FACT CHECK: TOP TEN WORST LIES BY JOE BIDEN IN VP DEBATE

Once again, Joe Biden lied his way through a Vice Presidential debate--just as he did in his contest with Sarah Palin in 2008. This time, the media caught a few of Biden's worst "malarkey" moments--as did his opponent, Paul Ryan, when he could get a word in edgewise. 

Here are the top ten worst lies told by Biden during the debate:

Update - Honorable Mention: "There's not one Democrat who endorsed his...plan." Biden lied--as Ryan pointed out, amidst the Vice President's interruptions--about the fact that Ryan had worked with both Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin in developing his entitlement reforms. While it's true that neither have endorsed the Romney-Ryan ticket's separate plan--which is different--Ryan's own plans, to which Biden referred, were endorsed by Democrats, and Biden knows it.

10. "With all due respect, that’s a bunch of malarkey....not a single thing he said is accurate." At the outset of the debate, Biden tried to paint Ryan as a liar--when Biden, in fact, was the one lying. Ryan had pointed out: 1) that the White House had distanced itself from the Cairo embassy's apologies on 9/11; 2) that Obama had failed to speak up for Iranian protestors in 2009; 3) that the Obama administration called Syria's dictator a "reformer"; 4) and that the Obama administration is imposing defense cuts and projecting weakness. All of that is true.

9. "The president has met with Bibi [Netanyahu] a dozen times....This is a bunch of stuff." While they have met several times--not a dozen--that includes a meeting at which Obama made the Israeli prime minister enter the White House through a back entrance, refused to take a picture with him, and left him on his own for dinner. Specifically, Ryan had criticized Obama's refusal to meet Netanyahu in New York last month, and to tape talk show interviews instead--a clear snub that sent the wrong signal, again, to Israel's enemies.

8. "Just let the taxes expire like they’re supposed to on those millionaires." Biden's "millionaires" are actually households earning more than $250,000 a year, which includes many middle-class families with two earners, and small business owners in particular who report business earnings as personal income. Biden and Obama have repeatedly labeled those earning over $250,000 as "millionaires and billionaires," distorting the actual impact of their tax plan on the non-millionaires it would hit hardest, who create a vast proportion of small business jobs.

7. "You know, I heard that death panel argument from Sarah Palin. It seems that every vice presidential debate, I hear this kind of stuff about panels."Biden's cheap shot against Palin was an attempt to diminish both her and the man sitting across from him. But Palin never talked about "death panels" in her debate with Biden, for the simple reason that Obamacare had not yet been proposed. Nor did Ryan mention "death panels"--he had addressed the undeniable fact that Obamacare proposes a board to impose cost controls.

6. "The congressman here cut embassy security in his budget by $300 million below what we asked for." Biden's lie about Ryan's budget was an attempt to dodge responsibility for lax embassy security--and to cover up that the Obama administration called for new cuts to embassy security just days after the 9/11 attacks. Ryan's proposal, which called for a 19% overall decrease in non-defense discretionary spending, does not even mention embassy security--the Obama campaign merely made up that number by applying 19% across the board.

5. "No, they are not four years closer to a nuclear weapon." Biden's attempt to lie about the glaring reality of the Iranian nuclear program fell flat. Iran is indeed four years closer to a nuclear weapon, and the Obama administration--believing it knew better than its predecessors--tried to reinvent the wheel on talks with Iran, causing frustration to our allies in Europe and the Middle East. Meeting after meeting this year has failed to produce results, and the loophole-filled sanctions, while hurting Iran somewhat, are not stopping its nuclear program.

4. "No religious institution, Catholic or otherwise...has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact." No, it is not a fact--it is the opposite of a fact, and saying "that is a fact" does not make it any less a blatant lie. The Obama administration is forcing religious institutions to provide contraceptive and abortion drugs through their insurance policies. That is the reason several dozen religious institutions are suing the administration to defend their First Amendment freedom of religion. 

3. "It came from this man voting to put two wars on a credit card...I was there. I voted against him." Biden voted for both the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war. He did not vote for George W. Bush's plan to extend coverage of Medicare to prescription drugs (though he voted for an earlier, similar proposal), nor did he vote for the Bush tax cuts. But he voted for both of the wars he derided last night. To quote Bill Clinton's speech to the Democratic National Convention: "It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did."

2. "What we did is we saved $716 billion and put it back -- applied it to Medicare." Biden repeated the lie the Obama administration has been telling since before Obamacare passed in 2010: that cuts to Medicare today were savings that extend the life of the program. They would be--if the same $716 billion wasn't also being used to pay for Obamacare. As Ryan pointed out in 2010, and again last night, you can't double-count the same cuts. Taking $716 billion out of Medicare means exactly that--and hurts, not helps, the program's solvency.

1. "Well, we weren’t told they wanted more security again." Biden lied through his teeth about the fact that the administration--specifically, the State Department--had been told again and again that security on the ground in Libya, and in Benghazi in particular, was inadequate. The day before, in Congressional hearings on the Libya attacks, former regional security director Eric Nordstrom described his frustration with having those requests turned down by the government bureaucracy: "For me the Taliban is on the inside of the building."

Brietbart

Depending on Dependency

The theme that most seemed to rouse the enthusiasm of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte was that we are all responsible for one another -- and that Republicans don't want to help the poor, the sick and the helpless.

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

Yet the notion that people who prefer economic decisions to be made by individuals in the market are not as compassionate as people who prefer those decisions to be made collectively by politicians is seldom even thought of as a belief that should be checked against facts.

Nor is this notion confined to Democrats in America today. Belief in the superior compassion of the political left is a worldwide phenomenon that goes back at least as far as the 18th century. But in all that time, and in all those places, there has been little, if any, effort on the left to check this crucial assumption against facts.

When an empirical study of the actual behavior of American conservatives and liberals was published in 2006, it turned out that conservatives donated a larger amount of money, and a higher percentage of their incomes (which were slightly lower than liberal incomes) to philanthropic activities.

Conservatives also donated more of their time to philanthropic activities and donated far more blood than liberals. What is most remarkable about this study are not just its results. What is even more remarkable is how long it took before anyone even bothered to ask the questions. It was just assumed, for centuries, that the left was more compassionate.

Ronald Reagan donated a higher percentage of his income to charitable activities than did either Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ted Kennedy. Being willing to donate the taxpayers' money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.

Milton Friedman pointed out that the heyday of free market capitalism in the 19th century was a period of an unprecedented rise in philanthropic activity. Going even further back in time, in the 18th century Adam Smith, the patron saint of free market economics, was discovered from records examined after his death to have privately made large charitable donations, far beyond what might have been expected from someone of his income level.

Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.

Although the big word on the left is "compassion," the big agenda on the left is dependency. The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.

Optimistic Republicans who say that widespread unemployment and record numbers of people on food stamps hurt President Obama's reelection chances are overlooking the fact that people who are dependent on government are more likely to vote for politicians who are giving them handouts.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that, back during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He was reelected in a landslide after his first term, during which unemployment was in double digits every single month, and in some months was over 20 percent.

The time is long overdue for optimistic Republicans to understand what FDR understood long ago, and what Barack Obama clearly understands today. Dependency pays off in votes -- unless somebody alerts the taxpayers who get stuck with the bill.

The Obama administration is shamelessly advertising in the media -- whether on billboards or on television -- for people to get on food stamps. Welfare state bureaucrats have been sent into supermarkets to tell shoppers that food stamps are available.

The intelligentsia have for decades been promoting the idea that there should be no stigma to accepting government handouts. Living off the taxpayers is portrayed as a "right" or -- more ponderously -- as part of a "social contract."

You may not recall signing any such contract, but it sounds poetic and high-toned. Moreover, it wins votes among the gullible, and that is the bottom line for welfare state politicians.

Thomas Sowell - Townhall

Kinky Friedman: Rick Perry's Got My Vote

Kinky Friedman once ran against Rick Perry for the Texas governorship. So would the singer and writer vote for him for president? Hell, yes! The world’s most famous Jewish cowboy on why he wants to live in Rick Perry’s America. 

Rick Perry has never lost an election; I’ve never won one. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the world. On the other hand, I’ve long been friends with Bill Clinton and George W., and Rick Perry and I, though at times bitter adversaries, have remained friends as well. It’s not always easy to maintain friendships with politicians. To paraphrase Charles Lamb, you have to work at it like some men toil after virtue.

I have been quoted as saying that when I die, I am to be cremated, and the ashes are to be thrown in Rick Perry’s hair. Yet, simply put, Rick Perry and I are incapable of resisting each other’s charm. He is not only a good sport, he is a good, kindhearted man, and he once sat in on drums with ZZ Top. A guy like that can’t be all bad. When I ran for governor of Texas as an independent in 2006, the Crips and the Bloods ganged up on me. When I lost, I drove off in a 1937 Snit, refusing to concede to Perry. Three days later Rick called to give me a gracious little pep talk, effectively talking me down from jumping off the bridge of my nose. Very few others were calling at that time, by the way. Such is the nature of winning and losing and politicians and life. You might call what Rick did an act of random kindness. Yet in my mind it made him more than a politician, more than a musician; it made him a mensch.

These days, of course, I would support Charlie Sheen over Obama. Obama has done for the economy what pantyhose did for foreplay. Obama has been perpetually behind the curve. If the issue of the day is jobs and the economy, Rick Perry is certainly the nuts-and-bolts kind of guy you want in there. Even though my pal and fellow Texan Paul Begala has pointed out that no self-respecting Mexican would sneak across the border for one of Rick Perry’s low-level jobs, the stats don’t entirely lie. Compared with the rest of the country, Texas is kicking major ass in terms of jobs and the economy, and Rick should get credit for that, just as Obama should get credit for saying “No comment” to the young people of the Iranian revolution.

More to the point, could Rick Perry fix the economy? Hell, yes! Texas is exhibit A; Rick’s fingerprints are all over it. He’s been governor since Christ was a cowboy. The Lone Star State is booming. The last time I checked, Texas is kicking in a hell of a lot of the U.S. GDP. Unemployment is lower than the vast majority of the other states. Hell, we could probably even find a job for Paul Begala.

Kinky Friedman, left, listens to Texas Gov. Rick Perry during the 2006 Texas gubernatorial debate, Smiley N. Pool / AP-pool

As a Jewish cowboy (or “Juusshh,” as we say in Texas), I know Rick Perry to be a true friend of Israel, like Bill Clinton and George W. before him. There exists a visceral John Wayne kinship between Israelis and Texans, and Rick Perry gets it. That’s why he’s visited Israel on many more occasions than Obama, who’s been there exactly zero times as president. If I were Obama I wouldn’t go either. His favorability rating in Israel once clocked in at 4 percent. Say what you will about the Israelis, but they are not slow out of the chute. They know who their friends are. On the topic of the Holy Land, there remains the little matter of God. God talks to televangelists, football coaches, and people in mental hospitals. Why shouldn’t he talk to Rick Perry? In the spirit of Joseph Heller, I have a covenant with God. I leave him alone and he leaves me alone. If, however, I have a big problem, I ask God for the answer. He tells Rick Perry. And Rick tells me.

So would I support Rick Perry for president? Hell, yes! As the last nail that hasn’t been hammered down in this country, I agree with Rick that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats. While Obama is busy putting the hyphen between “anal” and “retentive” Rick will be rolling up his sleeves and getting to work.

A still, small voice within keeps telling me that Rick Perry’s best day may yet be ahead of him, and so too, hopefully, will be America’s.

Kinky Friedman is a country music singer, politician, Texas Monthly columnist, the author of a successful mystery series, and was a candidate for Texas governor in 2006. His most recent book is Kinky’s Celebrity Pet Files. You can visit his website here.

The Daily Beast

Nancy Pelosi: The Girl in the Plastic Bubble

Being a leftist in America means never needing to actually hear or grasp what conservatives believe.  Many leftists, particularly soon-to-be Minority Leader Pelosi, live in a plastic bubble.  Pelosi grew up as the daughter of a powerful Democrat, Thomas D'Alessandro, whose power base was Baltimore.  In college, Pelosi interned for Democrat Senator Brewster.  She met her husband, a native of San Francisco, and after a short stint in New York City, the two moved to Mr. Pelosi's home town, where they have lived for more than forty years.

Pelosi has been a Democrat operative from Northern California since 1976.  How political has the Pelosi family been?  Not only was her father a Democrat mayor and congressman, but one of her brothers, Thomas D'Alessandro III, was also mayor of Baltimore, and another of her brothers, Ronald Pelosi, was a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.  The Pelosi family, for more than ninety years, has been inextricably connected to the Democrat Party.  Consider, also, just where these Pelosi Democrats have lived and worked in politics.  Baltimore, New York City, San Francisco -- three cities as thoroughly Democrat and profoundly leftist as any in America.  

Lots of those on the left can live for  years before they actually are exposed to genuine conservatism....The left's plan for America has been remarkably simple: make sure that Americans hear only information which supports the left, hear only analysis which reinforces leftism, and receive only mass entertainment marinated in leftism. 
But there are some Americans who can go through their lives without ever feeling the destructive idiocy of the left, without enduring or seeing a friend or relative endure the brutal bigotry of the left, and without stumbling across a vast quicksand of leftist mendacity. You spend your entire life in communities which are aberrations of Middle America.  You live in Washington, among the most leftist polity in the Republic, for decades.  You dwell in an America whose national media, until you are well into middle age, is a monolith of ideological purity which only reinforces your prejudices.  Living such a surreal life, a woman like Nancy Pelosi can actually find herself to the left of Barack Obama.  But that is where she is, this Girl in the Plastic Bubble.  
Read The Rest At American Thinker

the stealth $600 billion tax increase

Although most economists are loathe to admit it, inflating the currency really serves as a form of stealth taxation. The entire goal of inflation is to allow the issuer of the currency to buy things with the full initial value of the money being inflated while simultaneously reducing the value of the money held by everyone else. In other words, inflation transfers the value represented by monetary tokens (bills, banking computer data, etc.) from the people who hold old tokens (the bills in your wallet) to the people printing the money (in America, the Fed).
Now, toss in this little bit of goodness:

The Fed usually [sic] manages the economy by adjusting short-term interest rates. With those rates already near zero, Fed officials had to dust off a strategy for boosting the economy that debuted during the darkest days of the financial crisis. The Fed plans to create money, essentially out of thin air, and then pump it into the economy by buying Treasury bonds on the open market. These purchases are to be finished by the end of June, the Fed said.

Stop laughing at the “manages the economy” bit and focus on the emphasized text. What is really going on here?
What is really going on is that the Fed is stealing $600 billion dollars of real value from your pocket and using that value to fund the US Federal government through Treasury bonds. The real transfer of real value goes: You–>Fed–>Government.
It’s a damn tax increase craftily carried out using the finance system.

Shannon Love

This Is America, Stupid!

A nation holds its collective breath.  America's pivotal election is today. We will either put the brakes on the Democrat-socialists' drive to transform us into a failing European-style social democracy or we continue to hurtle toward the cliff of no return.   

Voters have waited through long, suffering months to make their voices heard at last. 

Democrats have made an unprecedented mockery of representative government, ignoring the will of the people with arrogant disdain. Elitist hypocrites who campaigned on "love" for the poor party hearty on the hard-earned money of America's producers, jet to debauchery-ridden Europe to scorn our good name, and come back home only to spend our children into serfdom. The words "public servant" have almost become synonymous with "tax cheat." American companies are threatened with open thuggery by a power-mad administration of academics who wouldn't know how to actually produce a single cent if their very lives depended upon it. 

The Democrats and their president line up in bowing and scraping infamy before the Islamists, throwing America under the bus of cowardly appeasement. A Democrat president still sends America's finest young people to war and ties their hands with hideous rules of engagement and withdrawal timetables, which inevitably make our bravest into cannon fodder. Democrat foreign policy has emboldened every evil actor on the world stage and made whole regions into powder kegs set to blow at the slightest provocation. Peace with genuine justice is an alien concept to the cowards in charge. These so-called peacemakers have been revealed as nothing but doormat-enablers.

And all around the land, media elites fumble the ball. These dimwitted media scalawags have twiddled their thumbs while 1776 redux has mounted a vociferous challenge to the ruling class of both parties (a class that the media themselves have for decades joined and empowered). The economy stands at the precipice of full-blown depression, the inevitable outcome of discredited Keynesian theory and a president who has bitten the small-business hand that feeds us enough to leave it bleeding and traumatized. Since our media elites are nothing more than materialist fat-cats themselves, they can see nothing in the Tea Parties but economic angst.

What a bunch of ninnies these people are. All of them. From the ivory-towered elitists in charge of the government to those in charge of the airwaves.  

To Read the Rest

The Elite Without A Country

Anti-Americanism, Community of Fashion, The Cognitive Elite, The Elect, The Intelligentsia, The Left

 Mark Krikorian argues that Charles Murray’s description of the alienation of the New Elite from the rest of America does not go nearly far enough.

Charles Murray is too generous in his Sunday piece on the elite’s disconnect from the rest of America. He’s spot-on in identifying how socially, culturally, politically, and geographically isolated today’s elite is, but he ends the piece this way:

The bubble that encases the New Elite crosses ideological lines and includes far too many of the people who have influence, great or small, on the course of the nation. They are not defective in their patriotism or lacking a generous spirit toward their fellow citizens. They are merely isolated and ignorant. The members of the New Elite may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.

While I’m sure this describes some people, much of the New Elite does not, in fact, love America and is, in Murray’s phrasing, defective in its patriotism. Today’s elites — not just here, but in Europe as well — are increasingly post-national. Murray writes that “the New Elite clusters in a comparatively small number of cities and in selected neighborhoods in those cities,” which is correct, but he doesn’t seem to get (or at least didn’t write) that these “comparatively small number of cities and in selected neighborhoods in those cities” are increasingly part of a distinct transnational community. Marx and Engels were wrong when they wrote that “the working men have no country” — but that description is increasingly apt for large parts of the post-American New Elite.

Never Yet Melted

WOLF: Obamacare's Unkeepable Promises Utopian vision was a fraud from the beginning

We are witnessing the unmistakable collapse of an American presidency. While this may not yet be irreversible, it certainly was predictable and preventable. Chief among its causes has been the unbridled hubris that prompted this president to force Obamacare, the government takeover of the finest health care system in the world, against the clear will of "we the people" while turning his back on the free-market principles that once made us the most prosperous nation on earth.
A diminished president, even - or perhaps especially - if his fate is self-inflicted, is not good for America and should not be pleasing to any patriot regardless of his or her political leanings. It certainly is not pleasing to me, as this president is my cousin. But as a physician who took an inviolate oath to my patients, I am duty-bound to take this stand, particularly after watching Barack Obama make so many unkeepable Obamacare promises:
c Obamacare would reduce our deficit. We were to believe that millions of Americans would be added to the insurance rolls, that medical care would not suffer, and somehow, almost magically, costs would go down. We might as well promise it will never rain on weekends. Gravity caught up to this wishful thinking, and even the president's own actuary now admits the overhaul will increase, not decrease, the deficit.
c Obamacare would allow you to keep your doctor and your current insurance. How can you keep your doctor if your doctor can't keep his practice? nearly half of America's doctors are being forced to consider leaving their practice if Obamacare is implemented. 90 million Americans will lose their current insurance policies because of the takeover. Millions of them will be forced into Medicaid and government exchanges.
c Obamacare would not jeopardize senior citizens' care. The continued viability of Medicare Advantage is in serious jeopardy because of Mr. Obama's Medicare cuts to pay for other parts of his health care overhaul. Already, 42 percent of doctors do not accept Medicare, and that number is increasing. Your shiny government-issued Medicare card is meaningless without doctors who will accept it.

c Obamacare would not ration health care. The president promised time and time again that he would not ration health care, and then promptly, under the cloak of a recess appointment, installed as the head of Medicare a man who would do it for him.

c Obamacare would not raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year.I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes." New excise taxes on pharmaceuticals and medical products will, of course, by necessity be passed on to the patients who depend on these lifesaving medicines, pacemakers, MRI machines or even tongue depressors. Even more flagrant, there are new Obamacare taxes on everything from tampons to tanning salons, from gold to the sale of your home.

c Obamacare would create 4 million new jobs, 400,000 almost immediately. since the health care takeover was signed into law, no such jobs boom has occurred.

Can we really repeal Obamacare? Let me be clear. Yes, we can.
First, in 2010, elect candidates who understand that health care freedom - like our other freedoms - saves lives. Elect candidates who pledge to first defund Obamacare immediately and then will vote for its repeal. Second, let's convince this president that it's in the nation's best interest - and his own - to undo this unholy government takeover that bears his name. If we cannot, then in 2012, let's find a president who will.
Dr. Milton R. Wolf is a board-certified, practicing diagnostic radiologist and cousin of President Obama's. He is also a member of Docs4PatientCare.

Read the whole article here.

The Browning of the GOP - Ebony Jet Online Magazine

Top Conservatives Bring Color and Candor to Republican Party                                                   Friday, October 08, 2010                                               By Armstrong Williams

Here's a statistic that you might find shocking: one in four Black voters between the ages of 18 and 29 describes [himself or herself] as 'conservative.' Now, here's why you shouldn't find it shocking: African-Americans, as a whole, are conservative, favoring positions that could only be described as mainstream Republican. According to a recent study, 75 percent of Blacks favor school prayer; 73 percent favor a $500-per-child federal tax credit; and 72 percent favor three-strikes-and-you're-out laws. These are all conservative positions.
While the most liberal faction of the Democratic Party has held it hostage with left-wing ideas that are far from the mainstream, the Republican Party has remained steadfast, supporting the issues that a new generation of Blacks routinely rate among their chief concerns. Be honest: Black America often cringes with the Republican Party at the liberal secular attitudes Democrats have toward such issues as nontraditional marriage, gays in the military and education policies that continue to fund a failed system.
But we never break rank, even though the reality is clear: no political group has done more to help minorities than Republicans. Its the party that freed the slaves, invited Booker T. Washington to the White House and sent federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce school integration.
In fact, most Blacks used to be die-hard Republicans, fleeing, for the most part, in 1964, when Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater­­ widely regarded as the fat, beating heart of the publicly professed his intent to repeal the Civil Rights Act. The rise of Goldwater signaled unmistakably that the highest levels of the modern Republican Party leadership included outright racists.
Even now, its amazing to think that one man created a mass exodus of Black voters from the Republican Party. But today, the great flight has the chance to be met by the great return as a new breed of Black conservative has emerged and taken center stage in the Republican Party. The two face plates for this movement ­­former U.S.Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and current National Republican Committee Chairman Michael Steele‹speak exclusively to Black America in the November issue of EBONY.
Ebony Jet

ObamaCare Breaks the Top Ten

He did it again. When his health care bill was floundering last year, President Obama rallied liberal religious leaders to sell his plan.He even invoked the Ten Commandments by charging, "There are some folks that are, frankly, bearing false witness."

Now, as the public defies his promise that they'll like it after it's passed -- and as they prepare to go to the polls -- Obama is again turning to religious leaders to convince us...or, as Politico put it, to "preach the gospel" of the Patients' Bill of Rights.

"Get out there and spread the word," Obama told thousands of faith-based and community leaders on a conference call.

So it's fair game to check whether ObamaCare meets biblical standards. For starters, let's test it against the Ten Commandments.

Health Care Law Violates All Ten Commandments

This one law violates all of the Ten Commandments. Let's work our way backwards: 

#10. You shall not covet.

As with many bills, politicians sold ObamaCare by stoking envy. It goes like this: "What other people own -- what they earned -- you are entitled to." Covetousness, wanting what others have, is cloaked as a "right." But a "right" to a product (like insurance) or service (like health care) means others are forced to pay for or provide it, with no concurrent "right" to be justly compensated.

#9. You shall not bear false witness.

Remember when President Obama made the wild accusation that doctors were removing children's tonsils and amputating diabetic patients' feet to make money? Virtually no mainstream media found it worth reporting that Obama's malicious false witness was debunked.

#8. You shall not steal.

Stealing is not only pointing a gun and demanding, "Give me your money." It's also taking money under false pretenses -- frauds and scams like Bernie Madoff's, where money willingly handed over is used for something other than what was promised.
You know where the bulk of the money taken for ObamaCare through taxes, fines, and raiding other accounts will go -- not to actual health care or insurance, but to 159 new bureaucracies, and tens of thousands of new government employees.  

#7. You shall not commit adultery.

ObamaCare channels millions of dollars to graphic sex education programs which instruct kids as young as kindergartners to be sexually active. Read what some of the comprehensive sex education programs teach. This sets children up to take marriage vows lightly since "it's just sex."

#6. You shall not murder.

ObamaCare allows government funding of abortion, the murder of the most innocent.

#5. Honor your father and mother.

As parents age, it oftentimes falls on their children to make their health care decisions. It can be heart-wrenching. But it is our responsibility and duty as their children.
Under ObamaCare, that privilege will be stripped from us and given to unaccountable bureaucrats. They will ultimately decide what health care our parents can get. Medical advances will be stymied, and what is available will be rationed. The elderly will be denied hip replacements and heart surgeries, medical wonders that provide full and productive lives. This will lead to unnecessary disabilities and untimely deaths. Parents will be at the mercy of bureaucrats tasked with calculating costs, rather than a family motivated by love and honor.

#4. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

Why was Congress compelled to hold the final vote on ObamaCare on a Sunday? No looming deadline demanded immediate action by the House of Representatives. It's as if they went out of their way to thumb their noses at God and prove their disrespect. The Senate vote was held on Christmas Eve. 

#3. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.

Many people limit this to avoiding using God's name as a curse word. Jewish scholars, however, so solemnly followed this commandment that they wouldn't even write out the full name of God. They were cautious not to take His name lightly.
President Obama gave a pen with which he signed ObamaCare to Sister Carol Keehan, the nun who runs the Catholic Health Association. Why? Her seal of approval appeared to give a Catholic blessing to a bill that her superiors, the bishops, rejected. Among the "Religious Left" credited by Nancy Pelosi were United Methodists and the "Faithful Reform in Health Care," a coalition of liberal religious agencies.

Their titles as religious leaders, ambassadors of God, were shameless props used by politicians to give the thin veneer of God's approval. In effect, they used God's name, His reputation, to promote something that contradicts His commandments.

#2. You shall not make for yourself a carved image (false gods).

What do those who worship false gods do? They sacrifice to those gods, even despicable gods, in hopes that they will get something in return. Of course, these gods can't deliver.
ObamaCare became a holy grail that surpassed a desire for health care reform, morphing into an obsession to pass a bill. Congressmen sacrificed their reputations and careers to pass a bill -- a despised bill. It became a false god. And it isn't delivering.

#1. There is only one God.

ObamaCare sets up government as the one who will supply our needs and provide for our health. It places us on the path of socialist countries, where people expect the government to provide for them and then riot when governments cut bloated spending.
In contrast, Americans throw Tea Parties to stop government expansion and spending. Most Americans know that their faith is better-placed in the true God who loves them more than any government official can.

Propaganda and promises -- even from Obama's religious leaders -- will not overcome Americans' objections to ObamaCare. And we have good biblical reasons.

Wendy Wright is president of Concerned Women for America, the nation's largest public policy women's organization.

American Thinker

The public hates almost everything Congress has done

By: Byron York Chief Political Correspondent     09/13/10 7:01 AM EDT

Gallup has released a new poll asking respondents to assess the major accomplishments of Congress in the last two years: the national health care bill, the stimulus, the bailout of auto companies, the bailout of major banks and financial institutions, and the financial regulatory reform bill. The pollsters found majority opposition to all those measures, with the exception of financial reform.
The numbers: Bank bailouts, 61 percent disapprove versus 37 percent approve; national health care, 56 percent disapprove versus 39 percent approve; auto bailouts, 56 percent disapprove versus 43 percent approve; stimulus, 52 percent disapprove versus 43 percent approve. Only financial reform, with 61 percent approve versus 37 percent disapprove, is a winner for the representatives and senators seeking re-election.
Although the bank bailout was passed with significant bipartisan support, the news is terrible mostly for the House and Senate Democratic leadership. It's even worse for Democrats when you single out the opinions of independents. Just 32 percent of independents approve of the bank bailouts; 35 percent approve of national health care; 38 percent approve of the stimulus; and 40 percent approve of the auto bailouts. Sixty-two percent of independents approve of financial regulatory reform.
The most partisan division is found over the national health care bill. Sixty-nine percent of Democrats approve of the bill, opposed to just 13 percent of Republicans, and 35 percent of independents, who approve.
Given the bleak news for Democrats, it's no surprise that you're seeing more and more stories like this.  The current Democratic majority is a party that wants to look to the future, not events in the distant past of 2009 and 2010.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/The-public-hates-almost-everything-Congress-has-done-102761814.html#ixzz0zRSWhZRH

Liberalism under siege

Charles Krauthammer analyzes the rhetoric of today’s increasingly desperate liberals. He is essentially arguing that those who used to claim that they were “the party of the common people” now hold the opinions of the “common people” in contempt. Instead of arguing for their positions, liberals have become reduced to labeling everyone who disagrees with them a bigot:

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.
– Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.
– Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
– Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
– Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.
Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?
Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.
What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.
Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.
As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays — particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?
And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.
It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims — a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, “just downright mean”?
The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

Gene Veith

Walter E. Williams - The Founders' Vision Versus Ours

The celebration of our founders' 1776 revolt against King George III and the English Parliament is over. Let's reflect how the founders might judge today's Americans and how today's Americans might judge them.
In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist some French refugees, James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, stood on the floor of the House to object, saying, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." He later added, "(T)he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." Two hundred years later, at least two-thirds of a multi-trillion-dollar federal budget is spent on charity or "objects of benevolence."
What would the founders think about our respect for democracy and majority rule? Here's what Thomas Jefferson said: "The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society." John Adams advised, "Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." The founders envisioned a republican form of government, but as Benjamin Franklin warned, "When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."

How might our founders have commented about last week's U.S. Supreme Court's decision upholding our rights to keep and bear arms? Justice Samuel Alito, in writing the majority opinion, said, "Individual self-defense is the central component of the Second Amendment." The founders would have responded "Balderdash!" Jefferson said, "What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
George Mason explained, "(T)o disarm the people (is) the best and most effectual way to enslave them." Noah Webster elaborated: "Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed. ... The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive."
Contrary to Alito's assertion, the central component of the Second Amendment is to protect ourselves from U.S. Congress, not street thugs.
Today's Americans have contempt for our founders' vision. I'm sure our founders would have contempt for ours.
Townhall

The paranoid answer by Steven Den Beste

Get out the tinfoil hats, folks, and let us delve into the realm of raving paranoia. Is there a different way to read the news lately?
The sane answer: they’re blithering incompetents. The paranoid answer: they’re doing it on purpose.
Glenn Reynolds asks, “Why is the Gulf cleanup so slow?”
The sane answer: because the Obama administration has sold its soul to the unions, and is reluctant to do anything that would make union leaders angry.
The raving paranoid answer: Because Obama wants this oil spill to be dreadfully harmful, because it will sour Americans on drilling in the ocean, and on oil (and other fossil fuels) in general. Never waste a crisis, my friends, and this crisis can help lead all the troglodytes (that’s you and me) away from their accustomed gas guzzlers and wasteful lifestyles towards the paradise of “green” energy and sustainable lifestyles.
Nile Gardiner says, “America is sinking under Obama’s towering debt”.

With his reckless big government policies, Barack Obama threatens to run his country into the ground, with American decline the inevitable end result. It is not too late to reverse course, but so far there is not a shred of evidence that the president is willing to do what is necessary.

The sane answer: Obama doesn’t think that far ahead, and Obama has a deep and abiding faith that socialism will, despite a hundred years of evidence to the contrary, solve all of this in the long run.
The raving paranoid answer: Obama’s goal is to permanently change America, to make it cease to be the strongest nation on the planet, and to once and for all bury American exceptionalism. Destroying the economic viability of the largest economy on the planet is the goal, not an unfortunate side effect, because Americans consume more than their “fair share”. America must become a good citizen of the world and stop being so greedy. If the troglodytes (guess who?) won’t agree, Obama will use indirect means of forcing them into it.
Jimmy Bise, Jr. says: “Wealth does not come from Wealth Faeries.”

Now, those of us who get the origin of wealth understand that prosperity only happens when people own the fruits of their labor. The principle that what you produce belongs to you and you have the absolute right to dispose of it as you wish is the cornerstone of all the wealth and wonders created in America for well over 230 years. If you noodle it through, you can easily figure out why this has so. Economic freedom is the first, and most important freedom we have.

The sane answer is the one Bise gives: the progressives are deeply ignorant about the practical realities of economic theory.
The raving paranoid answer: progressives hate wealth, no matter who has it. They know that these redistribution programs will impoverish everyone, and that’s the real goal of it. The problem with wealth is that creating it at the kind of rate we do is “unsustainable”. Technological civilization, and especially the industrialized world, are careening out of control and we must step backwards from it.
Shiver. I think I need to go hide under my security blanket now.
Hot Air

Endless Zeros

By Jeffrey Folks

Twenty trillion dollars. That is the estimate of federal indebtedness by 2020. But that $20 trillion is just the federal debt: it does not include $3.4 trillion in current annual spending, nor does it include state and local obligations.

Government has no intention of paying off this debt -- only of continuing to add to it. What that means is that taxpayers are obligated to service this debt (and whatever is added to it) at prevailing interest rates forever. Those rates could range from 3% on up -- to whatever rate the bond market assigns. Generally speaking, the more debt a nation incurs, the higher the rate over time.

At 3%, the annual cost of servicing a $20-trillion debt is $6,000 per taxpayer (assuming that half of all Americans pay no federal taxes), or $12,000 per middle class couple. This amount is in addition to whatever Congress appropriates each year. By 2020, the annual appropriation (currently at $3.4 trillion) may well reach $5 trillion, which is $50,000 per taxpayer. Assuming that $1 trillion of this amount is passed along annually to the national debt, the immediate obligation would be $40,000 per capita. Add $40,000 to $6,000 and we get $46,000, or $92,000 per taxpaying couple.

The Heritage Foundation provides a similar estimate. Federal spending in 2010 will come to $30,543 per household, at least half of which pay no income taxes. A conservative estimate of a 60% increase in spending by 2020 implies federal spending of nearly $50,000 per household, half of whom pay no taxes.

These figures do not include state and local tax obligations, which consist of future pension liability and bond indebtedness. California, for instance, is in hock by $68 billion (December 31, 2009 figure), or $1,838 per capita. This may seem like a modest figure, but it does not include a 2010 deficit of $19 billion, nor does it account for future pension and benefit obligations. 

Read the rest at American Thinker

The Dems Lies And Oil

Lie #1: We’re drilling in deepwater because we’re running out of places to drill.
Not True.
For decades, Democrats have blocked efforts to responsibly develop this nation’s energy resources, transforming vast areas of opportunity into “The No Zone.”Over the past 30 years:

Democrats have blocked the development of new sources of petroleum.
Democrats have blocked drilling in ANWR.
Democrats have blocked drilling off the coast of Florida.
Democrats have blocked drilling off of the east coast.
Democrats have blocked drilling off of the west coast.
Democrats have blocked drilling off the Alaskan coast.
Democrats have blocked building oil refineries.
Democrats have blocked clean nuclear energy production.
Democrats have blocked clean coal production.

But, they’re funding projects in Brazil.
The Wall Street Journal reported:

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

This radical president is shameless.
He’s pushing for more regulations and his cap-&-tax energy policy that will cause energy costs to necessarily skyrocket.

We have the Chinese drilling off our southern coast, and Brazil is drilling everywhere they can. I think the Dems have an aversion to American oil. 

Gateway Pundit

Gettin The facts Right On American Oil Reserves

 From an article at American Thinker by Chad Strafko,

We are not running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.  In fact, it is due to the President's party of extreme environmentalists that BP had to drill some 40 miles from the coastline in deep waters to extract oil.  Imagine if this oil leak had happened in the shallow waters off of the East Coast or even, dare we say it, in the pristine ANWR region.  How much easier it would have been to cap the leak and clean up the oil.

Consider our nation's vast oil reserve resources that are currently unavailable for use due to government ownership of the land or outright bans on drilling in certain areas.
According to a June 2008 article in Kiplinger Magazine, the United States has enough oil reserves to power the nation for upwards of three centuries.  That's three-hundred years, Mr. President.  We are not running out of oil reserves, it's just that those oil reserves have been declared off limits due to decades of environmental lobbying of our politicians, especially those on the Left.  This lobbying has driven the likes of BP and others out deep into the Gulf of Mexico to extract the nation's needed oil.
Note the following statement from the article:

"...untapped reserves are estimated at about 2.3 trillion barrels, nearly three times more than the reserves held by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Counties (OPEC) and sufficient to meet 300 years of demand-at today's levels-for auto, aircraft, heating and industrial fuel, without importing a single barrel of oil."

Think about that.  The nations that currently hold us hostage by their massive oil production actually have far less reserves than our own nation.
To read the rest

Goo-Goo Genocidaires: The Blood Is Dripping From Their Hands

As the Security Council prepares to vote the next round of sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, I’m thinking of some old debates about how to handle difficult regimes.  The thoughts aren’t consoling; too many voices in the debate over Iran hearken back to some of the worst ideas in American and European history.
Of all the mass murderers, genocidaires and enablers of the twentieth century, one group of collaborators does not get its fair share of condemnation and moral loathing. Unfortunately Americans have never really come to terms with the terrible things they did, we have never really named and shamed them, and we have never diagnosed and exposed the bad ideas that led to some of America’s most fateful and costly blunders.  Until we do, our society is at risk of repeating these errors.
The people I have in mind are the ‘goo-goo genocidaires,’ the willfully blind reformers, civil society activists, clergy, students and others whose foolishness and ignorance was a necessary condition for tens of millions of deaths in the last hundred years.  Unreflective, self-righteous ‘activists’ thought that to espouse peace was the same thing as to create or safeguard it.  As a result, tens of millions died.  Unless this kind of thinking is exposed and repudiated, it is likely to lead to as many or more deaths in the 21st.
We all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions; this turns out to be particularly true when it comes to the road to foreign policy hell.  Over the years good people or at least people who wanted to be good or thought they were, motivated by what seemed to them to be the highest of motives, have taken political stands and made policy proposals that helped mass murderers gain power in their own countries and launch themselves on international careers of conquest and mayhem.  At other times, fortunately, they’ve failed to change policy; still, they wasted a lot of people’s time and made life significantly more difficult for those whose plans to help the world ultimately worked.
Walter Russell Mead

Health premiums could rise 17 pct for young adults

CHICAGO — Under the health care overhaul, young adults who buy their own insurance will carry a heavier burden of the medical costs of older Americans — a shift expected to raise insurance premiums for young people when the plan takes full effect.
Beginning in 2014, most Americans will be required to buy insurance or pay a tax penalty. That's when premiums for young adults seeking coverage on the individual market would likely climb by 17 percent on average, or roughly $42 a month, according to an analysis of the plan conducted for The Associated Press. The analysis did not factor in tax credits to help offset the increase.
The higher costs will pinch many people in their 20s and early 30s who are struggling to start or advance their careers with the highest unemployment rate in 26 years.
Associated Press
More proof that morons run the country

The Stupak Mystery

Why did he hold out for a meaningless executive order? By Timothy Noah
A lot of people are scratching their heads about the executive order Rep. Bart Stupak extracted from President Obama as a condition of supporting health care reform. "It's not clear the executive order changes anything," writes the New Republic's Jon Cohn. I'd have to agree. So why did Stupak hold out for it?
Here's my best guess: Stupak was holding out not for language that merely reaffirmed what the Senate bill already says, but for language that delinked the fate of health reform's abortion ban from the fate of the Hyde Amendment. As I've explained before, the Hyde Amendment is not a permanent ban on government (actually, just Health and Human Services) funding of abortions. It's a ban that gets attached to appropriations bills and therefore must be renewed year after year. In the Senate bill, the ban on government funding of abortions through the new health insurance exchanges is dependent on the Hyde Amendment's renewal. The word "abortion" is defined "based on the law [governing HHS appropriations] as in effect as of the date that is six months before the beginning of the plan year involved." (This is on Page 119.) If Congress fails to renew the Hyde Amendment in any given year, the abortion ban in the health care reform bill will vanish.
Earlier today, Kathryn Jean Lopez reported on National Review Online that she'd been leaked a draft of the executive order as of last night. She scorned it as "meaningless," but it contained some important language that didn't make it into the final version. The draft said: "The Executive Order directs that the Hyde language [italics mine] found in sections 507 and 508 of the Labor HHH Appropriations Bill shall apply to the HR 3590." The final version said: "The Act maintains current Hyde Amendment restrictions [italics mine] governing abortion policy and extends those restrictions to the newly-created health insurance exchanges." What's the difference between language and current restrictions? Language denotes the wording as distinct from the conditions under which that wording is applied. Current restrictions, on the other hand, refers to the conditions. The first renders the Hyde Amendment immortal (at least until a followup executive order undoes it.) The second leaves it conditioned on renewal in the HHS appropriation. Once the Hyde Amendment restrictions were no longer current, the insurance exchanges would be free to use federal funds to pay for abortions.
Here's what I suspect. As of yesterday, the White House was willing to promise Stupak an open-ended ban on abortion funding in the exchanges. But today, either because of blowback from pro-choicers* in Congress or because Stupak lost some leverage as the health reform bill acquired more votes, it was not. So a basically meaningless executive order was issued to help Stupak save face.
Just a guess, but I bet I'm right.
Slate