LSJ Blogs: People's Politics

Can you believe it?

Obama famously said he was “deeply concerned” about the election results in Iran and “It is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling” so he didn’t want to comment on it.  He followed that with he did not want to make the US the issue with the protestors so the rulers couldn’t blame the Great Satan again.  He also made some weak statement about he wasn’t sure that the election results were actually wrong so Ahmedinejad could have been elected by the people.

The good things

I’ve been accused of nothing but Obama bashing, so I thought I’d write a post on what I see as the positive things Obama has done.  As I vehemently disagree with leftist positions, the list is logically fairly short, but not everything he has done is bad—except in the economic realm.

Yes, we can-except in Iran

Now that it seems the Iranian “revolution” has been put down by force and it doesn’t appear, to me, to have any chance of resurrection in the near future, I would be curious to hear how Obama supporters and opponents feel the President did in the crisis.  Was he measured and Presidential?  Was he a coward?  Was he the ideal mixture of reason and calm calculation? 

They were serious

The “People’s House” took another step toward idiocy yesterday in approving the remarkably flawed and absurdly named “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” by a vote of 219-212.  While eight Democrats (actually it was 44, my error-tk) as well as eight Republicans crossed party lines, our Michigan representatives dutifully voted right along party lines; all eight Democrats supported it and all seven Republicans opposed.  The American Conservative Party looks very good to me right now.  This abysmal piece of legislation was supported by President Obama who “declared global warming and energy independence among his top priorities, and Friday evening he hailed the House vote.”    Not surprisingly, Al Gore was in on this too as well as the rest of the usual suspects.  Let’s see what this does.

Democrat = tax; Republican = sex

Seems like everyone Obama tapped for an appointive office had tax problems of some sort or another; no wonder he makes use of the czars who don’t have to be approved or vetted by the Senate.  On the other hand, it seems like every current Republican has a sex problem of some sort.  Vice and dishonesty seem to be the only bipartisan things in Washington.  Disgusting.

Senator Al Franken

Every state is entitled to have two US Senators represent them.  Except, apparently, Minnesota. 

Al Franken ran as a Democratic challenger to incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman last year.  It was a very close election, and the candidates requested recounts of various parts of the state, which was perfectly reasonable.  The recounts showed Al Franken to be the winner.

And here we are, 7 months later, and Senator-elect Franken has not been sworn in or seated.

Gerald Walpin, former IG

Who?  For those of you who ignore possible ethics lapses in Washington with the change in administrations, you may not want to learn about Gerald Walpin, the former Inspector General (IG) of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the organization that runs AmeriCorps.  This is another of the “private-public” partnership organizations that hands out taxpayers’ money for (hopefully) worthy causes.  If you are not familiar with our government operations, the IG has a unique place in the functioning of organizations.  In fact, the IG is so unique there is a special law, not a regulation but an actual law, that covers the firing of an IG; it “requires the president to give Congress 30 days' notice, plus an explanation of cause, before firing an inspector general.”  It is hard to believe Obama was not familiar with the 2008 Inspectors General Reform Act as he was one of the sponsors while in the Senate; looking at how Democrats neglect to read the laws they pass though, perhaps he didn’t know what it said. 

Pelosi or Sosa

While it should come as no surprise, the House voted 247-171 to table a motion by the Republicans to establish a select subcommittee composed of four members of the Intelligence Committee to "review and verify the accuracy of the speaker's aforementioned public statements."  The Republicans were of course referring to Speaker Pelosi’s comments that the CIA frequently lied to Congress.  Somewhat surprising to me, the vote was on pure party lines; not a single Democrat thought an accusation that the country’s main source of overseas intelligence lied to them was worth seriously considering.  Instead, they played it off as purely Republican political chicanery.

Obama scares me too

The left is fond of saying in several different versions that the Republicans and conservatives don’t like Obama because he is a black man and/or a Muslim, but the accusation is typically disguised to imply that everyone who disagrees with Obama is a racist.  Of course there are some leftists that are a bit less circumspect about their views; Janeane Garofalo on the equally abominable Keith Olbermann’s show when talking about the tea parties, said the attendees were "a bunch of teabagging rednecks, this is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up."  Obviously she has a screw or two very loose; she is not only hideously obnoxious, but totally wrong as well.  There are many of us that don’t like Obama’s policies because they are too liberal.

Iran voting fraud

Even to Jimmy Carter, it must be obvious that the election in Iran was a total fraud.  The election results were announced just hours after the polls closed even though the ballots had to be moved and, as they were paper ballots, had to be counted manually.  While I don’t pretend to know who won and by what margin, clearly the votes were not fairly counted.  For those of you that have not been following this, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner over Hossein Mousavi by a 63% to 34% count.