Guess Obama is a Racist, After All

Mark Noonan

Well, that is the way it works, isn’t it? Do anything to oppose a black man in office, and that is proof of racism, right?

Embattled New York Governor David Paterson said on Sunday he was still running for office, in the face of reports that President Barack Obama had asked him to withdraw from the 2010 race for fear that he cannot regroup from a series of political setbacks.

“I am running for office,” Paterson told reporters at a Manhattan parade. “I’m not going to discuss confidential conversations,” he said, adding that he planned to continue focusing on matters related to the financial crisis.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that the Obama administration is worried Paterson’s unpopularity could drag down New York’s Democratic members of Congress and the Democratic-controlled state legislature in November 2010 elections.

Citing an administration official, the Times reported that Obama’s request that Paterson step aside was put forward by his political advisers, but approved by the president.

Of course, this means that Obama is a bit of a fascist, too – typical of modern liberals, he doesn’t want to let the Democrats of New York decide but, instead, wants to use political pressure to get the man he wants.

Wasn’t there a mention or two of “change” when Obama was running?

Swine Flu: Panic-Mongering for Donations, or a Real Threat?

Mark Noonan

I don’t know which, myself:

The swine flu pandemic could kill millions and cause anarchy in the world’s poorest nations unless £900m can be raised from rich countries to pay for vaccines and antiviral medicines, says a UN report leaked to the Observer.

The disclosure will provoke concerns that health officials will not be able to stem the growth of the worldwide H1N1 pandemic in developing countries. If the virus takes hold in the poorest nations, millions could die and the economies of fragile countries could be destroyed.

Health ministers around the globe were sent the warning on Thursday in a report on the costs of averting a humanitarian disaster in the next few months. It comes as officials inside the World Health Organisation, the UN’s public health body, said they feared they would not be able to raise half that amount because of the global downturn.

If this isn’t panic-mongering, then we need to really get on this…too many lives are at stake, and in addition to the loss of lives would be the massive disruption of global civilization. In my view, better safe than sorry – time to tap TARP and throw some money at this problem, rather than the problem of bankers. If it is panic-mongering, then we’ll have wasted a bit more than a billion dollars…which Congress can waste in five minutes, on a good day.

I’ve heard, over the months, both the worst-case and nothing-to-worry-about scenarios on this pandemic – while I’ve tended towards the nothing-to-worry-about, I can’t help but notice the similarities between this outbreak and the 1918-19 flu…and while we in the wealthy nations will get off lighter than the poorer nations, the fact remains that a great deal of what we use in our nation comes from the labor of people in poor nations…given how stupid we’ve been about outsourcing our hard work, we now lack the capacity to look after ourselves in a crisis. And this knowledge just reinforces my better-safe-than-sorry approach.

Phrase of the Day

Mark Noonan

For those of you who are not Christians, if you ever wanted to know just what makes us tick:

To holy people the very name of Jesus is a name to feed upon, a name to transport. His name can raise the dead and transfigure and beautify the living. – Venerable John Henry Newman

It really works like that – and its not just spiritual…we Catholics hold to a much more immediate, in-the-flesh view of this in the Eucharist. Right there, right next to us, all the time and everywhere.

GOP Has Early Lead in NH Senate Contest

Mark Noonan

To win would be to hold the seat, but this could also be a sign that the GOP is starting a resurgence in the northeast:

Republican Kelly Ayotte leads Democrat Paul Hodes by eight points in an early look at New Hampshire’s 2010 race for the U.S. Senate.

The first Rasmussen Reports survey of the race to fill the seat being vacated by retiring GOP Senator Judd Gregg shows Ayotte ahead 46% to 38%.

Five percent (5%) of New Hampshire voters prefer some other candidate, and 12% are undecided.

Ayotte, the state’s attorney general from 2004 until her resignation in July, captures 81% of the Republican vote, and Hodes, a two-term member of the U.S. House, earns the identical number (81%) of Democratic votes. Among voters not affiliated with either party, Ayotte leads by 14 points.

The independents are the key number here – lost them by 14 points, and you can’t win. From all polling that I’ve seen, independents are starting to swing back to the GOP out of dismay for the harsh, leftist politics emanating from the Democrat Congress and White House. They voted for moderate hope and change, they’ve got hard left, hard ball, corruption-as-usual politics…and the Democrats might pay a very high price next year for this failure to live up to their campaign rhetoric.

The Palin Effect

Mark Noonan

Crucial to the debate over Obamacare:

For an uneducated, unsophisticated rube and former governor from a backwater state, Sarah Palin sure can drive a debate. With prospects for passage of his sweeping overhaul of the American health care delivery system fading with every speech, President Barack Obama is making it increasingly clear that Palin will be recognized, for good or ill, as perhaps the most prominent single political figure responsible for stopping it in its tracks.

It’s a remarkable story. A failed vice-presidential candidate and resigned governor — unfairly viewed by many as a cruel joke – reached from beyond the political grave her elitist critics prematurely dug for her and her political future to thwart a popular president prematurely regarded by the same elite that shunned her as perhaps the most gifted politician this nation has ever produced. If Sarah Palin were a sitting governor, a failed presidential candidate, or even a state legislator, her influence in the health care debate would not be as unexpected. It is the fact that she is a private citizen, completely out of politics save for a small political action committee, that makes this story unique.

How did she do it? That’s where the story gets even more remarkable.

There were no public appearances or speeches, no glitzy ad campaigns, no publicity tours, no interviews in the mainstream press or any new media outlet. Sarah Plain killed health care reform with a posting on her Facebook page, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and an exquisite sense of timing.

“Death Panels” did it – and I know our liberals still yank their hair in frustration…there was no such thing, they assert. After all, you can comb through the whole series of proposals and never find the phrase “death panel” mentioned. And that, to the liberals, is the end of it…its sort of like their assertion that no one is pro-abortion because no one actually says they are pro-abortion. But just as there are pro-abortion people, so were there “death panels” in the health care reform proposals, disguised as various commissions and committees which would oversea what coverage plans were to provide. And Sarah Palin’s phrasing was crucial to turning the debate firmly against Obama and his Democrats.

Now, the Palin might be out of the running for President – the left smeared her as a dunce, much as they once smeared Dan Quayle as a dunce, even though he was vastly smarter than Al Gore; and that smear might stick. Its hard to overcome public prejudices – it can be done, but its hard. The best person at it, ever, was Ronald Reagan. We’ll have to see if Palin can develope Reaganesque ability to re-shape public perceptions. But, be that as it may, Palin has shown why she rose so far and so fast – and still has a shot at the White House in 2012: she’s very, very smart.

And she’s made the left jump to her tune – that, in and of itself, will provide satisfaction when set against the slanders the left has launched against her.

Wimps in the White House

Mark Noonan

Doesn’t surprise me at all:

Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday has been in the media game for a long time now. He’s reported good news and bad news about both Democratic and Republican presidents, and the White House staffs took most of the bad news in stride. They knew Wallace was just doing his job.

Not Barack Obama and his White House. The president snubbed Wallace and Fox News in his flurry of visits to Sunday news shows tomorrow, and last night, Wallace told Fox colleague Bill O’Reilly that Obama’s team is just as petty as their boss.

“These guys, everything is personal. I gotta tell you, everything,” Wallace said. “They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

It was all supposed to be so easy for them – Obama in the White House, large Congressional majority, a cheer leading MSM, leftist groups being put on the government dime…the opposition was not supposed to be able to do anything. We haven’t stopped them, of course – and, in fact, we can’t stop them: we don’t have the votes…but we have caused them serious pain and the longer this goes on, the worse it gets for them. Remember, if the big ticket items aren’t done before Thanksgiving, they won’t get done before January of 2011 because no one in the House, especially, is going to want to vote on controversial issues next year (and, in fact, they’re already afraid of voting on them, this year).

And now we get Wallace saying they are taking it personal – which is a sure sign of both executive weakness and lack of ability to figure out what to do, next. No one is really minding the store over at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: the President seems fixated on endless campaign stops interspersed with flying visits to foreign lands to denounce America; the First Lady is acting like an Empress; the staff seems to be heading in six directions at once…the change from Bush to Obama is quite stunning. Heck, even Clinton’s relatively slip-shod operation is looking like a model of efficiency compared to Obama’s crew.

Can they pull it together? Perhaps – but by the time they do, the damage might already be done.

Weekly Recap (2009-09-19)

Matt Margolis

FDIC Out of Money

Mark Noonan

Maybe the mattress is the best place for money, after all?

The chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. says she is “considering all options, including borrowing from Treasury,” to replenish the dwindling fund that insures bank deposits.

“I never say never,” FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair told an audience at Georgetown University Friday.

Bair’s remarks go beyond what she said just three weeks ago when asked about tapping the Treasury after the fund that insures regular deposit accounts up to $250,000 hit its lowest point since 1992, at the height of the savings-and-loan crisis. “Not at this point in time,” she said on Aug. 27.

The FDIC estimates bank failures will cost the fund around $70 billion through 2013. Ninety-two banks have failed so far this year. Hundreds more are expected to fall in coming years largely because of souring loans for commercial real estate.

The FDIC’s fund has slipped to 0.22 percent of insured deposits, below a congressionally mandated minimum of 1.15 percent. The $10.4 billion in the fund at the end of June is down from $13 billion at the end of March, and $45.2 billion in the second quarter of 2008.

More failures and less payments in to the fund – the FDIC, of course, only works as long as only a few banks per year fail. As we’ll probably have more than 100 fail this year, and probably as many next year, this is the “push comes to shove” time for the FDIC…and it has failed.

Margaret Sanger's Version of "I Have A Dream" Coming True?

Leo Pusateri

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was demonstrably a racist eugenicist:

The aim of the program was to restrict—many believe exterminate—the black population. Under the pretense of “better health” and “family planning,” Sanger cleverly implemented her plan. What’s more shocking is Sanger’s beguilement of black America’s crème de la crème—those prominent, well educated and well-to-do—into executing her scheme. Some within the black elite saw birth control as a means to attain economic empowerment, elevate the race and garner the respect of whites.

Margaret Sanger, one of the founders of the Malthusian Eugenics movement, thought it a wonderful idea to “do away” with the “undesirables” of society. Unlike Dr. Martin Luther King, who dreamt of the day when little black children and little white children could walk hand in hand, Margaret Sanger (did I mention she was the founder of Planned Parenthood?) dreamed of the day when little white children would be walking hand in hand with each other–with no black children to be found.

And the story in today’s AP looks like Margaret Sanger’s “dream” (to others, a nightmare) is coming ever closer to fruition:

LONDON (AP) – Giving contraceptives to people in developing countries could help fight climate change by slowing population growth, experts said Friday.

More than 200 million women worldwide want contraceptives, but don’t have access to them, according to an editorial published in the British medical journal, Lancet. That results in 76 million unintended pregnancies every year.

If those women had access to free condoms or other birth control methods, that could slow rates of population growth, possibly easing the pressure on the environment, the editors say.

Sounds eerily like…

(Magaret Sanger and fellow eugenicists)… espoused racial supremacy and “purity,” particularly of the “Aryan” race. Eugenicists hoped to purify the bloodlines and improve the race by encouraging the “fit” to reproduce and the “unfit” to restrict their reproduction.

Which, when you think of it, is the liberal elitists’ position on everything. In their mind, their status of being the “enlightened” ones makes them uniquely entitled to the spoils of the world, while the unwashed masses should be happy to live in squalor. While Nancy Pelosi and Algore can have their personal jetliners to jet themselves and their families to points unknown, the rest of the plebian masses can take public transportation. While Rosie O’Donnell can travel with an armed body guard, she seeks to deny the 2nd Amendment right of self-protection to the plebiscite. While Margaret Sanger and her ideological descendants think that they, the enlightened, are entitled to live, the great ‘unwashed masses’ beneath them are a waste of resources and thus are not only expendible, but actually have a duty to curb their numbers.

At any rate, you get the picture.

And the more you look at it, the more the picture begins to look like Dorian Gray.