A bit old of an Article but forever worth reading, A french soldiers point of view

by Jean-Marc Liotier

American troops in Afghanistan through the eyes of a French OMLT infantryman

The US often hears echoes of worldwide hostility against the application of its foreign policy, but seldom are they reached by the voices of those who experience first hand how close we are to the USA. In spite of contextual political differences and conflicting interests that generate friction, we do share the same fundamental values – and when push comes to shove that is what really counts. Through the eyes of that French OMLT (Operational Mentoring Liaison Teams) infantryman you can see how strong the bond is on the ground. In contrast with the Americans, the French soldiers don’t seem to write much online – or maybe the proportion is the same but we just have less people deployed. Whatever the reason, this is a rare and moving testimony which is why I decided to translate it into English, so that American people can catch a glimpse of the way European soldiers see them. Not much high philosophy here, just the first hand impressions of a soldier in contact – but that only makes it more authentic.

Here is the original French article, and here is my translation :

“We have shared our daily life with two US units for quite a while – they are the first and fourth companies of a prestigious infantry battalion whose name I will withhold for the sake of military secrecy. To the common man it is a unit just like any other. But we live with them and got to know them, and we henceforth know that we have the honor to live with one of the most renowned units of the US Army – one that the movies brought to the public as series showing “ordinary soldiers thrust into extraordinary events”. Who are they, those soldiers from abroad, how is their daily life, and what support do they bring to the men of our OMLT every day ? Few of them belong to the Easy Company, the one the TV series focuses on. This one nowadays is named Echo Company, and it has become the support company.

They have a terribly strong American accent – from our point of view the language they speak is not even English. How many times did I have to write down what I wanted to say rather than waste precious minutes trying various pronunciations of a seemingly common word? Whatever state they are from, no two accents are alike and they even admit that in some crisis situations they have difficulties understanding each other.

Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins and creatine – they are all heads and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them – we are wimps, even the strongest of us – and because of that they often mistake us for Afghans.

Here we discover America as it is often depicted : their values are taken to their paroxysm, often amplified by promiscuity lack of privacy and the loneliness of this outpost in the middle of that Afghan valley. Honor, motherland – everything here reminds of that : the American flag floating in the wind above the outpost, just like the one on the post parcels. Even if recruits often originate from the hearth of American cities and gang territory, no one here has any goal other than to hold high and proud the star spangled banner. Each man knows he can count on the support of a whole people who provides them through the mail all that an American could miss in such a remote front-line location : books, chewing gums, razorblades, Gatorade, toothpaste etc. in such way that every man is aware of how much the American people backs him in his difficult mission. And that is a first shock to our preconceptions : the American soldier is no individualist. The team, the group, the combat team are the focus of all his attention.

And they are impressive warriors ! We have not come across bad ones, as strange at it may seem to you when you know how critical French people can be. Even if some of them are a bit on the heavy side, all of them provide us everyday with lessons in infantry know-how. Beyond the wearing of a combat kit that never seem to discomfort them (helmet strap, helmet, combat goggles, rifles etc.) the long hours of watch at the outpost never seem to annoy them in the slightest. On the one square meter wooden tower above the perimeter wall they stand the five consecutive hours in full battle rattle and night vision goggles on top, their sight unmoving in the directions of likely danger. No distractions, no pauses, they are like statues nights and days. At night, all movements are performed in the dark – only a handful of subdued red lights indicate the occasional presence of a soldier on the move. Same with the vehicles whose lights are covered – everything happens in pitch dark even filling the fuel tanks with the Japy pump.

And combat ? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all – always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay. That is one of their tricks : they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the ennemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting : they just charge ! They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later – which cuts any pussyfooting short.

We seldom hear any harsh word, and from 5 AM onwards the camp chores are performed in beautiful order and always with excellent spirit. A passing American helicopter stops near a stranded vehicle just to check that everything is alright; an American combat team will rush to support ours before even knowing how dangerous the mission is – from what we have been given to witness, the American soldier is a beautiful and worthy heir to those who liberated France and Europe.

To those who bestow us with the honor of sharing their combat outposts and who everyday give proof of their military excellence, to those who pay the daily tribute of America’s army’s deployment on Afghan soil, to those we owned this article, ourselves hoping that we will always remain worthy of them and to always continue hearing them say that we are all the same band of brothers”.

Related articles:

Liz is being nice

Where Did Our Real Wealth Go? Another Excellant Analysis by Victor Davis Hanset

Via Pajamas Media


by Victor Davis Hanson
The Greek Lesson

No, I don’t mean the classical Greeks, but their present-day counterparts.

Economists have given us all the usual diagnoses of what went wrong in a now bankrupt Greece — high taxes, tax cheating, too generous retirements, unsustainable entitlements, government corruption, and anemic demography.

Add to such socialism the natural foreign policy and collective expressions that always follow statism in the modern Western world — increased pacifism, utopian pretension, moral equivalence, cheap anti-Americanism — and we have the foreign policy expression of Greece (and much of the E.U.) of the last 30 years. (A citizen who believes by birthright that he is to be taken care of by the state always hates the state that can never do enough, in the fashion that the country who is taken care of militarily always hates its protector.)

In other words, Greece is the canary in the mine of the impending crack-up of the modern welfare state. It is a great gift to us all, this example. A year ago, the socialists, even as they were juggling and falsifying their books, were bragging that the Wall Street meltdown was a referendum — and capitalism was doomed. Now, the entire socialist dream is exposed and even the most ardent statist knows that there is no longer enough “others” to pay the tab.

The poor E.U learned that the Greek siesta, the 10PM Athenian dinners, the state power company vans at the beaches in the workday afternoons, the kafenions full of 50-year-old men at 11:00 a.m., the angry students perpetually in the streets at each hinted reform, and the moonlighting telephone employees all came at the expense of far harder-working Scandinavian and German socialists, who apparently now realize a nice two weeks each year on Santorini or Crete aren’t worth billions of their own Euros in rescue bailouts.

We Are All Greeks Now?

Here in California we see the symptoms of the same Greek malady as we go from one budget shortfall to the next — dream-like borrowing, raising taxes, and furloughing, in lieu of the tough medicine of cutting government payrolls, changing pension payouts, and freezing the pay of state-workers until their compensation mirror images those in the private sector.

Postmodern Western society will soon witness a real showdown, analogous to the teenager who rebels and either accepts that he is still dependent on his parents and therefore subject to the rules of the house, or runs away and implodes in a sea of drugs and street-life.

In short, how will an entitled society react when the money runs out and it learns that it must change or wither away — and all the whining rhetoric about “social justice” and “a green future” and “spread the wealth” and “redistributive change” won’t bring another barrel of oil or bushel of wheat or Douglas fir 2” x 4”?

Imagine…

Imagine a politician announcing: we are going to raise the Social Security age to 66. We are going to freeze and cut spending until we balance the budget within three years, and then with surpluses pay down the debt within 6 years. We are going to build 100 new nuclear power plants and open up the country and its shores to oil and gas production. We are going to cut back all federal entitlements and subsidies by 20% immediately. We are going to ensure enough water for agriculture. We are …

Would collective relief or revolution follow?

Two Forks in the Road Ahead — California as Greece

On the one hand, the money is vanishing. Income, state and federal, as well as payroll, taxes here in California may soon top 60% on top incomes (10% state, 15% plus payroll on most of one’s self-employed income, 39% federal). Add in property and sales taxes and we’ve reached the point where the lemon can no longer be squeezed without either more than the current 3,500 a week leaving the state, or going the Greek route of endemic cheating.

(Indeed, as I wrote not long ago: I go to Greece every other summer, and lived in the country for over two years. I come away with one overriding observation: almost every Greek I met in some way either cheated on his tax obligation or conned a way to get some state subsidy — or both, while furiously damning “them.” [“Them” if one were poorer, meant the rich; and if richer, the state; and for both, also meant the United States.])

Bottom line: I don’t see how the state or federal government can up taxes much more and still find wealth-producing, law-abiding, motivated job creators.

On the other hand, as the money runs out, will state workers, pensioners, and entitlement recipients accept that there are too few wealth-creators to fund their pay-outs, or, as in Greece, hit the streets in protest, teenager style, each time some adjustments are necessary?

So if we can’t raise taxes and we can’t cut expenditures what is left? There is no Germany to bail us out? Cut defense? Keep borrowing from the Chinese and Japanese?

Modern Drones

Where did all the wealth go? Modern Western society is in some sense becoming drone-like, its entitled sensitive citizens assuming ceremonial roles and attitudes about the very landscape they inherited from their industrious predecessors.

Here in California we idle farmland, though we have the water, expertise, and soil to produce far more food than we do. We put vast swaths of both land and sea off limits to gas and oil production, though we could produce far more petroleum and natural gas than we do. We snub nuclear power, though our population steadily increases and its desire for electronic appurtenance grows, not shrinks. We like “wilderness areas” (who doesn’t?) where we build no roads, harvest no timber, and build no dams. We strangle Silicon Valley with all sorts of labor and business regulations until it fabricates and outsources abroad. In other words, we are creating no real new sources of concrete wealth as we nuance the shrinking capital we inherited.

We Are Still Humans For a Bit Longer

Hollywood is great. Tourism keeps San Francisco alive. Napa Valley produces great wines. We have strong finance, insurance and plenty of regulators. But ultimately our generation lost sight of the fact that we must eat and therefore grow food; we must clothe ourselves and therefore need fibers; we must move from place to place and therefore need fuel; and we must have shelter and therefore have wood, cement and glass.

Yes, we can import all this from the Chinese or the Canadians or the South Americans, but at some point one needs the real capital created by real wealth to pay for it all — not nuancing and adjusting and tinkering with money. Money is simply a representation of stored capital that comes from real production of some sort. Talking about “millions of green jobs” and “a wind and solar future” and “high-tech sector” is well and good. But ultimately Western man has not yet (as we learn from his consumptive habits) evolved to some sort of ethereal existence. Even Harvard Review grandees need real fuel to power Air Force One to get to Copenhagen.

So for a while longer, we need the miner, the oil pumper, the farmer, the fabricator, the carpenter, the road-builder, the railroad guy, the cement layer, the chemist, the computer engineer — and the system that allows them all to create wealth unimpeded by government and in an environment in which the citizen who benefits from their labor appreciates their industry.

The 11th Hour

Yes, before we have the actor, the writer, the professor, the insurer, the investor, the regulator, and the politicians, we need the elemental among us to find or create material wealth. We, the sloganeering class, forgot that, and so subsidize our high living either on borrowed money or the prior productive investment of those now in the grave yards.

And the tab is coming due faster than we ever dreamed. All the soaring, teleprompted rhetoric, the Ivy-League credentials, and the social justice boilerplate will no more create wealth than ceremonial fifth-century A.D. consuls and robed bishops could fabricate the glory of Rome.

P.S.: Why am I not too optimistic right now? Our President, who submitted the largest deficits in recent memory, and who is on track to nearly double the national debt in record time, continues to blame Bush — not just for Bush’s lamentable deficits, but for Obama’s own new unsustainable ones. I think his weird logic is: “Bush’s bad deficits made me trump them by a factor of four.” When the Commander-in-Chief expects the populace to believe that, or drops real unemployment figures and talks instead of theoretical jobs saved, or flip-flops on everything from evil Wall Street bankers now suddenly good, or bad nuclear power now vital, then we have about as much hope as we would have under Jimmy Carter.

Remember January 2009? In the era of Democratic supermajorities in Congress, a new JFK in the White House, and a media proclaiming Obama “a god,” we were all grassroots saints, who threw out the Bush bums and had at last a great workable Congress and White House — and were a daring electorate eager for hope and change from a non-traditional president. Yes, life was good and we, in the pre-tea-party age, were the salt of the earth that earned an Obama.

Now? Suddenly in our media and politics the people are stupid, full of ingratitude, often racist, the system broken, the Congress bankrupt, all of us undeserving of our one chance in a lifetime state agenda. Yes, the petulant liberal attitude in 12 months went from “We, the People” to “You stupid idiots” — and all because some Democratic congressmen discovered that the more they went out on the limb on Obama stimulus, healthcare, cap and trade, higher taxes, bigger government, bailouts and endless deficits, the more they were going to get sawed off in November by the ungrateful people. So naturally instead blame the filibuster, the people, the clingers — anything other than the self-preservation instincts of the political class of your own party.

©2010 Victor Davis Hanson

And now for the real news. If you don't read "The Economist " you should

Eastward ho?

* Feb 26th 2010, 15:20 by S.D. | WASHINGTON

The lead note in the Finance & Economics section in this week's issue looks at the shift in the balance of economic power from the West to Asia. Our correspondent crunches some numbers, and clarifies the ways in which this much-talked about shift is real, and the ways in which it is exaggerated. It turns out, for instance, that looking at GDP at market exchange rates, there hasn't been that much of a shift at all:

Thanks partly to falling currencies, Asia’s total share of world GDP (in nominal terms at market exchange rates) has actually slipped, from 29% in 1995 to 27% last year (see chart 1). In 2009 Asia’s total GDP exceeded America’s but was still slightly smaller than western Europe’s (although it could overtake the latter this year). To put it another way, the output of the rich West is still almost twice as big as that of the East.

That Asian exports are somehow taking over the world is also not as true as some suppose:

As for the popular belief that Asian producers are grabbing an ever-larger slice of exports, the region’s 31% share of world exports last year was not much higher than in 1995 (28%) and remains smaller than western Europe’s. Indeed, the shift towards Asia appears to have slowed, not quickened.

Of course, converted at purchasing-power-parity, Asia's GDP share looks more impressive. And although official statistics may say America's share of private consumption dwarfs Asia, the piece points out that it may be bigger in reality than captured by official figures. But it's Asia's demand for capital goods that really stands out:

Many Western firms are more interested in Asia’s capital spending than its consumption, and here Asia is undoubtedly the giant. In 2009, 40% of global investment (at market exchange rates) took place in Asia, as much as in America and Europe combined.

Lots more interesting stuff in the piece itself,here.

Why Obama's Great Bet Will Fail: I more than hope he's right!

Townhall.com ^ | February 28, 2010 | Kevin McCullough

Posted on Sunday, February 28, 2010 7:21:12 AM by Kaslin

This week when President Obama concluded the seven-hour, made-for-television faux summit on health reform, and more or less announced his intention to cram his signature bill through the Senate in the form of reconciliation, he sealed his choice in moving forward with a great wager. This is a bet that he is hedging to see if the electorate will be more forgiving of him once he's able to claim that he's accomplished something--anything--in his first two years in office. As I was the first person in American punditry to predict this President's success to elected office, let me again go out on the prediction limb to say on this, "he will fail."

I'm basing my gut feeling on two polls recently released by a news organization.

And nope, it's not Fox News. It's CNN!

The CNN/Opinion Research poll released the middle of this last week was the first shocking poll. Only 25% of Americans want the current Obamacare bills (either one of them) to be passed and turned into law.

The Republicans attempted to point this out to the President, the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate Majority leader. They attempted to point it out to the minority leader and to the remainder of the Democrats gathered who were supposedly called there to "listen" to the Republicans share their health care ideas. "Supposedly listen" because the Republicans were given less than two full hours, of the seven and a half the event took to actually speak.

Maybe it's just me, but five and a half hours for one side and one hour and fifty-four minutes for the other doesn't seem like much "listening."

But I digress...

The CNN poll also showed that 48% of Americans wished the President and Congress would scrap the current bills and start the discussion and process on health care reform all over again. Something else Senators Lamar Alexander and Tom Coburn were particularly skilled at pointing out. The Democrats, however, acted as though they could not hear them.

The same CNN poll showed that another 25% of Americans wished the federal government would drop health care reform for the time being--altogether. My hunch is that these are folks who believe, like most of us, that if you fix the jobs problem, then more people will automatically get health care.

Since it is unlikely that the jobs numbers will change anytime soon, the President chose to double down and go for the jugular on health care. In a sense, he's sort of backed into a corner. He hasn't improved the economy, the unemployment situation has not stabilized--much less improved, Gitmo is still open, four terror attacks against the U.S. have happened on his watch, and people are tired of all of his speeches--while seeing no results.

He's also created another monumental issue that he will have a hard time overcoming if he does push health care forward, and even blinks in the direction of cap and trade legislation.

According to another CNN/Opinion Research poll out towards the end of this past week, a majority of Americans now feel like the government cannot be trusted. Specifically 56% of the American people believe the government is intruding upon the basic rights of its citizens. The survey shows that 4 in 10 democrats feel that way as well as 6 in 10 independents.

The entire debate around the cronyism of the stimulus bills, the takeover of private enterprise in the bailout programs, the usurpation of the free market on the health care debate, and the desire to raise the most punitive taxes against consumers ever imagined in the cap and trade legislation all contribute to this feeling.

The youth vote, the vote that gave Obama his 4% win in the electorate (beating McCain by 40% in the demographic), feel this "intrusion" effect most acutely. That's why the actor Stephen Baldwin, my media company partner, and myself founded the XPAC experience at CPAC this year. We sensed this restlessness coming on.

That's why CPAC had an 11% increase in attendance this year, nearly 61%, by people who were under 30 years of age.

That's why the state Republican party in California has asked us to bring the XPAC experience to their state-wide convention in San Diego this August.

The American people are telling CNN, not Fox News, that they do not like the President's priorities, nor his policies. The young Americans that are being asked to shoulder these nightmarish realities for their future are agitated. And the voters in America are more aware of the legislative score than Obama lets on.

So, if he pushes reconciliation to pass a bill that 75% of the nation does not want just to get it through the Senate, what will his trick be when he gets it in front of the House where Nancy Pelosi is now 21 votes short of passage?

Meanwhile the 2010 election clock is ticking...

My Point ot View Exactly!

This Isn't Eugenics ... No, Wait!
By Mark P. Mostert
Any allusion to present-day biomedical practices as being eugenic usually leads to quite hysterical denials and the accusation of painting with an inappropriate Nazi brush.

I've heard all the arguments, so please spare me: The only people who were Nazis were the Nazis. The only things that are eugenic are what the Nazis did in the interests of breeding a more superior race. Genetic research in this day and age is an absolutely cutting-edge, wonderful, and very necessary ethical endeavor.

The howling eugenics deniers will even concede that eugenics didn't originate in Nazi Germany (the U.S. and the U.K. have that distinction), and, if pressed, that some prominent historical figures supported eugenics (Margaret Sanger and Winston Churchill among them). But that's as far as it goes. The prevailing zeitgeist holds that eugenics was a terrible thing in a time gone by. It doesn't happen anymore. We learned from our collective social mistakes.

The thinking behind eugenics isn't very difficult to understand. People are different in many ways. Some of these differences are socially and medically acceptable; others are not. We need more people with socially acceptable traits and fewer people with undesirable traits. There are two ways to do this. One, we passively encourage people with undesirable traits not to reproduce, but this takes a long time to reduce the undesirable population. Two, we actively take steps to eliminate those with undesirable traits by whatever means we can. Historically, that has meant sterilization, abortion, laws banning people with undesirable traits from marrying or reproducing, and the killing of so-called defectives.

...Which brings us to an AP story that recently surfaced.

Essentially, the article makes the case that advances in genetic screening are reducing the incidence of children born with a wide range of genetic anomalies, so much so that several genetically-induced disabilities are close to being completely eliminated. However, the AP is unintentionally but clearly an exemplar of the spin that has morphed eugenics from a reprehensible horror to a heroic and loving social responsibility with predictable results. Eugenics is now called preventive medicine.

As increasing numbers of women undergo prenatal testing at the behest of their physicians, genetic counselors, and medical organizations, more and more unborn children with genetic anomalies are being detected. The result? A genetic sorting that makes some unborn children (and human embryos) second-class citizens fit only for death.

What you think of this state of affairs depends on your views about the exceptional nature of human life. However, there are two undeniable certainties. One, unborn children with genetic anomalies are now much more likely to be aborted than their more perfect peers. Two, abortion cures genetic anomalies 100% of the time.

I have no argument with parents who are genetically tested and decide not to take the risk of reproducing children who might have some form of genetic disability. This is preventive genetic screening used appropriately and ethically. The turning point emerges when a human life is created and decisions are then made that some should live because they are more genetically perfect, while others are destroyed because they are genetically less perfect. This genetic discrimination is already a matter of policy of several major medical associations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. ACOG, for example, strongly recommends that all white women be genetically tested for cystic fibrosis and that in-utero testing for Down syndrome be extended to all pregnant females, not only older women who are most at risk.

While lip-service is often paid to presenting the pregnant women whose fetuses are genetically disabled with all possible options, including giving birth, there is evidence suggesting that in the real world of the doctor's or geneticist's office, the pressure is much more likely to be for abortion than anything else. Most commonly, health professionals convince parents that their child will have a lower quality of life, be subject to expensive and possibly painful medical procedures, and that the child will have a limited lifespan.

The AP piece reports the inevitable results. For example, in Massachusetts, the instances of live births with cystic fibrosis dropped from a relative high of 29 in 2000 to 10 in 2003 as mothers opted for abortion over delivering a genetically disabled infant.

There are similar trends in California, where in 2006-2008, Kaiser Permanente offered genetic screening for cystic fibrosis. Of the 87 volunteer pregnant couples genetically predisposed to producing offspring with the anomaly, 64 fetuses were anomaly-free, while 23 were found to have cystic fibrosis. Sixteen of the seventeen who were more severely afflicted were aborted. Of the six with milder forms of the disease, four were aborted.

Easy math: 23 unborn children singled out only and exclusively because they were genetically disabled, 21 disposed of. The other 64 genetically non-disabled unborn children were allowed to live -- only because they were of purer genetic makeup.

How is this not eugenics?

Mark P. Mostert, from Virginia Beach, Virginia, comments on issues at the intersection of disability and bioethics. Contact him at markpmostert@gmail.com. From American Thinker

Just because the President had his little televised junta doesn't mean anything has changed. With the support of the corrupt press, and some (not all) Democrats who are presently taking the place of O'Reily's blooters, and boffins, things are supposed to be different.

The truth is that nothing,nothing has changed concerning the national consensus that a majority of the people don't want the health government program. One exception is there are more people now informed as to what the health care bill contains or at least looks like when it appeared on the desk of Senator () the other day during the dog and pony show.

To voir dire these women and men of the Democratic party on this act of treason would be revealing. As if suddenly there was a call from the country to get health care done. It is all a farce a falshood and a lie.

What is happening is nothing more than what Pelosi Reid Obama and Biden, (poor Joe) do everyday. They blurt out THEIR ideas and thoughts as if magically that is going to change the attitude of the American people. Perhaps they are just really deaf but more likely they just really don't care what the populous wants.

The American people are screaming at them not to pass this piece of shit legislation and they continue on like some drunkin sailor looking for the next bar while stumbling down the street blindly blitzed. We don't want this shit! and they don't care.

Does it have a chance of passing? I'm not all that convinced that it does. But to hear the Democratic leaders and the press you would once again think that it is a shoe in. Which of course its not.

Right now the Democrats are like a herd of sheep being surrounded by a pack of wolves, angry wolves, us. The wolves are hungry for some blood. The sheep most frightened are the ones in the middle like Pelosi, Reid, and Obama. They are yelling to the other sheep to stick together. Stick together! lets all huddle in a circle, that way the wolves won't get us.Well show them we are strong.

But really the wolves are moving in closer and they are going to pick off the most stupid of the herd who are dumb enough to remain on the outside of the huddle. While Reid Pelosi and Obama hang in towards the middle of the group, waving the others to come in closer around them.

The Senators and Congressmen who vote in favor of this fiasco called reform are destined to get picked off. Pelosi and Reid , are still believing they won't be touched, but it doesn't totally that way.

It is time once more for the weary American conservative movement to rise up in revolt, and scream " NO NO don't even think about it". To once again remind your local representatives that if they vote in favor of this shit that they are gone.

Not since I have been voting have I ever experienced such a blatant deception of the public interest more so than perhaps even the assassination of John F Kennedy. That was the dawning of my political awareness and things have not been the same ever since.

We as concerned Americans once more must overcome this onslaught of tyranny by the Democratic leaders to drag our great country down the slippery slope of decline. This health care deceit is nothing more than "one giant step against the American tradition in every facet. It is the most blatant grab for power of modern times by a peaceful loving nation. It must be stopped.

Your leaders if you prefer to call them that, are not listening to the cries of outrage by the people. Obama must fail in his efforts to beat the American people down with his insistence on having a bill that he cares nothing about in substance to arrive on his desk for signature.It is a power play.

The people only need to look back to the recent past and examine Obama's promises. He made numerous false statements about who he was and what he wanted as change for the American people. America has begun to wake up and see that he consistently has lied, not only a little but about everything.

In that case why would America think that this bill is about health care. It is about power. Obama's need to pass on a legacy of the most tremendous shift in power ever achieved in the United States. A shift of power away from the control of the American people into the hands of a centralized dictator. Health care is the disguise of tyranny in its most devious form.

Think about it. The liberal Dems are always playing off the emotional (not rational) side of the populous. Tinge the emotion and get an emitted predetermined bout of sympathy that can be tapped and manipulated. This health care bill is not about taking care of Mom and Pop. It is a paradigm shift in power away from the states and into the hands of Washington. This by the way is the tactical tool that goes unmentioned in the back room deals at the White House.

Just think Joe Ohio Senator is drawn a picture of a lifetime assurance of money position and power. This is how they will be swayed. Do you think that these offerings are not still going on? How naive of you. Obama just upped the anti Another Chicago lawyering trick.

Obama may suck as President, but he is most definitely well rehearsed in the sleezy lawyer don't give an inch, movements known to the best of the assholes in the legal profession. However its not really all him either. Obama is a straw man being coached from the side lines. In truth he is too stupid to figure out how to get this thing done by himself. Without help he would be without a clue. He is getting help from the likes of George Soros, and once again Bill Ayers. Barack Obama just ain't that smart all around.

Either way he can be stopped. I have dealt with lawyers like him in my own personal life and when they get to the stage that Barack Obama is at right now one must call their bluff. The Republicans and Independents need to call his bluff, and not any of them support any type of legislation that the House is threatening to review once more. If they do this their will still not be enough Democrats to get the job done. There are not enough votes to support a wholly Senatorial version of health care, based on promise. After all look at what happened with Nebraska's Senator after accepting bribes from the Obama camp.

True American must now take action once more and contact their representatives, let them know that they are in peril if health care moves forward at all.

Recent Media On Capturing Hispanic Vote Misses That Most Hispanics Think Immigration Too High

Reprinted from Numbers USA


By Roy Beck

Highly paid PR firms for the open-borders lobby have gotten stories in many major newspapers this month suggesting that the only way to attract the Hispanic vote is to favor a comprehensive amnesty and also an increase in foreign workers. But a massive Zogby poll shows Hispanic views to be quite different.

If 56% of likely Hispanic voters (according to Zogby) think immigration already is too high, and only 7% think it is too low, why would a politician push for a jump in immigration? Not only would it apparently satisfy only 7% of likely Hispanic voters, but it definitely would turn off the majority of other voters concerned about high unemployment.

Several former Bush allies are working overtime to keep elected Republican leaders from helping unemployed Americans by importing less foreign labor.

Basically, what they are saying is that even if high immigration hurts U.S. workers, the Republicans should do the wrong thing in order to attract more Hispanic votes .

They aren't just wrong morally, they are wrong in their counting. If few Republican candidates ever get more than 35% of the Hispanic vote, why would they think they can attract more by pushing for higher immigration when 56% of Hispanic voters want less?

Other open-borders consultants are pushing Democratic leaders to force a vote on amnesty this year as the only way to get Hispanics to come to the polls and vote for Democrats. But when Zogby gave likely Hispanic voters the choice between making illegal immigrants go home over time through better enforcement and giving them a path to citizenship, they favored attrition through enforcement by 52% to 34% over amnesty.

The one thing the consultants have right is that it makes a difference how politicians oppose amnesty and oppose foreign labor importation. Obviously, if the rhetoric is aimed at opposing Hispanics specificially, that is going to hurt with the Hispanic vote. But both Democrats and Republicans need to constantly remember that immigration policy is not about ethnicity but about numbers.

It is nice to have Zogby's confirmation that likely Hispanic voters look for a practical numerical immigration policy in about the same way as the rest of U.S. voters.

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA

NumbersUSA's blogs are copyrighted and may be republished or reposted only if they are copied in their entirety, including this paragraph, and provide proper credit to NumbersUSA. NumbersUSA bears no responsibility for where our blogs may be republished or reposted.
Views and opinions expressed in blogs on this website are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect official policies of NumbersUSA.
Subscribe to our Blog Feed

Obama, the Chicago Boys, and their 30 Billion Dollar Slush Fund

February 26, 2010

By Ed Lasky
The Obama administration is seeking to exclude from federal oversight its new $30 billion dollar small-business lending program. Obama's rhetoric about transparency during the campaign was as phony as his vow to end the era of lobbying (last year was that industry's best year ever in Washington).

David Cho writes in the Washington Post:

Senior Treasury officials have told the financial bailout program's inspector general that they are considering excluding a new $30 billion small-business lending initiative from the watchdog office's oversight.

The message, delivered at a meeting last week, sparked outrage from Republicans, who accused the Treasury of taking revenge on the watchdog for writing a series of scathing reports. Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for the bailout, urged the Treasury to reconsider, arguing in a letter that the department was acting "contrary to the best interests of the taxpayer."


One representative, Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is decrying the plot by Treasury to remove Barofsky's office (known by the acronym SIGTARP) from its oversight role regarding the spending of taxpayer dollars.

SIGTARP has been an aggressive watchdog for American taxpayers and this attempt to circumvent their oversight must not go forward," Issa said. "It is disturbing, but not altogether out of character, that this Treasury Department would attempt to deny SIGTARP the ability to conduct oversight of this proposed program."

Barofsky contends that the decision to exclude the watchdog would leave the small business program "vulnerable to potential fraud".

Barofsky must have been biting his lip when he wrote that diplomatic passage. Of course, it would make the 30 billion dollar program "vulnerable to fraud". That is the goal: to have a vast slush fund and honey pot to reward supporters with taxpayer dollars. I have written before that programs such as the Small Business Administration are ripe for abuse: loans become bribes or payoffs. The default rates on these "loans" are high. Obama and his team of Chicago Boys are once again bringing the worst of Chicago alderman mores to the federal government: backroom deals, pressure, payoffs, and bribes.

We just saw another instance of how Obama and his team of Chicago Boys loathe oversight -- seemingly just as much as criminals do. That is why crime occurs at night. That is also why one of our great American jurists, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, referred to the benefits of openness and transparency when he coined the line that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." But Obama and his team don't want the sunlight; they prefer the shadows, closed doors and the absence of any scrutiny.

The team of wise guys is wising up. They are on a learning curve. Not on how to govern; but how to play their fun and games with no penalty. Why do I say they are learning?

In 2009, the Obama team fired and then insulted Inspector General Gerald Walpin, who had the temerity to point out irregularities in the spending of federal funds by the Sacramento Mayor and Obama political ally Kevin Johnson. Federal money that was supposed to go to help students and fund theatre and art programs instead had been diverted to" pad salaries, meddle politically in a school-board election, and have recipients perform personal services for Mr. Johnson, including washing his car". Walpin dutifully performed his job and reported this fraud on the federal taxpayer. Then all hell broke loose and the Obama team dumped tons of bricks and ran Walpin through the mud. Recall, Barack Obama's statement, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." That is the modus operandi of a criminal. Evidently that is also the governing philosophy of our President.

General Walpin, the victim, was fulfilling his duty to watch how our money was being spent. Who gave the public his side of the story? Not the mainstream media, but only outlets such as Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and the Washington Times and AT. Walpin was a government whistleblower, calling out the abuses of the powerful. In theory, whistleblowers should be mainstream media darlings, given wide airplay. The narrative of a brave underdog crushed by the powerful nicely fits into their template of America the unjust, needing rescue by a brave media. But not when the whistleblowers blow the lid on problems reflecting badly on Barack Obama, their chosen transformational figure.

Only the presence on the media landscape of new media outlets serves to deter -- to the extent they can -- the Obama agenda. They serve as channels to inform the American people about the corruption crew in charge, and they are thriving, while the old media outlets are shriveling on the vine. Hence the need to shroud the 30 billion dollar program in a cloak of secrecy.

Consequently the Obama administration will have the freedom to spend our money with abandon. We saw how stimulus money flowed disproportionally to Democratic districts (twice as much as GOP districts). But we won't see how this 30 billion dollar slush fund is spent.

Will it flow to window companies run headed by the husband of the White House official in charge of weatherization, as was stimulus money? Will the money flow to companies headed by Democratic owners, as was a lucrative no-bid contract for work on Afghanistan?

Barack Obama has been noticeably thin-skinned when he has been criticized or his record scrutinized. This certainly was visible during the campaign. Now the same prickliness is clear when his track record as President is on the docket. Inspectors Generals-the unsung heroes-continue to bedevil his administration. Recently, the much ballyhooed weatherization program came in for some well-deserved criticism by Inspector General Gregory Friedman who termed the lack of progress of this boondoggle alarming .

Now he just wants to lop off the heads of Inspector Generals (thereby intimidating the remaining ones) and exclude programs from their purview.

Barack Obama does not like anyone else grading his performance. Their evaluations just might tarnish his self-proclaimed B+ average.

Will anyone be accountable for how our money is spent and wasted?

Obama has announced a program to publicize and stop the pork diet known as earmarks. His statements and speeches often are "just words" as he might say; they are all too rarely followed up by actions. However, if earmarks in government budgets do become a political problem what better way of using money top grease political wheels than funneling it through a small business program that has no one looking at the books? Will the small business slush fund (er..initiative) just become a fount of earmarks under another name ( this administration is quite conversant with the value of a thesaurus).

Crony capitalism is alive and well in Obama's Washington. Such a bastard form of capitalism thrives in darkness and behind closed doors, in country clubs and fine-dining restaurants, at soirees and state dinners.

The promise of transparency was just one more of a long litany of broken promises by Barack Obama and his team. Transparency is not what they want; that was merely a slogan.

What a gang wants is secrecy -- and that is what they will have.

The rest of us be damned.

Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/obama_the_chicago_boys_and_the_1.html at February 26, 2010 - 09:42:32 AM CST

Once again very patiently we are letting you know Mr. President , that you have pushed us to the limit. We are not going to wait much longer

CIA extends secret war into Pak cities

So why now does the NYT release such an article as this one. It is more than apparent to the American people that the U.S. CIA has been operating in Pakistan for some time.

This reminds me of an operation I once conducted in Northern Laos, where it was discovered that China was supplying more than 50,000 logistical and combat soldiers to help North Vietnam with its efforts in defeating the south. It took a year for such information to be released to the American people and by then the number had been reduced to a mere 5000 troops.

ARTICLE

Despite a tormented relationship, the US and Pakistani intelligence agencies are working together on tactical operations, as the CIA extends its secret war beyond the mountainous tribal belt and deep into Pakistan’s sprawling cities, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The CIA and its Pakistani counterpart, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, have a long and often tormented relationship. And even now, they are moving warily toward conflicting goals, with each manoeuvring to protect its influence after the shooting stops in Afghanistan,” the newspaper said in a dispatch from Islamabad.

Yet interviews in recent days show how they are working together on tactical operations...”, the Times said.

Beyond the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, CIA operatives working with the ISI have carried out dozens of raids throughout Pakistan over the past year, working from bases in the cities of Quetta, Peshawar and elsewhere,” the newspaper quoted Pakistani security officials as saying.

The raids often come after electronic intercepts by American spy satellites, or tips from Pakistani informants - and the spies from the two countries then sometimes drive in the same car to pick up their quarry. Sometimes the teams go on lengthy reconnaissance missions, with the ISI operatives packing sunscreen and neon glow sticks that allow them to identify their positions at night.

The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan is well known, which is striking given that this is a covert war. But these on-the-ground activities have been shrouded in secrecy because the Pakistani government has feared the public backlash against the close relationship with the Americans.

Officials in Washington and Islamabad were cited as saying that the relationship between the two spy services has steadily improved since the low point of the summer of 2008, when the CIA suspected that the ISI was involved in the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul.The CIA declined to comment.

The spy agencies have built trust in part through age-old tactics of espionage: killing or capturing each other’s enemies. A turning point came last August, when a CIA missile killed the militant leader Baitullah Mehsud as he lay on the roof of his compound in South Waziristan, his wife beside him massaging his back.

Mehsud for more than a year had been responsible for a wave of terror attacks in Pakistani cities, and many inside the ISI were puzzled as to why the United States had not sought to kill him. Some even suspected he was an American, or Indian, agent.

Non Sequitur ?

(Slaughter) We have fallen behind, we're no longer the biggest manufacturer in the world, we've lost our technological edge. We have an opportunity to do that, but a major part of the success of that is getting this health care passed."



Huh ??? Earth to Slaughter, while health care might be a lofty goal which inspires Democrats, it has little to do with maintaining a technological edge. Bill Gates could not invent Microsoft because we did not have Canadian style health care? Google could not get started because the Swedes have better emergency care?

The definition of non sequitur is "that does not follow".

He can't be happy with the results!.... the President that is

He really doesn't care what we think !

Less than one minute of Nancy Pelosi

Well that's it. I tried I really did, I tried to watch a portion of today's summit. With Nancy Pelosi leading off I couldn't get through 60 seconds of it. Just look at the unity and warmth between the gang of four, Reid, Pelosi, Biden, and Obama, all side by side and unable to look at each other with a sincere glance of feeling and understanding.

What you have are four severely disjointed political figureheads who are completely at odds with each other. They remind me of the latest version of "Survivor" where you can see the same thing going on between the rival teams of "Hero's and Villains" . Ego's are puffed to the max and the subtle power plays are not even discreet.

Well this summit is destined to fail, I am convinced. It will take up the next two weeks in front page press and go nowhere. Sometime around a month of 6 weeks from now the President will declare a victory while he bides his time in wait for something of a miracle to happen with regards to the economy. I am convinced that his insistence on beating the drum for health care will be his waterloo!

Around the end of the year the country will be unanimous in singing the song "Bye bye Bama! to the tune of " Bye Bye American Pie".

I TRIED I TRIED I REALLY DID! A few minute ago I tried once again to watch the summit. This time viewing the President giving his COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION PITCH. That lasted less in time than me watching Pelosi. I am sorry folks but I do not believe in giving homage to out right lies. I just cannot bring myself to do it.I cannot watch this public display of patronizing the Republicans and the American public. This President just does not get it. We Americans do not want his socialist programs no matter how bad off the country is supposed to be.

Never in my lifetime have I held so much disdain for an American President. Never in my lifetime do I believe we have ever had such a lier for President, not even Richard M. Nixon. This man has to go. I am not sure we can sustain 3 more years of destructive deconstruction of our American way of life.

Obama Embraces Nixonomics

Townhall.com by Steve Chapman

Barack Obama has often modeled his policies on Franklin Roosevelt. Lately, though, he's been coming across more as Richard Nixon Lite.

In 1971, fed up with the steady rise of wages and prices, Nixon had a big idea: Attack inflation by imposing strict controls on wages and prices. A federal board was created to establish guidelines and enforce compliance, on the assumption that government officials were wise enough to decide the correct price for millions of products and the right wage for millions of workers.

The main result was to prove the folly of such intervention. Nixon's own chief economist, Herbert Stein, admitted that the administration eventually had to give up because the program was "a total disaster." Among the unwanted side effects: "Cattle were being withheld from market, chickens were drowned, and the food store shelves were being emptied."

Motorists had to wait in line for hours to buy gasoline. At one point, Americans faced a nationwide shortage of toilet paper. Yes, toilet paper. Oh, and the inflation rate didn't fall. It rose.

Insurer's profits aren't the problem

From NRO

For an administration that says it’s committed to using empirical evidence to determine “what works,” and a president who says he’s “not an ideologue,” Obamacare’s marketing sure does rely on a healthy dose of fiction. The central inference behind the supposed need to pass Obamacare is that insurance companies are shamelessly gouging us and disproportionately driving up the costs of our entire health-care system. This is demonstrably false. But the Obama administration’s failure to recognize — or to admit — this inconvenient truth, largely explains why its proposed remedies would not only fail to drive health costs down, but would instead raise them up even further.



According to the most recent Fortune 500 rankings, health insurers are not even among the top-30 United States industries in profit-margin. Health insurers rank 35th, with a profit-margin of just 2.2 percent — less than one-fifth the profit-margin of railroads. None of the ten largest American health insurers made profits of more than 4.5 percent, and two of them lost money. Health insurers’ collective profit-margin is less than one-eighth that of drug companies and less than one-seventh that of companies that sell medical products or equipment. It’s also less than that of medical facilities. Yet when was the last time you heard President Obama rail against greedy hospitals?



The combined profits of America’s ten largest health insurers are $8.3 billion. That’s less than two-thirds of the profits of Wal-Mart alone, less than half of the profits of General Electric alone, and less than one-seventh of what Medicare loses each year to fraud. Health insurers collectively have one-eighth the profit-margin of McDonald’s or Coke, one-ninth that of eBay, and one-fifteenth that of Merck.



Why don’t these much more profitable companies or industries need to be taken over by the federal government? Why don’t they need to be subjected to something like President Obama’s proposed Health Insurance Rate Authority, which would be run by the same U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that already loses $60 billion of taxpayer money to Medicare fraud each year? (Not that I want to give the Obama administration any ideas.)



In all, the combined profits of the 14 largest American health insurers (the ones who crack the Fortune 1000) are $8.7 billion. That’s less than 0.4 percent, or 1/250th, of overall U.S. health-care costs, which are $2.5 trillion.



Anyone but an ideologue could plainly see that insurance profits aren’t the problem. The problem is having a health-care system with too many middlemen (government or otherwise); too little competition and choice; and too little opportunity for Americans to control their own health-care dollars, shop for value, or even see prices.



If you can’t identify the problem, you aren’t likely to stumble upon the solution. Maybe that’s why the Congressional Budget Office says that, under Obamacare, which would cost $2.5 trillion in its real first decade (2014 to 2023), the average family’s insurance premiums in the individual market would increase by $2,100 in relation to current law — while under the House Republican health bill, which would cost $61 billion (just 2 percent as much as Obamacare), the average premiums would be reduced by 5 to 8 percent.



President Obama likes to say that the Republicans don’t have any ideas, but the House GOP bill would clearly make the American health-care system better. The small bill would make it better still. Obamacare would raise nationwide health costs, siphon billions out of barely solvent Medicare and spend them elsewhere, cut Medicare Advantage benefits by an average of $21,000 per beneficiary in its real first decade, politicize medicine, reduce liberty, raise taxes, cost jobs, and inevitably lead to rationed care. In an Olympic competition between the GOP plan, the small bill, and Obamacare, the status quo would clearly merit the bronze.



In truth, the judges — the American people — disqualified Obamacare some time ago. But here comes President Obama, skating back onto the ice to the cheers of the far Left and the amazement of everyone else, seemingly as oblivious to the judges’ verdict as he is to the true causes of American health-care inflation and thus to the solutions that would constitute real reform.

Obama's War: U.S. boosting arm sales to both India and Pakistan

The United States is sharply expanding its weapons sales to both India and Pakistan in a apparent bid to gain influence in both South Asian countries while "creating new opportunities for American defense firms," a report in a major US newspaper said Thursday.

The report appeared in The Wall Street Journal as foreign secretaries of the two South Asian nations met in New Delhi to ease tensions in the sub-continent.

"The U.S. has sought to remain neutral in the thorny relationship between the nuclear-armed neighbors," the Journal said, while pointing out that Washington hasn't been shy about pursuing weapons deals in the region.

The US has made billions of dollars in weapons deals with India, which is in the midst of a five-year, $50 billion push to modernize its military, it said.

At the same time, according to the newspaper, American military aid to Pakistan stands to nearly double next year, allowing Islamabad to acquire more U.S.-made helicopters, night-vision goggles and other military equipment. "The aid has made it easier for Pakistan to ramp up its fight against militants on the Afghan border, as the U.S. tries to convince Islamabad that its biggest security threat is within the country, not in India," the dispatch said.

During a late January trip to Islamabad, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. would for the first time give Pakistan a dozen surveillance drones.
"But India and Pakistan have each been irked when the U.S. made big-ticket weapons sales or transfers to the other," the newspaper said. India lobbied against recent U.S. legislation giving Pakistan billions of dollars in new nonmilitary aid; the measure passed.

A top Pakistani diplomat warned last week that a two-year-old civilian nuclear deal between the U.S. and India could threaten Pakistan's national security by making it easier for India to covertly build more nuclear weapons.
Washington's relationships with the two nations are very different, the Journal said, noting: "India, which is wealthier and larger than its neighbor, pays for weapons purchases with its own funds".

"Pakistan, by contrast, uses American grants to fund most of its arms purchases. A new US counterinsurgency assistance fund for Pakistan is slated to increase from $700 million in fiscal year 2010 to $1.2 billion in fiscal year 2011.

"We do straight commercial deals with India, while Pakistan effectively uses the money we give them to buy our equipment," the Journal said citing a US official who works with the two countries.

Paul Ryan to Attend Health Care Summit

Taken from The Weekly Standard·
BY John McCormack

Here's the about-to-be-unveiled list of House Republicans attending the "health care summit" tomorrow; the four additional picks are Ryan, Roskam, Blackburn, and Boustany:

* Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH)
* Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA)
* Energy & Commerce Committee Ranking Republican Joe Barton (R-TX)
* Ways & Means Committee Ranking Republican Dave Camp (R-MI)
* Education & Labor Committee Ranking Republican John Kline (R-MN)
* Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)
* Dr. Charles Boustany (R-LA)
* Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL)
* Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)

The Democrats are probably salivating at the chance to contrast their plan with Ryan's plan, which they say would abolish Medicare. To which Republicans should say: bring it on.

Ryan can ably explain the differences between his plan and Obama's plan. Unlike Obamacare, Ryan's plan actually wouldn't cut benefits for anyone over the age of 55. It won't be hard for him to explain why his free-market approach to reducing costs is superior toObama's Medicare rationing scheme . And, of course, Ryan's plan is just his own personal proposal. The official GOP plan is a more modest, incrementalist approach to reforming health care.

Most Decorated Modern War Hero Colonel Robert Howard Laid to Rest

As a young boy Audie Murphy was my hero. After reading his book and seeing the movie by the same name I wrote him a letter. He returned my writing with one of his own personally signed in ink pen. I received two personal letters from Mr. Murphy before his tragic death in an California plane crash.

Going to Vietnam I felt was my duty as an American,Audie was my roll model. I served in the 5th Special Forces Group, RVN working in the Central Highlands with a SOG group called CCC (Command and Control Central) operating a "Hatchet" team out of Kontum for a period of time. After awhile I moved on to the Pleiku Mike Force, another special operations outfit within Special Forces, spending 33 months all tolled in Southeast Asia.

I knew (then)Sargent Bob Howard. We operated within the same command together out of the same team house. He was undoubtedly one of the most well known and experienced counter insurgents in the woods. The N.V.A. had a reward on his head for his capture or kill. Mostly they wanted him alive as a trophy. He came close many times that I know of, but was never taken. Our AO (area of operation) was Laos and Cambodia.

Although we were not personal friends, the few times we had any direct contact during infiltration or in passing the time in the team house, I remember his genuineness. He was a soldiers soldier, just like Audie Murphy. He was the guy you wanted to be in the woods with.

I never expected nor do I think Col. Howard expected he would become the most decorated soldier of the Vietnam War. Like Audie Murphy, it wasn't about the medals, as it is with some high ranking officials who are all about them.
To Bob and Audie it was about duty, honor, and his fellow soldiers. It was about knowing he had the ability to do the job. Bob was a professional, one of the finest I have ever known. Once again Colonel Howard RIP
Col Bob Howard

He was everything you hear about him and more.

A short tribute to him below was posted in a Washington paper.

On Monday’s NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams updated viewers on possibly the most decorated American war hero of the modern era, Colonel Robert Howard, as the Vietnam War veteran was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetary. Williams had taken a moment on his show in December to commemorate his passing. On Monday, Williams recounted:

Robert Howard was laid to rest today at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Bob was a recipient of the Medal of Honor. He died back in December. He was the most heavily decorated veteran of the Vietnam War. He was wounded 14 times over 54 months of combat. He received eight Purple Hearts, four Bronze Stars, nominated for the Medal of Honor three separate times. Twenty of his fellow Medal of Honor recipients were there today to see their old friend off. The American flag was presented to his son Robert Jr. Bob Howard was 70 years old.

The Official Boneyard

Boneyard

Dubbed The Boneyard, but officially known as the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) facility, this sprawling US airbase is reputed to be the world's largest military aircraft cemetery.

Spread across the huge 2,600 acre site, equivalent in size to 1,430 football pitches, is a collection of over 4,000 retired aircraft including nearly every plane the US armed forces have flown since World War II.

Now, for the first time, a series of high resolution satellite images of the four square mile-site have been released by Google Earth. They show in incredible detail the full range of aircraft found at the site.

Among the aircraft are B-52 Cold War-era bombers that were retired in the 1990s under the the terms of the SALT disarmament treaties signed between the US and the Soviet Union.

Also, on show are dozens of F-14 fighter planes which were retired from the US Navy in 2006 and featured in the Hollywood movie, Top Gun. The Boneyard has also featured in a series of films, the most recent being Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Located in Tucson, Arizona, on the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, the facility was first set up shortly after World War II. It was chosen for its high altitude and arid conditions, that mean the aircraft can be left outdoors without deteriorating too quickly.Boneyard

How to cut the budget

Taken from American Thinker

By Christopher Chantrill
This week the Tea Party conservatives launched their "Contract from America." And a group of conservative luminaries released the "Mount Vernon Statement." The former proposes to cut excessive spending, but doesn't say what, and the second is a noble expression of soaring generalities.

If you wonder why bold conservative reformers are so timid, you need only to step over to usgovernmentspending.com and check out the gory details.

United States Federal State and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2010

Pensions: $0.99 trillion
Health Care: $1.09 trillion
Education: $1.04 trillion
Defense: $0.90 trillion
Welfare: $0.75 trillion
Protection: $0.35 trillion
Transportation: $0.27 trillion
General Government: $0.13 trillion
Other Spending: $0.58 trillion
Interest: $0.31 trillion
Total Spending: $6.50 trillion


These numbers tell us that when you talk about cutting excessive government spending, you had better be talking about the big four: Pensions (including Social Security and government employee pensions), Health Care, Education, and Welfare.

The government has utterly failed at these major programs. That's because of two inescapable facts of government: It always promises more than it can deliver, and it is always more interested in rewarding its supporters than in actually delivering a product. Business is different. It has to deliver the product before it pays its wages, and it has to deliver on its promises or politicians will know the reason why.

In the end, we will have to take these programs away from government. They are too important to fail.

But is it really possible to do all these social programs without government? What will happen to Grannie? What will happen to the poor? Don't we care about kids?

Let's think about how this is possible, just between you and me. Let's call it the Back-Pocket Manifesto. Liberals, go away and watch Keith Olbermann for a while.

Social Security. In Chile, they have replaced most of their government pension plan with a true savings plan. It is heavily regulated, but it delivers such high returns to Chileans that many of them retire early. It is obvious that Fidelity and Vanguard could scale up to administer a national program of worker savings for the U.S. in very short order.

Education. We know that homeschooling works. We know that school choice works. But there's more. In the third world, James Tooley shows in The Beautiful Tree that unregulated, off-the-books, private, fee-paying schools for the poor are outperforming government schools. To replace government schooling fully, we will need to put teenagers to work. According to Harriet Sergeant, we could ask Father Parkes, president of Cristo Rey, a Catholic parochial school in East Harlem, how that works. His students work one day a week on Wall Street.

From the age of 14, they join a team of five pupils, each performing clerical work one day a week. They know their salary pays "a big chunk" of their education. As one young man said, "They treat me like an adult."

Child sweat-shop workers back in 1913 thought the same. They hated the way they were treated at school.

Welfare. We already know that welfare can be reformed. We did it fourteen years ago. If we've forgotten, we can always go back to the ABCDEFG method used by social workers in the 19th century to get discouraged workers back to work. Then we'd have money for people in genuine need.

Health Care. This is the hardest nut to crack. Let's pose the issue in its starkest terms. Suppose we didn't have government-provided health insurance: What then? We'd still have modern life expectancy due to clean water, sewage disposal, garbage pickup, vaccination, asepsis, neonatal care, and antibiotics. There would still be Wal-Mart Care, which costs about 80 percent less than a regular doctor visit. People would be a lot more careful about carrying catastrophic health coverage. Maybe U.S. health care would look a lot like Singapore's, with medical savings accounts and prices about one-third of U.S. rates. Need a knee replacement? That's $12,000 to $14,000, about the price of a good used car.

But the real reason to dismantle the welfare state is a moral one. The only moral way to help the afflicted and relieve the poor is with personal action. Simply writing a check, whether to the government or to a charity, is not enough. Herbert Spencer wrote in "The Proper Sphere of Government" of an analogy between established religion and established charity. "The form will always be substituted for the reality" in religion and in charity. "The payment of [taxes] will supplant the exercise of real benevolence, and a fulfillment of the legal form will supersede the exercise of the moral duty."

I'm not suggesting here that we should immediately throw all our beloved national welfare-state programs on the bonfire of the liberal vanities. I'm only pointing out that we could.

But when the day comes, and the liberal welfare state hits the wall, there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. The end of the world is here, the apologists will wail.

No it isn't, well-informed conservatives will say, hauling out our Back-Pocket Manifestos. It says here that there are alternatives to the liberal government programs, and they work every time they are tried.

There is a problem, we'll admit. There won't be many government jobs for liberals. That would be the end of the world as they know it.

Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/how_to_cut_the_budget.html at February 23, 2010 - 07:49:08 AM CST

A small step, very small step toward equal rights from Saudi Arabia

Saudi women lawyers may get court access

Saudi Arabia could soon allow women lawyers to appear in court, though apparently only representing other women, the country’s justice minister said in comments published on Sunday.
Justice Minister Mohammed al-Issa said the ministry is drafting new rules to permit female lawyers to argue family cases, which could be passed soon, Saudi newspapers reported. The women would be able to represent women in marriage, divorce, custody and other family cases, the newspapers said.
Female lawyers in the kingdom can currently work only inside the women’s sections of law and government offices, where they do not come into contact with men.
All judges in the kingdom are male religious clerics. As part of ongoing judicial reforms, the Saudi government is developing a network of specialised courts, including “personal status” or family courts, where the women lawyers would be allowed to practice.

Summit of Spin

President Obama would no doubt be delighted if Republicans were to accept the basic outlines of the Democratic health-care proposal: new regulations on insurers, a mandate that everyone buy insurance, and subsidies to help them do so. All the evidence of the last year suggests that this type of bipartisanship — a Republican surrender — is the only kind in which he is interested. Since Obama knows full well that no such deal is possible, the real purpose of his health-care summit is political. He must think that the Democratic proposal will look better in comparison to Republican ideas. He wants to make Democratic efforts to push through their bills seem like a reasonable response to the unreasonableness of Republicans.

Republicans, for their part, understand perfectly well that Obama is not going to be bargaining in good faith. But they think that the public will give him the benefit of the doubt, so they will attend the summit. There they should do what they can to frustrate the president’s design.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ADVERTISEMENT

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

They should keep the focus on the defects of the Democrats’ proposals. Thus they should resist two temptations. The first is to dwell overlong on the advantages of their own free-market plans. When the president criticizes Republicans’ ideas, they should defend those ideas but move quickly back to the subject at hand. Building support for Republican reforms is a long-term project that requires the defeat of Obamacare in this legislative session.

The second temptation is to complain about how Democrats have shut Republicans out of the legislative process. We doubt that most people much care about this issue. Republicans should talk about procedural issues only to highlight the Democratic legislation’s substantive defects: for example, its indefensible backroom deals. President Obama has refused to take responsibility for those deals, but congressional Democratic leaders cannot get off the hook. Republicans should ask them how it can be justified to exempt Floridians from Medicare Advantage cuts, or to exempt union health-care plans from new taxes.

They should note that the legislation increases entitlement spending at a time when such spending already threatens to bankrupt our government; that it makes it more expensive to employ workers at a time when the long-term health of the labor market is already widely questioned; and that it will cause many Americans to lose their current health-care arrangements whether or not they want to.

The president is glib. Congressional Republicans are not always as well-versed on health-care issues as they should be. Still, Republicans should not be too nervous going into the summit. Can they win this health-care debate? They already have been winning the larger one.

Teaming up with the Democrats?

From Todays American Thinker
By Randall Hoven
Leave it to third-string, has-been quarterbacks of the Republican Party to throw an interception at the precise moment conservatives are about to turn the game around. What is wrong with people like former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former Senator Alan Simpson and Senator Orrin Hatch? I am sorely tempted to use one of those phrases made famous by Rahm Emanuel.

One would get the impression that Republicans simply sit back and say "no" to all the noble, but slightly flawed, ideas proposed by Democrats. One would think that Republicans never have ideas, but that coming to a table with Democrats might inspire them.

Newt Gingrich wants to team up with Democrats on health care. Let's see. President Nixon offered comprehensive national health care proposals in 1971 and 1974. Ted Kennedy's response to the 1971 proposal? "It's really a partnership between the [Nixon] administration and the insurance companies." It died in the Democrat-led Congress.

As for the 1974 proposal, UAW President Leonard Woodcock said at the time,

"The American people have shown repeatedly through polls that they insist health care has to be a matter of right. The only way that can be done is through a universal system. And compromises that throw away universality are just unacceptable. We prefer to see nothing come out of this congress than that kind of compromise."


Get it, Newt? "Universality" or nothing. No compromise. Since 1971.

For a brief spell in the latter 1990s, Republicans controlled Congress. And sure enough, they proposed and even passed real Medicare reform. As reported in The Wall Street Journal,

"The solution is to change Medicare into a defined-contribution health care model much like the insurance system that covers nine million federal employees and family members. Instead of directly paying for all medical charges, Medicare should pay seniors to help them buy modern medical insurance, including drug coverage, on the private market. This was the idea behind the Republican reform that passed Congress before Bill Clinton vetoed it in 1995."


President Clinton also came up with the idea of a bipartisan commission to fix Medicare, the Breaux Commission. That commission came up with a recommendation similar to the Republican proposal. Clinton killed that, too.

So far, that is four serious Republican or bipartisan proposals over three decades to address rising health care costs and Medicare problems. All four were killed by Democrats.

But there's more. Paul Ryan (R-WI) introduced The Patients' Choice Act in the House of Representatives once in 2007 and twice in 2008. Jim DeMint (R-SC) proposed The Health Freedom Act in the Senate. All killed by the majority Democrats.

President Bush tried to throttle back Medicare spending and he was excoriated for it. Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) said,

"This administration ought to know that five years' worth of Medicare and Medicaid cuts totaling $200 billion are dead on arrival with me and with most of the Congress,"


That would be the same Max Baucus who proposed over $400 billion in Medicare cuts in 2009.

If you don't think a single-payer, government-run plan is the real goal of Democrats, look at this video or others like it on YouTube. The reality is pretty simple: there is a big enough group of Democrats in Congress to stop any health reform that does not move us closer to single-payer. There is no compromise with that. As Ezra Klein said in that video, "At some point you have to win."

Obama thought he'd won. He thought the time was ripe. He was hoping to ram a public option through by August 2009. It was buried in thousands of pages that no one would read. No debate with Republicans. Here is exactly what Obama said in September 2009.

"Every debate at some point comes to an end. At some point, it's time to decide. At some point, it's time to act. Ohio, it's time to act and get this thing done."


But suddenly, after Democrat losses in special elections in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, it's time for Republicans to discuss, debate and compromise? Newt thinks so.

If Obama and the Democrats want some ideas on health reform, especially from Republicans, let them do some reading up and then get back to us. Here is my suggested reading list.

* The Patients' Choice Act, sponsored by Paul Ryan in the House and Tom Coburn (R-OK) in the Senate.
* The Health Care Freedom Plan, sponsored by Senator Jim DeMint.
* Budget options for health care, prepared by the Congressional Budget Office and containing 115 options, each scored for cost and coverage.
* "Eight things we can do to improve health care without adding to the deficit," an essay by John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods.


But let me save you some time, Republicans. Democrats know all that and they don't care. They don't want ideas. They especially don't want your ideas. They want one of two things: single-payer, or a world of hurt they can blame on you.

The latest Republican re-tread is retired senator Alan Simpson, whom Obama calls "a flinty Wyoming truth-teller." Simpson is co-chair of Obama's new National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. And the good news is that everything, including tax increases, is on the table. The flinty truth-teller had this to say,

"This is about your children. This is about the future of America. This country is going to go to the bowwows unless we deal with the entitlements and Social Security and Medicare."


Really? Why we had no idea, Alan. You mean there is a budget problem, and entitlements are a big part of it? Your folksy-flinty "bowwows" reference really brings it home to us bitter, benighted folks in fly-over country who aren't good at math but like to pet dogs. It's too bad no one has thought of tackling entitlements before.

Oh wait. President Bush did try to reduce Medicare costs. See above. He also tried to do something about Social Security in the last decade, twice in fact. Like President Clinton before him, he established a 16-member bipartisan commission "to study and report specific recommendations to preserve Social Security for seniors while building wealth for younger Americans" in 2001. He also proposed SS reform in his 2005 State of the Union address.

How did that work out?

"[A]s expected, Democratic lawmakers prevented a vote on the matter, essentially ending the debate for the year. According to a report form the Associated Press, "Sen. Rick Santorum, (R-PA), said every attempt to reach across party lines on Social Security had ‘met with a partisan obstructionism that is as rock-solid as the marble before me on the rostrum' in the Senate chamber."


I have a reading list to recommend to Alan Simpson and the rest of his commission: The Roadmap for America's Future. (My write-up is here.)

The Roadmap is proposed legislation, scored by the Congressional Budget Office, and sponsored by a sitting congressman, Paul Ryan. (Yes, the same Paul Ryan who proposed The Patients' Choice Act.) If Democrats want to debate with Republicans on how to cut deficits and reform entitlements, they have (1) a written proposal to work from, and (2) a forum for debate called Congress. They could, for example, go so far as to allow Ryan's bill to go to committee.

I guess a brand new commission outside of Congress is supposed to be better, though. (As a side note, the Constitution, Article I, Section 7, says, "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.")

Gingrich and Simpson are not the only ones. Sitting Senator Orrin Hatch thinks the Tea Party needs to work with the Republican Party.

"If we fractionalize the Republican Party, we are going to see more liberals elected."


Here is how cause and effect works, Senator. Republicans went from 55 Senate seats in 2005, to 40 after the 2008 election. The Tea Party movement started in 2009.

The Republican implosion led to the Tea Party; not the other way around.

I just went to the Library of Congress to see what legislation Senator Hatch sponsored. Here were the first three to show up.

* S. 334. A resolution designating Thursday, November 19, 2009, as "Feed America Day." (Maybe Friday, Nov. 20, was "Obesity Awareness Day.")
* S. 338. A resolution designating November 14, 2009, as "National Reading Education Assistance Dogs Day."
* S. 215. A bill to authorize the Boy Scouts of America to exchange certain land in the State of Utah acquired under the Recreation and Public Purposes Act.


That is what a senior Republican Senator was doing in 2009 while the Tea Party movement was stopping Obamacare and Cap & Trade.

Don't lead. Don't follow. Just get out of the way.

Randall Hoven can be contacted at randall.hoven@gmail.com or via his web site, randallhoven.com.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/teaming_up_with_the_democrats.html at February 22, 2010 - 07:43:50 AM CST

Some Cool PIX

More Unique Photos - The most amazing bloopers are here

Up Next! On Live TV! Battle Over ... Health Care?

From Today's New York Times.
A slanted view of how Obama still doesn't get the message.(blogger)

February 21, 20
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — When he jousts with Congressional Republicans over health care policy during a televised meeting on Thursday, President Obama will seek to portray his adversaries as sharing many of the broad goals of his legislation and also strive to unify Congressional Democrats to press ahead and adopt a bill, senior White House officials and leading Democrats say.

But Mr. Obama, top White House advisers and Congressional leaders of both parties are under no illusion that the meeting will resolve more than a half-century of disagreements over health care policy. Instead, Democrats say, they hope the event will create a climate that helps revive their legislation in Congress and prove to the American public that they are willing to hear out Republicans and even adopt their ideas.

“We may not be able to resolve all the disagreements, but we ought to be able to thrash out areas of broad agreement,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser. “The fact is, there are broad areas of agreement on elements of this, and hopefully that will become apparent here.”

Mr. Axelrod added, “Sitting side by side working through these issues is better than not sitting side by side and dealing with distortions.”

Republican leaders have not yet committed to attending the session and have said they doubt the sincerity of Mr. Obama’s bipartisan overtures, given his refusal to discard the Democrats’ legislation and start over. But senior Republican aides said that party leaders planned to participate and that a chief goal would be to portray the president as defying the will of the American people if he continues pushing for an expansive and expensive bill.

The meeting is fraught with risk, and also offers potential rewards, for each side.

White House officials said that by Monday they would unveil Mr. Obama’s own comprehensive proposal, focused on uniting Democrats who spent much of the past year deeply divided on many points. Administration officials and Congressional Democrats have expressed hopes that the meeting will help generate support for a plan to attach health care legislation to a budget bill, which would prevent a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Even some senior White House officials are divided about whether a comprehensive bill is still viable and privately voice uncertainty about the outcome of the meeting.

Many Democrats in Congress said they doubted that it was feasible to pass a major health care bill with a parliamentary tool called reconciliation, which is used to speed adoption of budget and tax legislation. Reconciliation requires only 51 votes for passage in the Senate, but entails procedural and political risks.

“If we took a vote now, we would not have 51 votes for that approach,” said a Senate Democratic aide. “The president would have to do a major sales job. He is the only person who has the political capital to do it. But his focusing on health care means that our efforts to focus on jobs are likely to be drowned out.”

Mr. Obama and his fellow Democrats are also pursuing a parallel political strategy: to use the televised event to put Republicans and their ideas on display. It is a gamble that Americans will actually watch an in-the-weeds discussion of health care policy and conclude either that Republicans are unwilling to negotiate or that their policy ideas — emphasizing tax incentives and state innovations — will not work.

“This is now the crucial hour for health reform,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. “This is the make-or-break time, and the public is going to get to see it on TV. The impressions people get on Feb. 25 can be impressions that people take into the voting booth in November, so they can say, ‘Who put us first? Who said it was more important to do what was right for America, rather than just bicker?’ ”

Even as Republicans have denounced the meeting as “political theater,” they, too, sense an opportunity.

Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican whip, said in an interview that he believed Republicans ought to attend — not to negotiate with the president, but to use the session to make the case to the American people that the Democrats’ bill ought to be thrown out.

“Republicans, I think, are up to the task of explaining why this bill is not for America,” Mr. Cantor said. “We will be there to present a better way.”

Some of the initial jockeying at the meeting is likely to be over the basic question of what goals policymakers should focus on.

Mr. Obama has said he will challenge Republicans to show how their proposals would provide insurance to more than 30 million Americans over 10 years, which is what the Democrats’ bills are projected to do.

But Republicans have argued for months that broadly expanding coverage is not a realistic goal, given the weak economy, and that lawmakers should focus on reducing health care costs.

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said Americans did not want an expensive bill. “Anyone who thinks they want a bill that raises a half-trillion in new taxes and slashes Medicare for our seniors simply isn’t listening,” Mr. McConnell said in a statement on Saturday.

Before the policy debate, however, come the practical arrangements. White House officials and Congressional Republicans are negotiating details of the meeting, including seating charts, who will speak and in what order, the number of staff members who can attend and the positioning of television cameras.

However the meeting plays out, Mr. Obama and his team will still face a formidable challenge in trying to muster the needed votes. The House adopted its health care bill on Nov. 7 on a vote of 220 to 215, with one Republican, Representative Anh Cao of Louisiana, in favor.

But since then, one Democratic supporter (John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania) has died, another (Robert Wexler of Florida) has resigned and Mr. Cao has said he would vote against the bill, meaning some Democrats who opposed the measure in November would need to switch sides to pass it.

Mr. Obama, in his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday, urged Congressional leaders to attend the meeting in good faith.

“I don’t want to see this meeting turn into political theater, with each side simply reciting talking points and trying to score political points,” he said. “Instead, I ask members of both parties to seek common ground in an effort to solve a problem that’s been with us for generations.”

Some Democrats expressed skepticism. “There’s hope for a breakthrough here, but the odds of that are not very good,” said a top Democratic aide who has worked for years on health care. “This is a media event.”

Democratic Congressional leaders are far less interested than the White House in playing nice with Republicans and instead are looking to the president to twist the arms of rank-and-file Democrats to produce the needed votes.

“Once we get a bill,” a Senate Democratic leadership aide said, “we are still going to need a heck of a lot of help from the administration to help us get a bill through the House and Senate.”

Robert Pear contributed reporting.

If Dems are finishing the Health Care bill, why have a summit?

I have been following the announcement of an Republican summit meeting between President Obama on February 25 with much interest and anxiety. Obama has used this tactic of spreading what I call "squeezers" previously since becoming President. And more so Harry Reid has done this often when things are not going his way. This is the one by which the President just can't let go of something until he feels he has gotten the last hand. Or Reid is losing lots of ground on an issue and will lie to try and save face.

Fortunately neither has been very successful in using it. Mostly the outcome has been one where the POTUS gets to make an announcement to the press that he has resolved a problem and they scurry around decreeing success, thus allowing the POTUS to continue in his delusion. While in reality the issue at hand remains unresolved or becomes worse as a result of Obama's mucilaginous insistence on belaboring the point or Reids failure as Senate Boss.

The rumor mills are churning out much minutia concerning continuing closed door meetings between Democrats as the day of summit draws nearer. They are meant to interpolate an illusion that these meetings are drawing the Dems closer and closer to a two house deal on health care.

The purpose of the ongoing meetings has not been revealed. But seeing as it is strictly Democrats who are attending them, they give the appearance of being very sinister.

If there is truly an effort on the administrations part to seek bipartisan participation like the President has announced there is, why hold these meetings?
More so why allow the rumors to circulate?

Past White House reaction to unsanctioned rumors unfavorable to the President has been met with swift counter-response. Usually by an immediate announcement of some sort of retaliation towards the perpetrator if discovered. Or if unknown already a disclaimer statement by a top official spokesman, declaring just the opposite, be it a lie or not in context.

The fact that no one from the White House is countering these rumors leads me to believe that there really is no consensus among the Houses or the Dems at all. It is all hog wash and Harry Reid is promoting this tactic to try and force the Democrats into accepting a health bill by embarrassing them publicly ahead of time if they go forth and don't support their own bill. With Republican demand to scrap the present bills on the table Reid believes that moderate Republicans will turn in favor of some sort of legislation, wholly approved by Democrats, and sway the Democrats not to abandon the work he has done. He is wrong.

Or perhaps Reid figures he can hold his own party members from abandoning the current bills by declaring that there is still room for deals before the meeting with Republicans so they had better get on board now before the 25th to get their piece of pie.

In any case it is time once again to pressure your local representative be they Democrat or Republican to scrap what presently is written in both houses. If they even want to be considered for having the opportunity to remain as an elected official they must not back this last minute push to get something passed.

The article below sort of relates the same message that there is really no general consensus at present between the Dems for a passage even with 51 votes which by the way may be unconstitutional


By Jeffrey Young

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) doesn't much like the fact that Democrats continue to piece together an agreement on healthcare reform in advance of a bipartisan summit next week — and mocks their inability to do so successfully.

Keying off reports that President Barack Obama plans to present a unified Democratic healthcare plan prior to the Feb. 25 summit and reports that congressional Democrats aren't quite sure what will be in it, Boehner's office issued a statement to reporters Thursday once again calling on the White House and congressional Democrats to start from scratch on healthcare reform.

RELATED ARTICLES

* White House reportedly will have health plan ready Monday
* Tips for healthcare summit

"We’re one week away from the ‘bipartisan’ White House health care summit, and Washington Democrats are scrambling to salvage their massive — and quite partisan — government takeover of health care," the statement says. "But for all that, Democrats may not even have a backroom deal ready by the summit despite promises to post it online in advance.

"We don’t need a six-hour infomercial for the latest Democratic backroom deal. We need to start over on real health care reforms to lower costs. That’s what the American people want, and what they deserve."

After Obama announced his plan for the summit, GOP leaders seemed to endorse the idea but have since questioned the White House's motives amid indications that House and Senate Democrats continue to work with the White House on merging the bills that passed both chambers and that the White House is working on its own set of proposals based on that legislation. So far, the only Republican to publicly announce that he'll show up for the summit has been Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee ranking member Mike Enzi (Wyo.).