First we're unpatriotic ... Now we're selfish!

Obama's New Attack on Those Who Don't Want Higher Taxes: ‘Selfishness’

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"The reason that we want to do this, change our tax code, is not because I have anything against the rich," Obama said in Sarasota, Fla., yesterday. "I love rich people! I want all of you to be rich. [The Ponderosa: So he can "spread" your wealth!] Go for it. That’s the American dream, that’s the American way, that’s terrific.

"The point is, though, that -- and it’s not just charity, it’s not just that I want to help the middle class and working people who are trying to get in the middle class -- it’s that when we actually make sure that everybody’s got a shot – when young people can all go to college, when everybody’s got decent health care, when everybody’s got a little more money at the end of the month – then guess what? Everybody starts spending that money, they decide maybe I can afford a new car, maybe I can afford a computer for my child. They can buy the products and services that businesses are selling and everybody is better off. All boats rise. That’s what happened in the 1990s, that’s what we need to restore. And that’s what I’m gonna do as president of the United States of America.
[The Ponderosa: So, since 2001, no one has gone to college, bought a new car or a computer? Got it. Guess he missed the economic expansion that was fueled in great part by consumer spending.]


"John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic," Obama continued. "You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness."

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Well, there ya have it.

Wishing to retain the rewards of your labor, intellect and innovation is now selfish according to the would be Community Organizer in Chief.

Obama constantly talks of building the economy from the "bottom up".

What Obama clearly does not understand is that the automobile, airplane and the PC, to name but a few key inventions that radically changed the way we live, did not come about based on some great groundswell of demand for them.

(Were you sitting around in 1975 wishing there was some way you could communicate with someone on the other side of the planet with a few keystrokes?)

They were someone's dream and only when the dreams came true was there a demand. That's Say's Law: Supply creates its own demand.

The next amazing life-changing innovation is being developed right now by someone risking everything.

That person will likely get rich -- and Obama will love him -- but, more importantly, his creation will provide more valuable to the world than the work of 10,000 community organizers.

Let us leave you with this thought: If wishing to retain the fruits of your hard work, diligence and imagination makes you selfish what does voting for someone to steal another's fruit make you?

The word is covetous.

Obama's playground economics

Next John McCain will call me communist, Barack Obama says

RALEIGH, N.C. — Barack Obama accused Republican rival John McCain on Wednesday of stooping to low tactics by labeling the Democrat a socialist.

‘‘I don’t know what’s next,’’ Obama, the presidential candidate, said at an outdoor rally in North Carolina. ‘‘By the end of the week, he’ll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.’’

Obama turned to ridicule to rebut McCain’s daily references to Obama’s encounter with ‘‘Joe the Plumber.’’ McCain has capitalized on a moment when Obama told an Ohio plumber that he wanted to ‘‘spread the wealth around’’ by boosting taxes on wealthier people to finance a middle class tax cut.

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This is what happens when people who aren't funny try to be.

Ever since he was hoodwinked by Joe the Guy with a Productive Job into admitting that he favors looting the productive, Obama has been quite defensive about his redistributionist instincts.

His quip, if you can call it that, reveals more about his worldview than it does about the McCain campaign.

This guy was raised by a Marxist, mentored by a Marxist, preached to by a Marxist and hung out with unrepentant Marxist terrorists and he doesn't get the difference between willful sharing -- true compassion -- and the coerced redistribution of wealth and property?

Nobody would call the former socialism but the latter certainly is and Obama is undeniably a socialist, if not quite a full-blown Marxist.

Let's put it in terms that Obama can understand: The lunch room bully that threatens to beat you up if you don't fork over your Fluffernutter sammich -- that's YOU, "Senator"!

Here's a great object lesson to teach the kids at Halloween:

Some kid comes to your door with a bag bursting with candy -- he worked hard on a cool costume, started early, went to a lot of houses and has quite the feedbag going.

Tell him he needs to leave half the candy in his bag with you so you can "spread the wealth" to the less industrious trick or treaters.

Expect to be scraping a 12-pack of Grade A's off your car in the morning.

Obama v. Madison, et al

We've been convalescing offsite for a week or so after a domestic accident but this little gem caught our ear t'other morning ....



Obama seems troubled that the Constitution deals only in "negative rights" -- the rights to be secure in one's life, liberty and property, at least until you encroach upon the negative rights of others.

But what are these "positive rights" he so pines for?

Why, the "right" to health care. The "right" to housing. The "right" to a job.

And on and on.

The problem with "positive rights" is that most of the time they entail stealing money, time and/or resources from an individual or, more typically, a class of individuals for the benefit of a larger class of "dispossessed" or "victims" of an "unjust" system.

Since, to the chagrin of community organizers everywhere, the Constitution makes no mention of such freebies it is left to legislators like Obama to fleece people like Joe the Guy with a Real Job in order to lavish these "positive rights" on their enfeebled and benighted constituents (Read: voters).

This concept of "positive rights" runs counter to the philosophies of John Locke, whose writings informed many of our Founders including Madison and Jefferson.

Locke, in his 2nd Treatise, wrote:

Though the legislative, whether placed in one or more, whether it be always in being or only by intervals, though it be the supreme power in every commonwealth, yet, first, it is not, nor can possibly be, absolutely arbitrary over the lives and fortunes of the people. For it being but the joint power of every member of the society given up to that person or assembly which is legislator, it can be no more than those persons had in a state of Nature before they entered into society, and gave it up to the community. For nobody can transfer to another more power than he has in himself, and nobody has an absolute arbitrary power over himself, or over any other, to destroy his own life, or take away the life or property of another. A man, as has been proved, cannot subject himself to the arbitrary power of another; and having, in the state of Nature, no arbitrary power over the life, liberty, or possession of another, but only so much as the law of Nature gave him for the preservation of himself and the rest of mankind, this is all he doth, or can give up to the commonwealth, and by it to the legislative power, so that the legislative can have no more than this. Their power in the utmost bounds of it is limited to the public good of the society. It is a power that hath no other end but preservation, and therefore can never have a right to destroy, enslave, or designedly to impoverish the subjects [...]
Second Treatise, Ch. 11.)

(All emphasis ours).

Essentially, in a state of Nature, I have no right to help myself to your wealth or property so how, upon entering into a joint society, is it laudable to band with others -- perhaps with the help of community organizers -- to empower a legislator to do just that?

Is thievery acceptable as long as a majority approves?

This reminds us of one our favorite Walter Williams quotes -- and we paraphrase: The only difference between a mugger and a liberal politician is that the mugger doesn't stand around boring you with all the reasons he robbed you.

Obama is frustrated that the Warren court wasn't radical enough, that it "didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution".

The Founders sought to form a "more perfect union".

As brilliant and wise as they were, they knew it could never be fully perfect, for true perfection is not of this life but the next.

Obama, however, by all appearances, believes himself enlightened enough to form a perfect world, a Heaven on Earth, simply through the power of his superior intellect and pureness of heart.

Transcendent, the "One" we have been waiting for and all that crap.

Funny stuff.

Hayek called such pathological grandiosity the "fatal conceit".

For Thomas Sowell, it's the "vision of the anointed".

In The Road to Serfdom Hayek reminds us of Hölderlin's admonition that "[w]hat has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven."

Thanks to a weak-as-water McCain campaign and a media more interested in Sarah Palin's wardrobe than the radicals -- his father, Franklin Marshall Davis, Saul Alinksy -- who shaped Obama's worldview, or the convicted slumlord who helped Obama buy his home or his true relationship with the loathesome Weather Couple and the voter fraud machine known as ACORN or his friendship with Rashid Khalidi, the one-time PLO spokesman , Obama just might get his chance to try to erect his collectivist Heaven here on Earth.

Make no mistake, like all others before him, Obama's road to serfdom will lead to Hölderlin's hell.

McCain wins

We thought he lost the first two, substance aside, on points, but he was actually pretty good tonight.

If you lose you at least went down fighting, sir.

(hand raised horizontally to forehead)

Vouchers ...

... have Obama nodding.

How about vocational school?

Not every kid is college material!

We need plumbers, auto mechanics and electricians to steal -- er, spread the wealth of.

An education question ...

... to the Senator from NEA whose work on the CAC produced such great results in Chicago.

No doubt the unborn ...

... will be voting McCain/Palin

If they are required ...

... why did the babies die.

You, sir, are a liar.

He's lying

He did vote for that.

Born alive

Go John.

Obama on justices ...

No litmus test but believes Roe v. Wade rightly decided.

Blathers on more.

Finds an overacrching privacy right in the Constitution and equates it with the First Amendment!

What a brilliant statesman!

Pay discrimination?

That's your key issue?

You supported Boumedienne!

This plan could lead to the unravelling ...

... that's what we want?

Why is health care tied to employment.

Why?

SENATOR GOVERMENT!!!!!!

PEFRECT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Please hit him on the health care lies

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So Medicare is the reason we need socialized medicine?

High-larious!

McCain wasting time on health care banalities

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Wow, this is so revolutionary ...

Has he never heard of COBRA?

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Enforce unfair trade agreements?

What exactly does that mean, genius?

Uh, lemme respond ...

Obama reciting Colombia's past.

Where's his concern for human rights in Iran?

Good, Colombia ...

Maybe McCain did his homework tonight.

Does he know that NAFTA was enacted in, what, 1993?

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10 years?

Impossible.

Indeed, ridiculous.

Wind, tide, solar ....

... yawn.

Any realist knows you can't give a number ...

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Please bring up the Global Poverty Act ...

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Senator McCain, he voted against missile defense!

Oy!

She's a capable poli ...

Very eloquent, Senator.

Give tax cuts, not to to the wealthiest corporations ...

i.e. the people who create jobs, products and services.

Obama's broken heart ...

... oh, puhleeze.

Obama lies

"That's absolutely not true".

It is.

Your associations ARE troubling

What a fraud.

He is slick, though.

And Obama lies and fudges ...

Bill Ayers is an unrepentant domestic terrorist you jackass.

Annenberg had no idea you would use that money to foment anti-Americanism.

ACORN defense even more lame.

McCain hits Ayers and ACORN!

Huzzah!

Taxing the productive ...

... will surely lift wages.

You do pal around with terrorists ...

... Senator.

Joe Biden is ...

... one of the finest public servants who has ever served in this country?!

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHAHAAHHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Obama brings up the "kill him" and "terrorist" guys ...

Has Obama repudiated the Move On and Daily Kos freaks?

A guy who's never had a job ...

... wants to talk about the economy.

Beautiful.

The issues that matter to us ...

Is a candidate friendly with an unrepentant domestic terrorist?

Obama has the shoulders of a teenage girl

Just sayin'.

Why is there never a "conservative" journalist asking the questions?

Interesting.

On taxes on energy on "torture"

Bush was right.

We're not hurting nor angry ...

Least-wise not yet.

Which programs work, Senator?

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The deficit is higher now because WE ARE AT WAR YOU SIMP!