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From $1 trillion in debt
to $4 trillion in debt
in six weeks
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Open Letter to the Secretary of Defense |
Honorable Robert M. Gates, 3 Mar. 2009
Enough is enough!
You must be aware at this point of the tempest brewing among the Rank
and File. I am writing you in an effort to appeal to your sense of
concern for the Military; a concern we share not only for the Military
as a whole but for each and every individual who wears the Uniform in
the Service of our Country. I am in this regard specifically
asking you for your help. I implore you to not wait until the "pot
boils over" and we find ourselves in total disarray.
I am
convinced, beyond any doubt, that the moral well being and efficiency of
our fighting forces to defend our Country is soon to be hanging in a
precarious balance if not already. In my humble estimation this is
NOT a theoretical possibility to construct a thesis or a contingency
plan about. It is a reality and is happening right now.
Resolution of this issue must be accomplished in the most expeditious
manner available at your disposal to gain immediate relief to those of
us who are struggling to fully comply with our sworn Oath to the
Constitution while being conflicted by questions relating to the
qualifications of the POTUS to hold the office in full and absolute
compliance with the Natural Born Citizen Clause.
Regardless of
differences in the color of our uniforms, the color of our skin,
religion or gender WE are Brothers and Sisters in Arms and our family is
being torn apart. Are you not looking and listening to what is
happening around you? How can anyone of good conscious stand by
and let this happen to us? I for one cannot! You must care
enough to intercede to stop this. Is this not within your power to
do so? Why have you not acted already? What is it that you
are waiting for?
If you have any doubts of what I am saying is
true you need look no further than the comments made on the Military.com
site regarding the actions of Lt. Scott Easterling who in my opinion is
an absolutely courageous young Army Officer. Irrespective of your
personal opinion of his actions, one thing is abundantly clear; the
horrible, hateful and demeaning things that were being said about him
and one to the other among my Brothers and Sisters in Arms were things
that I have NEVER experienced in ALL my years of military service.
It is no less than gut retching to see this happening. The wounds
that are being inflicted will NOT be healed by any Medicine I have at my
disposal. There is nothing I learned in Medical School or in my
training as a Flight Surgeon that can fix this; save the absolute power
of Truth. The POTUS must stop concealing the documents once and
for all and the issue of his qualifications must be addressed.
Make no mistake; any adverse consequences to the troops as a result of
your failure to act responsibly will be in large part directly on your
head.
Have you considered the legal ramifications for our
fighting forces if for any reason the POTUS is not qualified. Are
they in Iraq illegally? If so does this make them terrorists under
International law as the Islamic radical elements have been calling
them? Have they given up their Geneva protections and do not even
know this? If so when captured can they be killed or tortured
without International legal ramifications? Have they been stripped
of the legal protections by the Soldiers and Sailors Civil Relief act?
Are you willing to allow this risk to them when they are fighting for
us?
Once again I find myself at a loss of words to try to
explain the abject and total dismay I have at the administration to
include the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to allow the painful
division now occurring in our military to proceed unabated. I hope
that do not need to remind you that you as well took an Oath to support
and defend the Constitution. As a point of honor you are either
willing to do this or you are not. If you are not then preserve
your honor, resign and let someone who cares more about us than that do
what is right.
I again respectfully implore you to act within
your powers and help us. It is absolutely true and is my Prayer to
my Creator to allow me to suffer the slings and arrows of being thought
a fool rather than to have my convictions realized that persons of
responsibility have allowed through negligence to have the Office of the
President of the United States to be USURPED; it is self evident
however, that whatever the outcome we must know the truth.
V/R
Lt Col David A. Earl-Graef USAFR MC
Posted by
Defend Our Freedoms Foundation at 3/12/2009 5:56 AM
Categories:
activism |
|
Obama's Relentless War On The American Dream |
It's probably poor form to piggyback onto another columnist's
work, but Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger's disturbing
discoveries about President Barack Obama's budget summary justify an
exception. Those not blinded by the Obama cult fog have produced
abundant evidence of Obama's grudge against capitalism, but Henninger's
revelations are hard to top.
Despite Obama's later denials, he
was most serious when he cavalierly told Joe the Plumber he wanted to
"spread the wealth around." We've seen it born out in his policies
so far and in the promises of those to come.
He will restore the
Clinton tax hikes on higher-income earners, but there is so much more.
He'll reduce the effective charitable gift deduction, thus reducing
charitable giving. This is no surprise, though, because he
believes "charity" is the province of government -- not the private
sector.
He'll impose a cap and trade tax on corporations under
the pretense of making them "greener," raise the tax rates on capital
gains and dividends, reverse welfare reform, and nationalize health
care.
He'll eliminate the ceiling on payroll tax contributions,
which is presently about $110,000. This will be a major hit to
those earning more than $110,000, not that Obama cultists will have any
sympathy for those greedy beneficiaries of life's lottery, to borrow
from the Al Gore vernacular.
Some might argue that this is only
fair because the entire income of lower-income earners is subject to
that tax. But to make that argument surrenders any illusion that
this tax funds Social Security. If you eliminate the ceiling,
higher-income earners will pay exorbitant amounts into a mythical fund
(it's never been segregated from general revenue) with no expectation of
getting appreciably more back on retirement. Fairness? Only
if you believe the wealthy should be punished.
Read the rest from
David Limbaugh
here . . . |
|
Perpetual Crisis |
Lost in the hue and cry over Rush Limbaugh’s hope that President
Barack Obama "fails" is this key fact -- it’s the Chief Executive, not
the mighty mouth of Talk Radio, who sees an opportunity in the nation’s
suffering to change America.
Whatever one thinks of Limbaugh,
he’s not the one trying to use rising unemployment, a plummeting stock
market, the alleged impending collapse of the financial system and a
host of other fears about the future to advance his policy agenda.
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel gave the game away back in
November with his observation that:
"You never want a serious
crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity
to do things that you think you could not do before. This is an
opportunity…And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would
say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before."
Emanuel even helpfully specified the issues where the opportunity would
be most helpful to the new administration -- "health care area, energy
area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area --
things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now
immediate and must be dealt with."
Initially, Emanuel’s
disturbing words were dismissible as just his own, but Obama himself and
most recently Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have since repeated
variations on the theme. So it is clearly the Obama strategy to
use the current economic crisis as justification for his radical agenda.
Call it
policy-making by perpetual crisis. |
|
The Great Non Sequitur |
Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570
earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of
earmarks. Forget the "2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have
already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget
director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in
Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years
after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.
Forget
all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True,
Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end.
But that's a matter of scale, not principle.
All presidents do
that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart
of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight
of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.
The logic of
Obama's address to Congress went like this:
"Our economy did not
fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began
before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are
paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and
education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of
energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer
Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many
bad schools.
The "day of reckoning" has arrived. And
because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that
we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come
to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily
nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major
federalization of education with universal access to college as the
goal.
Amazing! As an explanation of our current economic
difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing
joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide
recession, this is perhaps the greatest
non
sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.
At the very
center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing
collapse and a systemic failure of the banking industry. One can
come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by
Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings
agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments,
the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers
pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious
mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful home buyers.
The
list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the
financial system does not include the absence of universal health care,
let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an
industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of
college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case
that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing,
smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical
models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe.
More from
Dr. Charles Krauthammer . . . |
|
Broken Promises |
In After only two months in office, President Obama may have
fallen short on a number of his campaign promises:
1: Sunlight
Before Signing -- "When there is a bill that ends up on my desk as the
president, you the public will have five days to look online and find
out what's in it before I sign it," he said.
2: Capital gains tax
elimination -- Just weeks prior to the election, Obama advisers Austan
Goolsbee and Jason Furman told the Wall Street Journal that Obama
planned tax cuts that included "the elimination of capital gains taxes
for small businesses and start-ups."
3: New American jobs tax
credit -- During his transition, Obama's promised to provide a $3,000
refundable tax credit to existing businesses for every additional
full-time U.S. employee hired in 2009 and 2010.
4: Hiatus on
401(k) penalties -- In October 2008, Obama released his "Rescue Plan for
the Middle-Class" in which he promised to allow financially distressed
Americans to withdraw up to $10,000 from their 401(k) accounts and
retirement savings without having to pay penalties. They would only pay
income taxes on the amount.
5: No jobs for lobbyists -- "I am in
this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the
agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate
in this race to take on lobbyists — and won. They have not funded my
campaign, they will not run my White House, and they will not drown out
the voices of the American people when I am president."
6:
Earmark reform -- at the first presidential debate in Oxford, Miss.,
Obama declared, "[W]e need earmark reform. And when I'm president, I
will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money
unwisely."
7: Bring troops home in 16 months -- Even as combat
troops are brought home, Pentagon officials have said fresh units will
continue deploying to Iraq.
8: Sign "Freedom of Choice Act" --
Obama expressed his support for the sweeping plan that would repeal all
national and state regulations of abortion passed over the last 35
years.
9: $4,000 college credit -- Obama pledged to make college
"affordable for all Americans" when he announced his American
Opportunity Tax Credit.
No. 10: Transparency -- On the White
House website, the Obama administration claims it will be "the most open
and transparent in history.
Details
here . . . |
|
O is for Overrated |
In his campaign for the Presidency, candidate Obama and his
minions relied on several key messages:
•
I am for change (I am not George Bush);
•
I am the candidate who will break through the racial barrier and
show how America (and yes, you the voter) can be part of this noble
uplifting effort;
• I am young and
vigorous but also calm and composed (not like John McCain);
• I am a gifted speaker who will
inspire you.
Experience, and in particular executive experience,
was not much discussed, since Obama had less of both than any candidate
for President in history. And Obama also ran from his public
voting record and history of associations (Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers,
Rashid Khalidi, Tony Rezko) that suggested he would be far more to the
left than any President in history. Rather the message was that he
would be bi-partisan, moderate, and post-racial.
We have now seen
the President and his team in action, and the lack of executive
experience seems to be a real drawback. The fiasco with British
Prime Minister Brown's visit may reflect more than the President's
fatigue after going through all those papers on his desk. The
Administration's vetting process for high level positions was weak and
many posts remain unfilled, especially at Treasury, arguably the most
critical Cabinet Department at the moment.
Investors remain
baffled as to how the Administration plans to address the banking
industry. The President's prior voting record (the most liberal of
any Senator's) seems to have been a reliable guide as to how far left
the President wants to move the country (as Rahm Emanuel has said: a
crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and in fact offers an opportunity).
On the other hand, Obama remains unflappable, at least on camera.
In one area, Obama as the great communicator, a little bit of the
glow is gone. For it turns out that while there is only one O in
teleprompter, without this trusted device, we might not have the Big O
in the White House (apologies to Oscar Robertson). It is now
coming out (though not in the New York Times or Washington Post) two
years too late, that underlying of the gifted public speaker iconography
is a machine. Our President has a dependency, and it is not on
tobacco products. The real "jones"
is for a teleprompter. |
|
John Walker Lindh’s Lawyer |
I mention this for one reason: Tony Ward is the
President’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Division.
If you want to know how far we are past 9/11, there’s your answer:
John Walker
Lindh’s defense attorney is
going to work for Obama's Justice Department.
I’ll say this: if I ever
defect to the other side and find myself captured with a bunch of
guys who want to kill as many Americans and unbelievers as possible,
this is the man I want pleading my case |
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©
Copyright Beckwith 2009
All right reserved
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