Barack Obama — VOICES for REASON

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the economy is being strangled to death by government spending and controls. And yet its leading economic official, Wesley Mouch, prescribes more government intervention as the solution: “I need wider powers!” he yells repeatedly. Besides the yelling, President Barack Obama sounded an awful lot like Wesley Mouch at his recent “jobs summit,” which was intended to address our 10%+ unemployment.

Consider the context of the summit. The Bush and Obama administrations warned us that if we didn’t fall into line with their trillion-dollar bailouts and industry takeovers, we would be punished by unemployment over 10 percent. We fell into line. Unemployment is over 10 percent.

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“[I]f countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us,” Barack Obama suggested, nearly a year ago. Since then the Iranian regime has found itself inundated by the administration’s cordial invitations (to a July Fourth barbecue; to talks over its nuclear program; etc.) and unctuous affirmations of our good will (see this video). Even after the mass protests in Iran challenging the theocracy’s legitimacy, Team Obama declined to lend its support to the protesters and thereby endorsed the regime that was gunning them down in the streets. By the logic of Obama’s policy, all this should have induced Tehran to put aside its “decades of mistrust” (of us), and halt its nuclear program and its patronage of Islamist terrorism.

So how’s this working out?

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Bret Stephens at the WSJ skewers Obama’s team for failing to recognize — time after time — that so-called diplomatic overtures will not induce Iran to end its nuclear program. Reflecting on the last six years of attempted negotiations, he observes:

Yet even as Tehran’s rejections piled up, a view developed that all would be well if only the U.S. would drop the harsh rhetoric and meet with the Iranians face-to-face. So President Obama began making one overture after another to Iran, including a videotaped message praising its “great civilization.” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei replied that Mr. Obama had “insulted the Islamic Republic of Iran from the first day.”

But there’s far more to this story. If we expand the timeframe from six to 30 years, it is not just Obama’s administration that ought to be rebuked.

Thirty years ago tomorrow, November 4, 1979, the U.S. embassy in Tehran was invaded and its personnel taken captive. That turned out to be the first act of war against us by what became the Islamic totalitarian regime in Iran. Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama has been bemoaning rising health insurance premiums ever since he started pushing ObamaCare. Yet newly released studies show that ObamaCare will likely drive up premiums—sometimes as high as double or triple their present rate. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the insurance company Wellpoint, Inc. just published detailed studies of the potential impact of ObamaCare on insurance premiums in the fourteen states where it offers plans. Their conclusion? Premiums for most customers, especially the young and healthy, would skyrocket: Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama defended his latest health care plan—yet another sprawling mass of dictates, mandates, prohibitions, and subsidies—as not only economically practical but above all moral. Quoting the late Senator Kennedy, he said: “What we face, is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.”

The President and the Senator are right about one thing: health care is above all a moral issue. Unfortunately, the ‘social justice’ morality behind universal healthcare is utterly un-American and destructive.

A proper system of health care, based on America’s founding principle of individual rights, is one in which each individual has a right to pursue health care on a free market of medical professionals and insurance companies. Such a system recognizes each individual’s right to his own life, and responsibility for its preservation—as well as the right of doctors and others to assist the poorest Americans through private charity. The practical result would be the same as emerges in any truly free market; ever better, cheaper products and services for your (health care) dollar. Read the rest of this entry »

In all of President Obama’s health care speech, there is one key sentence that reveals our leaders’ basic method of approaching the problem. It also makes clear why our health care system just keeps getting worse and why nothing that Congress passes will do anything to truly solve this mess.

Here is the relevant section, with the sentence highlighted in bold: Read the rest of this entry »

After interviewing high-up officials in Pakistan’s military for two hours, the New York Times’s reporters came away with this gem: “Dialogue with the Taliban, not more fighting, is in Pakistan’s national interest, they said.” What’s more: the Pakistani regime is unhappy about the American military efforts against Islamists in next-door Afghanistan. Why? The fighting has resulted in some of the Islamists crossing the border into parts of Pakistan. Translation: quit bothering the Taliban across the border, and quit bothering us about fighting them within Pakistani borders.

Note that Pakistan’s army gets some $1 billion in U.S. aid every year, and that our forces work closely with Pakistan’s military to target Islamists. Officials in the Obama administration praise these operations, though they complain that:

… Pakistani authorities have chosen to fight Pakistani Taliban who threaten their government, while ignoring Taliban and other militants fighting Americans in Afghanistan or terrorizing India. …

[American officials believe] Pakistan was still picking proxies and choosing enemies among various Islamic militant groups in Pakistan.

The United States maintains that the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, leads an inner circle of commanders who guide the war in southern Afghanistan from their base in Quetta [a city in Pakistan].

When will the weight of evidence impugning Pakistan be sufficient to overturn the belief (esp. in Washington) that it is our ally — and lead us to change our policy toward it? Its record has been abysmal. And its “dialogue with the Taliban” has worked splendidly — for the Taliban. Just look at the deal enabling Islamists to impose sharia in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. But perhaps no amount of evidence will be enough. For the idea that Pakistan is our friend — or even  that it is the enemy of our enemy (i.e., the Islamist movement) — belongs in the realm of make-believe. The Obama policy of self-delusion on Pakistan — continuing in the footsteps of Bush — will cost us dearly.

In a series of ads for “The New GM,” General Motors, recently taken over by the government, is doing everything it can to present itself as a newly nimble private company.  GM, the ads imply, is single-mindedly focused on returning to profitability by offering truly desirable cars to customers. How are they going to do this? By producing the kind of cars the Obama administration has been pushing: small cars with high fuel economy, hybrid technology, “alternative fuel” capability, etc.

If GM’s new approach sounds like an exciting turnaround, it isn’t. GM has already gone down a less extreme version of this road — and it proved to be the road to bankruptcy. Induced by irrational government fuel economy laws and union laws to make myriad small, fuel-efficient cars with overpaid union workers, GM lost enormous amounts of money. By contrast, GM and other American automakers made money on larger, safer, more luxurious cars (which could more easily absorb the higher labor costs) including SUVs and Muscle Cars — cars the administration decries. (See my previous blog post “The elephant — and the donkey — in the room.”)

And we can see this trend continuing today with the one new GM car that is generating genuine excitement among consumers, a car developed pre-Obama-era. Is it a hybrid or other car that gets 30+ MPG? No — the new hit car is a Muscle Car, the revamped Chevy Camaro, which gets a whopping 22 miles per gallon. And it’s only that high if you buy the lower-powered V-6 model.

Is there any chance that the new “Government Motors” would have developed this Camaro? I don’t think so, because it doesn’t fit into the government’s priorities, which are the real factor driving GM. While the old GM was hardly a model of customer focus, The New GM is necessarily government-focused. It is not privately owned or controlled; it is majority-owned by the government, and therefore controlled by Barack Obama and his appointees. It exists to pursue their agenda. Remember, Obama fired the former CEO of GM. He set the terms of GM’s phony bankruptcy. He holds all GM’s sticks and carrots — and GM acts accordingly.

There is nothing “New” about this GM. It is a government-controlled auto company pursuing the government’s agenda — an agenda that has nothing to do with making superior, profitable cars. Don’t let the ads deceive you otherwise.

flickr/myobb

In pushing health care reform, President Obama has continually made two insistent claims: that the reforms will not affect those who are currently insured and will not involve government in health care. These reforms “will keep government out of health care decisions,” he has said. “If you like your plan, you will be able to keep your plan. Period.” The reforms, moreover, will be “deficit-neutral”—they won’t have any negative fiscal impact. Everything will stay the same for those who are content, and everything will change for those who aren’t.

The President’s eight “health insurance consumer protections” demonstrate the contradictions inherent in these claims. The protections are effectively eight mandates that the President intends to place on insurance companies. These mandates would, among others, prohibit them from pricing their plans according to the health risks of the consumers purchasing them, prohibit them from limiting the amount of coverage a customer receives, require that they pay in full for preventive care, and require that they renew plans in perpetuity.

Are we really expected to believe that a whole series of new mandates forcing insurance companies to absorb additional costs while preventing them from making up the losses elsewhere will have no effect on current plans–or that this does not constitute government involvement in health care decisions? Does Obama think he can repeal the law of cause and effect?

We won’t know how insurance companies will react to such demanding federal mandates until they are passed. I don’t envy the employees of those businesses who will be charged with deciding where to cut costs, which plans to change, who to let go and which branches to close. The only certainty is that Obama’s mandates will affect everyone–even those who like their current insurance plan. Cumulatively, we’ll be worse off for it.

July was the worst month for U.S. casualties in Afghanistan — not just in 2009, but since the war began nearly eight years ago. Keep this awful truth in mind as you read the following observation on that war from our nation’s Commander-in-Chief:

“I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur,” Obama told ABC News.

Obama (echoing Bush) wants you to scale back your expectations: He’s saying, “Don’t expect us to break the enemy’s will and compel it to surrender à la Japan in WWII.” Whatever else America may be doing in Afghanistan, the goal is not to achieve anything like a genuine victory: i.e., the defeat of the Islamist enemy.

But why? Why might Obama and many other people hold this view?

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