Obama Weak On Immigration

AZ's Brewer Slams Obama On Immigration: Where's The Civility?

Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ): Almost a year ago, Governor Jan Brewer invited President Barack Obama to visit the Arizona border. He declined. Since then, the Federal Government has sued the State of Arizona for making sure immigration laws are enforced.

Brewer has been celebrated by many for taking action to enforce laws that Washington has long ignored, those who oppose the law continue to choose pithy punch lines over responsible and pragmatic action.

Two days ago in El Paso, President Obama decided once again that Arizona's unsecured borders and illegal immigration crisis are a laughing matter. Unfortunately, no one in Arizona is laughing.

Commentary

Obama is talking out of both sides of his mouth

Shribman Correct For Now...........



David M. Shribman: GOP presidential field still lacking in heavyweights

National Perspective David M. Shribman

NORTH CONWAY, N.H. — Stand in the center of this famous old town and look to the north.

There's Mount Washington with its early-May mantle of white clinging to the ravines. Look to the east and there's Mount Cranmore, the storied ski hill still with traces of snow. All about there is the feeling that the transition to the new season hasn't quite arrived.

So it is with the political season that is beginning in this state, for six decades the site of the first presidential primary. The struggle for the Republican presidential nomination hasn't really begun. Indeed the field, like so many of the old farms along the rural byways, seems almost empty right now.

In other years when the political field seemed incomplete, there was a giant on the sidelines, contemplating his options. One time it was California Gov. Pete Wilson, another it was Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson. Both Republicans were duds once real campaigning began in North Country towns like this and in the cities and suburbs to the south.

Once it was New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. In the end, a plane destined for Concord, N.H., to file campaign papers never took off, and so the Cuomo campaign didn't take off either.

This time is different. There is no giant abroad in the land, weighing a campaign, consulting pollsters and fundraisers about his prospects. The main figure in that position isn't a giant at all, but a diminutive man with an iron will and a gold-plated resume, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, whose prospects shot up when a truly large figure, the husky Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, stepped aside.

There's another reason this time is different. It's the utterly changed landscape since the slaying of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in a Pakistan mansion where he hid in plain sight. Now President Barack Obama seems like a giant-killer, in part because he ordered the killing of a giant figure — perhaps the biggest so far of the 21st century.

Where once the president seemed weak, indecisive, even lacking in audacity — I wrote these things myself only some weeks ago — now he seems strong, decisive, audacious. Where once he seemed overwhelmed by the problems that came to his in-box, he now seems confident and efficient in dealing with them, and perhaps even ready to begin some new initiatives of his own.

There has been no more dramatic a transformation of an American president in decades. Ones that come close include Gerald R. Ford's pardon of Richard M. Nixon, which worked to his disadvantage in the polls but not in history; Nixon's trips to China and Soviet Russia, which worked to his advantage both in the polls and in history; and Harry Truman's firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, which now is regarded as having re-established one of the bedrock principles of American civic life.

The other major effect of the bin Laden killing is to diminish some of the peripheral figures on Republican lists, especially businessman and television figure Donald Trump, who was transformed from caricature to cartoon in a few hours' time. No president since Andrew Jackson has had a coiffure remotely like Trump's, whose hair has the second disadvantage of eerily bringing to mind the great lesson from Richard Nixon: The cover-up is worse than the crime.

Many Republicans, several of whom graciously praised the president, increasingly believe they cannot prevail next year with a cast of characters who are the political equivalents of the stand-ins who played big-league baseball from 1942 to 1945.

I have argued in this space that the eventual challenger to Obama will rise in stature and in prospects merely by possessing the Republican presidential nomination. I still believe that. But Joel Goldfield, the St. Louis University political scientist, maintains that major-party candidates who win their nominations against a weak or depleted field may be inherently weaker in general elections than those who prevail over a stronger field.

The best example: John F. Kennedy was able to defeat Richard M. Nixon in 1960 in part because he defeated a formidable group of opponents, including Hubert H. Humphrey, Lyndon B. Johnson and Stuart Symington. The same was true of Ronald Reagan, whose 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter was enhanced because he was able to defeat such rivals as Senate Minority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr., former director of central intelligence George H.W. Bush, former Treasury secretary John Connally and former GOP vice-presidential nominee Robert J. Dole.

"A strong field greatly helps the candidate who ultimately gets the nomination," says Scott Reed, who managed Dole's later campaign, when he won the 1996 GOP nomination only to be defeated by President Bill Clinton. "It makes him or her more substantive, more knowledgeable and more capable in the general-election fight. It really helps to be tested in the primary and caucus season. It's a great warm-up for the general election — and it's one of the few big advantages you can't buy."

True — as long as the fight isn't vicious and long, in which case, as James A. Johnson, who managed Walter F. Mondale's 1984 campaign, argues, "The strong field emphasizes everybody's weakness, because a strong field is about differentiation."

Still, the Republicans seem to be seeking the presence of someone else. This new figure — and his or her identity still seems unknown — would have plenty to run on, the bin Laden episode notwithstanding.

The public is frantic about gasoline prices, which are in the $4-per-gallon range. Personal experience seems at odds with official figures showing a low inflation rate, with lettuce up 27 percent in a year and coffee up 11 percent. The success against al-Qaida hasn't brought any sense of bipartisanship to Capitol Hill, nor any realistic prospect of attacking a deficit that seems incomprehensible and a set of entitlements that seem insupportable.

So while the president isn't home free yet, the Republican search continues.

Republicans control 29 of the nation's governors' offices, but none besides Daniels is widely known. The situation is the same in the Senate, where Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida are perhaps the most appealing names. But Rubio has stepped aside and Dr. Paul knows that his father is a likely candidate. So for now — perhaps for a while — the GOP wait continues.

True Liberalism On Show

So Cal Democrat?s Campaign Ad: ?We Minorities Should Stick Together?

This is what Dr.Martin Luther King warned us about.Stuff like this

Romney Defends Massachusetts Health Care Plan

  Obama's Running Mate From Wall Street Journal Opinion Editorial

 


Mitt Romney travels to Ann Arbor today to deliver what his campaign bills as a major address laying out his "2012 principles for health-care reform." These are likely to be sensible, but what we'll be listening for is how he explains his health-care principles of five years ago.
As everyone knows, the health reform Mr. Romney passed in 2006 as Massachusetts Governor was the prototype for President Obama's version and gave national health care a huge political boost. Mr. Romney now claims ObamaCare should be repealed, but his failure to explain his own role or admit any errors suggests serious flaws both in his candidacy and as a potential President.
There's a lot to learn from the failure of the ObamaCare model that began in Massachusetts, which is now moving to impose price controls on all hospitals, doctors and other providers. Not that anyone would know listening to Mr. Romney. In the paperback edition of his campaign book "No Apology," he calls the plan a "success," and he has defended it in numerous media appearances as he plans his White House run.

Editorial Writer Joe Rago previews Romney's speech today.

Mr. Romney has lately qualified his praise, saying in a speech in New Hampshire in March that "our experiment wasn't perfect—some things worked, some things didn't, and some things I'd change." He's mostly avoided specifics other than retreating to the cover of state experimentation, but we can fill in the details based on interviews with Romney staffers as well as others present at the creation.
When Mr. Romney took office in 2003, the state was already enforcing public utility-style regulation of insurers for premiums and multiple benefit mandates. The resulting distortions were increasing rates fast, along with the natural increases from good but expensive Massachusetts medicine.

Mr. Romney applied the approach that succeeded when he was a Bain & Company business consultant: He convened an expert task force. His health-care commission immersed itself in data, crunched the numbers and came up with a technocratic solution.
The conceit was that a universal reform would cover everyone and all but pay for itself by reorganizing the state's health-care finances. Since 1985, Massachusetts footed most of the bill when the uninsured showed up for treatment through a $800 million fund for uncompensated care. That money, along with extra federal Medicaid dollars under a special waiver, would subsidize lower- and middle-income residents.
In the name of personal responsibility, Mr. Romney also introduced the individual mandate, first in the nation, requiring everyone to buy coverage or else pay a penalty. Free riders, he said, transferred their own costs to others, either through higher premiums or taxes. This is the same argument the Obama Administration is now using to justify the coercion of the individual mandate in the federal courts. Because the states have police powers under the Constitution, Mr. Romney's plan posed no legal problems. His blunder was his philosophy of government.
The people who don't buy coverage though they can afford it aren't really a major fiscal problem—unless the goal of the individual mandate is to force them to subsidize others. People who are priced out of coverage require subsidies—so in practice the logic of the individual mandate is that it is a government mandate too. Entitlements automatically grow and grow, and then the political class begins to make decisions that used to be left to markets and individuals.
Massachusetts took off on this entitlement trajectory after Mr. Romney signed the bill in 2006 and stepped down to run for President two years later. Let's go to the data, all of which are state-reported, in search of evidence of Mr. Romney's "success."
The only good news we can find is that the uninsured rate has dropped to 2% today from 6% in 2006. Yet four out of five of the newly insured receive low- or no-cost coverage from the government. The subsidies will cost at least $830 million in 2011 and are growing, conservatively measured, at 5.1% a year. Total state health-care spending as a share of the budget has grown from about 16% in the 1980s to 30% in 2006 to 40% today. The national state average is about 25%.
The safety-net fund that was supposed to be unwound, well, wasn't. Uncompensated hospital care rose 5% from 2008 to 2009, and 15% from 2009 to 2010, hitting $475 million (though the state only paid out $405 million). "Avoidable" use of emergency rooms—that is, for routine care like a sore throat—increased 9% between 2004 and 2008. Meanwhile, unsubsidized insurance premiums for individuals and small businesses have climbed to among the highest in the nation.
Like Mr. Obama's reform, RomneyCare was predicated on the illusion that insurance would be less expensive if everyone were covered. Even if this theory were plausible, it is not true in Massachusetts today. So as costs continue to climb, Mr. Romney's Democratic successor now wants to create a central board of political appointees to decide how much doctors and hospitals should be paid for thousands of services.
The Romney camp blames all this on a failure of execution, not of design. But by this cause-and-effect standard, Mr. Romney could push someone out of an airplane and blame the ground for killing him. Once government takes on the direct or implicit liability of paying for health care for everyone, the only way to afford it is through raw political control of all medical decisions.
Mr. Romney's refusal to appreciate this, then and now, reveals a troubling failure of political understanding and principle. The raucous national debate over health care isn't about this or that technocratic detail, but about basic differences over the role of government. In the current debate over Medicare, Paul Ryan wants to reduce costs by encouraging private competition while Mr. Obama wants the cost-cutting done by a body of unelected experts like the one emerging in Massachusetts.
Mr. Romney's fundamental error was assuming that such differences could be parsed by his own group of experts, as if government can be run by management consultants. He still seems to believe he somehow squared the views of Jonathan Gruber, the MIT evangelist for ObamaCare, with those of the Heritage Foundation.
In reality, his ostensible liberal allies like the late Ted Kennedy saw an opening to advance their own priorities, and in Mr. Romney they took advantage of a politician who still doesn't seem to understand how government works. It's no accident that RomneyCare's most vociferous defenders now are in the White House and left-wing media and think tanks. They know what happened, even if he doesn't.

***

For a potential President whose core argument is that he knows how to revive free market economic growth, this amounts to a fatal flaw. Presidents lead by offering a vision for the country rooted in certain principles, not by promising a technocracy that runs on "data." Mr. Romney's highest principle seems to be faith in his own expertise.
More immediately for his Republican candidacy, the debate over ObamaCare and the larger entitlement state may be the central question of the 2012 election. On that question, Mr. Romney is compromised and not credible. If he does not change his message, he might as well try to knock off Joe Biden and get on the Obama ticket.

Chris Matthews Still Has Obama Tingling Up His Leg

Chris Matthews: Last Week Was 'Best Week Ever For The Country'

Keep drinking the left wing cool-aid Chris keep drinking it.

Cal Thomas Gets It Right On Obama

 

More Taxes on Big Oil?

Conservative Columnist Cal Thomas

  

First quarter profits for American oil companies are jaw dropping. Exxon earned nearly $11 billion, up 69 percent from a year ago. Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Europe’s largest oil company, announced it made $8.78 billion in the first quarter, a 60 percent increase over last year. Much of it, but not all, is due to higher gas prices, over which the companies have very little control due to our heavy reliance on foreign oil.

Some in Congress — mostly Democrats, but a few Republicans — are calling for an end to tax breaks enjoyed by the oil companies and in some cases, higher taxes on their profits. But the Obama administration is contributing to higher energy prices, which inflate the companies’ bottom line.

The Environmental Protection Agency has prevented Shell from proceeding with its Northern Alaska drilling project after Shell reportedly invested more than $4 billion in the project. How can companies make costly investments when they are uncertain that policies allowed in one administration will still be allowed in the one that follows?

In March, when visiting South America, President Obama promised that the United States would help Brazil develop its offshore resources. But he won’t allow much new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, or Alaska. So we are going to help Brazil drill for oil, and then import it? Gas prices have nearly doubled since Obama’s inauguration and yet the media don’t blame him for it, as they blamed his predecessor when prices soared to current levels.

What about taxes? Oil companies are already heavily taxed. According to the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie, between 1998 and 2008, the oil and gas industry paid $1 trillion in total income taxes. That’s in addition to the $178 billion the companies sent the federal government in rent, royalty and bonus payments between 1982 and 2009. What oil companies pay in taxes is higher than the average American manufacturer, more than their “fair share.”

Wood Mackenzie also found that should taxes be increased on oil companies by $5 billion a year, that “would result in a $128 billion loss in government revenue and would reduce domestic production by 400,000 barrels per day by 2025,” with an additional 1.2 million barrels per day at risk. “This tax increase would increase, not decrease our reliance on foreign sources of oil.”

As for those large profits, the American Petroleum Institute (API) reports that in the latest published data for last year’s third quarter, “the oil and gas industry earned 6 cents for every dollar of sales in comparison with all manufacturing, which earned 8.6 cents for every dollar of sales.”

This administration gives lip service to the successful, while punishing them and subsidizing the unsuccessful. If the president is serious about reducing the cost of oil (and given candidate Obama’s frequent statements in favor of increased energy prices to force more of us (but not him) to drive hybrid, even electric cars — he can emulate George W. Bush.

In July 2008, President Bush lifted an executive order banning offshore drilling, a token gesture since a federal ban on offshore drilling remained in place, but his action caused oil prices to drop, as suppliers believed we were getting serious about obtaining more oil from domestic sources. The argument from the anti-drilling side is that new drilling projects would have no effect because of the time it takes to find and then refine the oil. If new drilling had begun five or 10 years ago we would be pumping far more oil than we are now. If we begin now, in five or 10 years we’ll see the results.

Demonizing the oil companies won’t produce one more drop of oil. Neither will higher taxes, which will affect employment and create many more negative consequences.

Last week, former President George W. Bush reiterated his support for more drilling: “I would suggest Americans understand how supply and demand works. And if you restrict supplies of crude, the price of oil is going to go up.”

President Obama either doesn’t understand supply and demand, or he is deliberately ignoring it in hopes of imposing his radical environmental views on us all.

This column by Cal Thomas can be read in todays print edition of the Boston Herald but not on their on-line edition.

Commetary

Cal Thomas is one of my role models as far as Conservative columnists are concerned.He is right 100% on the part of the EPA regulations getting in the way of as sarah Palin said Drill baby Drill.Along with over taxation ofth alleged "Big Oil" Companies

NYT On Big $$ In Elections



Opinion Editorial

    One would think that by reading the title of this mornings second lead oped "Democrats, Seduced by Secret Dollars" that the New York Times  left leaning editorial  board  have finally woke up.But that is not the case.
    From the OPED "Last year several pro-Republican advocacy groups degraded the Congressional elections by spending at least $138 million in secret donations on advertisements. The public did not know which lobbying interests gave money, or how much, or what they would demand in return. But the donations became a significant factor in the Republican gains in the House and the Senate."In all honesty I am surprised that the NYT isnot going after us in the Tea Party movement in particular.But  they are hypocrites none the less.
   The rant continues "Now several prominent Democrats are abandoning the high ground and have decided to raise millions of their own secret dollars. They have promised they will again try to pass a law preventing this secrecy if they win. (They were stymied in an earlier attempt by a Republican Senate filibuster.) Whatever they gain in money, they stand to lose far more by giving up principles that President Obama and party leaders once claimed to cherish."Thats funny LOL Democrats abandoning the high ground.
   Now the unions plan on helping Obama get $$$ for re-election "Bill Burton, who until February was Mr. Obama’s deputy press secretary, said last week that he would help lead a group called Priorities USA, which will raise unlimited money from undisclosed sources to aid in the president’s re-election campaign. The initial money will come from the Service Employees International Union and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood producer, but more will inevitably begin to flow in from other unions and wealthy Democrats."
   Like the $$$ hasn't come in from the punk thug ass unions before especially from the likes of the SEIU and left leaning idiots like Katzenberg.
   It seems that I am lauging more this morning for some weird reason heres more to laugh at "Mr. Obama has long claimed to champion transparency and denounced the secret-money sluice operated by Republicans last year as a “threat to democracy.” As he said in October, “The American people deserve to know who’s trying to sway their elections, and you can’t stand by and let the special interests drown out the voices of the American people.” Last year, speaking for the administration, Mr. Burton called for a “bright light” to shine on the shadowy groups."Transparency my ass but to champion it  Obama is a chump CHUMP!
   Here is another line of BS "Mr. Burton now says he does not like the campaign finance rules, which the Supreme Court."Excuse me it was McCain/Feingold in the US Senate and Meehan/Shays bill in theUS Hose tat ended up being the Campaign finance BS bill.
   The NYT ends this oped in condescending left wing fashion "A political system built on secret, laundered money will inevitably lead toward an increased culture of influence and corruption. Democrats would attract more support as a principled party that refused to follow the Republicans down that dark alley."
    Say what it is the Democrats who for years on end have raised and laundered campaign donations we don't have to look far here in the 6th Congressional district of Massachusetts our current socialist left wing Communist U.S.Rep.John Tierney (D-Salem Ma) whos wife was sentenced to a month in prison for laundering $$ for her brother (the brother in law of Congressman Tierney for you dumb ass liberals out there)who is wanted by the feds for $$ laundering gambling $$.But Tierney claimed that that was his wife's families business and he didnot know anything about it.Yeah right.