Obama-Care: Killing Off Grandma and Grandpa & Cost-Savings?

Via(SteveMaloneyGOP)

Barack Obama’s Culture of Death

The biggest issue that lies before America is Barack Hussein Obama’s version of national health care. Obama claims that increasing demands on the health care system, which his plan surely will do, is somehow going to lower costs while increasing quality.

Based on the experiences of other countries, including Canada and European nations, Obama-care eventually may lower unit costs modestly (mainly through rationing). On the minus side, it will decimate the quality of care. It will make the world’s gold standard in health care — the U.S. — start to resemble your local Department of Motor Vehicles (“take a number please”).

I’ll be writing on this subject for the next week to 10 days, and I hope you’ll follow along.

One way Obama wants to control health costs is by increasing the number of abortions, both in the U.S. and worldwide. The basic concept is that dead embryos don’t incur any additional health costs. I’ll write more about that later.

For now, however, I want to focus on the severely infirm and/or “terminally ill” elderly. Here’s what Obama recently said about them. He admitted he wants the government to decide what health care Americans receive.

“There’s always going to be an asymmetry of information between patient and provider,” he said. “And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options.” In other words, the federal government would be a middle-man, basically usurping a doctor’s determination what treatment is appropriate.

Continue Reading here:

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Hey Obama, America needs give NO APOLOGIES!!

The President’s Apology Tour

Great leaders aren’t defined by consensus.

By KARL ROVE

President Barack Obama has finished the second leg of his international confession tour. In less than 100 days, he has apologized on three continents for what he views as the sins of America and his predecessors.

Mr. Obama told the French (the French!) that America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has “a moral responsibility to act” on arms control because only the U.S. had “used a nuclear weapon.” In London, he said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” — as if that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S. had not “pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors” because we “failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas.”

By confessing our nation’s sins, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Mr. Obama has “changed the image of America around the world” and made the U.S. “safer and stronger.” As evidence, Mr. Gibbs pointed to the absence of protesters during the Summit of the Americas this past weekend.

That’s now the test of success? Anti-American protesters are a remarkably unreliable indicator of a president’s wisdom. Ronald Reagan drew hundreds of thousands of protesters by deploying Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe. Those missiles helped win the Cold War.

There is something ungracious in Mr. Obama criticizing his predecessors, including most recently John F. Kennedy. (“I’m grateful that President [Daniel] Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old,” Mr. Obama said after the Nicaraguan delivered a 52-minute anti-American tirade that touched on the Bay of Pigs.) Mr. Obama acts as if no past president — except maybe Abraham Lincoln — possesses his wisdom.

Mr. Obama was asked in Europe if he believes in American exceptionalism. He said he did — in the same way that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism.” That’s another way of saying, “No.”

Mr. Obama makes it seem as though there is moral equivalence between America and its adversaries and assumes that if he confesses America’s sins, other nations will confess theirs and change. But he won no confessions (let alone change) from the leaders of Venezuela, Nicaragua or Russia. He apologized for America and our adversaries rejoiced. Fidel Castro isn’t easing up on Cuban repression, but he is preparing to take advantage of Mr. Obama’s policy shifts.

When a president desires personal popularity, he can lose focus on vital American interests. It’s early, but with little to show for the confessions, David Axelrod of Team Obama was compelled to say this week that the president planted, cultivated and will harvest “very, very valuable” returns later. Like what?

Meanwhile, the desire for popularity has led Mr. Obama to embrace bad policies. Blaming America for the world financial crisis led him to give into European demands for crackdowns on tax havens and hedge funds. Neither had much to do with the credit crisis. Saying that America’s relationship with Russia “has been allowed to drift” led the president to push for arms negotiations. But that draws attention away from America’s real problems with Russia: its invasion of Georgia last summer, its bullying of Ukraine, its refusal to join in pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions, and its threats of retaliation against the Poles, Balts and Czechs for standing with the U.S. on missile defense.

Mr. Obama is downplaying the threats we face. He takes comfort in thinking that Venezuela has a defense budget that “is probably 1/600th” of America’s — it’s actually 1/215th — but that hasn’t kept Mr. Chávez from supporting narcoterrorists waging war on Colombia (a key U.S. ally) or giving petrodollars to anti-American regimes. Venezuela isn’t likely to attack the U.S., but it is capable of harming American interests.

Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoir “Years of Renewal”: “The great statesmen of the past saw themselves as heroes who took on the burden of their societies’ painful journey from the familiar to the as yet unknown. The modern politician is less interested in being a hero than a superstar. Heroes walk alone; stars derive their status from approbation. Heroes are defined by inner values; stars by consensus. When a candidate’s views are forged in focus groups and ratified by television anchorpersons, insecurity and superficiality become congenital.”

A superstar, not a statesman, today leads our country. That may win short-term applause from foreign audiences, but do little for what should be the chief foreign policy preoccupation of any U.S. president: advancing America’s long-term interests.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Moving Back To Uncle Sam’s Plantation!!

Via(WND)

By Star Parker

Six years ago, I wrote a book called “Uncle Sam’s Plantation.” I wrote the book to tell my own story of what I saw living inside the welfare state and my own transformation out of it.

I said in that book that indeed there are two Americas. A poor America on socialism and a wealthy America on capitalism.

I talked about government programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS), Emergency Assistance to Needy Families with Children (EANF), Section 8 Housing and Food Stamps.

A vast sea of perhaps well-intentioned government programs, all initially set into motion in the 1960s, that were going to lift the nation’s poor out of poverty.

A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mindsets from “How do I take care of myself?” to “What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?”

Instead of solving economic problems, government welfare socialism created monstrous moral and spiritual problems – the kind of problems that are inevitable when individuals turn responsibility for their lives over to others.

The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city schools and broken black families.

Through God’s grace, I found my way out. It was then that I understood what freedom meant and how great this country is.

I had the privilege of working on welfare reform in 1996, passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by a Democrat president. A few years after enactment, welfare roles were down 50 percent.

I thought we were on the road to moving socialism out of our poor black communities and replacing it with wealth-producing American capitalism.

But, incredibly, we are going in the opposite direction.

Instead of poor America on socialism becoming more like rich American on capitalism, rich America on capitalism is becoming like poor America on socialism.

Uncle Sam has welcomed our banks onto the plantation and they have said, “Thank you, Suh.”

Now, instead of thinking about what creative things need to be done to serve customers, they are thinking about what they have to tell Massah in order to get their cash.

There is some kind of irony that this is all happening under our first black president on the 200th anniversary of the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.

Worse, socialism seems to be the element of our new young president. And maybe even more troubling, our corporate executives seem happy to move onto the plantation.

In an op-ed on the opinion page of the Washington Post, Mr. Obama is clear that the goal of his trillion dollar spending plan is much more than short-term economic stimulus.

“This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending – it’s a strategy for America’s long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education.”

Perhaps more incredibly, Mr. Obama seems to think that government taking over an economy is a new idea. Or that massive growth in government can take place “with unprecedented transparency and accountability.”

Yes, sir, we heard it from Jimmy Carter when he created the Department of Energy, the Synfuels Corporation and the Department of Education.

Or how about the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 – The War on Poverty – which, President Johnson said, “… does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done. It charts a new course. It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty.”

Trillions of dollars later, black poverty is the same. But black families are not, with triple the incidence of single-parent homes and out of wedlock births.

It’s not complicated. Americans can accept Barack Obama’s invitation to move onto the plantation. Or they can choose personal responsibility and freedom.

Does anyone really need to think about what the choice should be?

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Who is President of France??

Via(RedState)

Obama Hacks Off France In Latest Foreign Policy Blunder

Someone forgot to tell Barack Obama that Jacque Chirac is no longer the President of France.

We would like to think that this is a joke. Sadly, the French media is reporting as true that Barack Obama sent a letter to the President of France pledging support and friendship. His actual words were

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

What’s This? Obama Worse Than Bush on Wars!

Yes you read that right.  According to some Anti-War Activists.

Via(CNSNEWS)

Obama’s War Policies Worse than Bush’s, Anti-War Activist Says

Adam Kokesh, Iraq Veterans Against the War

(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama’s war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan are criminal and worse than those of former President Bush, according to Adam Kokesh, who serves on the board of directors of the anti-war group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW).

Kokesh and other members of the IVAW gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Thursday to call on Obama to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also launched a 24-hour vigil/demonstration called “Operation No Change” to mark the sixth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War (March 20, 2003).

“In some ways, Obama is worse than Bush,” Kokesh told CNSNews.com. “Bush wasn’t proposing a surge in Afghanistan – and Bush was talking about a quicker timeline for withdrawal than Obama.”

“That’s why we called this ‘Operation No Change,’” said Kokesh. “What Obama is doing with our foreign policy on a fundamental level is not change. Though we are going to re-label the troops ‘non-combat troops,’ they are still out there, and clearly they are still fighting for American interests.”

Kokesh also said that he “absolutely” thinks Obama’s war policies are criminal and that he has not been surprised by Obama’s actions since he became president in January.

“I’m not disappointed because I never had any hope in him,” said Kokesh. “All of the predications of those of us who read the fine print about Obama have come true. During the primaries he sold himself very vaguely as a peace candidate and said he wanted to end the occupations.

“But when that congealed into something specific, I could see right away he really had no interest in reforming foreign policy or ending these occupations,” Kokesh said.

Tracy Harmon, however, who is an IVAW member, told CNSNews.com that while she has been disappointed in Obama’s actions since his inauguration, she thinks he is sincere about his intention to withdraw from Iraq.

“I do believe him,” said Harmon. “I think he wants to get us out but it has taken longer – he extended the pullout date by three months.”

Harmon said that Obama’s decision to send a surge into Afghanistan demonstrates that he is not a “peace president” as many voters may have thought.

“For the most part, it is a disillusionment,” she said. “He is seen as an anti-war president, but he is starting a whole new war in Afghanistan.”

When it comes to war policy, there were a number of presidential candidates who would have been better than Obama, including 2008 candidates Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), said Kokesh.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Hidden Truth About The Mortgage Plan

Via(THE HILL)

Phony mortgage plan

By: Dick Morris

President Obama and his big spenders are moving quickly, to the relief of those who are facing foreclosure on their mortgages. But the program they are offering will do nothing for those most in need.

In the fine print, Obama’s plan provides no relief for any homeowner whose mortgage exceeds the total value of his home. But these folks are the ones who have been conned into taking sub-prime mortgages so loaded with brokerage commissions, interest rate subsidies, bank fees and lawyer and title-company charges that the amount of the mortgage has ballooned. These high mortgage amounts, coupled with declining property values, have turned about 20 percent of American mortgages upside down, so that the debt exceeds the value of the property.

By excluding these homeowners from help, Obama is guilty of a holier-than-thou hypocrisy. Was it not Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that encouraged such over-mortgaged properties? Was it not the Democrats in Congress who passed legislation urging Fannie and Freddie to weaken the standards to allow more low- and lower-middle-income families to buy homes?

How can Obama suddenly pretend to be so shocked — shocked — that about 20 percent of America’s home mortgages are now worth more than the property they finance? It was the insistence of liberal Democrats that made it so. When Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros demanded that Fannie and Freddie invest 42 percent of their assets in buying low- and lower-middle-income mortgages, and when his successor Andrew Cuomo raised the quota to 50 percent, what did they think would happen? When they explicitly told Fannie and Freddie not to insist on down payments in the mortgages they purchased, how did they think the purchase would be funded? Obviously, if you don’t require the borrower to put money down, the full purchase price must be covered by the mortgage. To now, piously, refuse to come to the rescue of those who fell for your party’s seeming generosity and bought homes on the terms it suggested is hypocritical at best.

But it is not only the over-mortgaged whom Obama will ignore, but those who have lost their jobs! If you do not make enough money such that your mortgage payments come to 31 percent of your income, you can’t get your mortgage refinanced. If your income has dropped to a point where your monthly payments on your loan consume a greater part of your earnings than 31 percent, you are stuck.

So we have Obama rushing to the aid of those who have been hurt in this bad economy, but exempting from his proposed relief anyone who has lost his job and seen a cut in income or whose property values have dropped below the amount of his mortgage. In other words, he’ll help anyone but those most in need.

And, once again, Obama would limit his aid to those who make below $200,000 a year. While he doesn’t specify this limit in his proposal, he does limit his intervention to mortgages of less than $720,000. At standard mortgage interest rates, such a loan would call for $60,000 or so in payments a year. To qualify for relief, your mortgage payment can’t be larger than 31 percent of your income — or about $200,000. Once more, Obama makes it clear that he is not the president of anyone who makes that much money or more. He is only the president of the other people.

Obama, of course, forgets — or doesn’t care — that those making over $200,000 account for almost a third of the total national spending and that you cannot stimulate an economy while constantly cutting off those people from any consideration in any government program. But Obama is determined to try.

Morris, a former adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of Outrage. To get all of Dick Morris’s and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by e-mail or to order a signed copy of their new best-selling book, Fleeced, go to dickmorris.com.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Obama Kool-Aide Drinker’s

Great post via(BrokenCountry)

Obama’s Kool-Aide drinkers help to tank U.S. economy

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Indoctrinating Our Children?

Publishers Crank Out Children’s Books on Obama

President Obama, the merchandising phenomenon, has been a boon to sidewalk T-shirt vendors everywhere, the Washington Times reports.

Less conspicuous, perhaps, is the equally robust success of the children’s book industry in marketing Obama’s hopeful aura and personal history to parents of young children.

Are children’s book publishers seeking to indoctrinate impressionable young readers — or are they simply obeying the laws of supply and demand?

When the country elects a new president, publishers characteristically issue a biography or two geared toward young readers.

But in the case of Obama, publishers are tapping into unusual levels of excitement and curiosity.

Justin Chanda, vice president of Simon & Schuster’s Books for Young Readers imprint, told the Washington Times he and his team felt rumbles of a larger presence the day after Obama’s triumph in the January 2008 Iowa caucuses.

They wanted a book – double-quick.

In industry parlance, they call it a “crash.”

Continue reading at The Washington Times

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Liberal Defends Rush Limbaugh on Huff Post!

Via(WSJ Opinion)

An Honest Leftist

“You’re damn right I wanted the Iraq war to fail.”

By JAMES TARANTO

Best of the Tube Tomorrow Morning
We’re scheduled to appear on a “Fox and Friends” political panel tomorrow at around 7:15 a.m. ET. If you’re an extremely early riser, or a West Coast insomniac, tune in and see us on the Fox News Channel.

An Honest Leftist
Back when George W. Bush was president, this column would occasionally observe that many on the Democratic left were hoping that America would lose the Iraq war. This seemed to us an obvious observation, but it never failed to scandalize our loyal left-wing readership. But a Lee Stranahan, writing on the Puffington Host, admits it: “You’re damn right I wanted the Iraq war to fail.”

Well, two cheers to Stranahan for his honesty. (We’ll explain below why we’re withholding the third cheer.) What makes this acknowledgment even better is that Stranahan offers it in the course of defending the good faith of a man who, now that Bush is an ex-president, is the left’s favorite demon figure, Rush Limbaugh.

Responding to Limbaugh’s speech last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Stranahan writes:

Limbaugh wants Barack Obama’s economic policies to fail. He said it, he said it again, and he said it again at CPAC. Limbaugh was quickly accused of treason, more or less, and now he says he doesn’t understand what all the outrage is about. All he said was that he hopes the economic recovery plan fails. . . .

I wanted the Bush policy on Iraq to fail because the war and the ideas it was based were in complete opposition to my basic principles about how The United States should use its wealth and power. . . . Not because I hate our country or hate the troops but for the exact opposite reason–because I love my country and I value the lives of the people sworn to protect it. If you opposed the war, I bet you feel the same way. . . .

I believe that Limbaugh wants the president to fail because he loves the country, too. . . .

I assume Rush Limbaugh feels the same way, more or less, about the president’s economic plan. I bet he simply can’t bear the idea of a world where massive government spending is effective and therefore popular because “it works.”

Read the Rest of the Story Here:

I will say that Mr. Stranahan is honest and for that we say thank you for doing what the rest of the Left and the MSM is not willing to do.  And that is, put Rush’s quote into context.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Iraq Withdrawal was Who’s Plan?

Via(INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY)

The Bush Pullout

Iraq War: President Obama traveled to Camp Lejeune, N.C., on Friday to announce that the U.S. would stay in Iraq at least until 2012 and keep 50,000 troops there even after combat ends. Sound familiar?

Obama’s withdrawal plan would take U.S. forces in Iraq down from a current 142,000 troops to 35,000 to 50,000. Under the status of forces agreement between the U.S. and Iran, negotiated and signed last year by the Bush administration, all forces must be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

In short, though President Obama will get credit, it was Bush’s plan — not Obama’s.

When Obama first began running for the nation’s highest office in 2006, he vowed he would immediately withdraw all U.S. combat forces if elected. At the time, few with any knowledge about the conflict in Iraq took him seriously.

And sure enough, faced with the realities on the ground in Iraq and in the campaign back home, Obama changed his stance last year from immediately withdrawing all combat forces to one of removing, as his campaign Web site said, “one to two combat brigades each month, and (having) all our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.”

Now comes his much-awaited plan. Technically, Obama won’t be able keep his most recent promise on troop withdrawals, but he’ll come close. For that he can thank President Bush and the highly successful “surge” in troops he and Gen. David Petraeus put in place, making withdrawal possible.

In Friday’s remarks, Obama told the assembled Marines: “Today I’ve come to speak to you about how the war in Iraq will end.” But in fact, the actual war has been over for some time. We hate to tell the Bush-haters out there, or to relive painful recent history, but President Bush won it, making the current pullout possible.

That victory was underscored in January when Iraq held largely peaceful elections, in which voters mostly repudiated extremist parties in favor of the moderate leadership of Nouri al-Maliki.

In his comments Friday, Obama noted the progress made.

“Thanks in great measure to your service,” he said, “the situation in Iraq has improved. Violence has been reduced substantially from the horrific sectarian killing of 2006 and 2007.

“Al-Qaida in Iraq has been dealt a serious blow by our troops and Iraq’s Security Forces, and through our partnership with Sunni Arabs,” Obama continued. “The capacity of Iraq’s Security Forces has improved, and Iraq’s leaders have taken steps toward political accommodation.”

He further lauded January’s elections showing Iraqis have begun “pursuing their aspirations through peaceful political process.”

All very true. Iraq has been a big success, which explains why you never see or hear about it in the mainstream news anymore. Suicide bombings and attacks on troops have become relatively rare, and now that Bush is out of office, there’s little political profit remaining for the left in bashing America’s bold Mideast initiative.

Whether you agree with Bush or not, he brought a kind of democracy to Iraq that can be found nowhere else in that region. His plan rocked al-Qaida back on its heels, to the point where its survival is in doubt. Iraq is a model.

In short, Obama’s policy is really, in most respects, Bush’s policy. That the troops can now come home proudly is a tribute to Bush’s steadfastness. But Obama will be wise not to remove them all.

We kept troops in Europe and Japan after World War II and in South Korea after the Korean War. Bush’s policy proved that democracy can take root where no one thought possible. But as in Europe, Korea and Japan, it must be protected.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie