Big payoffs to unions, free healthcare to illegal aliens, death panels for Americans, limits and rationing to Americans… it’s ALL in the bill (HR 3200).
And remember, folks. We get taxed immediately but none of these wonderful “benefits” actually kick in for FOUR YEARS! So even if you liked this communist paradise you won’t get it for almost half the decade. It makes you wonder… how many dead people will Democrats be responsible for since this bill doesn’t kick in for so long, eh?
These are the things that Democrats want in a nationalized healthcare bill. These are the things that WILL end up passed if ANY part of Obamacare is passed.
This will materially alter the relationship between citizen and government and will put a tombstone over what was the United States of America. If Obamcare passes, the U.S.A. is dead.
It’s bad enough that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is giving short shrift to American manufacturers and our economy by ordering extravagant new crystal stemware from Sweden to make the crystal cabinets in America’s embassies sparkle impressively, but now we learn that Barack Obama has told the U.S. relief forces in Haiti not to fly the U.S. flag over its own military compounds. He says that it will “send the wrong message.”
Never mind that all the other nations have their flags proudly flying above their military relief installations in Haiti. Even Croatia has its coat of arms flying outside its base. Yet not the U.S. Army. No U.S. flag flies anywhere despite that we are far and away the largest force and have supplied the most relief supplies and money to the earthquake recovery effort.
According to USAID, as of January 19, 2010 the U.S. had spent $130,864,571 on aid to the Haitian people to help them recover from the devastating earthquake. By Jan. 25 that number had already increased to $179,883,065. It is only going up from there.
So why did the Obama administration forbid flying our own flag in Haiti?
“We are not here as an occupation force, but as an international partner committed to supporting the government of Haiti on the road to recovery,” the U.S. government’s Haiti Joint Information Center said in response to a query about the flag.
If it is so important to be seen as just another member of that international force, then why are all the other nations still flying their flags? Oh, I remember now… unlike the U.S. they don’t have a president that is more comfortable apologizing for his country than being proud of it, even when it is engaged in saving lives through relief work.
As far as Obama is concerned, we should be ashamed of our nation even when we are digging children and the aged out of mounds of crumbled ruins, even when we are feeding the hungry, and administering life saving medicines — all for free mind you. Even those efforts aren’t good enough for us to be proud to fly our flag above them, apparently.
The NavyTimes.com report reveals a craven attempt by the Obama Administration to pin this no-flag decision on our troops, too. Obama’s Army flak, Colonel Billy Buckner, spokesman for Joint Task Force-Haiti — “a group representing various Obama administration agency heads” the NavyTimes.com report tells us — says that our commanders are “smart” not to fly the flag.
“Our commanders are smart and intuitively understand their mission here in Haiti, and clearly the sensitivities that come with supporting the mission,” Buckner said. A U.S. flag went up at a temporary consular station set up in the first few days on the airport tarmac, according to Charles Luoma-Overstreet, a State Department spokesman in Haiti.
“Apparently, the prime minister (Jean-Max Bellerive) saw this” and thought it appeared as if the United States were taking over the airport, Luoma-Overstreet said.
He said Bellerive said something to U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten, who agreed that flying the flag wasn’t a good idea and told the consular officials to take it down.
Notice how it went from “the commanders” being “smart” enough to understand the situation to Obama’s Ambassador to Haiti ordering the flag be removed? In other words, despite the Colonel trying to make it seem as if the commanders on the ground are all for this dearth of Old Glory, it really ends up being a political decision by Obama and his cohorts who are ashamed of America and willing to let anyone denigrate her.
Does anyone really think that PM Bellerive would have persisted in his loose observation that the U.S. was an “occupying force” amidst all the aid flowing into his country? And even if he did, so what? The aid we were supplying is obviously far more important than a cheap political maneuver by Bellerive.
Still, this shows the lack of spine Obama has when standing up to foreign criticism. Even this offhanded comment from Bellerive was enough for Obama to slight his own army and his own countrymen by removing Old Glory from sight in Haiti.
If Obama is this much of a linguini-spined sort of a leader, what will happen to us if he faces a real foreign crisis?
Here is one of the sneaky tricks that the Old Media plays in order to support a cause. In this case it’s the Associated Press coming to the aid of Obamacare with “news” that a “Catholic” hospital group is coming out in support of Obamacare. Of course, the AP does not inform the reader that this purported Catholic group is not associated with the Church and is not authorized to speak for Catholics but it conflates this “Catholic” group with Catholics as if they do anyway.
With a headline that screams, “Catholic Hospitals Support Health Care Bill,” the AP’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports that the Catholic Health Association has come out in support of Obamacare despite the federal funding of abortion.
Naturally this report of Catholics in support of Obamacare is meant to fool readers into thinking that the Catholic Church itself, or some important segment of Catholics, are in support of Obamacare. If all you read is the headline and the first two paragraphs you might come away thinking that “Catholic Hospitals” support Obamacare.
Later in the story, after the lede, Alonso-Zaldivar does delve into some of the controversy amongst Catholics concerning the federal funding for abortion in Obamacare and states that the Church itself is still not supporting Obama’s takeover of our healthcare — this is good — but Alonso-Zaldivar never does fully explain that the group he is discussing is NOT a real “Catholic” organization.
You see, the Catholic Health Association is a for profit company that works for some Catholic hospitals as a sort of trade association. It isn’t part of the Church nor does it represent any official group of religious Catholics, nor does it serve as a source of Catholic teachings.
The truth is that CHA chief Carol Keehan is paid around $800,000 a year to advocate for this trade association, not the Catholic Church. She is not an altruist like nearly every other member of the actual Church that serves in an official capacity.
Kehan’s interest is to make money not to serve the Catholic Church and its doctrine. Naturally, Alonso-Zaldivar doesn’t inform his readers of any of this, leading the reader to assume that the CHA represents Catholics.
So, readers are left thinking that “Catholic hospitals” are in support of Obamacare yet are never informed of the capacity in which this Catholic hospital group serves Catholics… or rather doesn’t serve Catholics. And why is this so important right now? We all know that this coming week will find Obamacare facing a crucial and perhaps final push. This report is meant to help Obamacare pass. Plain and simple.
Pajamas Media is capitalizing on its earlier coverage of the Tea Party movement and has launched Tea Party TV. As the PR release says, “Expanding on its coverage of the National Tea Party Convention last week, PJTV announced its launch of Tea Party TV, offering comprehensive coverage of the Tea Party movement. The cornerstone of the Tea Party TV coverage will be a twice-a-week Internet TV show hosted by Glenn Reynolds and AlfonZo Rachel, well-known commentators on PJTV. ” Since the original PR release, they’ve also added Dana Loesch to Reynolds and Rachel. It’s “the best way to stay informed about the Tea Party movement,” they claim.
So, what is it all, anyway? To answer that I chatted with Glenn Reynolds and we talked about all things Tea Party. Coming down from the stomach flu as he was, we still had a lively talk.
I asked Glenn what sort of future he saw for the tea parties and he said that he was an early booster of the movement even when folks like Roger Simon thought it was all a flash in the pan and would go nowhere. “I think it is the most genuine outbreak of popular grassroots political activism in my lifetime,” Reynolds said, “and so that’s a pretty big deal and I think it’s coming to a crucial time for the country as well.”
Reynolds told me that PJTV wanted to cover the Tea Party movement because the Old Media was doing its best to ignore the whole thing. He praised PJTV as being one of the few to “put eyes on what is the biggest thing politically that’s been going on” in the nation.
One of my worries about the Tea Party movement is that it just might suffer from being too widely diffused. I asked Glenn if he thought it might suffer from not having a few central figures that can be focused upon.
Reynolds:The thing I’ve learned from the internet is that you can accomplish a huge amount with searches of popular entries and you can get more from the Internet in a period of a few weeks to a few months with people who just sort of drop whatever they’re doing and get involved, than you can do in years or decades of professional organization, but I’ve also learned if you want somebody to stick on something and keep plugging, it helps to have somebody who’s paid to deliver it. And that obviously is something you aren’t going to have in a grassroots organization very much.
Keeping with the question of long-term effectiveness, I asked Reynolds how long he felt the movement would remain potent?
Reynolds: I think that it’s going to last through the next election and probably through the election after and what’s going to happen after that is, you know, a lot of the grassroots enthusiasm will fade but it’s going [to] fade and some people [will] just find something else to do which may be political or not. And on the other side of it, it’s going – people are going to leave the Tea Party movement and they’re going to run for office themselves, become cabinets themselves, become precinct chairman or county chairman or members of the state or national party committees and things like that. And you know, that’s what normally happens with grassroots movement if they’re successful, which is, that they become part of the mainstream.
But what of the supposed extremists in the Tea Party movement, I asked. Won’t that just introduce the wackos, as the left and the Old Media claims?
Reynolds: The New Left took the Democrats further away from the mainstream of the American public, its true. But I think the Tea Party is moving the Republicans more in line with the mainstream to the American Public, so it’s more likely to have productive effects.
There is no political movement that doesn’t [have] fringes, but compared to the new Black Panther Party which is getting kissy face from Eric Holder, compared with Bill Ayers, compared with Bernadine Dohrn, compared with Van Jones these are people at the core of the administration Democratic party today, the Tea Party has got no fringe at all.
I pointed out that the Old Media focuses on what they portray as the Tea Party extremists, but it ignores all the extremists always in attendance at the left’s protests. There are actual communists, anarchists, radical abortionists, even animal rights and enviro terrorists but you never see these whack-jobs in the news.
Reynolds: Well, when we had the anti-war protest in 2003, 2004 with the almost sole exception of David Korn at the nation, nobody was willing to point out that those movements were organized by people who are literally, not pejoratively, literally communists. David Korn was we talked about Answer and the Workers World Party and the people who are providing the organizational infrastructure for those big marches on Washington and he wrote about in the nation and in L.A. weekly but places like Washington Post and the New York Times pretended that these are just ordinary mom-and-pop types of middle America coming down. When they don’t give that kind of a treatment to the Tea Party, but that is because they are fundamentally dishonest in their reporting.
I brought up another one of my worries for the candidates that try to rely on Tea Party groups and that is money. The sad fact is that politics means spending money. I asked Glenn if he thought that the Tea Party groups could raise the money necessary to help a candidate they are supporting win an election?
Reynolds: There are three angles to the money front. Angle number one is that in many ways Tea Party activism is the substitute for cash, that is to say, you don’t have to pay people to go out and do yourself because Tea Party people will do it for free.
I read over 6000 people traveled in from out of state to work as volunteers for Scott Brown and you know, and so that’s as good as money and indeed a lot of the publicity, a lot of the support of the Tea Party people produce is far more valuable than paid political ads.
The second thing is that yes, they do raise money as you’ve seen, for example, in the Scott Brown money bombs and for that matter with some of the other fundraising efforts.
The third part is that the real impact of the Tea Party rule on money has in some sense been a dog who didn’t bark which is say since 2005, 2006 Republicans have had a hard time raising money from the grassroots. And those are, I think, the same Tea Party people who decided to quit giving to the Republican Party when they felt it wasn’t living up to it’s principles.
My next question was about candidates claiming to be “the Tea Party candidate.” I think it is a mistake for a candidate to claim this mantle because there are so many groups, no national organization, and therefore it is a bit disingenuous for a candidate to say “I am the Tea Party candidate.” Plus it seems that this could actually work cross-ways and make Tea Party groups mad at the candidate that makes the claim without really having the solid support to back it up.
Reynolds: Well, the problem with that is there is no Tea Party to give you the nomination. The Tea Party is a movement it’s not party. If you support Tea Party principles and Tea Party people back here, then you are [a] Tea Party candidate but you can’t become one by calling yourself one and I suspect people [are] really pretty good at spotting the phony.
Well, it was a very good interview and I was glad Mr. Reynolds took the time with me. I asked him if he had anything to close with about PJTV Tea Party TV and here is what he said…
Reynolds: I think the Tea Party is going to be fun. Dana Loesch has come on board to Spearhead and she’s terrific for a number of reasons, one is she’s just terrific. She’s a really smart, savvy person. She’s very good on radio and TV, and you know does a fair amount of it. I mean she was one of the real movers and shakers in the St. Louis Tea Party movement which is one of the more successful Tea Party movements around the country. So she’s really a great person to have involved and the goal is going to be to really get out there and put the spotlight on people who are actually doing stuff. You know, the stars of Tea Party TV will be the Tea Party activists who are out there doing things and that’s something I’ve done to some degree to my own show on PJTV and will continue to do. But Tea Party TV is just a way of throwing more focus on that and more organized in the same way.
So, once again, thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the time. Please do check out Tea Party TV, folks.
Here is one of the sneaky tricks that the Old Media plays in order to support a cause. In this case it’s the Associated Press coming to the aid of Obamacare with “news” that a “Catholic” hospital group is coming out in support of Obamacare. Of course, the AP does not inform the reader that this purported Catholic group is not associated with the Church and is not authorized to speak for Catholics but it conflates this “Catholic” group with Catholics as if they do anyway.
So, what is it all, anyway? To answer that I chatted with Glenn Reynolds and we talked about all things Tea Party. Coming down from the stomach flu as he was, we still had a lively talk.