Showing posts with label healthcare reform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label healthcare reform. Show all posts

Monday, April 12, 2010

Guests of Vlad the Impaler ... Alan Caruba

Dear reader:

This is the kind of writing that makes Alan Caruba stand out from the multitude of Conservative commentators in the press and on the Internet today. Alan Caruba is extremely insightful. He probes deeper than most. Plus, his wit is as sharp as a double-edged sword.

Alan’s abilities as a wordsmith are unsurpassed. Once you read his article below, I’ll bet you will agree with me – and -- be ready to add a few superlatives, describing Mr. Caruba’s writings, yourself.

Alan has studied Mr. Obama and his administration and, with the accuracy of a laser, is able to cut through the layers upon layers of propaganda to offer his readers an analysis of the Obama Administration unmatched anywhere else on the web.

We are proud to offer the piece below to our readers, especially during this time of tribulation in America.

Please scroll down and read Mr. Caruba’s comments below.

Thanks.

J. D. Longstreet

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Guests of Vlad the Impaler
By Alan Caruba
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Lately I have been reading and hearing a lot of psychoanalysis of Barack Hussein Obama and it reflects a growing need by pundits and regular folks to figure him out.

The reason is obvious. We are all now the guests of Vlad the Impaler, version 2.0.

As several million unemployed already know, he doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about what it’s like to not have a salary, not have health care coverage, and not be able to make the mortgage or car payment.

Having been abandoned by his birth father, his step-father, and finally by his mother, Barack figured out how to bottle up all that anger, put on a happy face, and pay back America for failing him.

Obama has lived a virtually invisible life whereby no one who ever attended college with him recalls him. He taught at the University of Chicago and not one student has ever come forward to acknowledge having been in one of his classes. Among the friends he did choose, all shared a common theme of hatred for America. If there is a paper trail, it has been carefully sequestered, out of reach, sealed.

Less than a year and a half into his first and, hopefully, last term, all the polls including those of the mainstream media show that people don’t merely “disapprove” of his performance in office, they are seriously worried whether he should even be in office.

If you don’t like America, Barack Hussein Obama knows exactly how you feel and why.

All this was on display throughout the campaign, up to and including delusions of grandeur and omnipotence that in any other setting would have instantly identified him as a mental case. “Yes, we can” shouted the crowd.

What they got, however, was the biggest collection of left-wing nut-jobs one could gather in one spot; most of them designated “czars” and exempt from any investigation by Congress.

Communists, dedicated socialists, weird “scientists” who think reducing the population is the only way to save the Earth; others who think we should abandon all the traditional and known energy sources that keep the lights on and the cars rolling in favor of windmills, solar panels; and bicycles. You know, crazy people!

We got a kind of machine politics that hasn’t been seen in Washington, D.C. since the early days and years of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration when the Great Depression so frightened people they were willing to watch the federal government expand in ways that were never intended. From time to time, the Supreme Court would staunch the flood of horrid legislation. FDR’s answer was to try to “pack” the court by expanding it.

Today, we have witnessed a Democrat-controlled Congress that just passed a huge “reform” of the nation’s healthcare industries, effectively destroying the relative handful of insurance companies that provided coverage.

With healthcare now under government control and virtually every other commercial and financial activity to suffer the same fate, it is only time before everyone will be issued an ID card to control everything one does.

Where in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to literally own an automobile manufacturer destroyed by its own unions? An insurance company that was so big it was not allowed to fail despite billions in bad transactions? Why, in fact, is the federal government in the business of buying and selling housing mortgages?

For most of the beginning of his first year in office, Obama was everywhere on television, granting interviews to reporters who listened in amazement at his detachment from the reality of the economy. “Are you punch drunk?” asked Steve Kroft of Sixty Minutes. Bret Beir of Fox News fought to keep him focused on the questions being asked.

People swiftly noticed he could not speak extemporaneously. Without the Tele-Prompters, he lost the aura of being all knowing and all seeing. It became a joke. A response to a simple question about taxes recently elicited a rambling 17-minute “answer” that made everyone listening wonder why he could not deliver a simple answer.

And then there are the critical, unanswered questions that will not go away.

Where was he born? Hawaii? Okay, but his father was a British subject, a citizen of Kenya, so rule out his eligibility to be president. Why won’t he produce a real birth certificate? Why are his university records unavailable? What nation’s passport did he travel on when he visited, of all places, Pakistan? Questions, questions, questions.

There is the growing fear that he is not eligible to hold the office, but he has already named one Supreme Court judge and will soon appoint another. He is issuing executive orders. He is signing laws.

In my life, I saw Richard M. Nixon driven from office for official misconduct resulting from the Watergate scandal. I saw Bill Clinton survive impeachment despite having broken several laws that would have put most people in jail.

It is hard to get rid of a really bad president. It may prove harder to get rid of an imposter, a provocateur, a revenge-filled destroyer of the economy and the nation.

I saw this all before he won the office, wrote about it then and wrote about it since. If I did, others did. Indeed, some wrote entire books about it.

So why has no court in America demanded that Barack Hussein Obama produce a birth certificate or any other proof of eligibility?
If a cover-up got Nixon booted and both a real estate deal and a sexual dalliance with a White House intern merited a special prosecutor for Clinton, when doesn’t this question rise to a point of critical concern for the nation?

Alan Caruba

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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.
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© Alan Caruba, 2010

Friday, November 20, 2009

The Healthcare Reform Travesty ... by Alan Caruba


The Healthcare Reform Travesty
By Alan Caruba
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Other than the complete destruction of the U.S. economy, one sixth of which is generated by the healthcare profession, I cannot see any reason for the bill that Harry Reid is pushing for a Saturday evening vote in the Senate.

It has taken less than a year for the Democrats, led by Barack Obama, to saddle Americans with such enormous debt that your grandchildren will be paying it off. The so-called “bail-outs” have proven to be a bonanza for Wall Street firms on good terms with the Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, whose mantra is “It’s all Bush’s fault.” The “stimulus” bill has not stimulated anything except lies about “jobs created and saved.”


Rush Limbaugh calls Congress a “Kamakazi Congress” and the “Suicide Bomber Congress” because it is obvious that any Democrat Congressman or woman and any Senator who votes for this atrocious bill, probably without having read it, will be thrown out of office. And should be!


Ignoring all the town hall protests, the tea parties across the nation, and the massive September 12 rally in Washington, D.C. has to come with a penalty, but by then it will be too late for most Americans.


The November 23 edition of Business Week had a cover story by Catherine Arnst titled “Why Wait for Health Reform: Ten Ways to Cut Costs Right Now.” It makes clear that all the so-called reforms contained in the 2,000-plus page bill could be achieved in ways that do not require a monster piece of legislation intended to impose socialized medicine on America.


In brief, heres how to achieve an improved, and more affordable healthcare system:


1. Crack down on fraud and abuse. The amount of fraud in the Medicare system is estimated to cost $125-175 billion every year. Since the system operates as a kind of honor code, the government has been unsuccessful in detecting fraud and abuse. Meanwhile, private insurers such as the Blue Cross & Blue Shield Association report its anti-fraud efforts resulted in a savings of $350 million last year, a 43% increase from 2007.


2. Develop a healthy workforce. Wellness programs pay real dividends for the companies that sponsor them.


3. Coordinate care through family doctors. A patient suffering from one or more chronic diseases may depend on several doctors and “rarely do they communicate with one another.” This results in waste, often due to duplication of treatments. By designating a primary care doctor to organize care with specialists, pharmacists, and physical therapists, sharing medical records electronically, it is estimated that $250 to $325 billion could be saved.


4. Make health a community effort. Campaigns to encourage people to eat better, get more exercise, and other options could greatly reduce health-related costs.


5. Stop infections in hospitals. Every year, 1.7 million patients develop infections while in hospital and 99,000 die as a result. They can be reduced if hospitals put more emphasis on solving the problem.


6. Get patients to take their medicine. Three out of four Americans do not take their medicine as directed. Noncompliance leads to more doctor visits, hospitalizations, and treatments that add an estimated $177 billion a year to the nation’s health-care bill.


7. Discuss options near the end of life. End of life care can be especially costly. When patients and the families are informed they can choose pain management, nursing care, and psychological support, all of which reduce costs.


8. Use insurance to manage chronic disease. In 2009, UnitedHealthcare introduced a Diabetes Health Plan that offers rewards to patients who manage their disease properly. The idea is to contain costs by giving patients financial incentives based on their particular health issues rather than a one-size-fits-all approach…something the proposed healthcare reform will impose on all Americans regardless of their particular health problems.


9. Let well-informed patients decide. Too many Americans think that drastic surgery and other procedures are the only way they can survive a healthcare crisis, but such procedures extend lives or prevent heart attacks in only a tiny minority of especially sick patients. Few really know this. Educating patients can reduce wasted health spending by up to 37%.


10. Apologize to the patient. When hospitals reveal mistakes to patients and their families, investigate the cause, and offer a settlement, it takes the lawyers out of the process. Honesty really is the best policy.


Instead, Congress is getting ready to impose a massive bureaucracy that will be put in charge of healthcare, increasing the nation’s deficit and debt as millions are added to the Medicare ranks and private insurance companies are driven out of business. The loss of freedom will be beyond calculation as Americans must deal with bureaucrats instead of their physicians and other healthcare professionals.


It is the worst possible “reform” imaginable. We’re running out of time to call our Senators, mostly Democrats, and demand they vote NO!


Alan Caruba

Monday, August 24, 2009

How Is Obama Doing So Far?


So… How’s Obama Doing??? HUH???
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet
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Awful! Just awful! That’s how he is doing!

In a few short months, just over half a year in office, Obama has managed to wreck the economy, and lay an unspeakable tax burden on our children, our grandchildren, and quite possibly - our great-grandchildren, as well.

Obama, in league with Pelosi and Reid and their fellow socialists in the US Congress, have sure as heck brought change, all right! Boy, have they EVER!

As we look back over the past seven months, now, we can see the devastation left in the wake of the liberal/socialist/”progressive” battlestar as it smashed its way through an unsuspecting America looting the treasury as it went.

Why, just look at the money the Obama government has spent! Worse even than the squandered money is the power they have accrued unto themselves. As they repealed welfare reform and scared the American people half to death with their manic drive to chain America’s sick and elderly to a socialized form of healthcare we Americans don’t want and forcing worried American citizens to take to the streets of the capital city in a mass protest scheduled for September 12th.

Oh, but that is just a part of the sorry story of America’s worse president - ever! There is the Cap and Trade bill, which, if passed through the US Senate, will drive every American’s gas, fuel oil, and electricity costs through the roof. At the same time, industry will be dealt a lethal blow forcing many industries to close plants and lay off workers thus driving up unemployment and demoralizing some of the most productive workers on the planet.

And look what he has done for America overseas. He has managed to tick-off the UK and India and is doing a major “suck-up” job on our enemies such as Russia, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela to our south, just to name a few.

Over at the Federal Communications Commission, the stage is being set to institute a stealth Fairness Doctrine to clear the radio airwaves of conservative talk shows. Of course, they will deny it, but when you fan away enough of the smoke, you can see it quite clearly.

What we are seeing develop, dear reader, is a country far different from the America with a representative republican form of government the forefathers of this once great land envisioned when they founded it. What we are seeing is a socialist state aborning! Socialism is the incurable cancer of nations. It rots the soul, the spirit, and the heart out of all nations so hapless as to allow it to get a foothold within its government. You have heard it said that the very foundations of America are under attack. And it is true.
As we survey the wreckage of this beloved land we would suggest that those of you who believe in the power of prayer, should begin fervently to pray to God to intervene and save this last great hope of mankind on this planet. America has never, I repeat, never been in the peril she finds herself today, not even during the Great War for Southern Independence, nor the Second World War, nor the 40-year-long Cold War when soviet missiles were pointed down our throats from only ninety miles away.

It is becoming clearer as the days of the Obama Administration increase that the American electorate has made a monumental blunder - a historic mistake – and, as a result, we have an anomaly in the oval office. It is beginning to appear that the only recourse we have is to plead with the Republican senators to shut the US Senate down and allow no legislation to pass until after the next election in 2010. It can be done procedurally and as an American citizen concerned over what I see as a socialist takeover of this nation, I personally plead with the Republican minority leader in the Senate to do just that.

In the meantime I will resort to that age-old practice of calling on Providence, in His mercy, to intervene and save America from herself.

J. D. Longstreet.


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Friday, August 21, 2009

The September 12th March on Washington





The September 12th March on Washington
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On Saturday, September 12th, 2009, thousands of grassroots patriotic Americans will march on Washington, D.C. for the largest "tea party" in history -- the 09.12.09 March on Washington.

What’s happening in America? Well, it looks to this scribe as if Americans are fed-up with the worse government we have had in the history of this nation and they’re going to Washington to tell them so!



The folks over at www.gather.com/ say the following: “The politicians in Washington, D.C. take our hard-earned money with taxes and inflation. Then they bail out their buddies in the banks with $700 Billion of our money. Then they bail out their buddies in the auto industry... before taking over the biggest ones. Then they pass a so-called "stimulus bill" that is nothing more than a HUGE piece of pork. Then they try to pass the largest tax increase in history with their fake-environmental "cap and tax" bill.

THEN... they try to take over the American healthcare system, and try to ram socialized medicine down our throats. We've had enough, and we're NOT taking it any more. The "sleeping giant" is waking up." Read the article HERE.

Let’s take a look at a press release from FreedomWorks:

FreedomWorks Taxpayer March on Washington Scheduled for September 12, 2009

“WASHINGTON - (Business Wire) Over the last six months the national debt skyrocketed by nearly $3 trillion. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, our national debt will more than double by 2019. Americans will have to pay for this stratospheric spending spree first by begging foreign nations to buy our bonds, and later through higher taxes and inflation.


Grassroots anger at the inability of Washington to live within a budget has been building for some time, and began to boil over in late 2007 as the Bush Administration and Treasury Secretary Paulson abandoned their claimed free market principles to bail out automakers and Wall Street banks through TARP.


When newly elected President Obama and his allies in Congress passed the $780 billion debt stimulus plan in February 2009, activists took to the streets.

On tax day, the tea party movement began in earnest. Until now the movement has remained at the local levels. No longer will that be the case. The movement is coming to Washington on September 12, 2009 for a march and rally at the US Capitol.

From autos to banking, the government is crowding out the private sector of our economy. Where Bush bailed out the private sector, Obama is making hostile government takeovers. Ignoring our multi trillion-dollar deficit, Washington is considering a massive new energy tax and a takeover of health care.

On Saturday, September 12th FreedomWorks will be joined by over ten thousands of liberty-loving activists to take a stand against politicians who are bankrupting our future. National co-sponsors include Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, National Taxpayers Union, Americans For Tax Reform, Young Americans for Liberty, Ayn Rand Center, Campaign for Liberty, Free Republic, Young America’s Foundation, Smart Girl Politics, and The Club for Growth.

The event will kick-off on September 10th and 11th with various events throughout Washington including grassroots leadership training and Capitol Hill visits. The three-day event culminates on September 12th as taxpayers march on the Capitol building.

For more information, including media inquiries, registration, contacting event coordinators, and the schedule of events, please visit our event website at http://www.912dc.org/.” You can check this site out for yourself HERE.

Over at http://www.912dc.org/ the folks say this: “It’s time to take the tea party movement directly to Washington, D.C. Please join thousands of local organizers and grassroots Americans from across the country as we gather in our nation’s capital to deliver a message to the politicians: Enough!

We’ve had enough of the out of control spending, the bailouts, the growth of big government, and the soaring deficits. And we reject the future tax increases to pay for all of this spending and debt down the road. We are gathering on 9-12-2009 to deliver our message in person that we’ve had enough!”

Sounds as if these folks are determined to be heard - and to get their point across by taking their protest directly to the nation’s front yard. It is about time! When Moses won’t come to the mountain, then the mountain must go to Moses!

I have been on this earth a long time and I don’t recall ever experiencing a US government as disconnected from the people of the nation as is this government.

Now the fun begins! By the “fun” I mean watching the Mainstream Media trying their very best to ignore this building crescendo of citizen protest. Oh, make no mistake about it. The MsM will make every effort to ignore or “play down” this March on Washington. For if people turn up in vast numbers it will make the media look extremely bad!

It was a Tea Party in Boston that helped get this experiment we call America off and running. Now it is a Tea Party in the capitol of the nation the original tea party helped spawn that may, very well, play a part in saving that experiment!

I have only a couple, or three, questions: Whose got the tar? And whose got the feathers? And, oh yeah, the rails! Whose got the rails? Huh?

J. D. Longstreet
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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Watch For The Signs! ... Alan Caruba

Watch for the Signs
By:Alan Caruba


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There are some lessons one learns from a life spent first as a journalist and then for many decades as a public relations professional. You cannot succeed in PR if you cannot spot the early signs that the media herd is heading in one direction or the other.

It was obvious from the beginning that the mainstream media (MSM) fell in love with Barack Obama. Like Chris Matthews, it was a complete crush. Obama was the anti-Hillary, come to save America from her shrill voice and to redeem our sad history of racism.


At this point, however, it is just as obvious that he has managed to say and do any number of things that have aroused the distrust of the all but the 28% of those convinced he is a dandy President. The rest no longer feel that way.


The MSM is presently sticking its finger in the wind to find out which way it is blowing. They are checking Rasmussen and Gallup polls. Once they conclude that Obama is unpopular to a point beyond which they can no longer obscure or influence, they will do what all fearless MSM do; they will begin to gang up on him.


By the time Jimmy Carter left office, even the Peanut Farmer’s Gazette was glad to see him go.
Watch the signs. The week that either (or both) Time Magazine and Newsweek publish a cover story asking, “What Went Wrong?” or “Healthcare Reform is Very Sick” or anything similar that suggests—gasp!—Obama has suffered a major political setback, you can be confident that, in their editorial board offices amidst leather chairs and a huge polished mahogany table, someone will have intoned, “It’s not going well for Obama.”


The other beacon to watch is, of course, The New York Times. When Maureen Dowd can tear herself away from berating Sarah Palin to say an unkind word about Barack Obama, you know the beginning of the end will have arrived. When Paul Krugman thinks out loud that maybe a three trillion dollar debt is probably not a good idea, the banana peel will have been thrown into the Rose Garden.When the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson can no longer find an excuse for Barack Obama’s blunders and inability to sell a very bad healthcare reform and even worse Cap-and-Trade tax on energy, you might as well break out your GOP lapel pin and start to wear it in public.


There’s a reason for the rapid demise of the Obama Dream. It’s called reality.


Americans are not great fans of those who spend all of their time “apologizing” for the U.S.A. and blaming others for why the job they wanted has turned out to be a real stinker. It is now Obama’s foreign policy, Obama’s economy, and Obama’s gay rights agenda. Despite all the “green shoots” and other alleged signs that the economy is getting better, real people know it’s not.
Coming to a town near you or maybe your street, will be more mortgage foreclosures. Banks are being closed and their assets sold to other banks, but while that is a palliative measure to protect customers, it doesn’t change the fact that credit flow is still a trickle. A credit card meltdown is likely on the way. Job losses? Yes, that too.


Plainly speaking, the federal government is running out of monetary tricks to make the Recession go away. It will never dawn on them to actually cut spending. It is only now just dawning on them that the public hates the billion-dollar “bailouts” and “stimulus” bills.


The MSM is shedding jobs as if a plague has struck their newsrooms. And it has. First they shed their credibility as objective and reliable sources of news and now they are shedding consumers of news who prefer Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.


We are all just weeks from the first significant cracks in the MSM herd mentality regarding Barack Obama, his ever growing circle of “czars”, and those wacky Congress critters like Pelosi and Reid. By the end of the year, the MSM will desert him.


As a PR Counselor, I would advise Obama to say something critical about al Qaeda’s perpetrators of 9/11 and not blame the victims when that anniversary comes around. Otherwise, he’ll be able to watch the slow drift of the MSM turn into a stampede.


Alan Caruba

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Sunday, August 9, 2009

Seasoned Protesters ... Alan Caruba



Seasoned Protesters
by Alan Caruba
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Have you taken a close look at the protesters showing up at the town hall meetings being held by the horrified members of Congress? These folks are often quite OLD.

Unlike the union or ACORN thugs that Democrats use to intimidate attendees, some of those giving their Congressman an ear-full show up in wheelchairs or using walkers. The healthier among them seem quite at ease raising their voices and why is that?

Being among that generation, it occurred to me that they are the same people who showed up for the Civil Rights marches and at the Vietnam War protests in Washington, D.C when I was a young man. I was there, too. I saw these folks show up to demand President Nixon resign after the Watergate scandal got too big for him to silence.

Many of them--often quite liberal--continued showing up for environmental causes or for a march to find a cure for breast cancer. These are seasoned protesters; often liberal in their youth and just as often now conservative in their older years.

This generation of elder protesters has had plenty of practice and now has plenty to protest about. They aren’t a bunch of kids with no knowledge of history. These people lived history!

To begin with, they don’t want the government messing around with their medical insurance plans and they don’t want the government telling their doctors what they can and cannot do to ensure they get the best medical care available.

Those liberal programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, plus the prescription add-ons, may be socialism, but they like that kind of socialism; it’s the kind that helps pay their bills. Beyond that, they want the government to butt out.

Crazy schemes to sell carbon credits in order to limit carbon dioxide seem like the most absurd notions to the elderly, many of whom moved to warmer climates in Florida and Arizona to get away from the cold winters of the northern states. Global warming? They’re for it!

Like the rest of the population, they know that the weather has turned cooler all around the nation and those that keep up with such matters know there is no “global warming” and that they’re being scammed in order to put a huge new tax on the use of all energy.

One of the great appeals of Barack Obama when he was campaigning was his youth. Poor John McCain looked and sounded like Ebenezer Scrooge beside him. Youth, however, has some inherent problems such as the lack of the kind of experience needed to run a superpower, to find the right answers to end a deep recession, and to deal with the real threats to security and peace in the world.

At this point, the old folks know that the unemployment rate is much higher than the “official” announcement by the government. They know that Obama is doing nothing to thwart Iran from getting nuclear weapons. They know he hates Israel and they are seriously beginning to think he hates America, too.

All those old folks showing up at the town hall meetings were seriously offended when President Obama ran around the world apologizing for America’s having saved a large portion of it from the Empire of Japan and the Nazis in World War II, for having faced down the former Soviet Union for most of their lives, and for having had to invade Iraq (twice!) to stop Saddam from making war on his neighbors.

Some recall Pearl Harbor and all of them recall 9/11 like it was yesterday.

Listening to the new Dear Leader Barack telling some members of Congress to shut up and get out of the way because he wants to turn the U.S. into a giant Communist commune does not go down well with those old folks.

Their bones may ache a bit and their gait may be slower than in former days, but they know how to protest so they went to the town hall meetings to let their Congress critter know they don’t like being ignored, bullied, or taxed into the grave and beyond.

On September 12, there’s going to be a mass march in Washington, D.C. to protest proposed taxes and, even though I am in my 70s, I might just show up.

Alan Caruba







Tuesday, June 23, 2009

From Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama: A Horror Story!





From Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama: A Horror Story

By Alan Caruba
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John F. Kennedy, standing in front of the Berlin Wall, said “Ich bin en Berliner” to declare his solidarity with Western Germany, divided from its eastern half by the compromises with the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. Ronald Reagan would later demand, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” as well as declare his solidarity with the Polish people seeking to free themselves from Soviet domination.

I have heard two versions of what President Obama has done in response to the Iranian uprising. One says that he was right to keep a low profile so that the United States would not be blamed for the rebellion against the tyrannical ayatollahs. This, it’s said provides “deniability” in the event the regime successfully puts down the rebellion. The other version says he should be outspoken in his support for the Iranian people.

History will decide whether President Obama has chosen the right course of action, but we know he has already made major efforts to reach out to the “Supreme Leader” and his mullah cronies. Death to the U.S. and Israel has always been the rallying call for the thirty-year-old Islamic revolution. We are the external enemies by which the mullahs assert their right to run Iran. At the same time, by distancing himself from the Israelis, President Obama has let the whole of the Middle East know he has cast his vote for Islam.

In 1979 there were crowds in the streets of Tehran that drove out the Shah. President Jimmy Carter appeared to have been caught off-guard by what happened. So were the U.S. diplomats and the CIA who apparently had no idea how deep the hatred ran for the Shah. The exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini tapped into that hatred. Soon our diplomats were to be held hostage for 444 days, released only when Ronald Reagan took the oath of office and Jimmy Carter was rendered a powerless and defeated one-term ex-President.

Jimmy Carter was incapable of demonstrating the power and the will of the American people to free our diplomats. He blamed earlier decisions regarding Iran as a buffer state against the Soviet Union and a source of oil to the West. Did the CIA “meddle” in Iran’s affairs, engineering the overthrow of a prime minister in 1953? Yes, along with the British we did and, from what I can determine, it was the right decision.

By the time Carter was elected President in 1977, the memories of the 1973 oil embargo were still fresh in the minds of Americans. The members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries used the embargo to punish the U.S. for supporting Israel, re-supplying its military during the Yom Kippur war.

Despite later negotiating a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, it is safe to conclude Carter was no friend to Israel and that animus has deepened over the years. Israel relinquished the Sinai desert, just as it would later withdraw from the Gaza in a vain hope of peace. There's a museum in Cairo devoted to the "victory" Egypt claims it secured in the war.

As Seldon B. Graham, Jr. points out in his book, “Why Your Gasoline Prices Are High”, “On January 23, 1980, President Carter announced to Congress that the U.S. would defend the Persian Gulf area by military force if necessary. Thus, the official energy policy of the United States abandoned USA oil and gave the supply to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).”

Carter had already called for a “windfall profits tax” on U.S. oil companies and Graham calls it, “a death notice for USA oil”, noting that “Many US oil and gas companies went bankrupt because of the Windfall Profits Tax.” During his campaign, President Obama called for a similar tax.

In the wake of that earlier tax, not one single new refinery has been built by U.S. oil companies because (a) they cost well over a billion to construct and (b) there is no way they can be sure another such tax would not be imposed.

Exploration for America's vast reserves of oil have been meager as well. Virtually the entire continental shelf of the nation was put off-limits to exploration and extraction. An effort by the Bush administration to lift the restriction was swiftly rescinded by the Obama administration. Congress still will not let oil companies drill in Alaska's ANWR.

Carter's actions effectively left the United States dependent to a large degree on Middle East oil, although these days the U.S. now imports much of its oil from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela.

Denying the U.S. of its own vast energy reserves and attacking its energy producers has been a consistent theme in a straight line between President Carter and President Obama.

President Obama apparently also hates coal, vowing to “bankrupt” any company that attempted to build a coal-fired plant to provide much-need electricity to our growing population. In addition to rescinding the opening of the continental shelf to exploration, one of the first acts of the Obama administration was to cancel leases to explore for oil deposits in states where it is known to exist in large quantities.

Both the Carter and Obama administrations display the weakness liberals have for despots and despotic regimes of every description. In their hearts they see them as an appropriate way to keep people in bondage.

The leaders of many foreign nations have already taken Barack Obama’s measure.

The North Koreans hold him in such contempt they intend to fire a ballistic missile at Hawaii, probably on Independence Day. If he really wanted to show some character and a clear intent to defend the nation, he would destroy it in flight because we have the capacity to do this. He won’t.

Obama’s Democrat majority in Congress is beginning to back away from his disastrous taxing and spending proposals. It is widely rumored that the proposed “Cap-and-Trade” legislation, based on the bogus global warming hoax, will fail in Congress.

Similarly, the panic in the White House as it attempts to cope with a failing economy can be smelled a few blocks away on Capitol Hill. Obama’s constant drumbeat of one “crisis” after another is beginning to wear thin and it is likely too that his healthcare “reform” will fail as well.

Raising taxes in the midst of the worst recession since the days of the Great Depression is not likely to find much favor either.

On Independence Day, nearly 1,500 or more protest rallies, “Tea parties”, will be held in America from coast to coast. Their message will not be lost on Congress though you can be sure the slavish mainstream news media will do what they can to mislead the public into believing they were minor events.

Only they will not be minor events, nor will those that will follow. Americans will be in the streets in the weeks and months that follow. They will reflect the same determination of Iranians who want the freedom we too often take for granted.

In October 2010, Americans will have an opportunity to neuter this narcissist, this pretender in the White House. It is time to prepare for the midterm elections. It is time to take America back from the liberals that are ruining it.

Alan Caruba
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