The day’s top political news:
Daily Presidential Tracking Poll
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 29% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty percent (40%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -11.
That’s the first time his ratings have reached double digits in negative territory (see trends).
These updates are based upon nightly telephone interviews and reported on a three-day rolling average basis.
Today is the first update based entirely upon interviews conducted after the President’s prime time televised press conference. The number who Strongly Approve of the President has remained unchanged since the press conference but the number who Strongly Disapprove has gone up by five percentage points (from 35% on Wednesday morning to 40% today).
The proposed health-insurance bill from the House of Representatives refers to mentally disabled people as "retarded"
The term advocates, relatives and physicians find outdated and offensive. The bill refers to: "A hospital or a nursing facility or intermediate-care facility for the mentally retarded . . ."
The phrase could cause more problems with groups for the developmentally disabled, who were angered when President Obama referred to his poor bowling skills on "The Tonight Show" as "like the Special Olympics." Obama later apologized.
No matter how he dresses up his language, Obama’s health bill would ration care for disabled people just as it does for Senior Citizens. Liberal Democrats both groups to “die and get out of the way”.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07262009/news/nationalnews/retarded_house_bill_181448.htm
CBO deals new blow to health plan
For the second time this month, congressional budget analysts have dealt a blow to the Democrat's health reform efforts, this time by saying a plan touted by the White House as crucial to paying for the bill would actually save almost no money over 10 years.
On Saturday, the Congressional Budget Office said the proposal to give an independent panel the power to keep Medicare spending in check would only save about $2 billion over 10 years- a drop in the bucket compared to the bill's $1 trillion price tag.
On his White House blog, Orszag – who served as CBO director in 2007 and 2008 – downplayed the office's small probable savings number in favor of the proposal's more speculative long-term benefits.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25415.html
Opinion:
Today’s Democrats: by their fears and terrors can we know and understand them
Liberal Democrats are scared these days. They are actually terrified in some cases.
What scares them tells normal Americans a lot about Democrats. In the back channels of Congress, Democrats are afraid of words that might communicate an honest thought, position, or concept.
Congressmen have access to “frarnking privileges” – a perk that allows them to send mail through which they can communicate directly with the people they represent. Once, we would have assumed the “franking” procedure to be unfiltered – a Congressman allowed to write unimpeded – providing of course, he didn’t violate basic principles of decency.
Under the Democrats who run things in the House of Representatives today, that is no longer the case.
As we saw in the ominous powers depicted by George Orwell in his book dealing with an overpowering dictatorship, Democrats are blocking things from Republican mailings. Republicans are blocked from speaking the truth.
It is becoming very obvious in the case of Obama’s scheme to pass his pathway to socialized medicine. For the record, Democrats will not allow Republicans to speak of “government-run healthcare”…despite the fact Obama’s plan for redoing our health care will be government run.
WARNING! Don’t disturb Democrats with truth or fact when they are struggling to make a point. Don’t speak the unspeakable, and Democrats determining what is unspeakable.
We have seen this censorship earlier. A few years back, Democrats banned use of the term “Global War on Terror”. Perhaps banning such a discussion tells us why Democrats historically have been impotent in dealing with terror. Remember Clinton’s refusal to take Osama Bin Laden into custody when OBL was offered. Clinton refused several times, thus making 9/11 possible, maybe predictable. But I digress.
Last week, some Republicans planned to mail their constituents a diagram depicting the bureaucratic entanglement being proposed by Democrats as part of their healthcare plan. Democrats don’t want “the folks back home” to see that chart. They blocked the mail.
Democrat blocking of illustrations showing how government run healthcare will work, tells anyone watching that Democrats don’t want normal America to know and understand what they are contriving to do.
Note Democrat failure to note how their plan conspires against senior citizens and the handicapped. (Obama’s snide reference to the “special Olympics” is a matter of record, of course)
Obama, former Senator Tom Daschle, and other liberal Democrats contend senior citizens have an obligation to :”just die and get out of the way”. They have similar feelings regarding handicapped Americans as well. Democrats can be counted on to object to stating those facts as well – stay tuned.
Today is Sarah Palin’s last day as Governor of Alaska. She is stepping down early, and many believe it’s because of the cruel and false attacks on members of her own family by liberals.
Indeed, liberal Democrats are terrified of Palin, and that has fueled the most overwhelming crush of attack journalism and political smears seen in recent history. The media took a leading role and slandered Palin at every turn. They even attacked her handicapped grand child. The children and families of political figures are usually immune from attack – but that is not the case with Palin. A late night clown, David Letterman, had no reluctance to make a crude and obscene reference to Palin’s 14 year old daughter. Shame on Letterman, but he is not unique among way out liberals.
I cant blame Palin for stepping down. Liberal Democrats found willing conspirators among trial lawyers. They had no reluctance to cramming the halls of justice with wave after wave of writs and complaints that were all proven to have no substance. Trial lawyers are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats, of course. Their abuse of the legal system in the case of Sarah Palin has little parallel.
Oh well. She resigned and that story is ended.
But real concerns continue in the case of liberal Democrats and their on-going conspiracies. Obama’s “Cap and Trade” scam faces a vote this fall in the Senate. If passed, every family in America will experience an immediate increase of several thousand dollars in their taxes, and additional thousands in increased prices elsewhere.
Obama’s government run healthcare might make it to a vote before Congress adjourns. Passage would mean those in Congress who voted for it, chose Obama’s “healthcare on the cheap” over honest quality. The issue is just that clear, just that simple, and just that factual.
For senior citizens (and someday, all Americans will be senior citizens) passage will mean rationed care and a future in which access to health care and treatment will be up to Washington bureaucrats who owe obeisance to liberal Democrat politicians.
Never forget, Obama is a product of the Chicago Democrat Machine – the most corrupt political organization in America.
Buddy
The day’s top blogs:
1.
Amnesty disguised as Health Care Reform
What could be the real rationale for Democrats ramming health care reform down our throats? A witness to a conference in Washington last month described the nature of their efforts.
I want to tell you that last week I attended a conference on health care reform sponsored by La Raza. And I will tell you that what they had to say, Mark, is scarier than anything that's been said so far on the health care plan.
The kind of comments that were made and the notes that I took... they started the conference out by saying "America does not need health care reform, but Latino immigrants need health care reform."
And someone from Menendez' office [Ed.: Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ] promised that he would make sure that "the useless barriers of citizenship would not be in this bill" and that he would make sure that they would use keywords like "streamline"...
(NOTE: “Useless barriers of citizenship”? It is possible to imagine a more outrageous concept? Menendez seems to admit citizenship means nothing to him and his followers. Of course Democrats refuse to oppose the invasion of illegal aliens the US suffers. NO healthcare should be available to illegal aliens. Only emergency care should be on tap for them. They don’t share the cost, they don’t share the burden, they should not enjoy the fruits of labor from real Americans.)
It was La Raza, the Childrens Defense Fund and Senator Menendez from New Jersey, a representative from his office...
...Yes [they said they would get free health care for illegal aliens], these are my notes, Mark. They actually got up and said "Latino children need health care more than whites". And then they would say things like "you must go out into your communities, use words like 'streamline', use phrases like 'all workers' and 'all families'," because they said -- and I quote -- "If the American people find out that this bill is about giving health care to non-citizens, they will rise up against it."
...One of the quotes they said was, "We want to make sure we take care of barriers like verification, but we can streamline programs to the more affluent" and, quote, "Useless treatments for the elderly can be gone because we don't need to spend money for people who are going to die anyway."
That's a direct quote from that meeting. They also said, "We are very concerned there will be an effort to include" the illegal immigrants in this argument, so "we must make sure that we focus this" to the American people that it's looking like we want "health care for everyone".
And they also said that 75% of the children who will be picked up in this will be non-citizens and that 44% of the uninsured are non-citizens and they can't possibly allow the American people to know this." [Ed: Oops!]
Menendez' office said that he's going to make sure that "a family of four that makes $66,000 a year or less will pay nothing at all for the new health care. And he was the one who said he was going to get rid of specifics like "citizenship status" and focus on, quote, "equity for all workers".
And he said he's going to make sure that the Latino immigrants are the focus of the health care reform.
And La Raza said if they get this, they don't even care about amnesty, because they've fixed it so that one family member can apply for all extended family members. And... Mark, if you think we have a problem with illegal immigration now, wait 'til you see the borders when this thing gets passed.
"If the American people found out?"
Gee, what a surprise. A group that preaches racial superiority and divisiveness wants to enact a stealth illegal immigration bill -- not dissimilar to chain migration. The bill will reward illegal immigration to the direct detriment of all American taxpayers and especially the elderly.
Kind of puts Judge Sotomayor's membership in La Raza in a new light, doesn't it?
Groups like La Raza encourage the Balkanization of America. They promote mutually hostile political groups that do not form a "melting pot", that do not utilize a common language, and that do not share the principles of America's founding.
Fifty years from now, if La Raza gets its way, America will look more like Yugoslavia in 1993 than America.
Update: A press release issued by La Raza on 6/15 mirrors the caller's report (hat tip: Oil for Immigration):
As our nation’s leaders consider health care reform in the coming weeks, NCLR (National Council of La Raza), the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States, strongly urges President Obama and Congress to make every effort to ensure that health care reform reaches all communities. No single community stands to gain as much from this important debate as Latinos. In the U.S., one out of every three uninsured persons and roughly 40% of all uninsured children are Latino. NCLR stands for health care reform that makes coverage affordable and accessible for everyone—all families and all children.
..."This debate should be about health care for all, and setting the nation on a pathway to future health and well-being. Adding layers of immigrant verification and bureaucratic red tape to a new health care system would guarantee that millions of citizen children are effectively barred from accessing preventive care and would raise the cost of health care... we are extremely concerned that some view health reform as a way to scapegoat immigrants... Making health care easier to use and accessible for all workers and children is simple common sense."
2.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/2178136/subversives-for-obama.thtml
Subversives for Obama
Melanie Philips The Spectator
There are two American election campaigns currently running. The first, in the mainstream media, accepts Barack Obama at face value, no questions asked, while it viciously turns over Sarah Palin and her family whom it subjects to lies, smears and character assassination. The second, being conducted in the blogosphere and (with one or two notable exceptions such as the Wall Street Journal) not alluded to at all by the mainstream media, is the site of verbal warfare between Camp Obama and bloggers who are practising journalism as it used to be practised – going behind the propaganda to dig out information and asking questions about it. The blogosphere is not only rebutting the Palin lies but also piling up the most disturbing revelations about Obama’s background and associations -- compounded by the troubling manner in which Camp Obama responds to these discoveries.
A few months ago, a claim was made by former Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton that Obama had been funded through Harvard law school by Khalid Al-Mansour, a ‘mentor’ to the founders of the Black Panther party and advisor to ‘one of the world’s richest men,’ Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal. It was Prince Alwaleed whose $10 million check to help rebuild Manhattan after 9/11 was refused by New York mayor Rudy Guiliani because the Saudi prince hinted publicly that America’s pro-Israel policies were to blame for the attacks.
According to this story by Kenneth Timmerman, Camp Obama denied this claim -- and referred to a story on Politico.com in which reporter Ben Smith wrote that ‘a spokesman for Sutton’s family, Kevin Wardally’ said that Sutton had been mistaken when he made those comments. But when contacted, Sutton’s family not only denied that Sutton had misspoken but also said they had never even heard of Kevin Wardally – who appears to work for a Harlem political consulting firm.
So the claim that Obama was funded through Harvard by a radical Black Muslim activist with ties to the Saudis remains on the table.
Some of the most troubling questions, however, arise from Obama’s relationship with the unreprentant former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers. Obama has been at pains to play down this relationship, dismissing Ayers as just ‘a guy who lives in my neighborhood,’ and ‘not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.’ But thanks to the exemplary and important journalism of Stanley Kurtz, it is becoming ever clearer that such claims are deeply disingenuous and conceal a significant and long-lasting working relationship with a man who has never renounced his terrorist past. This relationship centred upon a fund called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), which although founded by former ambassador Walter Annenberg to improve Chicago’s schools, funnelled some $100 million into the hands of radical activists. The CAC was the brainchild of Ayers – and for four years in the 1990s, Obama was chairman of the board.
In the Wall Street Journal, Kurtz writes that documents in the CAC archives make it clear that William Ayers and Barack Obama were partners in the CAC.
In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the ‘Collaborative,’ which shaped education policy... The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda...
The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto. In works like ‘City Kids, City Teachers’ and ‘Teaching the Personal and the Political,’ Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. ..
The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.
Kurtz has also been trying to discover just who appointed Obama to the CAC board.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's ‘recruitment’ to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
Here, Kurtz adds that Obama has sought to obscure the role Ayers played in choosing
Obama to lead the CAC -- and also details how the CAC tried to obstruct Kurtz’s inquiries by blocking his access to the records. And here Camp Obama responds to these claims, along with Kurtz’s demolition of that response.
Nor is the relationship with Ayers the only radical question-mark over Obama’s associations. Indeed, Obama appears to be the front-man for a vast network of the most subversive radicals in the USA – an alphabet soup from the FBI menu, a veritable Rolodex of the American counter-culture. WorldNetDaily reveals:
The official campaign website of Sen. Barack Obama has completely scrubbed a series of user-generated blog postings on the candidate's site by a former top communist activist who is an associate of former Weathermen terrorist leader William Ayers. The move has raised questions regarding Obama's relationship with the deleted blogger, Mike Klonsky, who runs an education organization that was founded by Ayers and that received a substantial grant from a group directed by Obama.
Small wonder Camp Obama is sensitive to the association. Klonsky, a professor of education and leader of the New Communist movement, was national secretary of the radical group Students for a Democratic Society. In 1969, he was one of five SDS members arrested at the organization’s Chicago national headquarters for assaulting a police officer, interfering with a firefighter, and inciting mob action. As Global Labor and Politics has reported, Klonsky went on to form.
(NOTE: Obama has worked hard to hide his relationship with Ayers. No wonder. Ayers is an unapologetic domestic terrorist. “We did not bomb enough” is the message Ayers projected in an op-ed published the day 9/11 hit. We can speculate Ayers watched the attack with glee. Make no mistake about it – for Obama, Ayers is far more than “just some guy in the neighborhood”. Obama lies about his association with Ayers, but then Obama lies about a lot of things – including his own roots and early days.)
a pro-Chinese sect called the October League that later became the Beijing-recognized Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). As chairman of the party, Klonsky travelled to Beijing itself in 1977 and, literally, toasted the Chinese Stalinist leadership who, in turn, ‘hailed the formation of the CP(ML) as “reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people,” effectively recognizing the group as the all-but-official US Maoist party.’ (Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 228).
In 1991, Klonsky co-founded the Small Schools Workshop in Chicago – and his co-founder was one William Ayers.
AsTrevor Loudon continues to document, Klonsky and his Weather Underground friends Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are part of a far more extensive -- and organised – network of Subversives for Obama. In his latest post, Loudon concludes:
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are involved in an organisation uniting three Marxist parties, a host of ‘60s radicals and terrorists and a new generation of militant activists. That organisation has spawned a spin-off organisation specifically designed to put Barack Obama in the White House and to bring about massive social change across the US.
Barack Obama appears to sit on a nexus between Marxist revolutionary activists, unrepentant former terrorists, Black Power racists, Chicago mobsters – oh, and a Saudi who is trying to buy up America. If you were to turn up at US immigration control with a background of such associates, it’s a fair bet they wouldn’t let you off the air-bridge. Yet this man may well become President of the US! If any other candidate had had merely a fleeting relationship with William Ayers, his candidacy would have been terminated before it was even articulated -- let alone what we now know about Obama’s key role in Ayers’s CAC and its funding of radical groups; let alone the fact that Obama had been mentored during his formative years by a Communist Party plant; let alone his work for organisations modelled on the seditious philosophy of Saul Alinsky; let alone his two-decade membership of a Black Power church; let alone his relationship with fraudster Tony Rezko.
And yet despite all of this, virtually no-one in the mainstream media is asking any questions. Has there ever been a more staggering, surreal and scary race to the White House?
3
http://townhall.com/columnists/KevinMcCullough/2009/07/26/why_stupid_is_as_stupid_does
Why Stupid Is as Stupid Does
Kevin McCullough
If you're the leader of the free world, there may be a few things that take you by surprise from time to time. Planes flying into buildings of your largest city, or reporters from your hometown asking you a question in a press conference, one thing is for sure--these surprises will often tell everyone watching a little bit about who you really are.
So if a reporter from your home town, asks you a question that you probably shouldn't weigh in on then just say, "I have no comment on that at this time."
Also... If you intend on answering questions that you do not have the facts on, don't be blaming the media the next day and claiming they are "distracting" the American people from the important issue. Most Americans believe that the integrity of the President of the United States is a fairly important issue.
But perhaps the biggest lesson you might take away from President Obama's absolute choke-on-his-words finale to this past week’s press conference, is that perhaps the south side of Chicago is not where you should best form your opinion of municipal police departments. For while most of America was patently offended by the sliming of the entire Cambridge, Massachusetts police department in Obama's remarks--not even having the presence of mind to only slander the officers involved--the President didn't believe he had initially said anything wrong.
For you see, if you are from the south side of Chicago there are some things as a black man that you must never be allowed to believe. And if you are a political icon in that same community you are held to twice the amount of expectation on such things. Perhaps some of the most important ones being, "The police are always wrong, they must always be thought of with suspicion, and they always racially profile."
The rationale for some suspicion is probably well founded given African Americans’ history with the city over the years. But on some level it is simultaneously highly irrational given the large percentage of Chicago police officers who are in fact African American.
(NOTE: Make no mistake about it – Obama’s intemperate slander of law enforcement officers, was no honest slip of the tongue. The slander reveals a racist mindset Obama holds even now. No wonder, after all, for 20 years, he embraced, endorsed, and supported the virulent racism of Jeremiah Wright, a preacher who makes no secret of his hatred of white people and of this country itself. The theology of Jeremiah Wright was on display in Obama’s handling of this scandal.)
What I've known about President Obama going back all the way to when I covered his years in the state legislature, is that he is most transparent when he does not think. What we saw in the press conference this week was an example of that, and all the mea culpa since has been pure damage control. In other words when ignorantly (literally not knowing the facts of the case) the President pronounced the police as having acted "stupidly" it just rolled out of him naturally. Because on the south side of Chicago it is what you are taught to think, believe, and joke about with one another as the patrol cars come cruising by.
Jesse Jackson, Rainbow-Push Coalition, and the rest of the industry of outrage that make a living off of spreading such a victimhood mentality in their communities have been doing it for years. To be very honest its one of the reasons newly immigrated blacks from Africa or the Caribbean have a very hard time fitting in to such communities. As immigrants they see the opportunities in front of them as blessings and they cannot comprehend why some domestic, multi-generational black Americans won't seize them. Victimhood is a state of mind first and foremost. Overcoming the barriers that keeps one down is exceedingly liberating.
But on Chicago's south side, fellow African Americans make large sums of money convincing some that they must remain angry, suspicious, and sadly--victims.
One would think that Obama's ascendency to the White House could have hoped to have turned that idea, even just a little bit, on it's ear. One would believe that if a man running for President was going to make the ideas of "hope and change" come about that he would let those fundamentally good virtues take root in his own heart first.
One could probably justify Obama’s misstep and say it had been a hard week, his plans that he had labored long hours over (universal government sponsored health care) were twisting in the wind and up in smoke and that even his own horrible performance in his press conference had left him so exhausted and he simply dropped his guard for the final question.
If that is true then the first thing that should have happened the following morning was a publicly issued apology for tying the Cambridge Police Department to, in Obama word's, "the long history of racial profiling."
He should've also on some level taken ownership and admitted that he was the one “acting stupidly” in calling the Cambridge Police stupid.
It also would go against nature to do so. At least the nature that has poisoned the minds of those who have made a living on Chicago's south side teaching their children to trust gang-bangers more than uniformed officers, especially when significant numbers of Chicago's finest are in fact African Americans, who love and wish to protect the streets they come from.
And one aside here concerning Mr. Gates, maybe next time the President could advise his friend to also respect the police and simply show them his identification, instead of immediately becoming belligerent and calling the officers racist, especially when they've simply shown up to help protect his home.
Clean living and a slow temper solve many of life's problems in advance.
But so does waiting till you have all the facts before slandering those who protect and defend us.
Doing otherwise is just plain stupid!
Kevin McCullough is the nationally syndicated host of "'Xtreme' Radio and columnist based in New York. He blogs at www.muscleheadrevolution.com.
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