"Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them." — Thomas Jefferson
US President Barack Obama stormed out of tense debt-limit talks Wednesday with his top Republican foes after declaring he was ready to stake his reelection on the outcome, a Republican aide said.
After Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor proposed to raise the US debt ceiling in more than one catch-all vote, Obama got “heated” and insisted on one comprehensive deal, said the aide, who requested anonymity.
Obama said he would not be “afraid to veto” a short-term approach or “defend it to the American people” and warned that a US debt default would amount to “a tax increase on every American,” said the aide.
Obama said “I have reached the point where I say enough,” and added “I’ve
This isn’t a surprise to anyone who has been playing attention to our child president over the past three years. The Obama administration has been a veritable Mecca for narcissism and incompetence from the time Obama took the oath of office.
Now, for the first time since taking office, Obama is forced to make a decision that entailed personal risk. It isn’t a pretty sight.
CNS News reported:
“President Barack Obama has ended a nearly two hour debt-limit negotiation brusquely, declaring: "Enough is enough" as he rejected Republican demands that he accept a short-term extension of the government's borrowing authority.
Democratic officials and Republican aides familiar with the negotiations say the meeting ended after White House officials had identified more than $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years to reduce the deficit. Pressed by House Republican leader Eric Cantor to accept only months-long debt ceiling increase, Democratic officials say Obama announced: "Enough is enough. We have to be willing to compromise. It shouldn't be about positioning, and politics and I'll see you all tomorrow."
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the closed-door meeting.”
“Amid new warnings and fresh signs of strain, President Barack Obama and congressional leaders are entering a perilous debt-limit endgame. The president, declaring "enough is enough," is demanding that budget negotiators find common ground by week's end even as the Senate's top Republican gained followers for his own last-ditch scheme to avoid a government default.
The continuing impasse was unsettling Wall Street, which up to now had performed as if an increase in the debt ceiling was not in doubt. And the looming Aug. 2 cutoff for action was creating new tensions between the president and Republican leaders.
Moody's Investors Service said Wednesday it will review the government's credit rating, noting there is a small but rising risk that the government will default on its debt. If Moody's were to lower the ratings, the consequences would ripple through the economy, pushing up rates for mortgages, car loans and other debts. A Chinese rating agency, Dagong Global Credit Rating Co., also warned of a possible downgrade.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, addressing lawmakers, warned Wednesday that not increasing the nation's debt ceiling and allowing the nation default on its debt would send "shock waves through the entire financial system."
And in the cauldron of the White House Cabinet Room, Obama and top lawmakers bargained for nearly two hours Wednesday on spending cuts. Obama curtly ended the session when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., urged Obama to accept a short, months long increase in debt instead of one that would last through next year's presidential election.
"Enough is enough. I'll see you all tomorrow," Obama said, rising from the negotiating table and leaving the room, according to several officials familiar with the session.
The United States hit its current $14.3 trillion debt ceiling in May and the Obama administration says the government will default on its obligations if the debt limit is not increased by Aug. 2. For a new debt ceiling to last to the end of 2012 would require raising it by about $2.4 trillion.
Republicans, in control of the House of Representatives in part because of the support of tea party activists, say they will not vote to raise the limit if Obama doesn't agree to at least an equal amount of deficit reductions over 10 years.
Obama and the top eight House and Senate leaders met for the fourth time in as many days Wednesday, and, despite the tense ending, agreed to meet again Thursday. Cantor, speaking to reporters after the meeting broke up, said the White House had been lowering the amount of spending cuts it would put on the table, offering less than $1.4 trillion over 10 years, mostly in domestic and defense spending outside of the major benefits programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security”
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the reason the White House has not explained in detail to the American people what might happen if the federal debt ceiling is not raised is because the administration expects the increase to occur, adding that the public does not have a lot of time to focus on and understand the issue.
At the White House press briefing on last Wednesday, a reporter asked, “The fact is that the Gallup poll has come out today saying that most of the American people do not want their representatives to raise the debt ceiling. In spite of the fact that the president was on TV last night and talked about certain things that would be at stake, do you feel at all that this administration has not really laid out, in very strong terms, what exactly is at stake for the American people if this debt limit is not raised?”
In answering, Carney said, “I think it’s easy to understand why most Americans don’t have a lot of time to focus on ‘What is a debt ceiling?’ I mean, honestly, did anybody in this room – before they had to cover issues like this – have any idea what a debt ceiling was? Any understanding of the fact that a vote by Congress to increase our ability to borrow was simply a vote to allow the United States of America to pay the bills it incurred in the past?”
According to a Gallup survey, only 22 percent of Americans support raising the debt limit, a fact that Carney dismissed in his comment. Instead, he said that if people only understood what the debt limit was, they would support raising it.
I think every American – certainly a vast majority of Americans – would accept the principle, if asked, that the United States should pay its bills, just like they’re asked to pay their bills,” said Carney.
However, that same Gallup poll found that 51 percent of Americans feared the government would raise the debt limit without cutting federal spending, as opposed to the 32 percent who worried the limit would not be raised.
The debt ceiling is the amount of money the federal government is legally allowed to borrow. Congress must pass legislation and the president must sign it in order to raise the debt ceiling, which is currently set at $14.29 trillion.
A few days ago Obama told us we had to make some sacrifices and “eat our peas.” Perhaps he should begin in his own household by telling Michelle that going out to the opening of a new Shake Shack burger joint on DuPont Circle with her security entourage and ordering a 1,700 calorie meal of a big juicy burger, fries, chocolate shake and a diet coke is not exactly eating her peas. I wonder what the cost of this little excursion cost the taxpayers excluding the twelve dollars or so for the food.
Rick Moran writes in American Thinker:
“Everyone is entitled to a little cheating when it comes to dieting and eating healthy. But for Michelle Obama, who has been lecturing, hectoring, and wagging her finger at America for two years about how fat we are, how unhealthy we eat, and how we torture our children by feeding them snacks and stuff, there should be no vacation from eating right.
If she is going to pull crap like this, then she should shut her mouth and take care of her own:
First lady Michelle Obama ordered a whopper of a meal at the newly opened Washington diner Shake Shack during lunch on Monday.
A Washington Post journalist on the scene confirmed the first lady, who's made a cause out of child nutrition, ordered a ShackBurger, fries, chocolate shake and a Diet Coke while the street and sidewalk in front of the usually-packed Shake Shack were closed by security during her visit.
According to nutritional information on Shake Shack's Web site, the meal amounted to 1,700 calories.
Obama, who launched the "Let's Move" campaign to combat childhood obesity last year, has previously admitted to having an "obsession with French fries," which she says are fine to indulge in occasionally. "It's all about moderation," Obama told reporters.
No, it's not about "moderation" it's about control. FDA rules on restaurant menus, new rules on displaying ingredients, proposed sky high taxes on snacks and sodas - this is an issue of someone else telling you and your children what to eat because they say it's "for your own good."
This may seem like a small insignificant action on Michelle Obama’s part and perhaps it is. But, taken in the context of the entire Obama administration’s tenure it just points out that that like socialism is good for the people, but not for the socials eating peas is good for the people but not for the elite leftists in the White House. I recall another “first lady” who told the people to eat cake and lost her head instead.
It was on this very day in 1789 that Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops storm and dismantled the Bastille, a royal fortress that had come to symbolize the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs. This dramatic action signaled the beginning of the French Revolution, a decade of political turmoil and terror in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and tens of thousands of people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were executed. Is our “Bourbon” first family replicating the conditions leading to the French Revolution?
George Neumayr writes of Obama’s debt in the American Spectator:
“America's debt crisis is due not to under taxation but to overspending, not to "right-wing partisanship" but to bipartisan collusion. Spending profligates who demand "more revenue" on the occasion of an impending debt-lifting deadline are like thieves who turn back to their old victims upon the arrival of new bills.
The conventional wisdom — that opponents of tax increases and big spenders stand equally responsible for the crisis — is false. But even that bogus equivalence is too much for liberals to take; they consider opponents of tax increases wholly responsible for it.
How evil are opponents of tax increases in the eyes of the liberal chattering class? Evil enough for a member of it to compare Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor unfavorably to a murderous king. "To understand Cantor, think Macbeth with all the vaulting ambition and none of the accompanying guilt," writes Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus.
President Obama, meanwhile, plays the innocent bystander who strolls up to a crash he caused and asks to help. "Now is the time to deal with these issues," he said at Monday's press conference. "If not now, when?"
On crises he has ignored or made much worse, Obama never fails to present himself as the expert at solving them. He can add trillions of dollars to the deficit and then blithely cast himself as a deficit hawk, all the while portraying real deficit hawks who warned of the debt crisis as the parties least concerned about it.”
Obama claims he is concerned over the inability of college student’s inability to get government back loans and school lunches paid for by the Department of Education with their cohesive money. He believes more taxes are good to cover the costs of his feel good social programs, programs that he and his Democrat supporters need to retain their power.
As Frederic Bastiat wrote in 1850:
“Present-day writers—especially those of the socialist school of thought—base their various theories upon one common hypothesis: They divide mankind into two parts. People in general—with the exception of the writer himself—form the first group. The writer, all alone, forms the second and most important group. Surely this is the weirdest and most conceited notion that ever entered a human brain!
In fact, these writers on public affairs begin by supposing that people have within themselves no means of discernment; no motivation to action. The writers assume that people are inert matter, passive particles, motionless atoms, at best a kind of vegetation indifferent to its own manner of existence. They assume that people are susceptible to being shaped—by the will and hand of another person—into an infinite variety of forms, more or less symmetrical, artistic, and perfected. Moreover, not one of these writers on governmental affairs hesitates to imagine that he himself—under the title of organizer, discoverer, legislator, or founder—is this will and hand, this universal motivating force, this creative power whose sublime mission is to mold these scattered materials—persons— into a society.
These socialist writers look upon people in the same manner that the gardener views his trees. Just as the gardener capriciously shapes the trees into pyramids, parasols, cubes, vases, fans, and other forms, just so does the socialist writer whimsically shape human beings into groups, series, centers, sub-centers, honeycombs, labor-corps, and other variations. And just as the gardener needs axes, pruning hooks, saws, and shears to shape his trees, just so does the socialist writer need the force that he can find only in law to shape human beings. For this purpose, he devises tariff laws, tax laws, relief laws, and school laws.”
Obama is a petulant socialist bordering on Marxist ideology who will lie, obfuscate and tell antidotal tales to drive home his socialist agenda. He preaches hope and change, but he really hopes we will change to follow his clarion pied piper call. He is a chameleon, who will change his story anytime he wants to make his point. He called the “smartest man ever to occupy the White House” by his useful idiots in the main stream media. Yet, he is totally ignorant of economics and job creation. He believes government can solve all of our problems if given enough time and money — our money. He wants to regulate all aspects of our lives from what we eat to the light bulbs we use. His “green jobs” program is an abject failure. He has never run a business or let alone held a real paying job where he had to report every day at 8:00 am and was subject to layoff or termination for lack of performance.
So what can we expect from such an arrogant, narcissistic person with a messianic complex when he is challenged in is beliefs? When Obama does not have a hand-picked audience of true believers or friendly media and cannot read from his teleprompter he falls apart, displays scorn and turns into petulant child. Compromise is word not in his lexicon. Obama, like all elite intellectual types believes he has all of the answers and challenge him is a sacrilegious act for which you need to be sent to the wood shed for. If he had lived in the Stalinist Soviet Union he would have supported the gulags.
Senator Mitch McConnell has now proposed a plan that complicates Obama's posturing. Let's just give Obama the authority to lift the debt ceiling without having to hash out a compromise, argues McConnell. This is not his "first choice," he says, but at least it would avert a default, saddle Obama with responsibility for raising the debt limit, and spare Republicans from having to accept any tax increases as part of a compromise.
The can of peas that Obama claimed to want on the table and promptly eaten could be kicked down the road by him after all, if he takes McConnell's proposal. This might cause Obama some embarrassment, but, let's face it, that's never stopped him before. According to the press, "senior Democrats" like what they are hearing from McConnell
It looks like the Republicans are doing something right. If Obama is this upset, he knows his back is against the wall and that the majority of Americans are against his position. But, don't bet against this Chicago thug to bring a gun to a knife fight. Obama can and will fight dirty if backed into a weaker bargaining position. It’s time for the Republicans to put on their tactical gear and kick some Democrat butt. They should pass a bill in the House that assures payment of the government's primary obligations (Social Security, military pay, etc.) and send it to the Senate and dare the Democrats and Obama to let the U.S. go into default. Let's hope the GOP does not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory once again. Somebody tie Mitch McConnell up and put him in the closet while Jim DeMint handles things for the party in the Senate.
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