Friday Flashback: Even then, Obama wished those Tea Party "hobbits" had not left the Shire

That was back in April of 2009.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

~ Mohandas Gandhi

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This Morning: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

Links of the day:

The Good: "The Big Announcement? Palin to keynote Tea Party rally in Iowa." I'm in agreement with Another Black Conservative. I think Palin's presidential bid announcement is coming. It seems that she is no longer a paid commentator on Fox News.







The Bad: "Giving the people what they want." Pundette says:

Blame Boehner and the business-as-usual GOP all you want, but if the people were really clamoring for fiscal restraint and smaller government, both parties would be talking about freezing spending and canceling profligate, cockamamy schemes. Instead, they're quibbling about the calibration of the rate of government expansion. That the federal government, fueled by our grandchildren's money, will continue to balloon, is a given. If the majority of the people were demanding real change, we'd be having a different conversation right now.

The Ugly: "Bomb materials found in soldier's room near Fort Hood." Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo applied for conscientious objector status and refused to be deployed to Iraq "after he decided his Muslim beliefs would prohibit his service in any war." Those beliefs, however, didn't stop him from allegedly loading up his military computer with child pornography, going AWOL after he got caught, then moving to a hotel near Fort Hood where he made inquiries about how to build explosives and also acquired bomb-making equipment and supplies.



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U.S. Postal Service Plan: Sell Ben Franklin's Post Office to a Drug Store Chain

In what has become all-too-predictable slap in the face to the Founders of this nation, the U.S. Postal Service announced its plan to close the Franklin post office on Market Street in Philadelphia on the precise anniversary of the founding of what has evolved into the U.S. postal service on July 26, 1775. 

The B. Free Franklin Post Office is located on Franklin Square on the site of Ben Franklin's property near Philadelphia's Independence Mall, the Liberty Bell, and the home of Betsy Ross. Its name is derived from the B. Free Franklin postmark that Franklin himself used.

In 1775, Franklin already had been Postmaster of Philadelphia for 38 years and had been joint Postmaster General of the colonies for the Crown for a few years before his revolutionary leanings got in the way. It was then that the Continental Congress appointed Franklin Postmaster General of the not-yet-established nation.

By that time, Franklin had already cut the mail delivery time between major cities in half, established postal routes from Maine to Florida, and instituted regular mail service between the colonies and England. Under Franklin's system, post offices were not only regulated, they were audited.

In most public schools, it has been quite a while since the achievements of Benjamin Franklin have been considered worth mentioning.  In American education, it is hardly remembered that Franklin, before turning his efforts to founding this nation, had become a successful self-made businessman, a congenial and hardworking philanthropist, an inventor who donated his inventions to the betterment of humankind, and a self-taught scientist extraordinaire whose insights gained him entrance to--and gained the Revolution assistance from--the French Court. 

Buy your bottled water and souvenir tee-shirts here.

As reported by Fox News, "the  unassuming, three-story brick building, which pre-dates the Revolutionary War, would lose a post office but potentially gain a pharmacy, a grocery store or “other appropriate retailers” -- at least that's the view of the U.S. Postal Service.

Ingrates.

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Obama Privately Assures Banks There Will Be No Default

Obama's message to the American people

Barack Obama and his Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, have been telling everyone who will listen that the U.S. will default on its debts if the debt ceiling is not raised, pronto.

"The yellow light," the president said, "is flashing." "By August 2nd, we run out of tools to make sure that all our bills are paid. So that is a hard deadline."

Curiously, though, just a week away from that "hard deadline," the stock market is not panicking, and all is quiet on the Asian trading front, too.

What gives?

It seems that Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner have been assuring banks that what the White House has been telling the rest of us is pure bunk, fit only for the unwashed ears of the lowly American masses, including those fearful American grandmas living on the edge of starvation on tiny little Social Security checks.

From Fox Business (h/t the Strata-Sphere):

Obama's private message to bankers

While officials from the Obama Administration raised their rhetoric over the weekend about the possibility of a debt default if the debt ceiling isn't raised, they privately have been telling top executives at major U.S. banks that such an event won’t happen, FOX Business has learned.

In a series of phone calls, administration officials have told bankers that the administration will not allow a default to happen even if the debt cap isn't raised by the August 2 date.

America, who have you elected?

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Monty Python & the Essence of the Debt Ceiling Talks

What John Boehner is going through, in a nutshell:

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President Petulant Stamps Foot, Again

It [the debt ceiling] must be extended in a way that gives certainty to [the] economy through ‘13....

~White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley

William Jacobson asks: How badly does Obama want to get reelected?

I think most of the country knows the answer to that by now, whether or not we, as individuals, are willing to admit to ourselves or our neighbors how little our welfare means to our president.

As Jacobson points out, Obama wants reelection "So badly that he still claims to be willing to veto any debt bill which does not extend the debt limit beyond the 2012 elections."

It's for our own good, the White House says. The American people need economic certainty.

Myself, I'd settle for a slight feeling of confidence that our entire economic future has not already been flushed.

Meanwhile, Pundette wades into the Debt drama's thickening plot: How real is Reid's plan anyway, considering that it contains "about a trillion in ‘savings’ from ending the war in Iraq that’s already going to end”?

If Reid's plan is anything like the Gang of Six "plan" of less than a week ago, it's not real at all.

Hang in there, Boehner.
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Andrew Klavan: Find God in 60 Days

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Socialism Unmasked

From Grzmlyk, a commenter at The American Spectator:

Rip off socialism's compassionate mask and you'll see its true face: Nihilism. The apotheosis of ersatz values like moral vanity and self-satisfied virtue, misplaced compassion and willful ignorance of human nature has defeated the common sense values of industry, hard work, reward, individual responsibility and moral accountability. Like all good cancers, the victory of leftism is the death of its host organism.

Read the rest.


Linked at Maggie's Notebook. Thanks, Maggie!
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Stay Strong, Boehner: We Don't Want No Stinkin' $3 Trillion Tax Hikes

The president is emphatic that taxes have to be raised. As a former small businessman, I know tax increases destroy jobs.

~ John Boehner

 
$3 trillion more in hand-outs to Big Government: that's what the Gang of Six figures you and your fellow Americans are good for.

Investors Business Daily points out that the Gang of Six has "employed some of the most egregious budget tricks available to make the spending cuts look bigger and tax hikes smaller than they actually are."

The best example of this is the plan's tax proposal, which alternately boasts that it cuts taxes by $1.5 trillion and raises them by $1 trillion, but which more likely will result in taxes going up by more than $3 trillion.

According to the outline, the $1.5 trillion in "tax relief" is how the Congressional Budget Office would score the plan.

But what the gang conveniently leaves out is that the CBO's forecast has $4.6 trillion in tax hikes already baked into it. That's because the CBO baseline assumes all the Bush tax cuts get repealed, that every other temporary tax cut is left to expire, and that the alternative minimum tax continues to entrap millions more middle-class families each year.

Once you take that into account, the $1.5 trillion in "tax relief" turns instead into a $3.1 trillion tax increase over the next decade. (It's anyone's guess where the gang got its $1 trillion tax hike figure.)

Meanwhile, Obama says he willing to take "less," and he is complaining that he is taking "a lot of heat" because of that. Obama calls his latest offer "an extraordinarily fair deal." 

There are no Congressional Budget Office reports detailing what the president means by "less." But it is safe to assume that their calculations will still take for granted the end of all Bush tax cuts and all other temporary tax cuts as well as the continuation of the alternative minimum tax, an extra tax that some people and small businesses have to pay on top of their regular tax.

 "It is hard to understand," groused the president, "why Speaker Boehner would walk away from this kind of deal."

No, Mr. President. It's not hard to understand at all.

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The Guardian

An American eagle perches on the tombstone of World War II veteran, Sgt. Maurice Ruch, in the Fort Snelling National Cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ruch was a mechanical engineer by training who served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Aleutian Islands and who was awarded the Bronze Star. This remarkable photograph was taken by amateur photographer Frank Glick. 

Read the story here. Hat tip to Mad Minerva.

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Destination, Death Row? Fort Hood Shooter Arraigned Today

He who becomes compassionate to the cruel will ultimately become cruel to the compassionate.

~ ancient Hebrew adage 

His crimes sound almost cut and dried in news reports, like that in the NY Times: "Major Hasan has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder."

At his military Article 32 hearing (roughly equivalent to a civilian grand jury hearing) held last November at Fort Hood, people who were the victims of the shooter's attempted murder didn't find them so:

And neither did those who also mourn the unborn baby of Private Francheska Velez, who also was murdered that day.

At today's arraignment, Nidal Malik Hasan's trial date was set for March 5, 2012.

Also at today's arraignment, Hasan announced that he had changed his defense team of lawyers by "releasing" his sole civilian lawyer, John P. Galligan, a retired Army colonel and military judge, who holds that Hasan can't receive a fair trial at Fort Hood. Perhaps Hasan would like to meet those 72 virgins as soon as possible.
 
The NY Times has reported:

If convicted, Major Hasan will join a handful of other men on the military’s death row, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Although the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment in the military in 1996, military executions are rare. The last time the military carried out a death penalty sentence was on April 13, 1961, when John A. Bennett, a 26-year-old Army private convicted of the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old Austrian girl, was hanged at Fort Leavenworth.

I hope the military manages to hold onto Hasan. Under the current administration, this country's jailers--both military and civilian--aren't having much luck holding on to terrorist murderers and their accomplices. Take, for example, the releases of:

• Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, mastermind of the suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors and injured 39 others;
• Ahmed Gailani, killed 224, injured 4,000 at American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania;
• Abdullah Gulam Rasoul (alias Abdullah Zakir, aka Mullah Abdul Qayam Zakir), head of the reconstituted Taliban in Afghanistan;
• Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, bomber and murderer of Iraqi soldiers;
• Ali al-Shihri, suspected planner of the gruesome massacre of two nurses, an engineer and his wife, and a doctor and his young children.  

That list, which includes about 60 others, will be growing by one if Eric Holder gets his way and succeeds in springing al Qaeda financier and wanna-be assassin Abdurahman Alamoudi from the slammer.

The real victims in all these cases are the victims of the terrorists who have enjoyed the favor of progressive bleeding hearts and the politicians they elect and support.

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What Obama & the Gang of Six Have Planned for You

The good news is that today a group of senators, the Gang of Six, Democrats and Republicans — I guess now Gang of Seven, because one additional Republican senator added on—put forward a proposal that is broadly consistent with the approach that I've urged.

~Barack Hussein Obama

Via Accounting Today, the Obama/Gang-of-Six or Seven plan would reduce the following tax deductions:

• mortgage deductions
• 401(k) plans
• individual retirement accounts
• charitable deductions
• child tax credits.

Call me crazy, but it sounds to me like liberals want Americans to:

• buy fewer houses
• save less for their old age
• give less to charity
• have fewer children and poorer children.

Is this the platform of the so-called "party of the little people"--and the turncoat Republicans who have joined them? 

Gang-of-Six Democrats Dick Durbin (IL),  Kent Conrad (ND), and Mark Warner (VA)

Gang-of-Six Republicans Saxby Chambliss (GA), Mike Crapo (ID), and Tom Coburn (OK)

Must be, because President Obama says this plan is "consistent with" the approach he says he has urged.

Although I don't remember raising taxes on children, charity, savings, and housing being part of the hope and change Obama was advocating just 2 1/2 years ago.


Linked at iOwnTheWorld. Thank you, BigFurHat!
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