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Congress passed Obama's "Unaffordable Health Care Act" before they read it and which I have dubbed 'Obamascare.'
Now it has begun to fall of its own weight so Obama, the community organizer trying to act like an imperial president, decides, unilaterally, to extend its implementation.
I am not a Constitutional Lawyer nor is he, though the press and media would have you believe he is, so I cannot state, with authority, he is acting beyond his lawful ability.
What I can and do say is that we are a nation based on the rule of law and this president proceeds with utter disregard, nay, even contempt, for the rule of law as does his Attorney General and many other Cabinet officers and members of his administration.
No, I am not suggesting Obama be impeached. We tried that before and failed when 'Ole Bill Clinton besmirched his office and lied about his sexual performance.
What I am suggesting is that we citizens watch Obama closely, keep him on a tight leash because the press and media will not and let him grow more and more irrelevant as seems to be happening externally.
Obama is a perfect example of "The Peter Principle." In fact he reached his level of incompetence long before he became a Senator. (See 3 below.)
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The criminal Party? You decide! (See 2 below.)
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Glick says we are clueless when it comes to Egypt's Coup. You decide. (See 3 below.)
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Don't tell Gene Kelly or Geroge Gershwin:
PJTV, click on: "TRIFECTA JIHADISTS EXECUTE MOTHER AND DAUGHTERS FOR THE CRIME OF DANCING IN THE RAIN"
"Two sisters in northern Pakistan made the mistake of dancing and playing in the rain. After video of their joyous time circulated in their village, local jihadists executed them. Bill Whittle, Scott Ott and Stephen Green give their take on these so-called honor killings. How should we respond to these violent acts from proponents of radical Islam? Let us know in the comments section."
Just one more piece of evidence that we are dealing with religious terrorists which Obama seems unwilling to comprehend because he is more pro Muslim than rational and objective.
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Dick
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1)The Mindset of the Left: Part IV
By Thomas Sowell
Editor's note: This is Part IV in a series. Part I can be found here. Part II can be found here. Part III can be found here.
At the heart of the left's vision of the world is the implicit assumption that high-minded third parties like themselves can make better decisions for other people than those people can make for themselves.
That arbitrary and unsubstantiated assumption underlies a wide spectrum of laws and policies over the years, ranging from urban renewal to ObamaCare.
One of the many international crusades by busybodies on the left is the drive to limit the hours of work by people in other countries -- especially poorer countries -- in businesses operated by multinational corporations. One international monitoring group has taken on the task of making sure that people in China do not work more than the legally prescribed 49 hours per week.
Why international monitoring groups, led by affluent Americans or Europeans, would imagine that they know what is best for people who are far poorer than they are, and with far fewer options, is one of the many mysteries of the busybody elite.
As someone who left home at the age of 17, with no high school diploma, no job experience and no skills, I spent several years learning the hard way what poverty is like. One of the happier times during those years was a brief period when I worked 60 hours a week -- 40 hours delivering telegrams during the day and 20 hours working part-time in a machine shop at night.
Why was I happy? Because, before finding these jobs, I had spent weeks desperately looking for any job, while my meager savings dwindled down to literally my last dollar, before finally finding the part-time job at night in a machine shop.
I had to walk several miles from the rooming house where I lived in Harlem to the machine shop located just below the Brooklyn Bridge, in order to save that last dollar to buy bread until I got a payday.
When I then found a full-time job delivering telegrams during the day, the money from the two jobs combined was more than I had ever made before. I could pay the back rent I owed on my room and both eat and ride the subways back and forth to work.
I could even put aside some money for a rainy day. It was the closest thing to nirvana for me.
Thank heaven there were no busybodies to prevent me from working more hours than they thought I should.
There was a minimum wage law, but this was 1949 and the wages set by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 had been rendered meaningless by years of inflation. In the absence of an effective minimum wage law, unemployment among black teenagers in the recession year of 1949 was a fraction of what it would be in even the most prosperous years of the 1960s and beyond.
As the morally anointed busybodies raised the minimum wage rate, beginning in the 1950s, black teenage unemployment skyrocketed. We have now become so used to tragically high rates of unemployment among this group that many people have no idea that things were not always like that, much less that policies of the busybody left had such catastrophic consequences.
I don't know what I would have done if such busybody policies had been in effect back in 1949, and prevented me from finding a job before my last dollar ran out.
My personal experience is just one small example of what it is like when your options are very limited. The prosperous busybodies of the left are constantly promoting policies which reduce the existing options of poor people even more.
It would never occur to the busybodies that multinational corporations are expanding the options of the poor in third world countries, while busybody policies are contracting their options.
Wages paid by multinational corporations in poor countries are typically much higher than wages paid by local employers. Moreover, the experience that employees get working in modern companies make them more valuable workers and have led in China, for example, to wages rising by double-digit percentages annually.
Nothing is easier for people with degrees to imagine that they know better than the poor and uneducated. But, as someone once said, "A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him."
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2)How Democrats Exploit Minorities
By Michael Bargo Jr.
Democrats have portrayed themselves as the only political party that cares for the needs of minorities, that somehow they are uniquely qualified to help them. But a state senator from Louisiana, Elbert Guillory, recently left the Democratic Party and became a Republican, citing the recent policies of Democrats.
A close look at how the poor fare under Democratic Party control reveals that the Party has not only done very little to improve the long-term economic conditions of minorities but that its policies have a history of destroying the black family and the social conditions under which they live, as long noted by authors and economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.
The American city that has been most completely controlled by Democrats is Chicago. It is a case study of the effects of Democratic policies upon minorities. In a matter of just a few decades Chicago went from being a city that provided great opportunities for blacks to being the most racially segregated and oppressive city in America.
From its very beginning Chicago provided opportunity for blacks. The first non-native American settler in the area was a Haitian black named DuSable. Chicago never had slavery. It had an early abolitionist movement and showcased Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves, in debates with Stephen Douglas. The most prominent black magazines, Ebony and Jet, were founded in Chicago. They celebrated black culture and fashion. Oprah Winfrey became a billionaire anchoring her TV show in the City of Chicago.
When blacks first moved to Chicago during WW I in the great migration north they wore black armbands in memory of Lincoln and voted for Republicans, the party of Lincoln. But soon the black attitude toward Republicans changed. By 1920 thousands of blacks worked in Chicago in city and county jobs. But when Anton Cermak was elected mayor, he fired all the blacks and rehired only black Democrats. Black residents were funneled by the Chicago Democratic machine into highly segregated black-only neighborhoods. This segregation and racism has lasted one hundred years and persists to this day.
The Chicago Democratic Machine institutionalized housing segregation more than any American city. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted that Chicago's housing segregation was the major cause of poverty among blacks. Mayor Daley I doubled the number of residents in low-income housing from 1960 to 1970 at a time when the population fell by eight percent. Those high-rise buildings allowed Democratic precinct captains to intimidate black voters into voting for Democrats by threatening to take away their apartments. The era of high-rise low-income buildings, portrayed in the TV comedy show Good Times, only ended when a courageous black woman named Dorothy Gautreaux sued the Chicago Housing Authority for racial discrimination. Since then the high-rise buildings have been gradually torn down and blacks are moving to suburbs or out of Illinois entirely.
This segregation was practiced in all major northern cities run by Democrats including Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Boston, D.C., New York, Cleveland, Detroit and many others. While pursuing his civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, Dr. King marched in Chicago and was stunned by the racial hatred he experienced there. In a city that never hosted slavery, Dr. King said "I think people in Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate."
The 2000 Census found that for Chicago to be integrated 90% of the blacks would have to move. And remarkably, of the 10 poorest census tracts in the entire United States, nine of them were located in Chicago's black Congressional Districts of black Congressmen Bobby Rush and Jesse Jackson Jr. When Jesse Jackson Jr. resigned his Congressional seat, Democrats said that he must be replaced by another black. This could serve no other purpose than to preserve Democratic power and maintain the segregationist status quo.
Nothing has improved for black residents in these segregated areas even with the assistance of black politicians of their own race, who campaign that they will improve things. The Chicago Public School system is so bad that it has one of the shortest school days of any major city. This holds back the poor of all ethnic groups from excelling in academics and moving out of the City.
Racial segregation is a very effective means of exploiting the poor, since it keeps them from obtaining good paying jobs, deprives them of any benefit from public education (which is very expensive), and ensures that lack of opportunity forces young black men into lives of gang membership and crime. Today one of every nine black men in their twenties is in prison. This does not mean that one in every nine has ever been in prison, but that they are in prison all at once. All of these failures are great spiritual and emotional tragedies for the black families involved.
Black families did not suffer these high rates of single motherhood and crime until they were encouraged to go north into cities controlled by Democrats. It is a very tragic episode in the history of blacks in the United States. Fortunately blacks are realizing that it is the segregated urban environment that is the root cause of all these problems and many are leaving the North.
Anyone who firmly rejects this conclusion -- that blacks have fared far worse under Democratic rule -- needs to consider the corollary: imagine that Chicago and all other northern cities with black ghettoes had been run by Republicans and that blacks suffered the same high rates of unemployment, single motherhood, poverty and crime that they do today. Then imagine that these cities were taken over by Democratic politicians, and these social indicators were reversed: that the high school dropout rate greatly improved, that only 20% of blacks were born to single mothers instead of the 70% we see today, and that the murder rates in black areas greatly declined. Only then would it be reasonable to conclude that Democrats helped the black community.
It is true that blacks have been oppressed by whites in America. But it is more accurate to say that blacks have suffered under white Democrats in America. These thoughts led Louisiana state senator Guillory to quit the Democratic Party and become a Republican.
And while Barack Obama ran on the optimistic slogans of "yes we can!" and "hope and change" during his first term black unemployment and food stamp use rose to all-time highs. The Democratic Party continues to enjoy the support of black voters and this support is only possible because Democrats are never held accountable for the oppressive social conditions, poverty, and high unemployment suffered by blacks under their rule.
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3)Clueless about Cairo coup
By Caroline B. Glick
We are being told that with Morsi and his government overthrown, the Facebook revolution is back on track.
Again, the all-knowing are getting it all wrong
Wednesday Egypt had its second revolution in so many years. And there is no telling how many more revolutions it will have in the coming months, or years. This is the case not only in Egypt, but throughout the Islamic world.
The American foreign policy establishment's rush to romanticize as the Arab Spring the political instability that engulfed the Arab world following the self-immolation of a Tunisian peddler in December 2010 was perhaps the greatest demonstration ever given of their utter cluelessness about the nature of Arab politics and society. Their enthusiastic embrace of protesters who have now brought down President Muhammad Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood regime indicates that it takes more than a complete repudiation of their core assumptions to convince them to abandon them.
US reporters and commentators today portray this week's protests as the restoration of the Egyptian revolution. That revolution, they remain convinced, was poised to replace long-time Egyptian leader and US-ally Hosni Mubarak with a liberal democratic government led by people who used Facebook and Twitter.
Subsequently, we were told, that revolution was hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood. But now that Morsi and his government have been overthrown, the Facebook revolution is back on track.
And again, they are wrong.
As was the case in 2011, the voices of liberal democracy in Egypt are so few and far between that they have no chance whatsoever of gaining power, today or for the foreseeable future. At this point it is hard to know what the balance of power is between the Islamists who won 74 percent of the vote in the 2011 parliamentary elections and their opponents. But it is clear that their opponents are not liberal democrats. They are a mix of neo-Nasserist fascists, Communists and other not particularly palatable groups. None of them share Western conceptions of freedom and limited government. None of them are particularly pro-American. None of them like Jews. And none of them support maintaining Egypt's cold peace with Israel.
Egypt's greatest modern leader was Gamal Abdel Nasser. By many accounts the most common political view of the anti-Muslim Brotherhood protesters is neo-Nasserist fascism.
Nasser was an enemy of the West. He led Egypt into the Soviet camp in the 1950s. As the co-founder of the non-aligned movement, he also led much of the Third World into the Soviet camp. Nasser did no less damage to the US in his time than al Qaida and its allies have done in recent years.
Certainly, from Israel's perspective, Nasser was no better than Hamas or al Qaida or their parent Muslim Brotherhood movement. Like the Islamic fanatics, Nasser sought the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of the Jews.
Whether the fascists will take charge or not, is impossible to know. So too, the role of the Egyptian military in the future of Egypt is unknowable. The same military that overthrew Morsi on Wednesday stood by as he earlier sought to strip its powers, sacked its leaders and took steps to transform it into a subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood.
There are only three things that are knowable about the future of Egypt. First it will be poor. Egypt is a failed state. It cannot feed its people. It has failed to educate its people. It has no private sector to speak of. It has no foreign investment.
Second, Egypt will be politically unstable. Mubarak was able to maintain power for 29 years because he ran a police state that the people feared. That fear was dissipated in 2011. This absence of fear will bring Egyptians to the street to topple any government they feel is failing to deliver on its promises — as they did this week.
Given Egypt's dire economic plight, it is impossible to see how any government will be able to deliver on any promises — large or small — that its politicians will make during electoral campaigns. And so government after government will share the fates of Mubarak and Morsi.
Beyond economic deprivation, today tens of millions of Egyptians feel they were unlawfully and unjustly ousted from power on Wednesday. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists won big in elections hailed as free by the West. They have millions of supporters who are just as fanatical today as they were last week. They will not go gently into that good night
Finally, given the utter irrelevance of liberal democratic forces in Egypt today, it is clear enough that whoever is able to rise to power in the coming years will be anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-democratic, (in the liberal democratic sense of the word). They might be nicer to the Copts than the Muslim Brotherhood has been. But they won't be more pro-Western. They may be more cautious in asserting or implementing their ideology in their foreign policy than the Muslim Brotherhood. But that won't necessarily make them more supportive of American interests or to the endurance of Egypt's formal treaty of peace with Israel.
And this is not the case only in Egypt. It is the case as well in every Arab state that is now or will soon be suffering from instability that has caused coups, Islamic takeovers, civil wars, mass protests and political insecurity in country after country. Not all of them are broke. But then again, none of them have the same strong sense of national identity that Egyptians share.
Now that we understand what we are likely to see in the coming months and years, and what we are seeing today, we must consider how the West should respond to these events. To do so, we need to consider how various parties responded to the events of the past two and a half years.
Wednesday's overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government is a total repudiation of the US strategy of viewing the unrest in Egypt — and throughout the Arab world -- as a struggle between the good guys and the bad guys.
Within a week of the start of the protests in Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011, Americans from both sides of the political divide united around the call for Mubarak's swift overthrow. A few days later, President Barack Obama joined the chorus of Democrats and Republicans, and called for Mubarak to leave office, immediately. Everyone from Senator John McCain to Samantha Power was certain that despite the fact that Mubarak was a loyal ally of the US, America would be better served by supporting the rise of the Facebook revolutionaries who used Twitter and held placards depicting Mubarak as a Jew.
Everyone was certain that the Muslim Brotherhood would stay true to its word and keep out of politics.
Two days after Mubarak was forced from office, Peter Beinart wrote a column titled, "America's Proud Egypt Moment," where he congratulated the neo-conservatives and the liberals and Obama for scorning American interests and siding with the protesters who opposed all of Mubarak's pro-American policies. Beinart wrote exultantly, "Hosni Mubarak's regime was the foundation stone — along with Israel and Saudi Arabia — of American power in the Middle East. It tortured suspected Al Qaida terrorists for us, pressured the Palestinians for us, and did its best to contain Iran. And it sat atop a population eager -- secular and Islamist alike -- not only to reverse those policies, but to rid the Middle East of American power. And yet we cast our lot with that population, not their ruler."
Beinart also congratulated the neo-conservatives for parting ways with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who counseled caution, and so proved they do not suffer from dual loyalty.
That hated, reviled Israeli strategy, (which was not Netanyahu's alone, but shared by Israelis from across the political spectrum in a rare demonstration of unanimity), was proven correct by events of the past week and indeed by events of the past two and a half years.
Israelis watched in shock and horror as their American friends followed the Pied Piper of the phony Arab Spring over the policy cliff. Mubarak was a dictator. But his opponents were no Alexander Dubceks. There was no reason to throw away thirty years of stability before figuring out a way to ride the tiger that would follow it. Certainly there was no reason to actively support Mubarak's overthrow.
Shortly after Mubarak was overthrown, the Obama administration began actively supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood believed that the way to gain and then consolidate power was to hold elections as quickly as possible. Others wanted to wait until a constitutional convention convened and a new blueprint for Egyptian governance was written. But the Muslim Brotherhood would have none of it. And Obama supported them.
Five months after elections of questionable pedigree catapulted Morsi to power, Obama was silent when in December 2012 Morsi arrogated dictatorial powers and pushed through a Muslim Brotherhood constitution.
Obama ignored Congress three times and maintained full funding of Egypt despite the fact that the Morsi government had abandoned its democratic and pluralistic protestations.
He was silent over the past year as the demonstrators assembled to oppose Morsi's power grabs. He was unmoved as churches were torched and Christians were massacred. He was silent as Morsi courted Iran.
US Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson and Obama remained the Muslim Brotherhood's greatest champions as the forces began to gather ahead of this week's mass protests. Patterson met with the Coptic Pope and told him to keep the Coptic Christians out of the protests. Obama, so quick to call for Mubarak to step down, called for the protesters to exercise restraint this time around and then ignored them during his vacation in Africa.
The first time Obama threated to curtail US funding of the Egyptian military was Wednesday night, after the military ignored American warnings and entreaties, and deposed Morsi and his government.
This week's events showed how the US's strategy in Egypt has harmed America.
In 2011, the military acted to force Mubarak from power only after Obama called for them to do so. This week, the military overthrew Morsi and began rounding up his supporters in defiance of the White House.
Secretary of State John Kerry was the personification of the incredible shrinkage of America this week as he maintained his obsessive focus on getting Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. In a Middle East engulfed by civil war, revolution and chronic instability, Israel is the only country at peace. The image of Kerry extolling his success in "narrowing the gaps" between Israel and the Palestinians before he boarded his airplane at Ben Gurion Airport as millions assembled to bring down the government of Egypt is the image of a small, irrelevant America.
And as the anti-American posters in Tahrir Square this week showed, America's self-induced smallness is a tragedy that will harm the region and endanger the US.
As far as Israel is concerned, all we can do is continue what we have been doing, and hope that at some point, the Americans will embrace our sound strategy.
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