First, at the American Thinker are some harsh words on Obama and his acolytes, whom the author describes as modern day thieves.
February 17, 2009
The Prince of Thieves
By Lance Fairchok
The era of Obama-inspired bi-partisan goodwill was very brief. As with all his carefully choreographed pandering, it was in large measure a rhetorical tool. In the language of average Americans a “rhetorical tool” equates to a lie, a lie told to get votes. Obama was very good at convincing otherwise intelligent people that he was sincere, and the “Hope” and “Change” he would bring to often imaginary problems would make America a better nation, bringing opposing sides together to tackle all those problems in consensus and warm fellowship. It was all nonsense. A good speech does not make good government. We are beginning to get an idea of what the next four years will be like. It will be a purely partisan disaster.
Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer is a good example of the new spirit of the Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress. He thinks he knows the mind of the American people, assuming, no doubt, that the Obama electoral euphoria will suspend their capacity for critical analysis. As the deceptively named “stimulus” package is signed today and application and the true magnitude of its outrageous provisions continue to be revealed, the civil lethargy that the Democrats have so far profited from will increasingly start to fall away. The massive trillion-dollar scam will make millions of hard working self-supporting Americans angry, very, very angry. […]
The costs to those of us who still believe in limited government and responsible citizenship will far outweigh any benefits that may fall our way as we fund the entitlements for the minority who expect, and even demand, that government care for them in all things. This is what we saw after Katrina writ large, the nation believed the exaggerations, and New Orleans sucked down billions. The city is still as corrupt and blighted, crime ridden and poverty-stricken and nothing has changed. This is what we can expect for the entire nation.
The redistribution of wealth, taking money from the producing part of society and transferring it to the special interests that take without giving back, is the road to ruin. Now that the singular success of America has somehow been transformed into its greatest sin, the socialists feel comfortable doing what was the political kiss of death only a few years ago. Such is the leftist “progressive” influence on our culture. We who have built and maintained and defended this nation must now support those who have done nothing, either to prepare for hard times or to succeed. Our charity is no longer voluntary and the fruits of our labors are now controlled by the whims of elites, like Schumer, Pelosi, and President Obama, who hold us and all we cherish in disdain. […]
President Obama is the Prince of Thieves, who with his minions in Congress will do more to undermine this nation in a few short years than all the decades of economic turmoil, cold war and the war on terror. He wraps his policies in moral platitudes, cynically using little old ladies at rallies to anchor his inconsistencies and lies in the minds of a credulous public. The press is his willing propagandist.
They are stealing our children’s and grandchildren’s future, they are stealing money that we toiled for, they are weakening our nation and embracing our enemies, and very soon they will steal our freedoms one at a time, hoping we do not notice. Talk radio is already in their sights. They are stealing America. If we let them.
Next, the inimitable Phyllis Schalfly talks about the stealth national health care component that Obama snuck into the stimulus package pork bill. (Oh, you didn’t know that we now have socialized health care? You do now.):
Obama Gives What the Doctor Did Not Order
by Phyllis Schlafly | 02/17/2009
… Liberals love to control and ration as much as they love to tax and spend. Al Gore has spent nearly a decade spewing the nonsense of "global warming," which is a device for government to control and ration energy.
Team Obama may have overplayed its hand in bringing control-and-ration to medical care. The news has spread like wildfire on the Internet and talk radio, and nonpolitical patients in doctors' waiting rooms can be heard talking about it.
The United States is different from Canada and England in an essential respect: Here a patient can get a diagnosis and life-saving treatment within days, if not hours. Ted Kennedy (age 76) received immediate surgery for his otherwise inoperable brain cancer, a use of scarce medical resources that rationing would not allow for an ordinary patient.
American patients who have cancer or other life-threatening problems need and get prompt care, and we don't want that to "change." In Canada, England and elsewhere, patients are deemed by the government to be unworthy of treatment due to age or severity of illness, and they die while sitting on waiting lists for rationed care.
There is more funding for this new Big Brother bureaucracy in the stimulus bill than for all the armed forces combined. Wasteful pork includes billions to pay for the U.S. Census (which Team Obama is already planning to manipulate), and silly carbon-capture demonstrations (to appease the global warming lobby).
Meanwhile, the stimulus bill lays the foundation for new federal surveillance over electronic medical records, with an online medical record for each and every American. The bill establishes a massive new "federal coordinating council for comparative clinical effectiveness research" to devise ways to ration care based on the bureaucrats' review of patient data.
There can be no patient privacy in a national database of medical records because government, insurers, employers, ex-spouses and hackers will find ways to access it. Doctors will spend more time surfing the Internet and typing in data than listening to patients, and of course there will be inevitable computer mistakes.
The declining American Medical Association (AMA), which is increasingly a shill for leftwing advocacy, tried to downplay the outrage of giving a government bureaucracy access to everyone's medical records and punishing doctors who don't treat as the government wants. But there is no denying the harm of this new system that facilitates government oversight of an electronic database and gives bureaucrats (who never went to medical school) the power to punish doctors who provide "too much" care. […]
Finally, a non-connected Jew-by-birth is finding Judaism … through anti-Semitism:
Hatred is Turning Me Into a Jew
By Nick Cohen
The Jewish Chronicle | Tuesday, February 17, 2009
… My great grandparents fled from the Tsarist Empire at the time of the pogroms, but their son, my grandfather, revolted. He became a Communist and married outside the faith. My father was brought up with no connection to Judaism and, inevitably, so was I.
My sole interest in Jewish concerns came from being a left-wing opponent of the far Right, and the blood-soaked antisemitic superstitions which turned Europe into a graveyard. When I was young, such attitudes seemed unproblematic. You did not have to be a Jew to oppose fascism; everyone I knew did that regardless of colour or creed.
Today the old certainties have gone because there are two far-right movements: the white neo-Nazi parties that the Left still opposes; and the clerical fascists of radical Islam which, extraordinarily, the modern Left succours and indulges. I am not only talking about Ken Livingstone, George Galloway and their gruesome accomplices in the intelligentsia. Wider liberal society is almost as complicit. It does not applaud the Islamist far Right, but it will not condemn it either. From the broadcasters, through the liberal press, the Civil Service, the Metropolitan Police, the bench of bishops and the judiciary, antisemitism is no longer an unthinkable mental deformation. As long as the conspiracy theories of the counter-enlightenment come from ideologues with dark rather than white skins, nominally liberal men and women will not speak out. […]
In any case, my experience of left-wing antisemitism has changed the way I think and made me, if you like, more Jewish.
Although I want to see every Israeli settlement on the West Bank dismantled, it was clear to me that when Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Israel it had declared war and had to accept the consequences. I would not have thought that five years ago.
You do not need me to add that mine is a minority point of view among liberals, and that British Jews are living through a very dangerous period. They are the only ethnic minority whose slaughter official society will excuse. If a mass murderer bombed a mosque or black Pentecostal church, no respectable person would say that the “root cause” of the crime was an understandable repulsion at the deeds of al-Qaeda or a legitimate opposition to mass immigration. Rightly, they would blame the criminal for the crime.
If a synagogue is attacked, I guarantee that within minutes the airwaves will be filled with insinuating voices insisting that the “root cause” of the crime was a rational anger at the behaviour of Israel or the Jewish diaspora.
Put like this, the position of British Jewry sounds grim. Remember, however, that the first aim of radical Islam is to subjugate Muslims. When brave feminists, gays, democrats and liberals in the Muslim world and in Britain’s Muslim communities make a stand, they, too, are accused of being the tools of Zionists.[…]
I will tell them that the opponents of totalitarianism must never be frightened. If their enemies say they are Jews, they should shrug and say: “All right, I am.” As long as readers of the Jewish Chronicle don’t object, of course.
It’s all pretty frightening, isn’t it?
Welcome to the future, suckers.
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