Mr. President, do you know the definition of arrogant?

From: Fox News

By Cal Thomas - July 01, 2014

President Obama appears to have forgotten -- or ignored -- why we have elections. One reason is to stop, or slow down, an agenda the public doesn’t like.

When polls began reflecting buyer’s remorse about Mr. Obama in 2010, voters elected a Republican majority in the House of Representatives and might well have done the same in the Senate in 2012 were it not for some weak GOP candidates, especially in Nevada and Delaware.

President Obama acts as if elections other than his own don’t matter. His attitude seems to be, “I have the power and the rest of government be damned.” 

In another speech (does he talk in his sleep?) last week in Minneapolis, the president said of House Republicans, “They don’t do anything except block me and call me names.” 

Actually, Republicans have passed scores of bills, virtually all of which have died in the Senate, because Majority Leader Harry Reid refuses to bring them up for a vote, much less debate. It is Reid who is the real obstructionist.

Speaker John Boehner is threatening to file a lawsuit against the president for using his executive powers to bypass Congress. Critics, notably Neil Cavuto of Fox News, have accused the Republicans of engaging in a “stunt” that has no chance of succeeding. 

Cavuto may be right, but not all stunts, if that’s what this is, are without merit. 

While the courts might rule that Boehner lacks legal standing to sue the president, the lawsuit could serve as a teachable moment for the public, which polls show increasingly distrusts this president on matters both foreign and domestic.

Here’s what a real stunt looks like. While in Minneapolis, President Obama met with two people he said had written him about their economic struggles. He ate a hamburger with a woman who said she is having difficulty paying her bills. Maybe the president picked up the check, helping her out with one meal. Other than that, how did he improve the woman’s circumstances? 

Cutting taxes, lowering government spending and reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy would improve the economy so that the struggling woman — and many like her — might be able to find a better job with higher pay, or secure a raise in the job she already has.

This president believes in his policies even when they are not working.

As the late Pete Seeger sang about Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, so it might also be said of President Obama and the record of his administration: “We were knee deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool said to push on.”

The list of policy failures, corruption and probable misdeeds is long and growing longer. 

The website White House Dossier lists two dozen scandals linked to the Obama administration and while all might not rise to the level we have come to associate with legitimate political malfeasance, the list is an indictment of a president who sold himself as being nobler than ordinary politicians, not to mention most Americans. 

He was seen, and sees himself, as the great deliverer, perched far above the rest of us. Instead, his incompetence has been exposed, leading to the conclusion among growing numbers of us that he is in over his head and harming the country in ways that could last for generations.

The list of Obama’s broken promises is longer than his failures. Some have been compiled on Politifact.com.

The definitions of “arrogance” from dictionary.com accurately describe the president’s attitude: “1. Offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride. 2. Having or showing an exaggerated opinion of one’s own importance, merit, ability, etc; conceited…”

Synonyms for arrogance also apply: “presumptuous, haughty, imperious, brazen, proud.”
If this fall’s election gives Republicans a Senate majority, as seems likely, will the president’s arrogant behavior change? Not likely. 

Humility is not a trait found in Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”


God bless,
JohnnyD

Medical staff warned: Keep your mouths shut about illegal immigrants or face arrest

From: Fox News

By Todd Starnes - July 02, 2014

A government-contracted security force threatened to arrest doctors and nurses if they divulged any information about the contagion threat at a refugee camp housing illegal alien children at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, sources say.

In spite of the threat, several former camp workers broke their confidentiality agreements and shared exclusive details with me about the dangerous conditions at the camp. They said taxpayers deserve to know about the contagious diseases and the risks the children pose to Americans. I have agreed to not to disclose their identities because they fear retaliation and prosecution.


“There were several of us who wanted to talk about the camps, but the agents made it clear we would be arrested,” a psychiatric counselor told me. “We were under orders not to say anything.”

The sources said workers were guarded by a security force from the Baptist Family & Children’s Services, which the Department of Health and Human Services hired to run the Lackland Camp.

The sources say security forces called themselves the “Brown Shirts.”

“It was a very submissive atmosphere,” the counselor said. “Once you stepped onto the grounds, you abided by their laws – the Brown Shirt laws.”

She said the workers were stripped of their cellphones and other communication devices. Anyone caught with a phone was immediately fired.

“Everyone was paranoid,” she said. “The children had more rights than the workers.”

She said children in the camp had measles, scabies, chicken pox and strep throat as well as mental and emotional issues.

“It was not a good atmosphere in terms of health,” she said. “I would be talking to children and lice would just be climbing down their hair.”

A former nurse at the camp told me she was horrified by what she saw.

“We have so many kids coming in that there was no way to control all of the sickness – all this stuff coming into the country,” she said. “We were very concerned at one point about strep going around the base.”

Both the counselor and the nurse said their superiors tried to cover up the extent of the illnesses.

“When they found out the kids had scabies, the charge nurse was adamant – ‘Don’t mention that. Don’t say scabies,’” the nurse recounted. “But everybody knew they had scabies. Some of the workers were very concerned about touching things and picking things up. They asked if they should be concerned, but they were told don’t worry about it.”

The nurse said the lice issue was epidemic – but everything was kept “hush-hush.”

“You could see the bugs crawling through their hair,” she said. “After we would rinse out their hair, the sink would be loaded with black bugs.”

The nurse told me she became especially alarmed because their files indicated the children had been transported to Lackland on domestic charter buses and airplanes.

“That’s what alerted me,” she said. “Oh, my God. They’re flying these kids around. Nobody knows that these children have scabies and lice. To tell you the truth, there’s no way to control it.”

I don't mean to upset anyone's Independence Day vacation plans, but were these kids transported to the camps before or after they were deloused? Anyone who flies the friendly skies could be facing a public health concern. 

The counselor told me the refugee camp resembled a giant emergency room – off limits to the public.

“They did not want the community to know,” she said. “I initially spoke out at Lackland because I had a concern the children’s mental health care was not being taken care of.”

She said the breaking point came when camp officials refused to hospitalize several children who were suicidal.

“I made a recommendation that a child needed to be sent to a psychiatric unit,” the counselor told me. “He was reaching psychosis. He was suicidal. Instead of treating him, they sent him off to a family in the United States.”

She said she filed a Child Protective Services report and quit her job.

“I didn’t want to lose my license if this kid committed suicide,” she told me. “I was done.”

The counselor kept a detailed journal about what happened during her tenure at the facility.

“When people read that journal they are going to be astonished,” she said. ‘I don’t think they will believe what is going on in America.”

So it was not a great surprise, she said, when she received a call from federal agents demanding that she return to the military base and hand over her journal.

She said she declined to do so.

“I didn’t go back to Lackland,” she said.

Both workers told me while they have no regrets, they want to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

“They’re going to crush the system,” the nurse told me. “We can’t sustain this. They are overwhelming the system and I think it’s a travesty.”

Baptist Children’s and Family Services spokeswoman Krista Piferrer tells me the agency takes “any allegation of malfeasance or inappropriate care of a child very seriously.”

“There are a number of checks and balances to ensure children are receiving appropriate and adequate mental health care,” she said.

Piferrer said the clinicians are supervised by a federal field specialist from HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. She also said BCFS have 58 medical professionals serving at Lackland.

“Every illness, whether it is a headache or something more serious, is recorded in a child’s electronic medical record and posted on WebEOC – a real-time, web-based platform that is visible to not only BCFS but the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,” she said.

As for those brown shirts, the BCFS said they are “incident management team personnel” – who happen to wear tan shirts.

My sources say Americans should be very concerned about the secrecy of the government camps.

“This is just the beginning,” one source told me. "It is a long-term financial responsibility.”


God bless,
JohnnyD