Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan was an aviator in the 1930s.  In 1938 he mistakenly flew from New York to Ireland when he was supposed to fly from New York to California, because he claims he misread his compass.  It later turned out that he really intended to fly to Ireland but couldn’t get permission.

What’s Hillary’s excuse?  As the Obama Administration has called the removal of Honduran President Manuel Zalaya a coup d’etat, more attention is being focused on what the law in Honduras really says.  The Congressional Research Service looked into it and had this to say:

“The Supreme Court of Honduras has constitutional and statutory authority to hear cases against the President of the Republic and many other high officers of the State, to adjudicate and enforce judgments, and to request the assistance of the public forces to enforce its rulings.”

—Congressional Research Service, August 2009

So why is Hillary Clinton now attacking the Honduran Supreme Court by pulling the visa of all fifteen members of the court?  The U.S. sided with Hugo Chavez and Costa Rica to reach a “negotiated” settlement that would put Zalaya back in the presidency.  Honduras said, sorry, that would violate our constitution.  He broke the law, we dealt with it according to our constitution, and that’s that.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The upshot is that the U.S. is trying to force Honduras to violate its own constitution and is also using its international political heft to try to interfere with the country’s independent judiciary.

Hondurans are worried about what this pressure is doing to their country. Mr. Zelaya’s violent supporters are emboldened by the U.S. position. They deface some homes and shops with graffiti and throw stones and home-made bombs into others, and whenever the police try to stop them, they howl about their “human rights.”

When will the apology tour end and we start standing up for liberty and democracy?  Is it more important that Hillary have an accomplishment she can brag about than following  the rule of law?  This administration has so much, so backwards it is hard to keep track of it.  They focus all their time and energy doing things they are not constitutionally authorized to do (health care, taking over car companies and banks, funding ACORN), and ignoring their fundamental constitutional duties of foreign policy and national defense.  Let’s hope some pressure can be brought to bear on the Obama Administration to back off before Chavez puts a puppet in place.

From being the foregone conclusion as the first woman President of the United States in 2008 to a marginalized, snarky misrepresentative of the United States, it time for her to realize, the band stopped playing and everyone has gone home but her.  It’s time to call it a day and resign.

Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer

Proving, once again, he is the master of hardball politics, Barack Obama dangled the Secretary of State job in front of his vanquished rival.  She took the bait.  No more would she be a force in the Senate able to challenge Obama at the first stumble.  She was now part of the problem, not a potential solution.  Once ensconced at Foggy Bottom, she thought she enhance her image by holding the most prestigious post in the Cabinet.  But she again underestimated Barack Obama.

He proceeded to divvy up foreign policy among many advisers, undercutting Hillary every step of the way.  She’s no fool, she can see it and it is eating away at her, to the point where she is becoming a gaffe machine to rival Joe Biden.

She’s No Condoleezza Rice

Upstaged by her husband in North Korea, negotiating the release of the journalist hostages, she was asked what her husband thought about another matter while in Africa.  In a similar situation, Condoleezza Rice, would have handled that with aplomb and not become rattled. But here is Hillary’s response.  Hillary Snaps.  Smacking down a questioner on the world stage?  Well that will surely “correct” our image as the Ugly Americans.

The Apology Tour Continues

She goes on to make a speech in Nigeria and wants to emphasize that there is no place in the world for corrupt elections.  A very good point to make, that few could argue with.  But what does she use as an analogy?  She openly suggests that Jeb Bush fixed the 2000 Presidential election for his brother.  Of all the analogies of corrupt elections that she could have used, let’s see, Iran?  Cuba?  the old Soviet Union? she points to the oldest democracy in history and suggest that we are as corrupt as any third world dictator.  Hillary Compares U.S. Elections to Third World Corruption.  Disgraceful, absolutely disgraceful.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who endorsed Hillary to take his Senate seat, must be turning over in his grave.  He used to staunchly defend the United States at the UN and here his protege is saying we are no better than the worst of them.

In Honduras, the rule of law is being followed to prevent a Chavez style dictator from taking over that country, and who does Hillary and the Obama administration support?  The Chavez puppet.  What about standing up for democracy in our Hemisphere?  It is time for her to go.

The Gore Thing in 2000

Let’s get this straight one more time.  On election night 2000, Gore lost Florida.  He lost the recount.  He lost the re-recount.  He lost the re-re-recount.  He lost the official recount.  He lost the private recount sponsored by newspapers.

Their count showed that Bush’s razor-thin margin of 537 votes — certified in December by the Florida Secretary of State’s office — would have tripled to 1,665 votes if counted according to standards advocated by his Democratic rival, former Vice President Al Gore.

“In the end, I think we probably confirmed that President Bush should have been president of the United States,” said Mark Seibel, the paper’s managing editor. “I think that it was worthwhile because so many people had questions about how the ballots had been handled and how the process had worked.” — CNN

If Democrats and their radical supporters want to salve their wounds with this myth, live the fantasy.  But don’t smear this country with these lies while acting as our chief diplomat.

The statists like dissent if they are dissenting from a conservative view point, as Hillary Clinton explains here:

Hillary Defends Challenging the Administration

But if you stand for liberty and against big government dissent is a very bad thing, as Nancy Pelosi explains:

Nancy Pelosi Hints Town Hall Opposition are Nazis

So if you bash Bush, you are a patriot.  If you question Barack Obama, you are a Nazi.  So our statist friends only believe the First Amendment applies to them and it is not available to those who oppose them.  Turn them in to the White House!  Have union goons give them a beat down.

Camerawoman is Hit by SEIU member

In this raw video an SEIU member attacks a man for selling flags that say, “Don’t Tread On Me.”

SEIU Member Attacks a Black Conservative

Does this not sound like Hitler’s brown shirts? his Gestapo?  The left who like to throw down, in addition to the race card, the Nazi card look more like Nazis than conservatives ever did.

It now appears that both sides in the Honduran standoff are waiting on the United States to weigh in.  Despite those on the left (Chavez, Castro) continuing to push for less involvement by the U.S.  in Central and South America so they can step into the void, they are now calling on the United States to take a stand, on their respective sides, of course.  Chavez had this to say:

“Do something,” Mr. Chávez had said to reporters. “Obama, do something.” – NY Times, July 12, 2009

Hillary Clinton has joined with Castro and Chavez in calling for the return to power of Manuel Zalaya.  But as Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports in today’s Wall Street Journal:

“If there is anything debatable about the crisis it is the question of whether the government can defend the expulsion of the president. In fact it had good reasons for that move and they are worth Mrs. Clinton’s attention if she is interested in defending democracy.”

There’s the rub, if she’s interested.  It seems that the Obama administration has an aversion to democracy, once they get in office.  When polls in the U.S. show that 68% of the people believe a second stimulus is coming while 60% oppose a second stimulus, that tells you something about their feelings about democracy.  Their silence on Iran and their speaking out on Zalaya’s behalf, reinforces that belief.   The Obama administration’s goal is to get power, and do whatever they can as quickly as they can to consolidate it.  It seems like a page out of any tin pot dictator’s playbook.  Chavez could have written it himself.

Now the Obama administration has gone silent on the situation in Honduras.  Will they find their voice?  Will it be the voice of our Founding Fathers, or Che, Hugo, and Fidel?

Back in the early days of the Clinton Administration, Hillary Clinton undertook to bring about the most sweeping change in our health care system ever attempted.  It went down in flames, and Hillary faded into the background for a while.  Tom Daschle saw what happened and vowed that it would be different next time.  Tom Daschle had his own problems, but perhaps some of his ideas survived.

What’s Stimulus Got to Do with It?

What Daschle learned was not to try to do too much at once and not to include too many details.  So a couple of obscure provisions are included in the massive stimulus package that could radically change health care and your liberty.  Betsy McCoughey writes in Bloomberg.com

“The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (HR 1 EH, pages 445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors”

Strike One Against Your Liberty

Your medical treatments in an electronic format may reduce costs and make treatment more effective, but do you want every medical treatment that you receive tracked in a federal database?  Do you trust the federal government to protect your privacy?  But that’s not even the scary part.

“But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446).”

“Guide my doctor’s decisions?” Do I want some federal bureaucrat to be guiding my doctor’s decisions?  Some faceless wonk who has never seen me, let alone medically evaluated me?  What kind of guidance is he going to provide?  Let’s look at some cases in the U.K.

“The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.”

So, if grandma is diagnosed with a disease where the medicine to treat it is expensive, and some government board decides that the cost of the medicine is not justified by the number of years grandma has left, oh well.  Bye, bye grandma, it was nice having you around.

So, tell me again what this has to do with economic stimulus?

The balloons and bunting have been picked up, the Washington Mall has been swept, the ball gowns put away.  The campaign, the election, the historic celebration are now in the history books.  It’s time to govern.  Sadly, with only three weeks in office, President Obama’s lack of experience is on full display.

Due to the looming financial crisis, the transition in power was unprecedented in the level of cooperation between the departing Bush administration and the incoming Obama team.  Obama said he needed the second half of the $700 billion, Bush put in the request.  Everyone knew what problem number one was.  The economy was in crisis.

When Dealing With a Crisis, You Lead, You Don’t Delegate

When United Airways Flight 1549, which would end up in the Hudson River, was climbing after takeoff, the co-pilot was at the controls.  When the plane struck a flight of birds and lost power, Captain Sullenberger cooly said two words, “My aircraft.”  The co-pilot responded, “Your aircraft,” the captain took the controls and the first officer then set about trying to re-start the engines.

In the midst of this economic crisis, that President Obama keeps saying we have to fix now, he let Nancy Pelosi run the show, while he took a victory lap, visiting the White House press pool, writing exectutive orders closing Guantanamo, and speaking to el Arabiya.  Nancy Pelosi was furiously stuffing the stimulus turkey with pork, and President Obama was inviting Republicans in for tea, thinking that by doing so, a new era of bipartisanship would emerge.

In several corporate jobs that I have had there were times of crisis.  If we had to drastically cut expenses to deal with the crisis, it was all hands on deck.  It wasn’t see what you can do and get back to me.  It was, “Be on the conference call at 3PM prepared to tell the Chief, how you are meeting your expense reduction targets.”  All senior managers were on the call and all got a turn to tell the Chief what they were contributing or, gulp, where they were falling short. If you were falling short, make no mistake, you better have a damn good reason and whether or not you did, your future career was now under a microscope.  The point is, like Captain Sullenberger, in times of crisis, the leader is unmistakenly in charge.

President Obama let Nancy Pelosi craft this disaster, without strong guidelines of what he would or would not accept, and did not demand that Republicans be involved from the start.  You reap what you sew.  Now he is scrambling to drag this stinking corpse across the finish line and it’s not pretty.

Why did this happen?  Because President Obama was a Community Organizer.  He never ran a business. He never held an executive position in government.  His gossamery resume was obvious, but ignored.  Sarah Palin must be shaking her head in disbelief.

Running Back to Safety Zone of Campaigning

Barack Obama was a master on the campaign trail, first dispatching Hillary Clinton, and then deftly outmaneuvering John McCain.  So what does the inexperienced man do when he’s under stress?  Go back to what he’s good at.  This week we saw President Obama back on the campaign trail, with the same rhetoric.  The problem is, you can take a fair degree of license with what you say on the campaign trail.  When you govern, you have to deal with reality.  George Bush is gone.  Bashing Bush may have gotten Obama elected, but he’s got to put that one out to pasture.  His claim that tax cuts caused this financial problem, and that the past eight years have been an economic disaster, just don’t hold up.  It makes him look clueless.  Sure it fires up the base, but so what.  We need solutions, not pep rallies.  Tax cuts boosted the economy for Kennedy, for Reagan, for Bush.  In short, they work.  Obama may not like them, but they work.  To say otherwise is like hanging a sign over his head, saying Under Construction.

Cabinet Picks

And the late night talk show hosts were wondering what they were going to do without Bush in office.  The hits just keep coming.  Once again, you have to ask, who’s in charge?  How did all of these slip through the cracks?  Richardson, Geithner, Daschle, Soldis, Nancy Killefer, Eric Holder.  Sure it’s noble that Obama took responsibility for Daschle.  But if you stay with him too long you look, uh, inexperienced?  With all of these problems, someone’s head should roll.  The President is delegating what he shouldn’t and what he should delegate is a mess.

International

President Obama was supposed to usher in a new era of harmony in our relations with other countries.  But what has happened?

• Ahmadinijad — Candidate Obama said he would talk with Iran without preconditions.  Ahmadinijad said he wanted an apology before he would meet with Obama
• Several countries harshly criticize the stimulus package and its “Buy American” provision, raising the spector of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that deepened the Great Depression
• Iran shoots a missle into space to celebrate the Iranian revolution, with the subtext, “That was when we boldly took over your Embassy and held it for 444 days during the weak presidency of Jimmy Carter.”
• Pakastan releases A.Q. Khan the nuclear proliferator in a snub to the U.S.
• Kyrgyzstan tells U.S. to close military base that is key supply route to Afghanistan

I hope President Obama is a quick study, or we’re in for a long grim four years.

I was wondering how long it would take for Barack Obama’s lack of experience or a power base to manifest itself, but it appears the moment has arrived, and the problems keep coming.

His recent announcemnt or leak by his aides that Leon Panetta is his choice for head of the CIA is confounding, to say the least.  Panetta may be a nice man, and a good administrator, but in the midst of the War on Terror who but a rookie would put a rookie as head of the CIA?  Apparently Obama couldn’t push back those on the left who want no one who agrees with the Bush Administration in the post.  Two other potential appointees got hooted down by Obama’s supporters so he had to go with this pick.  The CIA is notorious for not liking outsiders.  Panetta has no intelligence experience, other than listening in on security briefings as Clinton’s Chief of Staff.

Bill Richardson withdraws his name from nomination as Commerce Secretary, due to a gathering scandal.

Eric Holder as Attorney General pick approved pardons for the FALN terrorists while working in the Clinton Justice Department and now he is responsible for prosecuting terrorists.

The Blogojevich scandal doesn’t want to go away and now the Democrats are battling over whether or not they will seat the man appointed to replace Obama in the Senate

We have the Coleman/Franken fiasco in Minnesota; Charlie Rangel under investigation for not paying taxes despite being chairman of the committee that writes the tax laws (Ways and Means); an item in the NY Times about a donation to the Clinton library from an individual who benefited from legislation supported by Hillary Clinton…

How long before the press decides the honeymoon is over?