The Wisdom of Thomas Sowell on Obama’s Health Care Solutions

Anything written by noted economist, Thomas Sowell, “is well worth reading”….and rereading. Here is Mr. Sowell’s reaction to last evening’s television wanderings of our president selling his one payer health care plan:

Distracting the audience’s attention is one of the ways magicians pull off some of their tricks. President Barack Obama’s televised news conference on medical care shows that he is something of a magician when it comes to politics.

The big trick for the president is to convince the public that he can add tens of millions of people to his government medical care plan without raising the costs. But an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office showed that Obamacare would in fact raise the costs and increase the deficit by billions of dollars.

With both common sense and economic analysis saying that Obama cannot expand government medical care without expanding the already runaway federal deficit, it is quite a trick to get the public to believe otherwise– a big challenge requiring big distractions.

One of those distractions has been to blame current high costs on scapegoats whom the president can rein in. Talking about the high pay of the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies is one of those distractions.

In an industry where developing just one new pharmaceutical drug can cost a billion dollars, whether the head of a mega-billion-dollar pharmaceutical company is paid a million dollars a year, 20 million dollars or works free of charge is not likely to raise or lower the cost of the medicine you buy by one dollar.

But, if making the CEO’s pay an issue can distract your attention from the impossible math used by Barack Obama and his supporters, then that is a trick worthy of Houdini.

Insurance companies are another distraction and a scapegoat because they do not insure “pre-existing conditions.” Stop and think about it: If you could wait until you got sick to take out health insurance, why would you buy that insurance while you are well?

You could avoid paying all those premiums and then– after you got sick– take out health insurance and let the premiums paid by other people pay for your medical treatment.

That is not “bringing down the cost of health care.” It is sticking somebody else with paying those costs. So is taxing “the rich.” So is passing on those costs to your children and grandchildren through government deficit spending.

When Obama makes the insurance companies the villains for not insuring pre-existing conditions, that gives him another distraction and enables him to be another escape artist, like Houdini.

What is the point of government-controlled medical care if it is not going to lower costs but just shuffle them around, like a shell game?

The government does not have some magic wand that can “bring down the cost of health care.” It can buy a smaller quantity or lower quality of medical care, as other countries with government-run medical care do.

It can decide not to spend as much money on the elderly as is being spent now. That can save a lot of money– if you think having a parent die earlier is a bargain.

The idea of a “duty to die” has been making some headway in recent years around the fringes of the left. It is perfectly consistent with the fundamental notion of the left, that decisions should be transferred from ordinary citizens to government elites.

Liberals don’t have to advocate it. But, once you have bureaucrats empowered to decide what treatments you can and cannot get, they may well decide that money spent keeping some 75-year-old grandmother alive for a couple of more years could be better spent politically by enabling ten younger people to have acupuncture or visit a shrink.

Even if her children or grandchildren are willing to spend their own money to keep grandma alive, when bureaucrats control the necessary technology or medication they may decide that it is not for sale.

Those pushing for government-controlled medical care say that you can keep your doctor. But bureaucrats in Washington will decide whether what your doctor prescribes will be allowed. Talking about your doctor is another distraction from the crucial question of who will actually have the power to decide, which can be the power of life and death.

Share: What is the point of government-controlled medical care if it is not going to lower costs but just shuffle them around, like a shell game?

The government does not have some magic wand that can “bring down the cost of health care.” It can buy a smaller quantity or lower quality of medical care, as other countries with government-run medical care do.

It can decide not to spend as much money on the elderly as is being spent now. That can save a lot of money– if you think having a parent die earlier is a bargain.

The idea of a “duty to die” has been making some headway in recent years around the fringes of the left. It is perfectly consistent with the fundamental notion of the left, that decisions should be transferred from ordinary citizens to government elites.

Liberals don’t have to advocate it. But, once you have bureaucrats empowered to decide what treatments you can and cannot get, they may well decide that money spent keeping some 75-year-old grandmother alive for a couple of more years could be better spent politically by enabling ten younger people to have acupuncture or visit a shrink.

Even if her children or grandchildren are willing to spend their own money to keep grandma alive, when bureaucrats control the necessary technology or medication they may decide that it is not for sale.

Those pushing for government-controlled medical care say that you can keep your doctor. But bureaucrats in Washington will decide whether what your doctor prescribes will be allowed. Talking about your doctor is another distraction from the crucial question of who will actually have the power to decide, which can be the power of life and death.

(The above article originated at TownHall.com.)

A Lot of Gass About Honduras?

A few days ago, Dennis Prager interviewed a Vicki Gass on his radio show regarding the administration’s view of the political crisis in Honduras.

There would be no political crisis at this time if president Obama were a normal American and not a leftist cozying up to Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, the Organization of American States, and the United Nations. He wants America to be loved, Dennis explains. “Wanting to be loved” can be a debilitating illness which can have devastating results, he correctly and often reminds his listeners. It becomes even more dangerous when a lefty wants the Left to be loved.

The critical crisis centers on the removal by the Honduras Congress and Supreme Court of a Chavez supported Leftist president of the country, Manuel Zelaya of the Liberal Party. He was replaced by the Liberal Party Vice President Roberto Micheletti with the blessings of the majority of that Party. The president was charged with a series of criminal acts leading up to an attempted coup which would allow Zelaya to extend his term of office, which term is limited by National Constitution to one four year term.

The single term law was instituted specifically to protect the country from coups which have been common in Honduras’ past. The ballots for selective distribution which would have claimed the Consitutional term limitation null and void were printed in Venezuela and flown in for the event secretly.

The Honduras military was called in by Supreme Court directive to escort Mr. Zelaya out of the country….to Costa Rica, as it turned out. Mr. Zelaya has attempted a return or two, his landings being thwarted, and has threatened the tyrant’s terms “or else”…the everlasting leftist threat of armed rebellion “of the people”. They have only the welfare of the people in mind.

President Obama has sided with Chavez and Castro….President Obama would have us believe his position is noble, for both the Organization of American States and the United Nations overwhelmingly support the return of the Chavezist, Zelaya, to his post….disrupting the established democratic process according to the rule of law in Honduras.

I do not know how Dennis got Vicki Gass’ name for the interview, but I did a bit of research after listening to her voice, tones and content in the interview. She seemed cold, programmed, and calculating. She was perfect as a stereotype of an angry, single, lefty sloganeering, fast talking female who has probably taught assertiveness classes to Democrats.

Ms. Gass described the Honduras issue as a coup de etat…an overthrow by the military. When pressed, she admitted the coup wasn’t actually engineered by the military but that point didn’t mean anything…even though the Supreme Court and the Congress had abided by the terms of the National Constitution, that didn’t mean anything either. It was the military which escorted him out of the country, therefore a coup.

As proof that the Honduran removal procedure was illegal, Ms. Gass coldly reminded Dennis that both the United Nations and the OAS, overwhelmingly condemned Honduras and have agreed to punish the country economically until it returns Zelaya to the presidency. It should be noted that at this very time, Castro’s Cuba is being elevated to OAS membership. Venezuela maintains unhindered membership as well. Likewise, lefty states of Nicaragua and Bolivia.

Vicki Gass is director of the Washington Office on Latin America…WOLA..It turns out she is very active in left wing circles of the AFLCIO Solidarity Center. The purpose of WOLA: “Promoting Human Rights, Democracy, and Social Justice.”

Comrade citizens, how can we complain, with such sweet Obamalike words? These words are the modern Democrat Party’s sugar from the Left. WOLA is affiliated with the ILO..the International Labor Orgnization. Isn’t that Harry Bridges’ Communist Party labor union of the 1950s? Does my memory serve me correctly? Isn’t this the San Francisco group that buddies with Nancy Pelosi?

A lot of Gass about Honduras? Could Dennis be wrong?

I have a good friend living in Honduras. She is devoted to improving the health of their young. I’ll be leaving tomorrow to find out what is happening in this very poor country. I wish them well in their struggles. May democracy strengthen their resolve.

Obama, The Salesman, Doesn’t Mix Well With Truth

The hot topic of the day politically is the Obama battle to railroad his single payer Government run Health Care plan down the throats of the American people. The president swears his plan is not more costly. He swears also that he has never been for a single payer system. Either he is slippery with his memory or he is slippery with his tongue. He is both….he admits to the first and performs the second.

On the matter of the Trillion plus dollar ($1,000,000,000 ++++) cost he is adding to the financial ruin of our America, president Obama is a chronic LIAR. Charles Krauthammer and Dennis Prager both fully acknowledge this but can only skim around the liar word. Mr. Krauthammer call him disingenouous, a brazen one, at that…..Dennis hedges, usually defining what he thinks a liar is first…”one who knowingly commits an untruth usually for some ill gotten purpose”….with Dennis’ kind belief that our president is simply a young and callow lefty.

Watch our president’s interview on YouTube with Meredith Vieira. Watch his various body squirms when he shifts and stammers trying to answer questions about his health care propaganda past.

Hidden in the news is Obama’s command to the Congressional Budget Office director to attend a private session with his highness in the White House. Did Mr. Elmendorf have some explaining to do. He had permitted his office’s assessments of Mr. Obama’s claims that his single payer health care plan wouldn’t cost the citizen more.

The Congressional Budget Office is mandated by Congress to be non-partisan…non-political. Its duty is to provide Congress with honest, reliable, professionally arrived at, budget assessments, even though the director is selected by Democrats when Democrats run Congress. The director, Douglas Elmendorf, is indeed, a Democrat, but one apparently respectful to his duties. God bless him….there seem to be so few.

Why the meeting? Mr. Elmendorf’s led Congressional Budget Office report warned those bothering to study the report, that the president’s health care plant would be exceedingly more expensive than claimed so that the nation’s economy might not be able to sustain the debt.

Do we Americans believe this president invited the director to congratulate him for his honesty and courage? Perhaps this young president is not aware that these words have any meaning in politics. So many in the president’s forming years were not aware. Certainly his preacher, Jeremiah Wright, was not.

One can turn to the CBO director’s blogsite, and read Mr. Elmendorf’s review of the meeting. He was not congratulated for his honesty and courage, but the event was reviewed with gentility. Gentle, perhaps, but the meeting itself was grievously unethical…The Congression Budget Office is supposed to be non-political. It has had a history upholding that honor.

The president, young and callow, must not have realized that he has set a precedent, for future presidents to follow this Obama footprint…politically corrupting the Congressional Budget Office.

Dennis Knows Marxism and Obama’s Habits. Will America Wake Up?

Dennis Prager has been exceptional in his analysis of the Left and Barack Obama over the past several weeks. He has become more animated and tense in his reviews of these subjects…and, of course, it is because the stakes are so high.

Dennis has formally studied the Left, both American and European, and especially Soviet, the Greatest Leftist Empire of them all. My own academic background includes a Russian and Soviet Studies graduate degree for which Marxist understandings and Leftwing political techniques become essential elementary studies. I add this to emphasize my respect for Dennis and his accuracy…..although I do believe his commentary about Obama and Leftwing deceit could use less kind descriptions. Often, very often, they simply lie…Yet, with so much material in their “misinformation kits”, even Dennis is finally coming around with the correct vocabulary with his wonderfully accurate analyses.

For those of you who have listened carefully for his review of Marxist stealth and other deceits, let us consider the following report from the AFLCIO-NOW News on American workers’ “rights”: (Isn’t the Episcopal Church true to 2009 form?)

“The Episcopal Church has added its support to the growing movement for the Employee Free Choice Act.

At the 76th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, held July 8-17, bishops and deputies approved a resolution asking Congress and the president to restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain.

The resolution, “Fix Our Broken Labor Laws,” explains that the church strongly supports the freedom of workers to collectively bargain for a better life.

Episcopal bishops and deputies are asking Congress to pass legislation that fulfills three key principles, the resolution says:

1. Provide workers the choice of seeking union recognition either through an election or through a majority sign-up on cards, which are then verified by the National Labor Relations Board.
2. Adopt more effective remedies for violations of employees’ rights, comparable to the remedies for discrimination provided by existing civil rights laws.
3. Where the employers and unions are unable to reach agreement on their first collective bargaining agreement within a reasonable period of time, resolve the dispute by submitting it to mediation and if mediation is unsuccessful, then to binding arbitration.”

Sounds sweet and democratic, doesn’t it? Has melody like the baritone we know. Church endorsed…Fix broken laws…remedy discrimination…provide workers choice..church supports freedom of workers…free choice…Obamawords.

What are they hiding?….What does Barack hide in his songs before television, teleprompter, and the public? The truth!

(Read carefully principle number 1.. What do you think ‘sign up’ cards means?

I believe Barack knows exactly what he is hiding….an authoritarian Marxist style agenda of leftwing control. Remember who his mentors were! Study his interview with Meredith Vieira of NBC. He knows when to dance aside an issue. Watch him! Listen to him!

The organized Left is not interested in what is good for a country…any country. In the United States, the organized leftwing includes anyone throughout the world who is interested in sabatoging American free enterprise….When there are riots in Seattle, or anywhere else in the United States, rioters of the world’s left arise, join the fight…pillage and burn. The primary purpose is to gain the power of government and of all of its systems of communication, most iimportantly education and communication. The Left in America has dominated post high school education in the social sciences for more than a generation. It would be only a matter of time when its children, Bill Ayers, for instance, and its children’s children would be persuaded to become America’s enemies of freedom.

The fact is the American Leftwing doesn’t give a damn about America…the country as it is …and won’t until it has become sculpted into Marxism….which is WHAT BARACK OBAMA IS PRECISELY ATTEMPTING TO DO! Then it will clamp down into an ultra conservative atheistic state dedicated to absolute equality for all citizens which must automatically lead to a secret police to control those who may press too hard for a touch of freedom. (Think Taliban or Islamic Iran without burkas.)
Conservatives in this country are always on the short end of salesmanship. They really love America even with all of its flaws, especially its violence and the vileness of the country’s new left. Most of the intellectual leaders today are conservative…They are not comfortable behaving like the Left.

There are nearly no apologists or deep thinkers leading today’s American Left. It has the preacher, Barack, oiling his charisma every day to con the population with sweet words to deflect the impending disasters of nearly every plan his gums explain and the trillions of dollars of financial debt that go with.

America hasn’t been educated for years. It has been trained…women trained in assertiveness to be more menlike….men trained to be female and cry more, why bother to think…..trained to hate the established white culture in the name of victimhood….trained to feel as a victim shood…to hate the “culprits responsible”…..trained to believe in childlike foolishness in drunkenness and drugs, and never grow up and become responsible…and …trained to believe in themselves over God, that all is relevant..that the USSR and USA were equal in immorality, that men are needed as much as fish on a bicycle..

Why would anyone think there would be consequences for such trainings?…Because Americans stopped thinking about and taking care of America a long time ago.

Until the Age of Obama?

That remains to be seen. The American People must awaken first. At the moment there is just a stir….of the body, but not yet of the mind.

Marxist Obama Has Arrived In America!

“For every force, there is a counterforce”. I don’t remember when I memorized this learning, but I have never forgotten it. I believe it was in the fifth grade. My thinking as a child frequently danced around “force versus counterforce” when I was trying to understand something new.

It is through these force/counterforce thoughts that, at an early age, I gained a comforting rather simple understanding of the existence of God…..

and I have ever since found it sufficient to avoid further entanglements. If there is evil, as my mother shortly after my birth and then on assured me there was, and, she said it was everywhere, then there must be “good”. And so, she said, good must be everywhere. So there you have it. God exists….as the counterforce to evil. Both forces are everywhere.

At age ten or eleven, I was sent to Bible school studies, and that Old Testament God reaffirmed my confidence that I was correct in my thinking. I was told at home, I could never escape my God. I liked that even though I knew He was often threatening, angry and unpredictable. “Well”, my Mother would explain, “that’s life…You’ll learn!”

The greatest force/counterforce in conducting human life, I believe, is the force of Liberty against the forces of control. Or, as the Leftwinger in modern societies views it, the force of human “Equality and Peace”, against the forces of “Liberty and Greed”. Both forces recognize the need for control. One energizes to control moral behavior, the other primarily economic behavior. One views liberty as a right for an individual to pursue a life of happiness and prosperity within the law versus the opponent which views the economic equality of all peoples as a superior right.

In America both have religious energies with liberty attatched to Godliness from the very birth of the country, and atheism, the religion of the moderns, “liberated” from moral and philosophical restraints of the country’s Judeo-Christian past; the religion married to the economic faith of Marxism and the belief that everything in life is economic.

Barack Obama speaks Marxism, the non-religion religion which taxes heavily those who create wealth to create power in government to determine who and what will be considered equal and what will be considered valued in life and what is needed to maintain “peace and equality among peoples”. The Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Albania, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Cuba, are some examples of Marxism on the march during the last century. State control of planning and resources for Peace and Equality also spread throughout Africa starting in the 1960s. The more recent entries into this Leftwing Hall of Fame include Venezuela, Bolivia, Equador, and Nicaragua.

About a month ago the president of Honduras attempted a coup de etat to establish himself as its perpetual leader ala Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. The United States of America under president Barack Obama has chosen to support Hugo Chavez’s attempt to attach Honduras to the list of Marxist nations for Peace.

The battle between Liberty and Equality has reached America. It elected Marxist Barack Obama as its president, November 4, 2008. He promised his flock the change he is now preaching…. Equal care…equal pay, equal learning, equal poverty, equal work, equal rooms, equal water used, equal miles driven, equal everything to be decided by a vast army of Obamafans, all paid well by government bureaus under Obama Czars, all graduated from Obama schools to make certain your life is equal and your thoughts and learnings are as equal as needed.

Chairman Obama has arrived in America. And there is no counterforce in sight.

Obamaland Described Two Centuries Ago!

I came across a review of a book by Paul A. Rahe, “Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift”, by Mark Steyn. This great American “foreigner”, Steyn, catches my attention whenever I come across his name. He battles for Liberty and he makes me enjoy being an American even with its great present powerblight, Barack Obama, as president.

I skipped over the review to the name of M. de Tocqueville whose name I met during my college days 55 years ago. From my memory I remember him as a genious. He visited the new United State in the early nineteenth century and wrote a little critique about this new society. What clairvoyance I thought, (with some assistance from my professor).

From Mark Steyn’s review:

The professor opens his study with a famous passage from M. de Tocqueville. Or, rather, it would be famous were he still widely read. For he knows us far better than we know him: “I would like to imagine with what new traits despotism could be produced in the world,” he wrote the best part of two centuries ago. He and his family had been on the sharp end of France’s violent convulsions, but he considered that, to a democratic republic, there were slyer seductions:

The brilliance of M. de Tocqueville (written around 1820):

“I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.”
(He didn’t foresee “Dancing with the Stars” or “American Idol” but, details aside, that’s pretty much on the money….Mark Steyn inserts.)

de Tocqueville continues:

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs…
The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” end of quotation

Mark Steyn continues: “Welcome to the twenty-first century.” and continues:

“It does not tyrannize, it gets in the way.” The all-pervasive micro-regulatory state “enervates,” but nicely, gradually, so after a while you don’t even notice. And in exchange for liberty it offers security: the “right” to health care; the “right” to housing; the “right” to a job—although who needs that once you’ve got all the others? The proposed European Constitution extends the laundry list: the constitutional right to clean water and environmental protection. Every right you could ever want, except the right to be free from undue intrusions by the state. M. Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president and chairman of the European constitutional convention, told me at the time that he had bought a copy of the U.S. Constitution at a bookstore in Washington and carried it around with him in his pocket. Try doing that with his Euro-constitution, and you’ll be walking with a limp after ten minutes and calling for a sedan chair after twenty: As Professor Rahe notes, it’s 450 pages long. And, when your “constitution” is that big, imagine how swollen the attendant bureaucracy and regulation is. The author points out that, in France, “80 per cent of the legislation passed by the National Assembly in Paris originates in Brussels”—that is, at the European Union’s civil service. Who drafts it? Who approves it? Who do you call to complain? Who do you run against and in what election? And where do you go to escape it? Not to the next town, not to the next county, not to the next country.”

As Glenn Ray, the student of so many years ago, I remember being proud of this de Tocqueville description of my young country, despite its apparent smallness of status and wastefullness. Although I agree with every complaint Mark Steyn cites about the growing Marxism in 2009 America with the administration of this Marxist president, Barack Obama, I still am measurably proud that I have lived in the country so described…..one which has set these parameters within which citizens can fight to expand their liberty, (for which conservatives haven’t fought for a long, long time).

However, there is a point where liberty becomes crushed by the greed of the mob…when the masses discover they can rob from the industrious to gain the right to expand their own indolence. The mob was well organized by a Marxist community organizer in 2008.

Prager likens the Obama movement to grab “power of attorney” over the American people to the feminization of America.

The human female is innately not interested in liberty. She isn’t going to put herself on the line except in one particular scenario……if her children are threatened. Miracles and sometimes even crimes can then occur. Otherwise the human female prefers security…safety….She also prefers reading to debating. Not only that, she prefers fiction to reality. She would rather dream than problem solve. Most are excellent at nurturing. The American academia, it must be mentioned in order to be fair, has long propagandized there is no difference between the human female and male, except through socialization. You decide!

Today’s American male is made female by culture to add to the problem. In academia’s (and therefore the Leftwing’s) drive to make one sex fit all, countless numbers of American boys have been drugged and/or trained to act like gentle little girls. Countless numbers are also fatherless or have fathers who have been programmed to act more like mothers than as models for male adulthood.

The American Left has been instrumental in the decline of the American family. It has used government and its legal systems to destroy it. Lefties, especially those sitting at university posts, know the family better than husband and wife, so it offers government as a replacement.

The Left always is certain it knows how to make one’s life better than the citizen.

The citizen will remain perpetually an unadult…made safe from any and all responsibilities….made free from risk….Obama will take care….”at no extra cost”.

Obama Bathes in Marxism With Chavez and Castro

As you Prager fans know, Dennis spent three days in Honduras earlier this week to participate in supporting the democratic struggles of this poverty belt country in Central America. He wore his emotions for Honduras on his sleeve all week. God bless him for his clarity and determination.

This little country with a long history of turmoil, not long ago had settled into a serious attempt to hold a government true to democratic principles. Its institutions held fast. The country’s president, Manuel Zelaya did not. President Barack Obama abandoned democracy as well, siding with Castro and Chavez to isolate and destroy those attempting to save the breath of popular rule in the country. Dennis Prager wrote the following in his most recent Townhall.com blog:

“Honduras has joined Israel as a pariah nation. The United Nations has condemned Honduras by a vote of acclamation, and the Organization of American States has suspended it.

The way in which nearly all the world’s media portray the legal, Supreme Court-ordered ouster of President Manuel (Mel) Zelaya is one major reason for the universal opprobrium. Because military men took part in the deportation of the sitting president, it has been portrayed as a classic Latin American “military coup,” and who can support a military coup?

The lack of context in which this ouster took place has prevented the vast majority of the world’s news watchers and readers from understanding what has happened.

I wonder how many people who bother to read the news — as opposed to only listen to or watch news reports — know:

— Zelaya was plotting a long-term, possibly lifetime, takeover of the Honduran government through illegally changing the Honduran Constitution.

— Zelaya had personally led a mob attack on a military facility to steal phony “referendum” ballots that had been printed by the Venezuelan government.

— Weeks earlier, in an attempt to intimidate the Honduran attorney general — as reported by The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady, one of the only journalists in the world who regularly reports the whole story about Honduras — “some 100 agitators, wielding machetes, descended on the attorney general’s office. ‘We have come to defend this country’s second founding,’ the group’s leader reportedly said. ‘If we are denied it, we will resort to national insurrection.'”

— No member of the military has assumed a position of power as a result of the “military coup.”

— Zelaya’s own party, the Liberal Party, supported his removal from office and deportation from Honduras.

— The Liberal Party still governs Honduras.

The United States is threatening to suspend all aid to one of the three poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere in order to force that country — against its own laws and with the inevitable violence it would entail — to allow Zelaya back as president.

Yet, no Honduran I talked to said he or she wanted Honduras to cave in to the American financial threat. “We will tighten our belts,” one man struggling to make a living told me. Indeed, what is happening is that Hondurans are coming to realize that American aid — even purely humanitarian aid — comes with strings.

In our increasingly morally confused — i.e., left-wing influenced — world, even America is having a harder and harder time distinguishing between right and wrong as it comes to value realpolitik and a desire to be loved, from Iran to Venezuela to Honduras, more than it values liberty. To the extent that Americans will be loved, it will be thanks to supporting liberty and thanks to the work of American charities such as Cure International, with its pediatric orthopedic hospital here and in other impoverished places (www.cureinternational.org).

Let there be no ambiguity here. Little Honduras was supposed to be the next country to lose its liberties as it joined the anti-American, pro-Iranian Latin American left. But Little Honduras decided to fight back. And this has infuriated Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who will surely attempt to foment violence in Honduras.

Therefore, if you love liberty, you will do whatever you can do help Honduras resist Chavez and his allies, which include the United Nations and Organization of American States.

There are many ways to do that. Buy Honduran goods. Write your representatives in Washington to back the present, law-based Honduran government. And, yes, even visit this friendly beleaguered place. When the world’s governments isolate a country, with few exceptions, that’s all you need to know about who the good guys are.”

I do love liberty, starting with my own. Prager enjoys preaching about taking risks…the reasonable ones. I enjoy practicing my freedom. And so, because……….

………… I view the picture in Honduras as does Dennis, I will be leaving for Honduras later next week for ten days. I am already thrilled. glenn h ray

What If George W. Bush Had Been Black?

I received the following comparisons of the 43rd and 44th presidents of the United States of America and have added a question of importance, in my view to each of these:

“What If George W. Bush Had Been Black?”

George W. Bush was president for eight years, some say eight long years…. so if you believe they were long years, and you’re one of those who believe he got dumber and dumber the longer he remained in office, how do you feel about the following?

What if George W. Bush had been black?

Had George W. Bush made a clumsy joke at the expense of the Special Olympics (viz., helping the intellectually handicapped), would you have dismissed it as a non-issue?

If George W. Bush had given an iPod to the Queen of England containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought “how cute?”

If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had visited Austria and referred to “the Austrian language,” would you have brushed it off as the understandable slip of a Harvard law grad?

If George W. Bush had appointed people to high places whose flawed character impaired them to the extent that they had difficulty remembering to file, much less pay, their income taxes, would you have dismissed this as minor mix -up that will all work out for the betterment of the nation?

If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had taken a cue from Hugo Chavez and politically dragooned a Republican Congress to allocate 5.6 billion dollars for the creation of a civilian volunteer security force as strong and well equipped as the regular Army, mandating that this quasi-military force fall under his personal command and control, would you have been concerned?

If George W. Bush had proposed doubling the size of the national debt, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had then proposed doubling the national debt again over the next 10 years, would you have dismissed it with a “tsk, tsk”?

If George W. Bush pushed the passage of a $785 billion stimulus bill and promised transparent tracking to reveal precisely how monies from the bill would be spent, then postponed oversight until 2010, would you approve or would you think something was “fishy”?

If Bush had promised 48 hour advance posting of the same bill on the internet but only released it to the public two hours before congressional approval, wouldn’t you have questioned his ethics?

If Bush’s White House Staff had spent over $300,000 flying Air Force One low over New York (for a publicity photo fly-by) scaring the hell out of the city’s residents, wouldn’t you have expected Bush to make the pictures public? Would you have approved? Obama won’t give them up, yet he saw fit to release the secret “torture memos”.

If George W. Bush had been “addicted” to using a TelePrompter, and seldom gave a speech without having one, would you have approved? Would you think he was intelligent?

If George W. Bush had pre-approved/pre-picked the list of reporters allowed to ask questions at his press conferences and refused to call on the correspondent from MSNBC (FOX with Obama), would you have approved? Is that a fair and balanced news conference?

If George W. Bush and a Republican Congress had given hundreds of millions of dollars to a group (the right-wing equivalent of ACORN) after its members had been convicted of voter registration fraud, would you approve of them doing the 2010 Census, which will determine congressional districts for 10 years? Will you trust ACORN in 2010?

Would you have approved of George W. Bush moving the census from the Department of Commerce into the White House and putting his Chief of Staff in control of the counting?

In the aftermath of 9-11, if you knew George W. Bush prohibited the CIA from water boarding Islamic extremists who possessed information we needed to prevent attacks that could potentially killed millions of Americans, would you have approved?

Oddly enough, Barack Obama has committed all these faux pas in just 22 weeks — so brace yourself, sit back and enjoy, we still have approximately three years and eight months remaining for more surprises. Or probably seven years plus, because with the help of the press, we continue to look the other way and don’t see where we are headed!

Would America’s press and pundits have reacted to these faux pas if George W. Bush has been just a little bit black? Would they have dared? What excuses could they concoct to warrant such abandonment to honesty and integrity? ghr

Confronting Leftwing Bigotry: Anecdote IV

Robert Whiting, an elderly gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane. At French Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry on.

‘You have been to France before, monsieur?’ the customs officer asked sarcastically.

Mr. Whiting admitted that he had been to France previously.

‘Then you should know enough to have your passport ready.’

The American said, ‘Thelast time I was here, I didn’t have to show it.

‘Impossible. Americans always have to show your passports on arrival in France!’

The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look Then he quietly explained, ‘Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn’t find a single Frenchmen to show a passport to.’

Confronting Leftwing Bigotry: Anecdote III

A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S. , English, Canadian, Australian and French Navies. At a
cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a large group of Officers that included personnel from most of those countries.

Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks but a French admiral suddenly complained that, whereas Europeans learn many languages, Americans learn only English. He then asked, ‘Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences rather than speaking “French”?

Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied ‘Maybe it’s because the Brits, Canadians, Aussies and Americans arranged it so you wouldn’t have to speak German.’