An Exceptionally Good Liar

"One of the highly developed talents of President Barack Obama is the ability to say things that are demonstrably false, and make them sound not only plausible but inspiring. ... Now there are different kinds of liars. If we must have lying Presidents of the United States, I prefer that they be like Richard Nixon. You could just look at him and tell that he was lying. But Obama is much smoother. On this and on many other issues, you would have to know what the facts are to know that he is lying. He is obviously counting on the fact that, in this era of dumbed-down education, many people have no clue as to what the facts are. He is also counting on something else -- namely, that the pro-Obama media will not expose his lies. One of the many ways of lying smoothly is to simply redefine words. Barack Obama is a master at that as well. ... It would be hard to become nostalgic about Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign in disgrace. But at least you could tell when he was lying. Obama's lies are just as big but not as visible, and the media that exposed Nixon is covering for Obama." --economist Thomas Sowell

The Difference Is Day and Night

By Dr. Thomas Sowell

The current occupy wall street movement is the best illustration to date of what barack hussein obama's America looks like. It is an America where the lawless, unaccomplished, ignorant and incompetent rule. It is an America where those who have sacrificed nothing pillage and destroy the lives of those who have sacrificed greatly.

He Says "End Run"- I Say Trampled

Thomas Sowell: The Progressive end run around the Constitution

These words begin the Constitution of the United States: "We the people." But neither the Constitution nor "we the people" will mean anything if politicians and judges can continue to do end runs around both.

Bills passed too fast for anyone to read them are blatant examples of these end runs. But last week, another of these end runs appeared in a different institution when the medical "end of life consultations" rejected by Congress were quietly enacted through bureaucratic fiat by administrators of Medicare.

Although Congressman Earl Blumenauer and Senator Jay Rockefeller had led an effort by a group of fellow Democrats in Congress to pass Section 1233 of pending Medicare legislation, which would have paid doctors to include "end of life" counselling in their patients' physical checkups, the Congress as a whole voted to delete that provision.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, soon to become Speaker of the House, objected to this provision in 2009, saying: "This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia."

Read more at the Washington Examiner:

Thomas Sowell

Opinion in Brief

"The corrupt manner in which this massive legislation was rammed through Congress, without any of the committee hearings or extended debates that most landmark legislation has had, has provided a roadmap for pushing through more such sweeping legislation in utter defiance of what the public wants.

Too many critics of the Obama administration have assumed that its arrogant disregard of the voting public will spell political suicide for Congressional Democrats and for the President himself. But that is far from certain.

True, President Obama's approval numbers in the polls have fallen below 50 percent, and that of Congress is down around 10 percent. But nobody votes for Congress as a whole, and the President will not be on the ballot until 2012.

They say that, in politics, overnight is a lifetime. Just last month, it was said that the election of Scott Brown to the Senate from Massachusetts doomed the health care bill. Now some of the same people are saying that passing the health care bill will doom the administration and the Democrats' control of Congress. As an old song said, 'It ain't necessarily so.'"

--economist Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell--Would You Have Believed?

I knew it was going to be bad, but I have an imagination reserved exclusively for fathers and husbands.

via Patriot Post and Patriot Mark Alexander

Opinion in Brief

"Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many 'czars' appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another 'czar' would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers -- that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called 'experts' deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments? Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough. How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path?

... How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin. Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to 'change the United States of America,' the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.

... Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year -- each bill more than a thousand pages long -- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question -- and the biggest question for this generation."

--economist Thomas Sowell

Reactions to Obama Flipping Us The Finger

Since there are just too many better writers out there, and many of you are working too hard to take the time to find them, here's a round up of reactions to ObamaCare.

Roger Kimball at Roger's Rules talks about Obama as Tony Soprano.

He introduces Thomas Sowell's piece on Obama vs. Common Sense.

But he absolutely loves Shikia Dalmia's PutUp or Shut Up.

Obama swears that there will be no rationing. But he's going to cut costs. TigerHawk and Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) talk about how ObamaCare will cut investments in medical innovation.

TigerHawk: As we have long predicted on this blog, the health care "reformers" propose to finance at least part of the "savings" or new benefits -- it is impossible to know which -- by decreasing the rate of return on medical technology. There are many ways in which this might be done, but the Senate Democrats are proposing to do so directly, by levying a "value added tax" on medical device companies according to their proportion of U.S. sales. This tax would be without regard to profitability, so it would amount to a capital tax on start-ups and a massive income tax surcharge on profitable companies, varying as net margins do.

Glenn Reynolds: The normal critique of socialized medicine is to point out that people have to wait a long time for these kinds of treatments in places like Britain. And that's certainly a valid critique. I'm sure my mom and daughter would still be waiting for their treatments, while my father and wife would probably be dead.

The key point, though, is that these treatments didn't just come out out of the blue. They were developed by drug companies and device makers who thought they had a good market for things that would make people feel better.

But under a national healthcare plan, the "market" will consist of whatever the bureaucrats are willing to buy. That means treatment for politically stylish diseases will get some money, but otherwise the main concern will be cost-control. More treatments, to bureaucrats, mean more costs.

Obama Care. Flipping you the finger while you wait to die.

cross posted at RedState

From the Always Succint Thomas Sowell

"Adam Smith [once] said, 'Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.'

That lesson seems to have been forgotten in America ... where so many people seem to have been far more concerned about whether we have been nice enough to the mass-murdering terrorists in our custody than those critics have ever been about the innocent people beheaded or blown up by the terrorists themselves. ...

Those who are pushing for legal action against CIA agents may talk about 'upholding the law' but they are doing no such thing. Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the Geneva Convention gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law. ...

So many 'rights' have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don't meet the terms of the Geneva Convention, then the Geneva Convention doesn't protect you.

If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to American citizens do not apply to you.

That should be especially obvious if you are part of an international network bent on killing Americans. But bending over backward to be nice to our enemies is one of the many self-indulgences of those who engage in moral preening. But getting other people killed so that you can feel puffed up about yourself is profoundly immoral.

So is betraying the country you took an oath to protect." --economist Thomas Sowell

Foreign Policy Experience?

GPOUSA Dr. Thomas Sowell

Now that the Democrats have recovered from the shock of Governor Sarah Palin's nomination as the Republican's candidate for vice president, they have suddenly discovered that her lack of experience in general-- and foreign policy experience in particular-- is a terrible danger in someone just a heartbeat away from being President of the United States.

For those who are satisfied with talking points, there is no need to go any further. But, for those who still consider substance relevant, this is an incredible argument coming from those whose presidential candidate has even less experience in public office than Sarah Palin, and none in foreign policy.

Moreover, if Senator Barack Obama is elected, he will not be a heartbeat away from the presidency, his would be the heartbeat of the president-- and he would be the one making foreign policy.

But the big talking point is that the Democrats' vice-presidential nominee, Senator Joe Biden, has years of foreign policy experience as a member, and now chairman, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

That all depends on what the definition of "experience" is.

The fact that Senator Joe Biden has for years listened to all sorts of people testify on all sorts of foreign policy issues tells us nothing about how well he understood the issues.

Out of the four presidential and vice-presidential candidates this year, only Governor Palin has had to make executive decisions and live with the consequences.

As for Senator Obama, his various pronouncements on foreign policy have been as immature as they have been presumptuous.

He talked publicly about taking military action against Pakistan, one of our few Islamic allies and a nation with nuclear weapons.

Barack Obama's first response to the Russian invasion of Georgia was to urge "all sides" to negotiate a cease-fire and take their issues to the United Nations. That is standard liberal talk, which even Obama had second thoughts about, after Senator John McCain gave a more grown-up response.

We should all have second thoughts about what is, and is not, foreign policy "experience."

Thomas Sowell on Special Interests

From Patriot Post:

“Senator Obama has also said many times that he is against ‘special interests.’ But, like most politicians who say that, he means that he is against other politicians’ special interests. His own special interests are never called special interests. Neither are the environmental extremists who support the Democrats called special interests. But the green zealots who have for decades blocked the country from using oil within our own borders—more oil than in Saudi Arabia, by the way—are also among the special interests with a big voicein the Democratic Party. They are also a major factor in shutting down the democratic voting process—in this case, in the House of Representatives, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi refuses to allow a vote on drilling for oil in places where the green zealots don’t want drilling. The Congressional Democrats could of course vote to continue forbidding drilling in those places. But voters paying $4 a gallon for gas are not likely to agree with the green zealots—and recent polls show that they do not. Rather than lose votes in the November elections by voting with the green zealots, or lose the money that the green zealots contribute to the Democratic Party coffers, Nancy Pelosi simply shut down the House of Representatives, so that there could be no votes, and turned off the lights so that C-SPAN could not broadcast Republicans’ speeches protesting what happened.
After all, what is democracy compared to support from the green zealots?” —Thomas Sowell