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Remember when liberals shrieked and wept about The Patriot Act, claiming that it would allow the Bush administration to spy on people's library reading records and destroy the Constitution? Remember when Barack Obama tried to filibuster against the Patriot Act because, even after 9/11, he didn't think a President should be entrusted those kinds of powers?
Well, times have changed. The House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, just quietly voted to renew The Patriot Act.
An optimist might say this is their belated way of admitting "Bush was right." A pessimist might say "the Democrats must really want to spy on someone." And a realist would point out that administration officials including Janet Napolitano, Eric Holder, and Robert Gibbs have repeatedly singled out "right wing" types and "military veterans" as being high on the list of people to keep an eye on.
Of course, they still can't listen in on tea party participants without a warrant, or fancy bugging technology, right? Think again. The FBI can (and increasingly does) turn on private cellphones remotely to use as listening devices...with no warrant necessary.All of which would really suck if we had a presidential administration that we couldn't trust with these powers. But fortunately, the Obama administration is GREAT! And we'll keep saying that until we can get the darned battery out of this cellphone...
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Unsurprisingly, Barack Obama's big bipartisan Healthcare Summit proved to be a crapfest of truly remarkable proportions - at least on the part of the Democrats.
The Republicans brought impressive ideas, facts, statistics, and proven methods of reducing healthcare costs...and raised concerns about huge budget deficits, new taxes and fines, the potential destruction of our medical system through government interference, and the unsustainable course of entitlement programs.
Typical of her party's rebuttals, Democrat Louise Slaughter countered with a heartbreaking story about a woman without dentures who "wore her dead sister's teeth, which of course were uncomfortable and did not fit."
She then asked, "Did you ever think in America that that's where we would be?" And truthfully, we have to answer "no." We never thought that America would actually have to debate which is more important: freedom...or free dentures.
Your tax dullards at work
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Today, Barack Obama is seeking Republican input and ideas on healthcare reform with the same enthusiasm and sincerity as Osama Bin Laden would show when seeking a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
The purpose of the meeting is not really to seek bipartisan solutions to real problems, but is instead pure political theater being presented as a prelude to the Democrats' reconciliation plan to ram through healthcare regulation against the will of the American people.
But is "reconciliation" to pass legislation with only 51 votes really such a terrible thing? All of these Democrats thought so in 2005...
• Barack Obama: "not what the founders intended."
• Hillary Clinton: "A bridge too far."
• Charles Schumer: "Checks and balances (will be)...evaporated by the nuclear option."
• Harry Reid: "The arrogance of power."
• Dianne Feinstein: "will turn the Senate into a body that can have its rules broken at any time."
• Joe Biden: "a naked power grab."
Today's Healthcare Summit is just a preview of coming attractions. The real show is about to begin.
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Despite promising to make job creation the "number one focus" of his administration in 2010, Barack Obama has done virtually nothing to help reduce unemployment while redoubling his efforts to force Obamacare down the throats of an unwilling public.
Experts say that the $15 billion "jobs bill" currently proposed by the Democrats is unlikely to spur significant new hiring. In contrast, the new Obama-version of healthcare reform may cost as much as $2 trillion...to be paid for, in part, by new taxes on business investments. And as business investments go down, so does the ability of companies to expand or hire workers.
Which is why Obama's "number one focus" sounds, to us, like another load of "number two."
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Another day, another debunking of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" about manmade global warming.
Scientists have just admitted that, oops, ocean levels aren't really rising after all. And the ice caps on the Himalayas aren't actually melting away. Tropical storms and hurricanes, defying doomsayer's predictions, haven't increased in number or severity. And, oh yeah, there's been no measurable atmospheric warming in the last 15 years.
In fact, it now seems that there is only one indisputable and unassailable truth of Al Gore's that reasonable people must agree on: "The debate is over."
Update: This morning, Republican Senator James Inhofe asked the Obama administration to investigate "the greatest scientific scandal of our generation" and to force Al Gore to give Senate testimony about the "science fiction" movie he promoted as settled fact.
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Unsurprisingly, when you put thousands of young, attractive, and physically fit men and women in a small, confined area, there's an awful lot of temptation. So much so that the Olympic organizers made sure to supply the athletes with 100,000 condoms...to avoid the embarrassment of a previous Olympics which ran low after supplying "only" 70,000.
There is, however, a certain parallel to the world of politics. Like the Olympic village, Washington is a small, confined area. And with access to unlimited taxpayer funds, there's an awful lot of temptation.
The big difference is that the Olympians are only screwing each other.
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On Thursday, Barack Obama and a hand-chosen group of Democratic leaders will meet with Republicans in order to hear new ideas on healthcare reform and, in a bipartisan manner, finally put the good of the American people ahead of political theater.
Ha, ha, ha - not really!
What will actually happen is that the Democrats will make impossible demands on the Republicans ("Add 30 million more people to insurance plans while making the total cost go down"), after which they'll shrug and say "we tried to work with the Republicans," before invoking reconciliation to push their healthcare bill through with as few as 51 votes.
Until they took power, Democrats referred to reconciliation as "the nuclear option," because it basically blows the Constitution into tiny, smoldering scraps of paper. What they may be forgetting, however, is that it's a bad idea to be standing at Ground Zero when you detonate such a nuke. There's a very, very good chance you could get burned...
BONUS: George Will delivers an absolutely incredible and inspiring speech on the differences between Conservatives and Liberals. You'll laugh, you'll applaud, you'll cheer - please check it out!
