The character of this president and the Democrats

http://terrellaftermath.com/

The (g)odless Inaugural Prayer   Time to ask if our country has crossed the spiritual Rubicon?
"In the RNS interview, Evers-Williams sheds some light on why she may have been so obtuse in her word choices about the deity (or lack thereof):

I have never been shy in mentioning my relationship with what I call God, a Spirit, and there certainly have been times over the years that I have called on him — or her, if you wish — in public. I deeply believe that there is a Supreme Being that sees us through.

Charles Krauthammer wrote in 2008 "A Question of Barack Obama's Character"   "Obama is not the first politician to rise through a corrupt political machine. But he is one of the rare few to then have the audacity to present himself as a transcendent healer, hovering above and bringing redemption to the "old politics" -- of the kind he had enthusiastically embraced in Chicago in the service of his own ambition.
"Second, and even more disturbing than the cynicism, is the window these associations give on Obama's core beliefs. He doesn't share Rev. Wright's poisonous views of race nor Ayers' views, past and present, about the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale. For many years he swam easily and without protest in that fetid pond."

Obama's speech: if this man is not a socialist, then what do you call him?

Barry Rubin; Obama’s Inaugural Speech Presents His New Strategy and Blueprint for Transforming America  "He just completely redirected the country, and no one seemed to notice."
"So here is Obama saying that the essential basis of American democracy is the Constitution, American exceptionalism, and the Declaration of Independence’s claim of unalienable rights granted to the citizen.
"Yet he is on record repeatedly rejecting each of these three ideas."

Ron Radosh; What Was the Meaning of President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address?  "In one fell swoop, President Obama moved from giving lip service to free-market ideology (thereby fooling people like Matthew Yglesias) to arguing against those supposed conservatives — strawmen, really — who supposedly want to do away with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and who, the president claims, argue that they “sap our initiative” rather than, as he would have it, “strengthen us.” "

’16 Times in 15 Minutes.’

A Perfect Example of Why I Hate the Media  "This guy explodes our debt, weakens our children’s futures, and Big Media publishes treacle like this.
"Sickening."

Comments on the Inauguration from the Orange County Register

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Ed Bjork:  I hope the 47 percent who pay nothing for Obama’s grand ball remember that while he wines and dines, his troops are in godforsaken places all over the world, wining and dining on water and C-rations [“A quiet beginning,” Front Page, Jan. 21]. He is concerned about them only when he has no other choice but to address their existence.
The king and his court, the Democrats, have driven us into Third World-debtor status, created a medical plan that will break taxpayers, plans to legalize illegals at the expense of those who waited on lists for years and seeks to destroy the Second Amendment.

 

LA HABRA, Bobby Florentz: The president laid out his plan for his next four years. In essence, he said that climbing welfare rates, food stamp recipients, joblessness, union favoritism, government expansion and inflation will continue unabated.

Alan Caruba; Inaugural Lies and the Big Chill

Warning Signs   "To what “climate change” is Obama referring? Is it the now thoroughly debunked “global warming” hoax? Is it the climate change of the 11,500 years since the last ice age? Or is it “the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms” to which Obama referred?

"If it is the latter, does anyone actually believe that these natural events can be mitigated by anything Americans or the entire population of the world can do? Did any among the thousands in attendance at the inauguration, shivering in the frigid weather, wonder what the President was talking about or why?"

 

Our in-your-face president

 

 

A President Who Has Learned Nothing

Jonathan S. Tobin "The address was a clarion call for the country to get behind the liberal agenda he supports. Fair enough. But, like much of what has come from the White House since November, it illustrated that this president was not interested in compromise or listening to any views but his own. If this speech is to be treated as sign of what will come, the next four years will be filled with more bitter partisan argument and ideological intransigence from the president. Even as many Americans were reveling in the feelings of unity that this ceremony engenders in all patriots, President Obama was throwing down a gauntlet to his foes and saying that he will redouble his efforts to demonize Republicans".  Via Lucianne,

A flat, partisan and pedestrian speech   "The only voice that really soared at midday was Beyonce’s, while singing the national anthem. President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address, by contrast, was flat, partisan and surprisingly pedestrian—more a laundry list of preferred political programs than a vision for a divided America and disoriented world. Congressional Republicans are acting as if the 2012 campaign is continuing, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that the president followed suit. He gave a progressive speech that Democrats will like"....

 

Against Swedenization

NRO  "Since the end of the Cold War, conservatives have warned against the “Swedenization” of America. These warnings are, most directly, about a policy regime wherein government spending accounts for more than half of gross domestic product and government regulation is the biggest factor affecting the generation of the rest.   

"Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show that, in 2010, all government spending in Sweden equaled 53 percent of GDP. The same figure was 55 percent in Finland, 56 percent in France, and 58 percent in Denmark.... In 2000, government spending in the U.S. accounted for 34 percent of GDP.
""Well, what are a few percentage points of GDP among friends? By this rudimentary measure of government outlays as a proportion of national income, America already differs from Scandinavia in degree rather than in kind. If conservatives want to avert the Swedenization of America, they need to explain, more comprehensively than they have done so far, the deplorability of that outcome, since Western European social democracy appears benign where Eastern European Communism was manifestly grotesque.

Obama's Perfect Second Inauguration

American Thinker "Maybe the general public is really as excited about today's festivities as the cable news coverage would suggest, but somehow I doubt it. Idle pageantry, combined with the visible diminishing of enthusiasm from 2009's levels in terms of crowd size, are omens. It is inevitable that more and more people will figure out in his second term that he is not the person he has been portrayed as in the dominant media. It remains taboo to examine the problems with the documentation of his public biography, but providence has brought a kickoff to his second term that is the perfect symbol of the man."

 

A Gun Ban That Misfired; "What I saw as a prosecutor in Washington, D.C., makes me wary of strict firearms laws.

Wall Street Journal
The D.C. gun ban, enacted in 1976, prohibited anyone other than law-enforcement officers from carrying a firearm in the city. Residents were even barred from keeping guns in their homes for self-defense.n Washington who owned firearms before the ban were allowed to keep them as long as the weapons were disassembled or trigger-locked at all times. According to the law, trigger locks could not be removed for self-defense even if the owner was being robbed at gunpoint. The only way anyone could legally possess a firearm in the District without a trigger lock was to obtain written permission from the D.C. police. The granting of such permission was rare.
....
The gun ban had an unintended effect: It emboldened criminals because they knew that law-abiding District residents were unarmed and powerless to defend themselves. Violent crime increased after the law was enacted, with homicides rising to 369 in 1988, from 188 in 1976 when the ban started. By 1993, annual homicides had reached 454.

What are you doing tomorrow?

Legal Insurrection "I can’t imagine why GWB would want to miss Obama’s 2nd Inauguration. Really, it’s hard to understand."

McCain’s Mideast Blunders

Andrew McCarthy at NRO  "No, no: The problem was that we sided with Qaddafi, giving the dictator — at the insistence of, well, McCain and the State Department — foreign aid, military assistance, and international legitimacy. If we just threw Qaddafi under the bus, the rebels would surely become our grand democratic allies.
"This, of course, was a much more sophisticated theory than you’d get from lunatics like Michele Bachmann. Sit down for this, because I know it’s hard to believe anyone could spout such nutter stuff, but Bachmann actually opposed U.S. intervention in Libya. She claimed — stop cackling! — that many of McCain’s heroes might actually be jihadists ideologically hostile to the U.S. and linked to groups such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the terror enterprise’s North African franchise. She even thought — yeah, I know, crazy — that if Qaddafi were deposed, the heroes would get their hands on his arsenal, ship a lot of it to AQIM havens in places such as Mali and Algeria, and maybe even turn rebel strongholds such as Benghazi into death traps for Americans.
Good thing we listened to McCain, no?
 

Alan Caruba; Comparing Two Inaugural Speeches, Reagan's and Obama's

Warning Signs

"The challenges in 1981 were not that unlike those in 2009. History records that Reagan met those challenges, lifted our spirits, and did his best to reduce the size of government. It also records that Obama has exacerbated our problems and done his best to increase the size of government and its intrusion into our lives.

"Obama’s legacy thus far has been a polarized society based on class warfare; a society in which millions more Americans are purchasing guns in anticipation of an attack on the Second Amendment, and a government that menaces the Constitution. His second inaugural speech will be as filled with false promises and failed policies as his first."

Victor Davis Hanson; Second-Term Reckonings
...."In short, this is the time when a careful Obama should be calling for bipartisan implementation of the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission, redoing a Gingrich-Clinton compromise, seeking non-polarizing appointments of the Panetta/Gates sort, and cooling his presidential partisan rhetoric.
"Unfortunately, he had done the opposite, and so a reckoning is on the near horizon. Let us pray it does not take us all down with his administration."

http://www.usnews.com/cartoons/barack-obama-cartoons

CBS advises Obama to go for the Republican's throats

Newsbusters  "The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat."
So astonishingly wrote CBS News political director John Dickerson at Slate Friday evening in a piece astonishingly titled "Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party."
....
"Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize," Dickerson wrote. "Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents.
....Did I mention this man was the political director for CBS News?  Read more:
Is CBS your main source of news? With everything including the mainstream media stacked against Republicans, the 2012 popular vote was still close. But what difference will it make if the party does get a candidate that can make the case for conservative principles but the MSM will not carry the message?