The Skinny on Obama’s Supposedly ‘Watershed’ Health Care Meeting

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  May 13th at 11:15 AM  | 

The Obama administration and its mouthpieces have spent a great deal of breath, airtime, and ink trying to tell America that, by the mere act of holding a press conference on heath care, President Obama has revolutionized America and proven he is a man of his word who “really intends to keep his campaign promises.” Despite all the self-congratulations and arrogant talk about the historicity | Read More »

Who Should Have the Final Say About Your Medical Care: Your Doctor, or Government Bureaucrats?

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 17th at 11:59 PM  | 

Update by Jeff: Perhaps this comment will shine a bit more light on the import of this issue. WHO SHOULD HAVE CONTROL over your medical care: your family doctor, or a bureaucrat you’ve never met whose sole job is to look out for the government’s financial bottom-line? That question, which is the subject of today’s AOL Hot Seat poll, is being debated in court right | Read More »

On This Day of the CIA Memo Release, a Polemic

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 16th at 06:06 PM  | 

The faux outrage over “torture” during the Bush War on Terror (I refer to it as the “Bush” war because, under Obama, we’re apparently replacing the “Global War on Terror” with the “Multiple-Day Standoff on Man-Caused Disasters”) is no more becoming of the left now than it was two, three, or four years ago. Co-opting the word “torture” to include methods far less offensive than | Read More »

What the Tax Day Tea Parties Represent

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 16th at 09:00 AM  | 

On Wednesday, over 200,000 ordinary Americans gathered at nearly 1,000 locations around the country. Fed up with high taxes, increasing debt, and expanding government encroachment into their private lives, they gathered to express their displeasure with the Obama administration’s policies and to rally around conservative ideas to push for a new way forward for America. From the 400 people squeezed onto a tiny grassy plot | Read More »

Of Ezra Klein and other Precocious Children (as well as Nonsequiturs and the Pizza I had this Weekend)

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 14th at 12:07 PM  | 

While I generally adhere to a policy of ignoring idiot college kids (and their close evolutionary relatives, post-graduate young pseudo-intellectuals with Obama-esque delusions of self-importance), this post caught my eye. Yesterday a child named Ezra Klein, who apparently writes for an online magazine called the American Prospect, had this to say about the U.S. Navy’s rescue of Maersk-Alabama captain Richard Philips from the Somali pirates | Read More »

In the Beginning was Obama, and He gave the Gift of Internet; and Before Him there Was no Internet, Whatever Google may Say

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 13th at 06:40 PM  | 

From the Book of Obama, Chapter and Verse 1: In thebeginning was Obama, Worker of light and the Hope of People unhappy with that which had made their Country great. And Obama saw that the world was without Internet, and He knew such a world to be void and formless So he decided to bestow upon the World the gift of Internet And some said | Read More »

The Story of a Successful Rescue (and a Democratic Administration’s Attempt to Claim Credit)

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 12th at 09:10 PM  | 

After four days of floating at sea on a raft shared with four Somali gunmen, Richard Philips took matters into his own hands for a second time. With the small lifeboat in which he was being held captive being towed by the American missile destroyer USS Bainbridge, and Navy Special Warfare (NSWC) snipers on the fantail in position to take their shots at his captors | Read More »

“Cam Sham”: Obama’s Photo Op with Cheering, Camera Wielding Troops 100% Staged

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 12th at 05:06 PM  | 

Isn’t it just a pain in the neck when there’s an alternative media that prevents strict message control by a staged-photo-op of an administration and its willing mouthpieces in the MSM? It’s painless for us, of course; rather, that pain is being felt in the necks of those who want to insist that a bow to a Saudi king isn’t a bow, that an omnibus | Read More »

President Obama: Are You or Are You Not Going to Normandy for the 65th Anniversary of D-Day?

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 8th at 06:30 PM  | 

During his incredibly successful [/snark] trip to Europe last week, President Obama rejected an invitation from French president Nicolas Sarkozy to visit Normandy, France — the site of the 1944 D-Day beach landing. The reason given by the Obama administration? They didn’t want to offend the Germans by having the U.S. president visit the site where over 4,400 allied soldiers died in the operation that | Read More »

Examining Obama’s Afghan Plan, Part III: Growing the Domestic Security Force.

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 7th at 10:00 AM  | 

Author’s note: This is the third installment in a seven-part series analyzing the Obama administration’s strategy for the Afghan front in the War on Terror. The administration’s white paper can be seen here, and previous installments in this series can be seen here. THE SMALL NUMBER OF TRAINED, reliable, and effective Afghan National Security Forces presents a serious holdup in the effort to secure Afghanistan | Read More »

Democrats Delay Release of Report Showing Success of DC Voucher Program Until After Senate Can Vote to Kill It

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 6th at 10:21 PM  | 

“With time running out on the DC experiment, and proof in hand of its success, Obama and Senate Democrats actively prevented the public from learning the truth about this program designed to pull poor minority children from failing schools until they had successfully terminated it.” On Tuesday, March 10, the U.S. Senate voted to terminate the experimental Washington, DC school voucher program, which had been | Read More »

Examining Obama’s Afghan Plan, Part II: A ‘Surge’ in Soldiers and Civilians

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 6th at 11:19 AM  | 

Author’s note: This is the second installment in a seven-part series analyzing the Obama administration’s strategy for the Afghan front in the War on Terror. The administration’s white paper can be seen here, and part one of this series, “Examining Obama’s Afghan Plan: Introduction,” can be seen here. PRESIDENT OBAMA’S IMPENDING ‘SURGE’ in the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan has been public knowledge for | Read More »

Examining Obama’s Afghan Plan: Introduction

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 5th at 01:49 PM  | 

AFTER NEARLY TWO YEARS of campaigning on a platform of hasty withdrawal from Iraq and a refocusing of American efforts on Afghanistan, a country Democrats have spent years referring to as the location of “the real War on Terror,” President Barack Obama has come out with an overview of his administration’s strategy for the region. Unfortunately, as often seems to be the case when Obama | Read More »

Mr. Obama Learns a Foreign Word

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 2nd at 09:04 AM  | 

At the end of his joint press conference yesterday with Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, President Obama stunned the audience by sounding out the word “Spass-seee-boh” — his “first official Russian word” uttered in public. Can’t you just feel the multiculturalism oozing from the White House, and the international feeling toward America warming before your very eyes (even faster than our endangered globe)? “I am also | Read More »

ORWELL-bama Strikes Again

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 1st at 03:40 PM  | 

Lobbyists in the Administration = No Lobbyists Allowed 9,000 Earmarks in a Spending Bill = The First Step Toward Ending Earmarks $2,000,000,000,000.00 in Debt-Growing Wasteful Spending = a Return to Fiscal Responsibility Running Roughshod Over the Minority = True Post-Partisanship We’re all familiar with these (and dozens more) examples of President Obama’s (D-IL) penchant for promising the opposite of what he plans to do, and | Read More »

Embarrassingly Inept Obama Stumbles Over Diplomacy, Protocol Yet Again

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 1st at 12:48 PM  | 

Update: Via Jake Tapper, President Obama’s gift to the Queen was….an iPod? Wow. At least it wasn’t cheesy American region 1 DVDs… This time it was on his visit to Great Britain — or, if you take his word for it, England, which he referred to in lieu of the nation’s proper name in a move that likely incurred the less-than-warm-and-fuzzy feelings in residents of | Read More »

Your Government-Run Health Care Outrage of the Day: 11,000 Colonoscopy Patients at Three VA Clinics May Have Been Exposed to HIV, Hepatitis

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  April 1st at 09:18 AM  | 

Over 11,000 veterans who received routine colonoscopies at three VA health centers are being warned to get blood tests for HIV, hepatitis, and other malignant viral infections in the wake of revelations that government-employed clinic staffers frequently neglected to sterilize the equipment between procedures. Patients at the Veterans Affairs health centers in question — 3,260 in Miami (FL), 1,800 in Augusta (GA), and 6,400 in | Read More »

Kathleen Sebelius (Democrat-Kansas) Has a Tax Problem

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  March 31st at 10:31 PM  | 

Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, the former trial lawyer lobbyist who looked out for the interest group while in the state’s highest office — even though doing so meant preventing decreased costs and increased access to care within her own state’s health care system — has a tax problem. According to this letter from Sebelius to Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA), the chairman | Read More »

Throwing Down the Gauntlet: House GOP Accepts Obama’s Empty Offer to Debate Budget Proposal

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  March 26th at 02:10 PM  | 

Just hours after the House Democratic leadership forced President Obama’s $3,600,000,000,000.00 budget for fiscal year 2010 through the House Budget Committee, the House GOP unveiled their alternative to the president’s astronomical spending bill (the GOP document can be seen here, courtesy of good friend and RS contributor Dan Spencer). President Obama has pulled out all the stops in pushing his multi-trillion-dollar budget, which even USA | Read More »

Can we Dispense with the ‘President Obama Didn’t Use a TelePrompTer Last Night!’ Charade Already?

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  March 25th at 09:07 AM  | 

Yes, he left the old familiar glass-paneled prompters that helped him recall childhood memories he said he would “never forget,” that helped him talk down to attendants at dirt-floored midwestern appearances, and that allowed him to thank himself for a St. Patrick’s Day invitation. But it wasn’t because he didn’t need them, or because he could be trusted to speak on his own to a | Read More »