I think that will pretty much cover it. More later...Tuesday, June 23, 2009
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Obama's Press Conference: The Fiction Starts To Crack
About what I expected, but with a few unintentionally humorous twists.Apparently even some of the press has begun to realize that there isn't any there there, and the tone of today's press conference was somewhat more contentious and a tad less obsequious than usual for Obama.
Barry Zero and his handlers apparently realize that the wind has shifted a bit. They've gone beyond just relying on feeding answers to Obama via teleprompter. Now They're apparently coreographing the questions in advance! And from HuffPo, no less!
Obama made the predictable noises about the world being 'appalled' by the Iranian violence, which he of course condemned ( at least as of last Saturday).After which Major Garrett of FOX asked him how long it took for him to be concerned, and whether Senators McCain and Lindsay Graham's remarks on the subject had maybe prodded him a little bit. Obama fluffed that off with a kind of Kerry-esque 'I was appalled before I was appalled' non-answer, and again reiterated that this was an Iranian matter that the US could not interfere in. We can't really make any demands of Iran...who do you think these people are, Israel? And of course, we're still going to have the mullah's diplomatic hirelings over for Fourth of July barbecue.
I particularly liked the first question: "Your administration has said that the offer to talk to Iran's leaders remains open. Can you say if that's still so even with all the violence that has been committed by the government against the peaceful protesters? And if it is, is there any red line that your administration won't cross where that offer will be shut off?
Heh!
Obama's non-answer basically was 'uhh, we'll have to wait and see.'
As in 'We might have to rethink this if London, New York or Tel Aviv end up with a mushroom cloud hanging over them.'
No questions on North Korea, by the way...
Obama hit all the expected talking points about health care, again calling it a necessity, not a luxury.And he took the opportunity to do some marvelous Clinton-esque parsing.
Originally, the One has sought to calm the waters by repeating something he keeps saying over and over again:. “There’s no doubt that we must preserve what’s best about our health care system, and that means allowing Americans who like their doctors and their health care plans to keep them,” he said.
Except, like almost everything else with this president, that's a flat out lie, and they're barely willing to make the effort to hide it anymore
Obama almost admitted that to ABC's Jake Tapper when Tapper asked him whether Americans would lose their insurance if their employers decided to dump them into a new government-run plan.
“When I say if you have your plan and you like it… and you have a doctor and you like your doctor, you don’t have to change plans, what I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform,” Obama said.
I swear, Barry Zero does Clinton better than Clinton, even. No, the government won't force people to change plans. They'll just come up with legislation that 'encourages' private employers to do it for them by making employer provided care more expensive and problematic to maintain as private care tries to compete with the government subsidized product, and they'll make it expensive for employees to stay private by taxing those private health care benefits as income.
Just for the record, the non-partisan analysts from the Congressional Budget Office have estimated that anywhere from 23 million to 119 million workers would lose their current health care, depending on the end result of the legislation as employers drop health care coverage and point their employees towards the government funded option. Eventually, that will be the only option, if this particular crack peddler has his way.
Oh and by the way, Obama was outright lying again when he stated that healthcare is "the primary driver of federal deficits."
In 2008, according to the CBO figures the feds spent a total of $600,121,000,000 on healthcare, including Medicare and Medicaid. That's 20.4% of the $2.93 trillion the government spent last year, slightly less than we spent on social security ( $615,256,000,000 or about 20.9%) or on national defense ( about $607,863,000,000). The real engine driving the deficit is Obama's ridiculous 'stimulus' plan. Although the estimated $1.2 trillion cost for his healthcare scam will likely be a close second.
On the economy, we finally got a clear look at what the Obama Administration is all about - making it up as they go along.
Here's the One on the economy:I think it's fair to say that, keep in mind the stimulus package was the first thing we did, and we did it a couple of weeks after inauguration.
At that point, nobody understood what the depths of this recession were going to look like. If you recall, it was only significantly later that we suddenly get a report that the economy had tanked. And so it's not surprising, then, that we missed the mark in terms of our estimates of where unemployment would go.
I think it's pretty clear now that unemployment will end up going over 10 percent, if you just look at the pattern, because of the fact that even after employers and businesses start investing again and start hiring again, typically it takes a while for that employment number to catch up with economic recovery. And we're still not at actual recovery yet.
So I anticipate that this is going to be a -- a difficult -- difficult year, a difficult period. I ..I am not suggesting that I have a crystal ball, since I -- since you just threw back at us our last prognosis, let's not -- let's not engage in another one.
In other words, the country was placed in massive debt and the deficit was ballooned up to the stratosphere just as something they thought they'd try without really looking at things too carefully. It's as if the guiding principle here was 'hey, let's throw it our there and if it doesn't work, stuff happens. Besides we can always blame it on Bush.'
To get the 'stimulus' done, Obama and his disciples rushed the bill through Congress so fast nobody could actually read it, locked the GOP out of conference so they couldn't debate on what was in the bill and ignored countless economic experts that accurately foretold that the bill would cost more jobs than if we had just done nothing.
Of course, the fact that most of the money was earmarked to go to Obama's political allies is a just another one of those funny coincidences that seem to be so much a part of this administration.
All in all, a stellar performance by the Prevaricator-In-Chief.One has to wonder how long he's going to be able to keep the act going over.
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Obama Administration Wants Settlement Freeze To Include Jerusalem
The US State Department confirmed to day what I've been telling you from day one.Obama is not just invested in prohibiting Jews from building homes in Judea and Samaria (AKA the West Bank. He's including Jerusalemin the area he wants to see judenrein:Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem are included in the US demand that Israel halt "settlement" construction, including for natural growth, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told The Jerusalem Post during a press briefing on Monday.
"We're talking about all settlement activity, yes, in the area across the line," he said, referring to neighborhoods in Jerusalem over the Green Line, or pre-1967 armistice line, in response to a question on where America's calls to halt construction in the settlements would be applied.
Even so, Kelly had no immediate reaction to the Ministry of Housing and Construction's inclusion in the draft 2009-10 state budget of funds for the capital's Jewish Har Homa neighborhood or for one in the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim. {....)
The Obama administration had not officially clarified its position on Jewish neighborhoods over the Green Line but within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, but the Netanyahu government had been working under the assumption that US officials' call to halt even natural growth in the settlements did not refer to neighborhoods in the city, according to high-placed government officials.
Kelly's comments Monday, however, made clear that Jerusalem was included, suggesting that efforts to finesse the disagreement could be further complicated.
"Complicated" isn't the word. It should be clear to the Israelis that the Obama Administration is looking for a confrontation with Israel. I use the old Nazi term 'judenrein' ( clean of Jews) deliberately, because that's just what the disciple of Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farakhan is advocating. He's not saying a word about stopping illegal Arab construction in these areas. Our supposedly 'post-racial' president essentially seeks to make all of Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem restricted neighborhoods...no Jews allowed
Obama is seeking this confrontation with Israel deliberately. Aside from his opposition to Israel on ideological grounds, Barry Zero sees the Jews of Israel as an easy target, compared with dealing with actual threats to the US like Iran or North Korea.
The Israelis ought to understand if they don't already that Obama has decided to throw them under the bus in favor of allying the US to the Muslim world and pandering to Islamist anti-Semitism.
America's Jews should wake up from their stupor and realize this too. Some of them may not realize it, but the Obama administration's animus towards Israel directly affects them too, in ways they can't even imagine.Obama's 'Emergency' Press Conference
What we'll hear will likely be a stew, containing:
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
The One is scheduled to do an 'emergency' press conference at about 12:30PM EST today. The scare quotes around 'emergency' are because I doubt Barry Zero planned this one too far in advance. His poll numbers on things like ObamaCare and a few other items are slipping badly, so he's likely going to try to shore things up before the big ABC infomercial tomorrow night.
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