Who poses a danger to America's democracy?; At a certain point you've made enough $; Gov to know your financial affairs

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be. Thomas Jefferson 1) Obama takes direct aim at anti-government rhetoric ANN ARBOR, Mich. – In a blunt caution to political friend and foe, President Barack Obama said Saturday that partisan rants and name-calling under the guise of legitimate discourse pose a serious danger to America's democracy, and may incite "extreme elements" to violence. Which “extreme elements” would they be, Barack Obama? The same friends of yours who bombed the Pentagon? The author of Rules for Radicals? Cloward and Piven? Van Jones, maybe? "What troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad," Obama said after receiving an honorary doctor of laws degree. "When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us." First of all, the government is NOT “us” right now. Poll after poll has shown that you are governing against the will of a majority of Americans. Second, you are at direct odds with the founders of this country, Barack Obama. But I suspect you already know that. Here’s some examples: -“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” - Thomas Jefferson -“I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.” - Thomas Jefferson -“Most bad government has grown out of too much government.” - Thomas Jefferson -“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” - Thomas Jefferson -"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interests." -- Patrick Henry -“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” - James Madison, Federalist No. 51 Now back to the article: …The financial meltdown dramatically showed the dangers of too little government, he said, "when a lack of accountability on Wall Street nearly led to the collapse of our entire economy." Every sentence he utters is filled with distortions and lies. The financial meltdown did NOT show the dangers of too little government. It showed the dangers that occur when government requires financial institutions to act against their financial best interest. In short, it showed what happens when there is TOO MUCH government. See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100502/ap_on_re_us/us_obama 2) Obama: “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money” Via News Alert and Breitbart TV, consider this Share the Wealth 2010. Barack Obama went off the TelePrompter in his speech to a Quincy, Illinois audience about Wall Street reform. After saying that Democrats don’t begrudge success that’s “fairly earned,” Obama then ad-libs — and reveals more about himself than he probably wanted: “We’re not, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.” He should have stuck with the TelePrompter. The President doesn’t get to decide when people have “made enough money.” In fact, as the radio host notes, that’s a statist point of view. Furthermore, the responsibility of an entrepreneur isn’t to “grow our economy,” core or otherwise. It’s to grow his own economy. In a properly regulated capitalist system, the natural tension of self-interests create economic growth through innovation and efficient use of capital and resources. See: http://hotair.com/archives/2010/04/29/obama-i-do-think-at-a-certain-point-youve-made-enough-money/ 3) What Lies Beneath OFFICE POLITICS The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama's health care "reform" law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers (emphasis mine), had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius's staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken (emphasis mine). "The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote," says an HHS source. "Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think." The analysis, performed by Medicare's Office of the Actuary, which in the past has been identified as a "nonpolitical" office, set off alarm bells when submitted. "We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff," says the HHS staffer, "and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary's office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report." In the end, the report was released several weeks after the vote -- the review by the secretary's office reportedly took less than three days -- and bore a note that the analysis was not the official position of the Obama administration. …PAYBACK BIG TIME One of the reasons the Obama Administration has stepped up its public criticism of Wall Street isn't just its opposition to the regulatory reform legislation on Capitol Hill, say New York-based executives for such firms as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America. It's because the firms have largely been pushing back against a number of requests from the White House in the past several months. According to these executives White House political advisers, such as Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, have been calling senior management of those and other firms demanding that the banks step up hiring. "They don't think we're hiring enough of their people or people in general while we're making profits," says one executive with Bank of America. "And for several months now, they've been pushing us to do more to help them on the employment front." See: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/04/26/what-lies-beneath 4) A raw deal for Republicans on financial regulatory reform One day after Republicans said they had secured a deal on a financial regulation bill that would allow them to move forward on debating the bill, they denounced the legislation and said it would not accomplish any of their goals for preventing bailouts or making the markets more secure. “The legislation that we are about to consider will help the likes of Goldman Sachs, but will harm the American people,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, Alabama Republican and ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee. “It will lead to job losses, lost opportunities for businesses to productively invest in the future, and it will ensure future bailouts,” Shelby said on the Senate floor. Shelby, who said Wednesday that Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, had given him assurances that he would make sure the regulatory reform bill ended any chance of bailouts for large financial institutions, said Thursday that the bill still contained the provisions he objected to. “I appreciate his assurances and take him at his word, but I am concerned that there appear to be no substantive changes in the relevant sections of the bill that would reflect such assurances,” Shelby said of Dodd. It was an acrimonious start — despite the encomiums voiced by both sides — to a debate that is expected to take at least two weeks. Republicans ended their filibuster of the bill Wednesday after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, said he would keep them in the chamber through midnight to make them sustain their blocking maneuver. …Neither Dodd nor his staff have gone into detail to rebut the specific criticism that says the bill will give the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation too much flexibility in how it treats creditors of a large financial firm in the event the big bank or firm needs to be shut down. …Another Republican that has been involved in talks over the derivatives portion of the bill for months, Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, ranking member on the Senate Agriculture Committee, lashed out at the Obama White House for directing his counterpart, Committee Chairman Blanche Lincoln, Arkansas Democrat, to stop negotiating with him. “I wish we were here today debating a derivatives product that had input from senators on both sides of the aisle and perhaps less input from the administration,” Chambliss said. “I am certain we could have done a much better job had we been allowed to work together in a bipartisan way.” …“This massive new government bureaucracy has authorities and powers to call you forward and ask you, under oath, about your personal financial affairs,” he said. “The fact so many are looking the other way on these serious threats to our civil liberties is troubling (emphasis mine).” …The Democrats’ stated objective for the CPA’s Office of Financial Research is to give the federal government better tools to know the state of the economy on a day to day, minute-to-minute basis, so they can act to prevent future crises before they spin out of control. But Shelby staffers, speaking on background, said it would be “personal financial information, collected by the government, put into a data center.” “This office can request and gather under subpoena all manner of financial data,” the staffer said. “This deposit activities from every individual in the country, this is small business data loans, this is a whole host of things that this new bureau would have authority and access to for every day Americans (emphasis mine).” See: http://dailycaller.com/2010/04/30/a-raw-deal-for-republicans-on-financial-regulatory-reform 5) A Full 10% of General Motors Bailout Paid Back General Motors CEO Ed Whitacre should have thought twice about the title of his Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full.” GM did announce that it would repay the $5.8 billion ($4.7 billion to U.S, $1.1 billion to Canada) remaining balance on the loans the automaker received from the U.S. and Canadian governments. GM is making good on the repayment early – the company had until 2015 to repay the full $8.4 billion loan. But the reality is that this accounts for only 10 percent of the full taxpayer bailout. The loan repayment is a sign of progress for the struggling automaker, an undeniably good thing. With 90 percent of the taxpayer’s funds tied up in government-controlled equity, there’s still a long way to go to right this ship. Real progress will be made when the government turns GM back to the private sector. See: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/04/23/a-full-10-of-general-motors-bailout-paid-back 6) The Tea Party in Boston Knew How to Right a Ship …Religious freedom has flourished because America’s religious foundation—Christianity—is by its nature a faith exercised in free will … not born of birth or obligation but of choice. It was with this foundation that early on Jews and later members of all world religions found a place of sanctuary and not punishment for their unique religious conscience. Freedom is the foundation of strong religious faith and the foundation for strong economic growth and the foundation for the release of human ingenuity and energy. And America has not used her strength only on herself. She has welcomed the world’s people, yearning to be free. She has used her prosperity and the strength of her character applied to military might to protect and defend nations all over the world, not as conquerors but as warriors handing out chocolates to little children…offering hope and peace….building up where we have made war. Making friends and allies of our enemies…sending unbelievable amounts of money and human treasure to aid in tragedies, build hospitals, feed the hungry, fight the diseased. There has never been a country like America … never (emphasis mine). A few years ago I was speaking on the grounds of the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, when an attendee amazed me with his remark. “If America falls, where else will the world turn? Who else will take its place as a beacon of hope and life and freedom?” …We will not survive the policies of this president. If we don’t rise up as our forefathers did 234 years ago, we will lose what they sacrificed for and, make no mistake, many of them lost almost everything they had in the pursuit of freedom. We will have lost the freedoms they sacrificed for in addition to what we have worked to achieve, but most of all lost that which our children and grandchildren will never have even experienced. We are at a tipping point. Either we turn this American ship around quickly, or we will all go down with it. The tipping point is fragile … if the ship leans one way, it will purge the nation of this leadership and all who follow it. …Out with a president who treats our friends like enemies and our enemies like friends. …Out with a president who says “Whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out … one way or another … we get pulled into them.” Whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower?!!! Out with a president who wishes his nation weaker … one who sets about to make it so. Yes, the tipping point is fragile and if we tip the other way, we will find out readily what it’s like to not be a military superpower, as terrorists and rogue nations gladly take us up on our weakness. …Which way will this great nation tip? God willing, it will be in the way of the Boston Tea Party Patriots before us who knew exactly what needed to be thrown into the ocean. See: http://townhall.com/columnists/SandyRios/2010/04/19/the_tea_party_in_boston_knew_how_to_right_a_ship?page=1 7) Military tells Congress to keep gay ban for now WASHINGTON – Senior Pentagon leaders on Friday warned Congress not to tamper with the ban on gays serving openly in the military until they can come up with a plan for dealing with potential opposition in the ranks. In a strongly worded letter obtained by The Associated Press, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen told the House Armed Services Committee that forcing policy changes on the military before it's ready would be a mistake. "Our military must be afforded the opportunity to inform us of their concerns, insights and suggestions if we are to carry out this change successfully," Gates and Mullen wrote to the panel's chairman, Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton. …In a statement released late Friday, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama's commitment to repealing the law remains "unequivocal" and that Obama "is committed to getting this done both soon and right." See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100501/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_military_gays 8) EXCLUSIVE: U.N. Elects Iran to Commission on Women's Rights Without fanfare, the United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged "immodest." …Buried 2,000 words deep in a U.N. press release distributed Wednesday on the filling of "vacancies in subsidiary bodies," was the stark announcement: Iran, along with representatives from 10 other nations, was "elected by acclamation," meaning that no open vote was requested or required by any member states — including the United States. FOXNews.com learned of the press release only after being alerted to it by Anne Bayefsky director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. See: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/04/29/elects-iran-commission-womens-rights/?test=latestnews 9) Chinese accused of vast trade in organs China's hidden policy of executing prisoners of the forbidden quasi-Buddhist group Falun Gong and harvesting their organs for worldwide sale has been expanded to include Tibetans, "house church" Christians and Muslim Uighurs, human rights activists said Monday. In a news conference on Capitol Hill, several speakers, including attorney David Matas of B'nai Brith Canada and Ethan Gutmann of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said their investigations have unearthed a grisly trade in which an estimated 9,000 members of Falun Gong have been executed for their corneas, lungs, livers, kidneys and skins. They likened the practice to the Nazi treatment of Jewish prisoners in World War II concentration camps, which included using them for sadistic medical experiments and taking the gold fillings from the teeth of corpses. The newest wrinkle, they said, is that organs from other religious prisoners — specifically dissidents from China's Christian, Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist communities — are also being harvested to satisfy an insatiable global demand. "These groups are useless to the state," said Mr. Gutmann, author of a forthcoming book on Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa. "They are toxic, so you can't release them. But they're worth a great deal of money in terms of their organs." Organs from just one person can fetch a total of $100,000 on the worldwide market, he added. …In 2005, Chinese Vice Minister of Health Huang Jiefu acknowledged that 95 percent of all transplanted organs come from executions, said Mr. Matas, whose 2009 book "Bloody Harvest," co-written with David Kilgour of Ottawa, a former member of the Canadian Parliament, details the practice. See: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/27/chinese-accused-of-vast-trade-in-organs/ 10) This week on 'The Hal Lindsey Report' On this week's edition of "The Hal Lindsey Report": When the military rescinded its invitation to Rev. Franklin Graham to speak at the Pentagon on the National Day of Prayer on May 6th, it was an act of appeasement. A group of Muslim clerics, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and the Secular Coalition for America had objected to Graham's invitation because of remarks he made about Islam shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. They remembered that the "hideously Islamophobic" Graham had called Islam an "evil and wicked religion." They apparently forgot that thousands of Muslim clerics worldwide and much of the Islamic world applauded the terror strike. Selective memory is a necessary job skill. Especially if you're a Muslim, secular humanist, or atheist. But that wasn't the only blow the National Day of Prayer Task Force received recently. U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb declared the national prayer observance unconstitutional. Judge Crabb apparently feels that the annual national call to prayer and meditation, established by Harry Truman in 1952, in effect establishes a religion. Never mind the fact that it doesn't require citizens to pray or even suggest to whom they should pray. Nonetheless, the judge feels that it is a no-no and should be prohibited. Her decision seems to suggest that the First Amendment to the Constitution forbids religion in the name of freedom of religion (emphasis mine). Huh? I'll take a shot at untangling her reasoning this week. …On the other hand, Martin Indyk, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and current foreign policy advisor to Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, continued the Administration's arrogant handling of our ally. He told Israel Army Radio that the tiny nation needs to fall in line with American foreign policy or suffer the consequences. Among other threats, he said, "If you need the United States, then you need to take account of America's interests." He said that Mr. Netanyahu has a very simple choice: "Take on the President of the United States, or take on his right wing." Indyk knows that if Netanyahu heeds the President's demands, the right wing parties in his fragile coalition will walk. If they walk, the Israeli government will collapse -- which is precisely what Obama and Clinton want. That way, Netanyahu will be forced to accept the Kadima party into his coalition and give the chronic appeaser, Tzipi Livni, a major role in the government. Goodbye, Israeli sovereignty. Hello, national suicide. It must be an adventure having America as a 'trusted' friend and ally. Indeed it must. See: http://www.hallindsey.com/the-hal-lindsey-report-4302010/