Dick Cheney’s Guantanamo Revelation

By Nick Stone / Drawline Politics

Is President Obama using drones in order to avoid putting new detainees in Guantanamo Bay?

Dick Cheney on Charlie Rose Show Wednesday mentioned a very interesting proposition on the use of drones in this White House.  While mentioning that he does not fundamentally disagree with the Obama administration drone program, he mentioned a key weakness in the program – the inability to detain (capture) targets (enemy combatants) and retrieve them for questioning.

This key point raises a question. Is President Obama purposely avoiding capturing combatants for fear he would have no option but to stash them in Gitmo?

Clearly this alternative would be politically problematic for the president for two reasons.  First, he campaigned on closing Guantanamo but has failed badly in delivering on that promise. Second, he would have no choice but to admit that the Bush administration had  it right on Gitmo in the first place.

That’s the whole point, isn’t it?  Of course nobody loves the optical nightmare of Guantanamo, but what other choice is there? If we are to capture and question our enemies to gather information, it is a keystone in our defense.  Period.

Will the president get his left wing base to swallow their displeasure over drones on the premise that the program will allow the slow closure of Guantanamo through attrition?  Or does he fundamentally disbelieve in the capture and question history of our intelligence gathering services?

Either way, it appears that the president is playing politics with our national security.  I’m glad Dick Cheney put his finger on it.

See and hear the interview by clicking on the link below:
http://drawnlines.com/dick-cheneys-guantanamo-revalation/

State of the Union: Failure

By: Michael Reagan / Townhall Columnist

Our failure in chief gave us his annual blurred vision of America again Tuesday night.

Based on his State of the Union message, Barack Obama’s eyesight is as ideologically impaired as ever.

Despite four years of failure, he still sees only one road America can go down to regain its economic health.

Not down the capitalist road of free enterprise and liberty that made us the richest country in history.

He wants to continue down the socialist road to more federal government -- which means more Obama taxes, more Obama spending, more Obama debt and more Obama government programs to fix problems government programs caused in the first place.

The president and his hallucinating idolaters in the mainstream liberal media think his failed policies and bad ideas will work their magic if only we try them for another four years.

But look at reality. Look at the unemployment rates in 2008 and 2012. Despite trillions of federal spending, they’re essentially the same.

Look at the federal debt in 2008 compared to 2012 -- it’s much worse today. Look at America’s bungled foreign policy.

Look at the middle class. The president keeps boasting about how he’s going to use the federal government to help them. The reality is that the middle class is being devastated by his administration.

Starting Jan. 1, 2013, Americans with jobs have had their disposable incomes cut 2 percent because Social Security taxes were returned to their normal level.

And because of the rules under Obamacare, millions of employees are going to have their hours cut by employers who can’t afford to pay every full-time worker’s health care.

That speech Tuesday night was a national joke. As usual, it was mostly hot air, bad ideas and tired platitudes. It delivered nothing sensible, newsworthy or brave.

What if Obama had turned to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and said, “Hey Harry, how about passing a federal budget this year? I’m tired of funding the government with continuing resolutions.”

What if he had said, “Sorry, my Green friends, you’re living in a dream world. We need the Keystone Pipeline and I’m going to do everything I can to speed up its construction.”

What if Obama had turned to the survivors of deadly gun violence in the audience and said, “I am not going to push for tougher new gun control laws because I know they would have done nothing to save your loved ones from being murdered.”

No chance. Instead, the president stuck to his socialist script and threatened that if Congress doesn’t cooperate with his latest brainstorms, he will get his way by using executive orders.

The people of this country will soon rue the day they voted to re-elect Obama in 2012. At some point they’ll learn that his “progressive” way, the 1930s taxing-and-spending-and-regulating way, is not the answer.

We’re in for four more years of slow growth, high unemployment rates, higher taxes and rising prices. Not to mention more government meddling in every aspect of our lives.

The impaired vision of Obama and his party is wrecking the economy, crippling the ability of our youth to get jobs and causing a decline in respect for America overseas.

My side -- the conservative Republican side -- is out of power. We don’t have the White House and the Senate. The courts rule against us most of the time. And the mainstream media are still in the tank for Obama.

All we can do for now is watch Obama’s Humpty Dumpty America as it falls off the wall and breaks into a million pieces.

At the end of the game, it’ll be up to the Republican Party, the conservatives, to put the country back together. I only hope we can live long enough to do it.

Obama's Gangster Government Operates Above the Law

By: Michael Barone / Townhall Columnist

Presidents' State of the Union addresses are delivered in the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. The classical majesty of this building where laws are made symbolizes the idea that we live under the rule of law.

Unfortunately, the 44th president is running an administration that too often seems to ignore the rule of law.

"We can't wait," Barack Obama took to saying after the Republicans captured a majority in the House and refused to pass laws he wanted. He would act to get what he wanted regardless of law.

One example: his recess appointments in January 2012 of three members of the National Labor Relations Board and the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the NLRB recess appointments were unconstitutional.

The decision, written by Judge David Sentelle, noted that the Constitution speaks of "the recess," not "a recess," and reasoned that it could only be referring to the recess between annual sessions of Congress.

Obama, like many presidents before him, interpreted the phrase as referring to any recess during which Congress is not in session. But he went one step further.

When Harry Reid became Senate majority leader in 2007, he started holding pro forma meetings of the Senate every three days and stating that the Senate was not in recess. George W. Bush, who had made recess appointments before, stopped doing so.

Bush took the view that, since the Constitution says that each branch of Congress makes its own rules, the Senate was in session if the Senate said so. Obama took the view that he would decide whether the Senate was in session. Who cares what the Constitution says?

As Sentelle pointed out, Obama's view would entitle the president to make a recess appointment any time the Senate broke for lunch. "This cannot be the law," the judge wrote.

Critics of his decision argue that under it the recess appointment power would be vanishingly small. But under Obama's view, the Senate's power to advise and consent could effectively vanish.

The Framers contemplated that the Congress would take long recesses (as for many years it did) and that it could take months for senators to return to Washington to act on appointments.

It's plausible that the Framers would have considered recess appointments unnecessary in an era of jet travel. It's not plausible that they would have approved of getting rid of the Senate's power to vote on appointments altogether.

Meanwhile, decisions of the NLRB and the CFPB are in legal limbo, pending a Supreme Court decision. Hundreds of thousands of people and are affected and millions of dollars are at stake. There is a price for not observing the rule of law.

There are other examples. For several years, the Obama administration has refused to obey a law requiring the president's budget to be submitted on a certain date. As Budget Director, Treasury nominee Jack Lew refused to obey the law requiring him to issue a report in response to the trustees' report on Medicare.

During the 2012 campaign, the Pentagon told defense contractors not to inform employees that they may be laid off if the sequester took effect as required by the WARN Act.

They were even told that the government would pay any fines for not complying. What law authorizes that?

Similarly, Health and Human Services has stated that the federal government can fund health insurance exchanges run by the feds for states that refuse to create their own exchanges. But nowhere does the Democrats' hastily crafted Obamacare legislation say that.

In spring 2009, we got our first glimmers of this modus operandi. In arranging the Chrysler bankruptcy, administration officials brushed aside the rights of secured creditors in order to pay off the United Auto Workers.

University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel pointed out that this violated the standard rules of bankruptcy law established, interestingly, during the New Deal.

"We have just seen an episode of gangster government," I wrote at the time. "It is likely to be a continuing series."

It looks like that's one prediction I got right. This president, like all his predecessors since Woodrow Wilson started delivering these speeches in person, looks magnificent in the temple where laws are made. But he doesn't seem to consider himself bound by them.

Heritage’s DeMint: Nation Can’t Afford Obama’s ‘Wish List’

By Todd Beamon and Kathleen Walter / Newsmax

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In his first Newsmax TV interview since leaving Congress to lead the Heritage Foundation, former Sen. Jim DeMint said that Americans are smart enough to know that President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech was nothing more “than a wish list that we can’t afford and that the president can’t get done.”

“He talked about a lot of wonderful things that we’d love to do as a country — improve education and clean up the blighted areas, create opportunity — but they can’t do that from Washington,” the former South Carolina Republican tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview. “There’s no evidence we ever could, and we can’t afford it.

“The president continues to think a central-planning concept is what makes America work — and we know it doesn’t,” DeMint adds. “You can’t do this from Washington. It’s really a ground-up phenomenon.”

Story continues below the video.  Click on link:

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/demint-nation-obama-wish/2013/02/13/id/490327?s=al&promo_code=12730-1

DeMint, 61, who takes over as the Heritage Foundation’s president in April, was interviewed by Newsmax with Edwin Feulner, a founding trustee and the outgoing president of the influential conservative think tank.

A tea party favorite, DeMint had been on Capitol Hill since 1999, serving six years in the House and seven in the Senate. Last year, Salon.com called him “perhaps the most conservative member of the Senate.”

He was seen as a “kingmaker” with Republican congressional candidates because of his fund-raising prowess — and DeMint had said he would not seek a third term in the Senate when his term ended in 2016.

DeMint stepped down on Dec. 31. He was replaced by Rep. Tim Scott.

At the Heritage Foundation, DeMint will oversee a budget of $80 million.

In the Newsmax interview, Feulner says Americans also should not believe President Obama when he said that his initiatives would not add to the nation’s $16.4 trillion debt.

“That isn’t the way it works. There is no free money out there. Every time he talks about interments, basically, he’s talking about more government spending,” he says. “I don’t know where he thinks it’s coming from. There is no big tooth fairy in the sky that’s going to give it to him.”

Looking toward the upcoming battle over sequestration, DeMint hopes Congress and the president reach a deal before $1.2 trillion in broad-based cuts over 10 years begin to take effect.

“Unfortunately, with my 14 years in the House and the Senate, the only compromises I’ve ever seen were to spend more money and to grow the government. We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing. We have to stop spending more than we’re bringing in.

“I hope the Republicans will do what they promised and put the country on path to a balanced budget over the next 10 years,” DeMint adds. “They can give the president a little more to borrow in the interim — and we can transition so that it doesn’t disrupt programs.

“It just slows the growth and spending. We can do that. We can balance our budget. That’s what we need to shoot for.”

Both Heritage Foundation executives say they are most troubled at how Obama has subverted the U.S. Constitution with his steady use of executive orders.

“The president’s clearly challenging constitutional boundaries — and he’s doing it to rile the Republicans up and to get them going after him,” DeMint says. “But it’s a tough thing, and we need to do it through the courts.

“It’s worrisome that he believes so much in central power and executive power. That’s not what makes America great. We’re a bottom-up nation, with millions of people making their own decisions about what they want to do and what they value.

“He’s trying to turn that upside down — and that’s got a lot of people concerned,” DeMint adds.

The retired senator says he plans to keep the nation focused on such issues as Heritage’s president.

“I wanted to step outside the political arena — not to be partisan, but to work on those ideas that we know make America better and makes lives better for every American. We see them working all over the country.”

He pointed to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allows Washington schoolchildren to leave underperforming public schools for those of their parents’ choice. The program has a 91 percent high school graduation rate.

“All over the country, our ideas are working,” DeMint says. “Heritage is about ideas — and I want to be a part of taking those ideas to the American people.”

“We’ve been trying a number of different ways to figure out how to reach every American with the eternal principles that we really believe undergird our ideas,” Feulner adds. “We want everybody to know that these truths work for everybody.

“We want to bring everybody together and give everybody the chance of climbing up that opportunity ladder and not have the government cut the bottom two rungs off of that ladder.”

In other comments in their wide-ranging Newsmax interview, DeMint and Feulner say that:

• Heritage plans to “take control of the ideas and our message; work with hundreds of coalitions around the country to make sure Americans know which ideas work for them,” DeMint says.
• Working on the state level is critical to this success. “After all, they are the 50 laboratories of our federal system — and what works in Tallahassee probably is not going to work in Massachusetts,” Feulner says.
• Social media is crucial, too. “We have to use everything that’s available, in terms of electronic contacts with young people,” Feulner says. “We’ve got to retrain ourselves that these truths still work and we’ve got to be able to communicate them more successfully.”

Editor's Note: Read more of the interview with Jim DeMint:

• DeMint: I'm Real Proud of Marco Rubio

Op-ed
The Grim Reaper cometh...and his name is Obama
By: Diane Sori

There is NO other way to say it except come right out with it so here goes...Barack HUSSEIN Obama is a bigot.  He hates white people...he hates rich people...he hates successful people...but above all he hates seniors, the elderly, the sick, and the unborn.

We all know that as a Senator this man voted in support of partial birth abortion, and for the letting die of any child who happens to survive this brutal procedure.  I call it murder but what do I know for in Obamanation it seems anything goes, and the value of a child's life means close to nothing.

And we all know that this man personally finds the sick, seniors, and the elderly a burden on his so very wanted European socialist-styled version of America, because taking care of the sick, seniors, and the elderly requires monies that could instead be going for the 'loyality and allegiance buying' he does with all his freebies and handouts.

This man, Barack HUSSEIN Obama, the architect of the monstrous health care plan known as ObamaCare (which is NOTHING more than the mother of all taxes), with it's rationed medicine and death panels, was one of the focuses in Tuesday's State of the Union Address.  Stating that health care reform was key to reducing long-term government debt, and by signaling out the “rising cost of health care for an aging population” this simply means watch out for what's coming next, because it won't be pretty.

'The rising cost of health care for an aging population'...in other words, seniors and the elderly are a burden on his and his minions newly-defined America.

Now this is scary...a few short months ago Obama administration advisor Steve Rattner, the so-called 'car czar,' stated in NO uncertain terms,“We need death panels” and insisted that rationing must be done to sustain Obama’s health-care plan.  Rattner, who specifically targeted the elderly, claimed that restricting medical spending on said elderly, especially on those in their last year of life, will save the government countless millions, because current treatment and palliative care “consumes more than a quarter of the [Medicare] program’s budget.”

For this miserable excuse of a man it's all about the dollar, and the hell with the human beings at the receiving end of his dangerous rhetoric.

And just as scary is the proposal of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former White House health care advisor (and the brother of the infamous Rahm Emanuel), who continues to push for 'rationed medicine' based on criteria like a patients age, expected 'quality adjusted life years' (the cost-benefit of applying a particular medical procedure, and how it reflects the quality and quantity of life added due to incurring that particular medical expense), and the patient’s so-called 'instrumental value to society.'

And guess who would make these decisions...Barack HUSSEIN Obama's hand-picked panel of judge, jury, and executioners...those he anoints to be demi-Gods will decide who's worthy of treatment and a chance at life, and those whose life must end.  Simply, a person's life worthiness is decided by government bureaucrats, and this is the polar opposite of the Founders’ intention that our government be the people’s servant, not their 'lord and master.'

Also with this comes so-called 'Observation Units', special wards set-up in hospitals or independently, where instead of a person receiving immediate ER treatment or hospital admission it will be the norm for those Obama appointed demi-Gods to peruse at will the people in these wards as they and they alone decide who will get treatment and be saved, and who will be expendable.

Silly me, and here it was I always thought that it was God who decides when a person's life will come to an end, but again what do I know as all rules of decency and morality have been overturned in this new America known as Obamanation.

It's so sad when you think about it that in Obamanation seniors and the elderly are now viewed as human refuse, a burden to be disposed of at will.  So different than in the Orient where the old are honored with respect, revered for their wisdom, and sought after for the knowledge they can pass down to the young. The old are NOT thrown away as trash or viewed as a commodity whose 'value to society' determines their worthiness of life.

But the bottom line remains that with Barack HUSSEIN Obama bloviating at the State of the Union that health care reform is indeed key to reducing long-term government debt, and specifically tying it into the “rising cost of health care for an aging population” this man has made it very clear that seniors and the elderly better sleep with one eye open at all times...just saying...