Filed under: Domestic Policy, Economy, Progressivism., Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: "Cash for Clunkers", $24, 000 a car, Economic Illiteracy
The “Cash for Clunkers” program continues to provide entertainment. It seems that the stimulus program which offered new car buyers a maximum $4,500 (taxable) for turning in an old gas guzzler, cost American taxpayers $24,000 for each new car sold.
According to an analysis by the automotive information form Edmunds.com in Santa Monica, California, the government could have done almost as well if they had just given the cars away.
Now, GMAC Financial Services Inc. and the Treasury Department are in talks to prop up the lender with its third bailout. The U.S. Government is likely to inject $2.8 billion to $5.6 billion of capital into Government Motors financial arm, on top of the $12.5 billion that GMAC has received since Dec. 2008. But they want to keep making loans to people who cannot afford to pay them back. Time to set the brakes.
Filed under: Economy, Health Care, Politics, Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Call Your Congressman, Single-Payer Government-Run Health Care
National Review featured a symposium today, with the question “Can ObamaCare Be Stopped?” The consensus was, yes it can, if Congress starts listening to the American people. The American people are worried about the economy, not health care, which is pretty low on their list of priorities. They think health care should be reformed, but they are deeply concerned about the cost.
Democrats make it clear that their aim is single-payer, government-run health care, but they never explain why. They have wanted single-payer, government-run health care practically forever, but most of the people we see in the video above are members of Congress, and they have not the slightest intention of participating in such a plan themselves. That should tell you a whole lot about the plan.
The experience of other countries should lead to a lot more serious reflection and careful planning that have been evident in anything we have heard about the Democrat plans. And despite all the promises of transparency, we haven’t seen any plan at all.
Above all, consider the tendency of everyone involved to lie about the contents of legislation, write the bills in closed back rooms and refuse to allow anyone to see them.
The impression in Washington is that there was a lot of push back this summer with the Tea Parties and Town Hall Meetings, but that interest has declined.
Congress needs to know what people’s concerns are. They don’t, I am told pay attention to emails, but they do pay attention to phone calls, especially when the volume is high. Call your congressional representatives in both the House and the Senate, not just once but daily. Let them know how you feel.
For your congressman’s phone number, check your phone book under U.S. Government, or go to http://www.house.gov or http://www.senate.gov. and follow directions. The bill will be harder to pass in the Senate, so your senators are more important. While you’re at it, call some of the blue dog Democrats, especially those in first year seats. Call over and over again, tell your friends and relatives to do so as well.
Filed under: Freedom, History, Military, Terrorism, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Afghanistan, Pakistan, The United States of America, U.S Military
Filed under: American Elephant, Democrat Corruption, Liberalism, News, Taxes | Tags: Democrat Corruption, Democrats, Obama
Chicago to pay rewards for citizens who turn in tax-cheating neighbors. A person could make a fortune just turning in the Chicago natives in the Obama administration!
Ahh, but it only counts if the tax cheats are businesses. So, since no one in the tax-evading Obama administration or corrupt Democrat congress has ever worked a real job, I guess they remain safe from paying for their felonious, tax-dodging ways.
Funny how it always works out that way!
Filed under: Energy, Global Warming, Politics, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: Carbon Dioxide, Clouds, Water Vapor
The percentage of carbon dioxide (CO2) is the atmosphere is really very small. The percentage of the CO2 that is derived from human causes is very, very small. Most of the CO2 in the atmosphere rises from the sea and has nothing to do with people at all.
You know in the videos that you see about global warming, they always show great black factory smokestacks belching out grey-white clouds of horrible pollution? Not pollution. It’s water vapor — steam. Most of the “greenhouse gasses” aren’t CO2 at all, they are water vapor in the form of clouds, mist and fog.
The Waxman-Markey House climate bill is estimated to cut Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by a cumulative $9.4 trillion by 2015. Emission permit costs for energy could top $300 billion a year by 2035. A typical family of four could pay $829 more annually just for electricity, and up to $4,600 for energy, food and consumer goods.
This is a massive wealth transfer to carbon traders, bureaucrats, activists and other preferred groups from hydrocarbon users. Massive job killer. According to European experience in Spain and Germany, the much touted “green jobs” come at the expense of two jobs in the regular economy for every green job.
All for perfectly natural global warming and cooling — which the planet has always done, warming and cooling. It has been vastly warmer in the past— the finest weather known to man — and a lot cooler too. This is a phony crisis, for a very tiny amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is essential to life. Without it, we wouldn’t be here. Do you suppose that Waxman, Markey, Boxer and Kerry all flunked high school biology?
Filed under: Health Care, Law, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: 3% Profit Rate, Baseless Accusations, Health Insurance Companies
60 Minutes did a fine report on Medicare fraud this past Sunday. Medicare fraud is now estimated to total about $60 billion a year. The government insurance program that provides health care to 46 million elderly and disabled Americans provides a rich income stream for criminals who are constantly finding new ways to steal much of the half-trillion dollars that are paid out in Medicare benefits.
In South Florida, the only visible evidence of the crime are thousands of tiny clinics and pharmacies that occupy low-rent strip malls. $60 billion is a lot of money. Medicare loses seven times as much money to fraud than the combined profits of the 14 health insurance companies listed on the Fortune 500.
The reason that the “public option” is supposedly better than private insurance is the government’s low administrative costs. The major reason why private insurance has higher administrative costs is that unlike the federal government, the private insurance companies make a serious effort to combat fraud. (emphasis added)
Filed under: Economy, Health Care, Law, Politics, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Competition Works, Health Care Reform, Predicted Costs
Let’s start with the fact that the Democrats want single-payer, government-run health care. I cannot fathom why they think this would be a good idea, since it has proved so damaging everywhere else. Damaging to the economy, damaging to the patients who depend on it, and damaging to the medical system itself, and damaging to the society.
But Democrats (Liberals/ Progressives) believe in their good intentions, are uninterested in studies, experience or history, and don’t care much about consequences. That’s why when they are in pursuit of their enlightened aims, their claims get more and more preposterous.
Washington has just run a $1.4 trillion budget deficit for fiscal 2009 — three times the deficit in 2008 under the evil George W. Bush. And we have just been told that a new health-care entitlement will reduce the red ink by $81 billion over ten years.
The theory is that a more involved federal role by those brilliant folks in Congress will restrain costs and thus make health care more affordable. Stop laughing, it isn’t funny.
Before the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, health care inflation ran only slightly faster than overall inflation. In the years since, medical inflation has increased 2.3 times faster than inflation in the regular economy. Much of this represents advances in technology and new treatments, but the idea of government as thrifty is plain silly.
The Wall Street Journal examined the record of Congressional forecasters in predicting costs.
The record is not good. Most government programs cost far more than they were estimated to cost, and of course Congress usually cannot keep their hands off and continually tinkers.
The $81 billion “reduction” in cost came from the CBO estimate applied to the Baucus bill which existed only as a bunch of concepts. We need a good CBO estimate of whatever they have added in the back room, behind closed doors. Whatever the estimate, history tells us that it will cost far more.
You will notice that only George Bush’s Prescription Drug benefit came in under predicted cost, but I have read that the Democrats are anxious to fill in the “donut hole” which was the device that brought the program in under estimates, along with greater use of generics, and lower participation by seniors.
Peter Orzag , now White House Budget Director, told Congress when he ran the Congressional Budget Office that the “primary cause” of the cost savings is that “the pricing is coming in better than anticipated, and that is likely a reflection of the competition that’s occurring in the private market.” Competition? Who knew! The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services agreed, adding that when given choices “beneficiaries have overwhelmingly selected less costly drug plans.”
There is a lesson there, but apparently no one is paying attention.
Filed under: American Elephant, Humor, Movies, YouTube | Tags: Halloween, Mary Poppins, The Shining
The horrifying tale of a magical nanny with a disturbing obsession with small children*:
…and for those who prefer more “wholesome” fare, a lighthearted, feel-good, family-flick called “Shining”*:
*please tell me no one is gullible enough to need a warning that this is sarcasm.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Law, Progressivism., The Constitution, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Democrat Demagogues, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, President Obama
In a recent article from the blog at The American Heritage Foundation, the author quoted an excerpt from historian Thomas G. West, author of The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science:
The Founders thought that laws should be made by a body of elected officials with roots in local communities. They should not be “experts,” but they should have “most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society” (Madison). The wisdom in question was the kind on display in The Federalist, which relentlessly dissected the political errors of the previous decade in terms accessible to any person of intelligence and common sense.
The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. … Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing. Politics was regarded as too complex for common sense to cope with. … Only government agencies staffed by experts informed by the most advanced modern science could manage tasks previously handled within the private sphere.
…
The Progressives did not intend to abolish democracy, to be sure. They wanted the people’s will to be more efficiently translated into government policy. But what democracy meant for the Progressives is that the people would take power out of the hands of locally elected officials and political parties and place it instead into the hands of the central government, which would in turn establish administrative agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to translate the people’s inchoate will into concrete policies.
This, the blog says, is why you have Obama’s Energy Secretary telling auto makers how they must build cars. This is why Obama’s health care plan empowers a panel of “experts” to reorganize one-sixth of our economy from the top down. Commonsense questions like “Won’t our electricity bills go up if we mandate power companies to use more expensive alternative energy sources?” and “Won’t our health insurance premiums go up if everyone is charged the same price and nobody can be refused coverage”" can’t be tolerated. People voicing such criticisms must be isolated and silenced.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Foreign Policy, National Security, Politics, The Constitution, The Elephant's Child
The office of the President of the United States has a long and complex history. Over the past 220 years, it has been occupied by just 44 different men. George Washington was the first and undoubtedly will remain the last to be elected unanimously. He came to the office reluctantly.
He had been Commander-in-Chief long before he was elected President. He was elected to that position by the Continental Congress in 1775 when he was forty-three years old. There was not yet an army for him to command, only the militias surrounding Boston. And when he said he farewell to his troops in 1783, he was fifty-one. He had only a few years as a civilian before his country called upon him again. His prudence and restraint set the country on a firm basis, and in his farewell address he said:
In the discharge of this trust, I will only say, that I have, with good intentions, contributed towards the organization and administration of the government the best exertions of which a very fallible judgment was capable. Not unconscious, in the outset, of the inferiority of my qualifications, experience in my own eyes, perhaps still more in the eyes of others, has strengthened the motives to diffidence of myself; and every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome. Satisfied that, if any circumstances have given peculiar value to my services, they were temporary, I have the consolation to believe, that while choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene, patriotism does not forbid it.
The office of the presidency, with its obligations of duty and commitment, takes a toll on the men who temporarily occupy the position. They owe a debt to those who have held the office before them, and to the history left to them by previous occupants. Treaties and alliances have been laboriously created, relations with other countries, whether in trade or good will, carefully nurtured. A knowledge and awareness of that history is essential.
Thomas Jefferson said:
Most bad government has grown out of too much government. [and]
Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have…The course of history shows that as government grows, liberty decreases.
President James Polk remarked:
No President who performs his duties faithfully and conscientiously can have any leisure.
President Harry Truman:
I have tried my best to give the nation everything I had in me. There are probably a million people who could have done the job better than I did, but I had the job, and I always quote an epitaph on a tombstone in a cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona. “here lies Jack Williams, He done his damnest.”
Dwight Eisenhower said:
Throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict on us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.
Conservatives, independents, pundits and even many Democrats are trying to understand President Barack Obama. There are so many questions.
He is clearly not the centrist that he portrayed during the campaign. Is he a radical leftist? He has described himself as a communitarian, for whatever that is worth.
Barack Obama has never, we have been told, had much interest in history. A knowledge of and respect for history are essential to the presidency. Without that you repeat the mistakes and failures of those who have gone before. Depression, inflation, stagflation, debt, unpreparedness or trust in the wrong adversaries. The demands of the office require humility, not hubris.
Nations have interests. Relations with other nations are not popularity contests. Years of carefully nurtured relationships based on fair dealing and fair trade are being discarded in the hope of deals with long-term antagonists who wish our destruction. Speeches, however charmingly delivered and meetings are unlikely to sway them from their purposes.
When a new president temporarily takes on the most important office in the world, he becomes the president of all Americans, not just the unions who supported his campaign. He must suffer criticism and mockery in the understanding that it is the right of the American people and his role to bear it.
He takes on an obligation to preserve, protect and defend the nation. The savings that represent the life’s work of its citizens cannot be spent wildly in some misguided attempt to achieve progressive goals that have been proven over and over not to work. The American people, 38 percent, want the budget deficit cut in half in the next four years. Only 23 percent think health care reform should be a top priority.
I just don’t think that Barack Obama understands the office of the presidency. Oh, he gets the prestige, and he clearly likes the perks and trappings, some of which he adopted before he was elected. He keeps reminding us that “I won!” Yet he seems not to have understood the obligation, the duty, the sacrifice of the office and the weight of the burden that a president must bear. He and Michelle keep complaining about how hard he has to work.
There’s a lot more to it than being surrounded by admirers and sycophants attending to every need, than having AirForce One at one’s beck and call. I just don’t think he gets it. What do you think?
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Climate Change, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Press Club
hoax n. An act intended to deceive or trick, either as a practical joke or as a serious fraud.
Last Monday, the wire services, cable news stations and Web sites reported that the U.S. Chamber fo Commerce had recanted its opposition to climate-change legislation. Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal wrote:
It was a hoax. Incredibly (well maybe not so incredibly), the hoax was perpetrated by an activist group in a room at the National Press Club in Washington in front of reporters who’ve risen to the top of their industry. The hoaxers had created a fake web site and faked a Chamber press release.
The made-up press conference ran about 20 minutes until someone from the real Chamber of Commerce showed up yelling. “This is a fraud!” Too late. Credulous TV and wire reporters had sent the Chamber’s climate flip-flop into an already confused world.
With fakery everywhere—some of it amusing, some of it not funny—people’s ability to know where things fall on the spectrum between fact and falsity becomes so compromised that they retreat into a shell of cynicism about everything. And there is a lot to process; 9/11 deniers, Iranian Holocaust deniers, Obama birthers. Lily Tomlin provided the epigraph for our age: “I try to be cynical, but it’s hard to keep up.” (…)
One can argue that all this reality bending remains harmless. Much of it’s just entertainment and the rest is reversible. People adjust. Living deep inside this new electronic forest, the human animal has learned to adapt. But the one presumably important area of life that seems to be having a hard time adapting to the reality of pandemic doubt is politics.
American politics long ago came up with its own word for shaping reality—spin. Being professionals, the politicians got away with a lot of it.
Now with more people decked out in protective coats of cynicism, it’s gotten harder for the pols to sell their grand schemes. Ask President Obama.
The whole article is available here. The credulity and willingness of the press to believe anything that fits with their political leanings is distressing. But when you are told a lie by an authority and believe it and act on it, the ripples of that lie go on and on, damaging everything they touch.
This president has no compunctions about “the facts” he uses to try to sell his health reform plan, including the fact that there is, as yet, no health reform plan. There is a Senate Finance Committee bill (the Baucus Bill) which is not yet put into legal language, so it doesn’t really exist and the committee members who voted it out were voting for a bunch of concepts, not prospective laws. There’s the old dead House bill, and a new one that is being written in back rooms with closed doors, and much of it passes far beyond “hoax” to outright fraud.
Much of our economy is being rearranged (and bankrupted) to “save the world” from a global warming that simply is a normal function of a climate that is always warming and cooling; and from CO2 that is not a pollutant, not a cause of global warming, and only a trace gas in the atmosphere.
Far from everyone having to worry about their “carbon footprint”, most of the CO2 in the atmosphere rises from the oceans in a long cycle of hundreds of years. CO2 is necessary to life itself, for it is a natural fertilizer—it makes plants grow. No CO2, no life. That simple. We do not have enough of it, for we are still recovering from the last ice age. The times in the past when we had far more CO2 in the atmosphere were far more beneficial to all life on earth.
You may call it spin, but it really qualifies as serious fraud.
Filed under: American Elephant, Democrat Corruption, Health Care, News, Politics, Progressivism., Socialism | Tags: Debunking Liberal Lies, Democrat Corruption, Obama, Swine Flu
Obama declares swine flu a national emergency, becoming the ONLY national leader in the entire world to have done so.
Meanwhile the regular seasonal flu affects far more people, and causes far more death than the swine flu ever will. For all the hysteria whipped up by Obama and his administration, the H1N1 “swine” flu has killed 1,000 people this year — plain old seasonal influenza, on the other hand, kills over 30 times that many people — an average of 36,000 Americans every year– and I don’t see Obama calling it a “national emergency.”
The number of seasonal influenza-associated (i.e., seasonal flu-related) deaths varies from year to year because flu seasons often fluctuate in length and severity. CDC estimated that about 36,000 people died of seasonal flu-related causes each year, on average, during the 1990s in the United States. [Center for Disease Control]
Nor will Obama declare the plain old seasonal flu an emergency because it is not sensational and he can’t use it to whip up fear and political support for his fascist health care takeover.
Meanwhile, the hysteria Obama is whipping up over swine flu will result in more deaths, not less, as millions of people who don’t need vaccines clog the system, making it harder for those who need the vaccine to get one. The vaccine is already in short supply. And will cost taxpayers billions more as the declaration makes federal dollars available to for Obama’s marketing ploy.
But that is the self-described Motus Operandi of this most corrupt, Alinskyite thug — “never let a crisis go to waste.” And when there isn’t a real crisis handy, manufacture one.
Can’t we impeach this crook yet?
Filed under: Islam, Military, Terrorism, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Afghanistan, Dithering, Pakistan, U.S. Army
On August 30, 55 days ago,General Stanley McChrystal submitted his request for 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan, and outlined his counterinsurgency strategy. President Obama is still reviewing the strategy and what everybody thinks of the strategy and who is for it and who is opposed, and playing golf and making speeches and having fundraisers. A decision has not been forthcoming, but he said maybe in another two weeks.
(h/t: the marvelous Michael Ramirez)
Filed under: Environment, Global Warming, Law, National Security, The Elephant's Child
Lord Christopher Monckton was a science adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He speaks and writes frequently on environmental policy. He sued to prevent Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” from being forced into British classroms…and won. The justice ordered that 9 serious inaccuracies in the film be corrected before the film could be shown in schools. Lord Monckton travels the globe, speaking to educate people on the myth of global warming.
Many of Lord Monckton’s papers and videos are available at The Science and Public Policy Institute.
Senior citizens have been vocal in their opposition to ObamaCare, with great justification. The costs of health care reform are largely to be borne by $500 billion worth of cuts in Medicare.
The theory was that payments to physicians would be cut sharply in the health care bill, (and then put back in a separate bill, so that the cut in the health care bill would reduce the CBO estimate of how much health care would add to the deficit) and maybe no one would notice that they put back the doctors’ pay in a separate bill, so the doctors wouldn’t oppose the health care bill. Yes, that is far too complicated, and quite a few Democrats thought it was far too sneaky, so it didn’t pass.
The old folks are still upset, and even worse, they vote and write letters and make telephone calls. So the administration answer is a bribe. They want to send each senior on Social Security a check for $250, because they’re not giving them a cost-of-living increase this year or next.
Chicago style ‘persuasion’ seems to be to bully, bribe or break. Neither criticism nor disagreement is allowed. The AMA was bought off with a promise to restore Doctor pay, the insurance companies were bribed with a promise of forcing everyone to buy health insurance, and the pharmaceutical companies were lured by a promise to let them off the hook for further attacks if they agreed to specific price-cuts for drugs.
As participants get a clear assessment of the administration’s Chicago-style thuggery, cooperation with government wishes seems the better part of valor. If you allow the government nose under the proverbial tent, first thing you know, you’ve got a whole herd of camels right in the tent with you. Your salary has been cut, or you have been fired and your corporation turned over the unions.
It is, however, all an attempt to distract attention from the increasing decline of ObamaCare in the polls. The American people don’t like the health care the government is trying to force upon us, and they are in eve-increasing numbers turning against it.
Politico writes:
President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds.
With a series of private meetings and pubic taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator, and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News.
Even liberal commentators are uncomfortable with the attempt to marginalize Fox News. It seems to be backfiring. But the White House is not pulling back.
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn (she whose favorite philosopher is mass murderer Mao Tse Tung) says “[The President] has continued to reach out to people who disagree with him, to look for common ground. He has adopted Republican ideas, even if our programs don’t get Republican votes. People give him credit because he has tried. And people want to see him defend himself.”
That whopper made me snort coffee out my nose. Doesn’t anyone in this White House have any familiarity with the truth?
ADDENDUM: Kim Strassel writes on “The Chicago Way” today in the Wall Street Journal. You can read her fine piece here.
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Freedom, History, Islam, National Security, Politics, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Afghanistan, Eastern Europe, Iran, U.S. Foreign Policy
Vice President Cheney gave a speech last night at the Center for Security Policy. Once again, he proved why he is probably the most consequential vice president in the Nation’s history.
An excerpt from the speech:
Most anyone who is given responsibility in matters of national security quickly comes to appreciate the commitments and structures put in place by others who came before. You deploy a military force that was planned and funded by your predecessors. You inherit relationships with partners and obligations to allies that were first undertaken years and even generations earlier. With the authority you hold for a little while, you have great freedom of action. And whatever course you follow, the essential thing is always to keep commitments, and to leave no doubts about the credibility of your country’s word.
So among my other concerns about the drift of events under the present administration, I consider the abandonment of missile defense in Eastern Europe to be a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith.
It is certainly not a model of diplomacy when the leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic are informed of such a decision at the last minute in midnight phone calls. It took a long time and lot of political courage in those countries to arrange for our interceptor system in Poland and the radar system in the Czech Republic. Our Polish and Czech friends are entitled to wonder how strategic plans and promises years in the making could be dissolved, just like that – with apparently little, if any, consultation. Seventy years to the day after the Soviets invaded Poland, it was an odd way to mark the occasion.
You hardly have to go back to 1939 to understand why these countries desire – and thought they had – a close and trusting relationship with the United States. Only last year, the Russian Army moved into Georgia, under the orders of a man who regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. Anybody who has spent much time in that part of the world knows what Vladimir Putin is up to. And those who try placating him, by conceding ground and accommodating his wishes, will get nothing in return but more trouble.
What did the Obama Administration get from Russia for its abandonment of Poland and the Czech Republic, and for its famous “Reset” button? Another deeply flawed election and continued Russian opposition to sanctioning Iran for its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
In the short of it, President Obama’s cancellation of America’s agreements with the Polish and Czech governments was a serious blow to the hopes and aspirations of millions of Europeans. For twenty years, these peoples have done nothing but strive to move closer to us, and to gain the opportunities and security that America offered. These are faithful friends and NATO allies, and they deserve better. The impact of making two NATO allies walk the plank won’t be felt only in Europe. Our friends throughout the world are watching and wondering whether America will abandon them as well.
Big events turn on the credibility of the United States – doing what we said we would do, and always defending our fundamental security interests. In that category belong the ongoing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need to counter the nuclear ambitions of the current regime in Iran.
A full transcript of the speech is available here.
