authority to impose this monstrous health care “reform” on us?
I am one of those people. I don’t consider myself to be a powerful special interest. Is it possible that some politicians oppose your method of health care reform because they are representing other people like me? I know you all think this Tea Party thing is a joke. Well, all of us involved in the Tea Parties think you are the joke, but we’re not laughing.
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Pelosi wants to “drain” more “savings” from the medical industry and institute a “millionaire’s tax”in order to support their un-Constitutional health care bill:
Trying to sell a historic health bill to a balky caucus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told POLITICO in an interview that she wants to soften a proposed surcharge on the wealthy so that it applies only to families that make $1 million or more.
The change could help mollify the conservative Democrats who expect to have a tough time selling the package back home. Their support is the single biggest key to meeting the speaker’s goal of having health care reform pass the House by the August recess.
The bill now moving through the House would raise taxes for individuals with annual adjusted gross incomes of $280,000, or families that make $350,000 or more.
“I’d like it to go higher than it is,” Pelosi said Friday.
The speaker would like the trigger raised to $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for families, “so it’s a millionaire’s tax,” she said. “When someone hears, ‘2,’ they think, ‘Oh, I could be there,’ because they don’t know the $280,000 is for one person.
“It sounds like you’re in the neighborhood. So I just want to remove all doubt. You hear ‘$500,000 a year,’ you think, ‘My God, that’s not me.’”
Pelosi also told POLITICO she will push to “drain” more savings from the medical industry — hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and health insurers — than they have given up under current health-reform agreements with the Senate and White House.
Asked whether she believes the industry players will wind up contributing more to the package, Pelosi replied: “I don’t know. I know they can, to the extent that the special interests are willing to cooperate. … They could do much better. … Frankly, I think all the money [to pay for health reform] could be drained from the system, if they were willing to do that.”
First of all, can anyone tell me where it says in the Constituion that Congress has the authority to tax specific groups in order to pay for another groups health care? I must have missed that part because I don’t remember seeing it in there.
I would also like to understand why people should be penalized just because they make more money. It’s always about taxing the rich. When did we become such a petty society? Why do we want to punish people just because they’re rich? Is it because we have lost faith in being rich ourselves so we want to punish those who have done better than us financially? It just makes no sense to me.
And, how much can we possibly drain from the medical industry before we break it? When it’s government versus industry only the government can survive. It’s as if McDonald’s were allowed to “drain” money from Burger King in order to expand themselves. At some point, Burger King will disappear. Well, that’s what the government wants to do with health care. Private industry cannot survive when competing against a government with limitless ability to outspend them and fund the spending by stealing them from the very industry they’re in competition with.
This is not the American way. It is the responsibility of the American people to stop this. Once this beast is unleashed, there will be no going back. Washington doesn’t repeal laws. Government is continuously expanding and it will not contract. Call your representatives today and tell them if they vote yes to this bill you’ll vote no to them in the next election.
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Michelle Malkin’s column today does a fabulous job of exposing the new beast of a bureaucracy the health care bill will create:
Because 32 “czars” isn’t enough, the Democrat plan would add another overlord to the Obama administration. The new “Health Choices Commissioner” would helm the new “Health Choices Administration” (Section 141 of the bill) – separate from the already existing Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (formerly the Health Care Financing Administration), the Veterans Health Administration, and the Indian Health Service.
Because the government has done such a boffo job managing the near-bankrupt Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds, the Democrats have proposed creating a “Public Health Investment Fund” and a “Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund.” The latter would create a “transparent and functional marketplace for individuals and small employers to comparison shop among private and public insurers.”
No matter that state insurance departments already operate such systems. Health care must be “fixed.” The federal cure is redundancy.
The Obamacare bill also creates a new “Bureau of Health Information” (not to be confused with the already existing National Center for Health Statistics) within the department of Health and Human Services. The BHI will be led by a new “Assistant Secretary for Health Information.” The new assistant secretary will coordinate with the recently-created “National Coordinator for Health Information Technology” – who is responsible for monitoring the $19.5 billion in the stimulus law to implement “a nationwide interoperable, privacy-protected health information technology infrastructure.”
That is just a taste of what she wrote. It gets much worse. I urge you to hop on over to her site and read the whole thing. You’ll get lost in all of the new agencies and jobs that will be created under this plan, even if there are already agencies and jobs in existence to deal with these issues. But, that’s politicians for you. I can’t really blame Democrats. I mean, when the five agencies responsible for preventing 9/11 failed, George W. came back with a brilliant idea: The Department of Homeland Security.
People across the country are starting to protest. The health care bill is becoming their battle cry. Politicians aren’t going to give the power back to us; we have to go out there and take it from them!
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I didn’t need a study done or “tween’s” brains imaged to figure out that boys are hardwired differently than girls:
Pardon the sexism, but a question: Why are girls so girly?
For the better part of the past half-century, feminists, their opponents and armies of academics have debated the differences between men and women. Only in the past few years have scientists been able to use imaging technology to look inside men’s and women’s heads to investigate whether those stereotypical gender differences have roots in the brain. No concrete results have emerged from these studies yet, but now a new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of children offers at least one explanation for some common tween social behaviors: girls are hardwired to care about one-on-one relationships, while the brains of boys are more attuned to group dynamics and competition with other boys.
Apparently, this is breaking news to the people over at Time. I guess none of them has ever had siblings, friends, or children of the opposite sex. Practically any social interaction with a member of the oppositte sex would have caused one of their writers to break this story a long time ago! But, that would have been politically incorrect. The feminist dogma states that all of our differences are learned. Wouldn’t want to shatter that myth!
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CBO announces that versions of the health care bills coming out of the hill will INCREASE costs, not curb them as has been stated as one of the primary goals of the health care legislation:
Congress’s chief budget scorekeeper cast a new cloud over Democratic efforts to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, telling lawmakers Thursday that the main proposals being considered would fail to contain costs — one of the primary goals — and could actually worsen the problem of rapidly escalating medical spending.
“We do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount,” Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, told the Senate Budget Committee. “On the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health-care costs,” he added.
When President Barack Obama and lawmakers set out earlier this year to revamp the health-care system, they had two main objectives: Expand access to health insurance and curb runaway costs, not just for the government but the economy as a whole.
This was never about controlling costs, it was always about expanding coverage and, in effect, expanding government and government control over the private sector and the private individual. The goal of this health care bill is nothing short of a government takeover of health care. The more dependent we are on government the more they can buy our votes.
I have said it before and I’ll say it again: We are not entitled to health care or health insurance. That is not, I repeat not, one of our God-given rights. This was NEVER authorized in the Constitution and should be stopped on those grounds alone.
It is unfortunate that some people are without insurance. Some of those people simply don’t want insurance. Some of those people don’t have their priorities straight and would rather have a $400 IPhone than pay insurance premiums. Some of those people are illegal aliens. And, some of those people are just poor. The thing about the legitimately poor is that they are already covered and could never be refused by a hospital for emergency care, anyway.
Health care may need reform, but what is being offered right now is not the kind of reform it needs. The reform being advocated now will not lower costs, it will hide costs as the government picks up the tab. And, by “the government” I mean individual taxpayers. And, they can talk all they want about just “taxing the rich,” but at some point they’ll be taxing you, too. If you smoke, they’re already taxing you for children’s health care. After all, nothing in life is free.
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Apparently the election of our first half black president wasn’t enough of a statement because according to Obama the pain of discrimination is still felt in America:
President Barack Obama on Thursday traced his historic rise to power to the vigor and valor of black civil rights leaders, telling the NAACP that their sacrifice “began the journey that has led me here.” The nation’s first black president bluntly warned, though, that racial barriers persist.
“Make no mistake: The pain of discrimination is still felt in America,” the president said in honoring the organization’s 100th convention.
Rousing up his audience, Mr. Obama offered his most direct speech on race since winning the White House, a mix of personal reflection and policy promotion. He worked on it for about two weeks and revised it until shortly before he spoke, his aides said, underscoring the importance of his message and his audience.
Implicit in his appearance: He is seeking the backing of the powerful NAACP and its members for his ambitious domestic agenda.
I’m not saying their isn’t discrimination in America, but it’s not institutional and systematic. There’s always going to be racism. That’s a fact. All we can do is work to erase it in/from our government. We can’t worry about the idiot that judges a person based on their race. Those idiots will always exist. And, let me tell you something, those idiots aren’t always white.
What about the racism that is rampant in many black communities? What about the racism that is fueled by the speeches and actions of groups like the NAACP? Oh, I’m sorry, that’s “reverse” racism, which is a ludicrous term. Racism is colorblind. Read the definition. It can’t be reversed. Reversed racism, more accurately, would mean no racism at all. BUt, I digress.
I’m so sick and tired of hearing about race in America. I thought we were getting past this? I know many people thought voting for Obama, electing our first (half!) black president was supposed to signal to the world that race wasn’t the issue. All of that white liberal guilt could be assuaged. We have repented for our racist sins. And, this is the point where Obama says, “Gotcha!”
If Obama wants to help out the black community, why doesn’t he start by eliminating welfare, which has done nothing but enslave the black community in fatherless homes in ghettos across the country? Why doesn’t he end affirmative action, which tells member of the black community they are inferior and can’t advance in life without a handout?
I thougth we were supposedly past race in America, but we’re not. And, confirming Sotomayer will guarantee that we never get past race in this country. Thank you to our first post-racial president! Whites need to get over it and stop dreaming of the day when we are finally forgiven for the sins we didn’t commit by the people these sins weren’t even committed against. We are not at fault and it is not our responsibility to keep apologizing and kowtowing to assuage this unwarranted guilt.
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