The GOP House of Representatives Has Offered Eleven Separate Bills to Try and End the Budget Stalemate…….

…… And eleven times, the Democrat Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, has refused to even allow these bills to be voted on in the Senate. President Stompy Foot Obama has promised to veto them anyway. So this is the fault of the Republican House? No. The Republicans are the reasonable adults here. The Democrats typical form of “negotiation” is reaching an extreme. “Give us everything we demand (i.e., give up all your bargaining leverage and we’ll call it “compromise”) and then we will “negotiate.”“ This is not negotiation. It is dictation of terms. Meanwhile the maladministration seeks to inflict maximum pain on the American people by cutting off access to open plazas grinding hiring to a halt, needlessly preventing businesses from operating, and just generally making it very well known how unhappy the Man Who Would Be King is. From the first link:

1. Roll Call 478 on H.J. Res. 59 (September 20, 2013)

Earlier in September, House Republicans voted to fund the government at current spending levels while strengthening our economy and protecting millions of American families by defunding ObamaCare.

Senate Democrats killed the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

2. Roll Call 497/498 on H.J. Res 59 (September 28, 2013)

With hours left until the government ran out of funding, House Republicans voted to keep the government open at current spending levels while protecting our economy by delayingthe glitch-filled ObamaCare for one year and repealing the tax on medical devices like pacemakers and children’s hearing aides.

Senate Democrats killed the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it, causing the government shutdown.

3. Roll Call 504 on H.J. Res 59 (September 30, 2013)On September 30, the House GOP again voted to fund the government at current spending levels, while ensuring that Congress doesn’t receive special treatment under ObamaCare, and delaying ObamaCare’s individual mandate.

Again, Senate Democrats killed the measure in the Senate, and President Obama threatened to veto.

4. Roll Call 505 on H.J. Res 59 (September 30, 2013)

That same night, Republicans in the House voted to request a formal House-Senate conference, so Democrats and Republicans could sit down at the table and negotiate to resolve their differences.

Senate Democrats defeated that resolution, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

5. Voice Vote on Provide Local Funding for the District of Columbia Act (October 2, 2013)To help reopen parts of the government while Democrats refused to negotiate, House Republicans passed H.J. Res. 71 by voice vote, which would have restored funding for the government of the District of Columbia.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

6. Roll Call 513 on Open Our Nation’s Parks and Museums Act (October 2, 2013)

To help reopen parts of the government while Democrats refused to come to the table and work out differences, the House GOP voted to restore funding for the nation’s parks and museums – including the World War Two Memorial in Washington that has been closed to visiting veterans.

Senate Democrats killed the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

7. Roll Call 514 on Research for Lifesaving Cures Act (October 2, 2013)To help restore funding for vital cancer research and other lifesaving innovations, the House GOP voted to reopen the National Institute of Health.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill (see Harry Reid ask a reporter “why would we want to do that?” when asked if he would vote to resume funding for children’s cancer treatment), and President Obama threatened to veto it.

8. Roll Call 516 on Pay Our Guard and Reserve Act (October 3, 2013)

In order to make sure that the government shutdown doesn’t get in the way of paying our National Guard and Reserve, the House GOP voted for the Pay Our Guard and Reserve Act.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

ise to America’s Veterans Act (October 3, 2013)The House GOP voted to provide immediate funding for vital veterans benefits and services during the government shutdown.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

10. Roll Call 522 on National Emergency and Disaster Recovery Act (October 4, 2013)The House GOP voted to provide immediate funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to ensure Americans have access to emergency responders in the case of a disaster.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

11. Roll Call 524 on Nutrition Assistance for Low-Income Women and Children Act (October 4, 2013) The House GOP voted to provide immediate funding for nutritional assistance for nearly 9 low-income million mothers and children.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

So who are the obstructionist here, the people who make very reasonable requests, or those who say it’s my way or no other? 

Judge Jeanine Piro On the Benghazi Hearings

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Leon Panetta need to be held to account for the Benghazi debacle. Incompetence is the best-case scenario here and I don’t think any of them is that truly incompetent. Watch.

Rand Paul’s SOTU Response

I can’t find anything to disagree with here.

Words Matter–Obama’s Promises Versus Reality

Watch this video and then tell me again why anyone can seriously consider sending this guy back for a second term.

 

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“You Didn’t Build That” The Flip Side of the Coin

Writing over at PJ Media, Ukraine native Oleg Atbashian explains the flip side of the coin on which President Obama's famous "you didn't build that" speech was engraved. In short, by the same logic that all get credit for the achievements of a few, then all can be punished for the failures of a few also.

If the businessman “didn’t build that,” who did? Apparently, all of us did. And if the credit is equally shared, so must be the reward. Jackpot winners all, no more worries about paying the mortgage or filling the gas tank. This thrilled Obama’s voters during the 2008 election, as his speeches removed moral barriers protecting other people’s property, establishing a new morality of forced redistribution of wealth — previously known as looting.

But here’s the catch: everything in this world has a price. If all of us can be credited for someone else’s achievement, by the same logic, all of us can be punished for someone else’s failure. Just as all individual credit goes to the society as a whole, so does all the blame. And if the entire group, class, nation, or race can gain moral authority because some of its members did something right, the same standard grants the moral authority to blame any other group, class, nation, or race because some of its members did something wrong. In the history of collectivism this concept translated into wars, slavery, pogroms, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, expropriation of wealth, deportation, internment, resettlement, and genocide.

The two notions, collective achievement and collective punishment, are as inseparable as two sides of a coin.

But there’s more: if nothing is to your credit, then nothing is your fault. What is the cost of that bargain? In a seemingly fair trade-off, we lose our right to individual achievements but gain the right to blame others for our failures. Collectivism provides us with a sufficiently analgesic illusion of fairness. If you turn out to be a loser, it’s not because you are unqualified: on a whim, with objective standards removed, you can now self-righteously put the blame on those close to you, or on the unfair system, or even on the big wide (and deeply flawed) world.

Read the whole thing. .

Somebody Else Did That For You, Barack

Barack Obama can't comprehend the idea of earned success, because all of his successes from admission to Columbia University and Harvard Law, election as Editor of the the Harvard Law Review, Illinois State and US Senate, US President and Nobel Peace Prize winner were completely unearned. Somebody Else made that happen. Bill Whittle explains:

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Economic Illiteracy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Barack Obama on the Romney campaign pointing out that there is a difference betweeen "outsourcing" and "offshoring": “Yesterday, his advisers tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.”

Actually, you wouldn't need to "make this up," because there is a difference. This is not by any means the sole example of Barack Obama's economic illiteracy but he manages to make himself sound even smaller and more petty than usual. Kevin Williamson at National Review explains: 

“Outsourcing” happens when a firm contracts out its non-core functions to other vendors, e.g., a hotel decides to hire a cleaning service rather than keep maids on the hotel payroll. To take an extreme but illustrative case, consider that the firms that provide car-driving services do not manufacture their own automobiles or stitch their drivers’ uniforms, even though doing so would “create jobs.” They outsource those tasks to GM or Ford and to whomever makes their uniforms. Likewise, their communication systems are outsourced to Apple or Motorola or RIM.

But at least they should “buy American,” right? GM is an “American” company building “American” cars, but it too outsources many of its needs, sometimes to other U.S.-based companies, sometimes to companies overseas. Moving facilities overseas is what “offshoring” means; it is not synonymous with “outsourcing.” GM has decided that it can build cars without manufacturing brake pads or tires, much less manufacturing steel or rubber, and its production partners include facilities, workers, and investors from around the world. (This is, it should go without saying, a good thing. People who talk mistily about the virtues of “global cooperation” rarely recognize it when they see it.)

The belief that seems to be popular on the left is that the point of offshoring is to take advantage of cheap labor but in Williamson's article he points out that the offshored functions tend to go to high wage countries like Germany and Japan, not Haiti and Rwanda. Williamson:  "That is because low wages are not the goal of offshoring. High productivity is the goal of offshoring. There is a reason that BMW does not move all of its manufacturing operations to India, and patriotism is not it."

Read the whole thing. 

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Fast & Furious: Botched Investigation, Or Something More Sinister?

If you don't know what Operation Fast & Furious or have only recently heard about it, it is probably because you rely on the mainstream media for your news and they have been very studiously ignoring it for over a year. Why would they do that? It isn't because it isn't news. It's because it's news that reflects very badly on their man, Barack Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder.

Bill Whittle's latest Afterburner will bring you up to speed on what it's all about:

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An Open Letter to "Mr." Obama

The incomparable Vodkapundit has written a letter to our Dear Leader, offering some good advice about what he should do if SCOTUS strikes down the healthcare law:

Mr. Obama, if the Supreme Court does strike down this law, you should get down on both knees and thank them.

And then you ought to stay there a while and beg us all for forgiveness.
 

We’re waiting.

Do go and read the whole thing.

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State of the Union - Cato Takes It Down Point by Point

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Bill Whittle Recaps the First Three Years Under Obama

For his last Afterburner of 2011 Bill Whittle recaps Obama's first three years.

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That's quite a rcord of non-achievement for three years of what I hope will be a single four-year term.

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David Harsanyi: Obama Proposes to Save The Middle Class by Enslaving It.

Over at Reason Online, David Harsanyi unbundles President Obama's speech at Osawatomie, Texas Kansas earlier this week:

In Teddy Roosevelt's era, President Barack Obama explained to the nation this week, "some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress....But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can."

And he's right. Even today there are people who believe they should have free license to take whatever they want from whomever they can. They're called Democrats.

It just gets better from there. Read the whole thing.

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Latest Absurd Assertion from the Obama Administration - He Doesn't Have to Sign Bills Before They Become Law

No, really. That's the latest out of the Obama Administration. This is in spite of what the Constitution says in plain English. A bill:

“shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States: If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it.”

So, first, Congressmen need not read the bills they pass before voting on them. Now the President need not read them or sign them for them to become law. I wonder what our government would think of the argument that the logical extension of that line of reasoning is that if Congress and the President needn't follow the plain language of the Constitution then we needn't follow the laws thusly "passed."  Somehow I don't think a pass is what we'll get. 

Our government is out of control. November 2012 can't get here soon enough for me.

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Barack Obama as Turncoat - Bill Whittle

Watch.



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Obama's Inner Bracket

The blogger known as Zombie got to thinking about Obama's bracket picks for the college basketball finals and a question occured to her; "Don’t we all have what is essentially an “inner bracket” which delineates our personal hierarchy of priorities, beliefs, behaviors and traits? If there was a bracket which revealed the inner workings of Obama’s mind, what would it look like? And what trait would emerge dominant?"

See the answer here.

(via Power Line)

JibJab Is Back With a Farewell Tribute to 2010

And what a year it was too.




(Via Power Line)

From the Wall Street Journal - Clinton: State is Her "Last Public" Post

So Hillary is getting out of public life. Well, so much for my prediction.

See ya, Hills.

Fraudulent Branding and Barack Obama

Kyle-Anne Shiver talking about the marketing of Barack Obama over at Pajamas Media:

"If Barack Obama had been a commercial product instead of a political candidate, then he and his brand creators — Axelrod et al — would be facing one of the most massive class action suits ever to hit any American business."

She goes on to compare the marketng of our 44th president to the marketing of cigarettes forty years ago. Read the whole thing but I wanted to draw attention to this comment left by reader cfbleachers (Yes, he gets his numbeing a little muddled; 1, B, C but he's on the money otherwise).

(Via Instapundit)

The Audacity of Mind-Blowing Arrogance

That is what Bryan Preston at Pajamas Media is calling President Obama's recent assertion that if the Republicans win control of the Congress, they'll have to move in his direction. I'm not sure there isn't an equal dose of cluelessness competing with the arrogance here. Obama, from Sunday's New York Times:

“It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, they feel more responsible, either because they didn’t do as well as they anticipated, and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn’t work for them, or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way.”

This from a man who is polling at  minus 18% in Rasmussen's Presidential Tracking Poll on job performance. Here is what Bryan Preston has to say about that:

"Nearly half the country “strongly disapproves” of your job performance, Mr. President. They’re your bosses. They’re evaluating you, your policies, and how you have behaved over nearly two years on the job. And they’re set to fire a wide swath of your allies and replace them with your political opponents. This forces Republicans to work with you? If the American people could fire you right now, a near majority of them would. But they can’t, yet. The best the voters can do right now is fire your enablers and keep more from getting into power. Democrats everywhere are finding ways to run away from you and your foolish policies, if they can. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not just the persistent unemployment rate that your massive stimulus project did nothing to alleviate."

And on the policies of Obama and the Democrat party in general:

"From border security to energy policy to failure to handle disaster to irresponsibility on taxes to granting terrorists civilian trials in the very city they attacked, this president and his party’s policies have been given a run. They’ve failed, and so dozens of Democrats all over the country are about to be fired. Their failure isn’t in that they didn’t try hard enough or do enough. Their failure is in the fact that they pushed their policies over the objections of the voters, those policies have been disastrous, and now November is just around the corner."

Exactly right. I can't wait for November 3rd.

 

A Primary Challenge for Obama? I Say Count On It.

Over at Commentary, Peter Wehner speculates that President Obama may have to deal with a primary chanllenge in 2012. I think he will and I'm predicting it will be Hillary Clinton. Obama is sinking in the job approval polls and you can bet that Hillary is still nursing a grudge from 2008 when she probably should have won her party's nomination. The Clinton's could never let an opportunity to take out a severely weakened Obama go to waste. My predicton is that shortly after the upcoming mid-term election, and certainly no later than the middle of next year, she will resign as Secretary of State and after a very brief break she will be hitting the road for one of her "listening tours."

Obama's numbers are terrible now. After the expected mid-term rout in Congress, he will become positively toxic, indeed he already is to some extent, as evidenced by all the Democrat congress critters that don't want his help campaigning and indeed actively avoid making appearances with him, even in their home states.

As for this comment in Wehner's article:

"If Obama remains or becomes increasingly radioactive in 2011, liberals will seek to separate their movement from a deeply unpopular president. And the man who in the past has been so quick to throw others (like Jeremiah Wright) under the bus may find himself suffering a similar fate. The cruelest cut of all, of course, would be for this act to come courtesy of those who were once Obama’s more worshipful supporters."

To paraphrase Matthew 26:52; He who lives by the bus, dies by the bus.  It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.