Real time, real information is entering the debate over the Obama Administration’s health care plans. However, the problem with real time streaming information is the diminished ability to distinguish between reality and falsehood. Some political operatives fan sparks into flame for the purpose of watching the fire, and they reside in both the left and the right. These political thugs have their own reasons for creating social unrest, modeled after the Saul Alinsky school of political thought. They believe that chaos and crisis is one of the most favorable environments to push forward radical, transformational policies.

Others are willing to endure the sparks in the political and media firestorms in order to uncover the truth of a matter. Their approach may create sparks, but these patriots’ goals are to discover accurate, truthful information from which the American people can make informed decisions.

For this reason, I appreciate Newt Gingrich, and his well informed political analysis. Those who firebomb Newt usually do so because he accurate, shining the light on back room political hacks and their deals often struck out of sight from the American people. Newt also has demonstrated the ability to apply political theory and forecast the outcome of a given flight path.

Newt has done it again with a recent article at HumanEvents.com. The health care debate has been stirred into a frenzy around the topic of rationed health care. A core question is whether or not seniors will receive the same quality care in the final years of their lives as they received in their youth. Words like “euthanasia” and “death panels” have been lobbed like grenades into the public forum. While the comments reflect the feelings of those behind them, the consequences of these verbal explosions are not helpful to the discussion. What is helpful is finding sources which can tell us what a US single payer, government plan will look like. Enter again Newt Gingrich.

Check out his article describing Britain’s national health care, and the decisions which the Britain’s national health board make regarding the monetary value of a human life. How much are you worth?

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=33100

Timothy Burns

Light the Fire

Obamunism - it’s a thought provoking title. Yet do the majority of America’s citizens assent to this characaturization of our new president?  After all, he was elected on a groundswell of American populism (and maybe Acorn voter fraud, but who’s really keeping track).  Until recently, His poll numbers continue to reinforce his self-assumed deification, and the liberal media unquestioningly toes the party line.   With support like this, who wants to challenge the Chicago thuggery politics which have come to the White House with him?

If only we could get an outside point of view – someone who could comment on recent political evolutions in America who doesn’t have Democrat or Republican prejudice.

In april of this year, Pravda, the state run media outlet in Russia printed the following.

“It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.”

Read the full story here: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107459-american_capitalism-0#

This commentary comes from the Russian state run political news machine. I would suggest that this group knows communisism and marxism when they see it.

Stand up Americans.

Light the Fires

Tim

As I watched Obama stumble, dissemble, and ramble through his prime time “State Media apparatchik public event” er, press conference, a powerful though came to mind. OK, two thoughts: The 1st, of course, was the mental image of the Brezhnev era military parades featuring the Soviet Elite atop the Kremlin walls waving to the “adoring” masses. Ah yes, the power of a prescient double entendre!

The 2nd:  Obama’s poll numbers are falling faster than Jimmy Carter’s. The Democrats, the ones who still eat meat, are in open rebellion, rightly fearing an impending 1994 redux. This guy is a liar, like Bill Clinton was. Obama, though, unlike Mr. Lewinsky, is an ideologue. Obama has neither the political skills nor the inclinations of W.C. Clinton to sway with the prevailing political winds and but survival above ideology. He has, along with the most left-wing congress since 1917, shoved his progressive, fascistic agenda against the collective will of the American people, who have seen this scam before.

His presidency, to quote a real US president, is like “an Evil Empire, whose last pages are even now being written.”

The Obama presidency is over. God bless America.

What we’re seeing is the people speaking through their politicians. Obama and many Democrats assumed that the financial crisis would predispose most Americans to favor a larger and much more expensive government than we ever have had before.

A plausible hope for change, perhaps, but polling shows it hasn’t happened. The prospect of huge federal deficits extending out as far as the eye can see is not appealing to most voters. The prospect of having the health care sector of the economy designed by the people who gave us the $787 billion stimulus package is even less appetizing.

But we should not cynically underrate the importance of a strong argument, which may prevail despite the transcendent aura of a new president. Some of the Blue Dogs’ concerns may be parochial (rural health care), but they make a strong case, buttressed by ( CBO’s) expert testimony, that Congress should not rush to transform the health care sector at huge cost and with little cost-cutting effect. And the Polis letter signers’ concern about the negative macroeconomic effects of higher taxation of high earners can find support in the writings of Democratic, as well as Republican, economists.

What will this Thursday bring? We’ll wait and see what comes from the buzzing on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, as I read the text of the Blue Dogs’ and Polis’ letters, I suddenly heard the voice of the late Jack Kemp proclaiming at the 1984 Republican National Convention that if you subsidize something, you get more of it and that if you tax something, you get less of it.
Full article in new window

• Obama’s Sinking Approval Ratings Are Even Worse Than They Look (usnews.com)
• Obama may have to wait for health care passage (ctv.ca)
• David Brooks: “Liberal Suicide March.” (althouse.blogspot.com)

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The argument has been frustrating.

We have the Colin Powell types demanding we draw and quarter the Rush Limbaugh’s and abandon conservatism. It’s just not fashionable, you see! We should just manage big government better than the democrooks.

Then there are the purists. Preferably start a new party, but at the very least, kick all the RINO’s and McCain’s to the curb! The republicans are worse than the democrats and must all lose, so that we can then win.

I’ve always thought both of these schools of thought were self defeating, for yes, we need to stand for limited government and constitutional jurisprudence, but there will never be enough of us to form a lasting majority. We must get better at teaching, explaining, and finding thoughtful, principled candidates, as well as finding some answer to the leftist, statist media monopoly that feeds the cancer of socialism that has befallen us. Reagan is the prototype. Idealistic, educated, dedicated to a purpose, not to a career, and yet appealing to centrists and democrats because he could explain conservatism in simple ways that people are instinctively drawn to and can’t ignore.

Mr. Barone has hit on a perfect message to which we can only hope the GOP is listening!…T

“So I think Republicans today should be less interested in moving toward the center and more interested in running against the center. Here I mean a different “center” — not a midpoint on an opinion spectrum, but rather the centralized government institutions being created and strengthened every day. This is a center that is taking over functions fulfilled in a decentralized way by private individuals, firms and markets.

…To govern is to choose, as John F. Kennedy said, and those in charge of these new centralized institutions are making choices that inevitably favor some and hurt others. Unsurprisingly, the politically well connected tend to get the favors. Banks forced to take government money are now blocked from paying it back and in the meantime must direct funds where the government wants them to go…when government gets this intertwined with the private sector, when it makes decisions not based on neutral economic criteria but by what is at best guesswork about the allocation and valuation of vast amounts of capital, bailout favoritism and crony capitalism are inevitable.

…It’s arguably good policy as well as good politics to run against this over-powerful center. Bailout favoritism and crony capitalism not only misallocate economic resources, they also sap faith in the fairness of our institutions. After World War II, Democrats wanted to retain wartime high taxes, pro-union labor laws, and wage and price controls — all manipulatable for political benefit by political insiders. Republicans ran in 1946 on the theme of “Had enough?” and won big enough majorities to lower taxes, revise labor laws and abolish controls.

The 1946 Republicans didn’t move to the center. They ran against the power of the center and permanently redefined where the center of the political spectrum was. That’s a path today’s Republicans might want to consider.
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“The American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed.”

Not my words, and no need to wonder how completely the drive-by MSM is covering comrade Obama’s tracks anymore. Pravda is now more conservative than the New York Times. Yes, these are the printed words of Pravda. Pravda!

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists…

Pravda summarises our dire situation nicely in it’s final sentences. Please be sure to access the full article in the post article link…T

…The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?
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I thought I might take a moment to reflect on Presidents past, specifically George W. Bush and how he compares to Barack Obama. It’s obviously no secret that I dislike the direction Obama is taking the country, but one thing you may not know is that not all anti-Obamunists were pro-Bush. In fact, there is a vast number of us who felt just as bad over the past 8 years as we are feeling now: completely controlled by unrelenting dogmatic philosophies on how everyone should live. With Obama, we teeter on the brink of becoming a socialist nation. With Bush, the threat was a church-state. Why do we have to keep electing such polarizing idealogues? Where are the fiscally conservative, socially liberal candidates? Where are the people who can think and reason critically?

I live in an area where being white makes me the minority. It’s difficult then to let anyone know that I am an Obama detractor. Immediately, I am simply a “racist” in the eyes of his supporters. It boils my blood that someone would assume that I look past all of Obama’s policies and land on the color of his skin as his “flaw.” When Bush was president, I lived in a different area where not liking him made me either a “terrorist supporting liberal” or a “satanist.” Of course, you can see where I am going with this. I am none of these things that people assume, but the Presidents we elect seem to give the people carte blanche to make such assumptions. It’s simply not healthy for half the country to always be ready with such an angry, thoughtless attack.

Whenever I can actually have a civil conversation with someone about my politics, they are often surprised to find out that I am not an Obama supporter. After the first few incredulous exchanges, I can eventually start explaining the problems I have with socialism. When I get to the part about how to solve problems without government intervention, I start getting nods. “Oh yeah,” they say, “that’s more of how I feel about it too.” So many people do not realize that they are centrists until you get them to say it out loud. Generally, until that point, they haven’t seen far enough down the road to understand the consequences of what is taking place.

Too often our “problems” are boiled down to “rich versus poor” or “black versus white” or “religion versus non-religion” or (under Bush) “good versus evil.” I believe that generally people want to do the right thing. It’s just that no two people are ever going to agree on how to do it. Is it sad that there are poor people? Yes, absolutely. Should you legislate the “rich” (I put that term in quotes because as of late it means families with $250,000 whereas in my eyes you aren’t rich until you’re well into the millions) to pay for the poor? Absolutely not. Redistribution of wealth is not a right of the federal government. Is it unethical for “rich” people to sit on the sidelines while the poor flounder? Maybe. But do you know how many “rich” people already give large amounts of money to various charities? Do you have a tally of all the humanitarianism in which each “rich” person takes part every year? Most pragmatically, have you thought about how many jobs that “rich” person has created with his or her wealth? People don’t care about those kinds of questions because the leader tells them they don’t have to.

My point is that the pendulum is swinging too far. Extremism may seem admirable, but in practice it only alienates and divides. Bush and Obama are no different in this regard. Abstract away the details of their respective agendas, and you have the same figurehead destined to help rip the country apart. Hopefully, eventually, the pendulum will lose momentum and land somewhere in the middle, bringing us a leader that can actually unite and not just campaign.

We want obamunism.us to be very interactive. So, we are looking for people who like to blog about politics. Generally speaking, you are qualified if your politics are anywhere to the right of Obamunism (and you can write well.) We don’t necessarily want people who are just going to write long, rambling rants (although those can be fun.) We want some serious, thought-provoking material  about current  events that can get people talking. Humor is also welcome. In fact, no style will be denied if you are a good writer. If you are interested, let us know. Send along a few links to some sample blogging you have done in the past. If we like what we see, you may just be able to become an official obamunism.us blogger. Looking forward to hearing from you.