Obama State of the Union, McDonnell Response Contrasts on Abortion, Health Care

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- President Barack Obama and pro-life Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell presented a stark contrast Wednesday night. Obama's State of the Union address promoted the pro-abortion health care bill while McDonnell included a reference to promoting pro-life values in his response.

"I want everyone to take another look at the plan we've proposed," Obama said of the Senate bill that funds abortions and have other abortion problems.

"Here’s what I ask of Congress, though: Do not walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close. Let us find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people," Obama said.

Obama appeared to ignore the polling data that consistently shows the American people not only oppose the health care bill but oppose government funding of abortions in it -- instead talking about how pushing the pro-abortion government-run health care bill affected his own political bottom line.

"I did not choose to tackle this issue to get some legislative victory under my belt. And by now it should be fairly obvious that I didn't take on health care because it was good politics," he said.

In his response, McDonnell presented a response from Americans opposed to Obama's health care plan.

"In recent months, the American people have made clear that they want government leaders to listen and act on the issues most important to them," he said. “We want results, not rhetoric. We want cooperation, not partisanship."

“All Americans agree, we need a health care system that is affordable, accessible, and high quality," he said. “But most Americans do not want to turn over the best medical care system in the world to the federal government."

He said Republicans offer different answers and "our solutions aren't thousand-page bills that no one has fully read, after being crafted behind closed doors with special interests."

On the issue of abortion itself, only McDonnell bothered to address it and he took a clear pro-life stance.

“America must always be a land where liberty and property are valued and respected, and innocent human life is protected," he said.

Obama on the other hand used language that appeared to support human worth but his record promoting abortion belies his words. In his State of the Union speech, he said, "America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity."

Former governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said Americans should evaluate Obama on his actions, not his words.

"Unfortunately, this administration’s actions speak louder than this President’s words and with Nancy Pelosi as Speaker and Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader, the gang that can't shoot straight," he said in an email to LifeNews.com.

"What’s needed is a resounding victory for conservative principles," including "life," Huckabee said.

Catholic writer Deal Hudson doesn't think Obama's speech delivered.

"President Obama gave his first State of the Union speech last night. With his popularity in a steady decline for the past six months, Obama needed his speech to rekindle the enthusiasm for his leadership that elected him in the first place. Thus far, there is no evidence to suggest he was successful," he said.

"Simply renaming health care reform 'health insurance reform' will not solve Obama's political puzzle, nor the underlying problems of the legislation. But this is typical of the president's approach to political obstacles -- change the language, not the substance, and people will drop their objections," Hudson added.

And Family Research Council president Tony Perkins noticed the pro-life line in McDonnell's speech.

""We applaud Governor Bob McDonnell for calling for a land in which 'innocent human life is protected,'" he said.

"The governor's call to protect human life is clearly in line with the American people who overwhelmingly oppose the President's health care plan which would use our hard earned dollars to pay for abortion coverage. FRC will continue to work to ensure taxpayers are not forced to be part of the President's pro-abortion agenda," he told LifeNews.com.

Americans likely had a different response to the speech depending on their political persuasion.

Before the speech, Gallup noted that Obama is the most polarizing president in American history, according to a poll it released.

The average difference in Obama's approval ratings between Democrats and Republicans turned out to be 65 percent -- the highest first-year gap of any president so measured.

"The extraordinary level of polarization in Obama's first year in office is a combination of declining support from Republicans coupled with high and sustained approval from Democrats," Gallup's Jeffrey Jones said.

Obama's 88 percent approval rating from Democrats is the second highest level of party support for a first-year president, trailing only the 92 percent Republican support for George W. Bush in 2001.

On the other hand, Obama's 23 percent rating among Republicans is tied for lowest party rating of a rookie president, matching GOP "backing" of Bill Clinton back in 1993.


Source:.lifenews.com/

Virginia's McDonnell plans stately response to Obama

RICHMOND -- Virginia's new Republican governor, Robert F. McDonnell, planned to talk about his views on the limited role of government, the need to rein in federal spending and the merits of offshore drilling as part of his party's response to the president's State of the Union address, according to early excerpts released Wednesday evening.

McDonnell was to deliver the nine-minute speech in the House of Delegates' chamber of the state's Capitol, a building designed by Thomas Jefferson. McDonnell invited 250 guests -- family members, friends, supporters and, at the last minute, a few Democrats -- as he tried to create a mini-State of the Union setting.

The setup was a clear departure from other State of the Union responses, which are generally delivered alone, often in an intimate setting. Four years ago, Gov. Tim Kaine (D) delivered his party's rebuttal from the Executive Mansion's ballroom.

Last year, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal delivered what was considered a flat speech from an empty room in the Louisiana governor's mansion, a setting that did not seem to flatter the young politician.

The congressional staffers and McDonnell advisers who organized this year's response sought a more commanding setting with an audience sure to applaud his vision for the country.

"I'm never going to match the ambience of the halls of Congress and the president of the United States, the leader of the free world," McDonnell told reporters earlier Wednesday. "I thought it would be a nice venue to invite a fair number of people so that they could hear the speech, to have a better backdrop than just a talking head on camera."

The theatrics surrounding the speech consumed Capitol Square, where a row of trucks was parked to assist FOX News, whose turn it was in a rotating pool of media organizations to air the speech.


The cost of the $30,000 event was paid for by the Republican Governors Association and the political action committees of McDonnell and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Congressional leaders chose McDonnell to deliver the response because of the way he campaigned and has so far governed: as a problem-solver who could appeal to Democrats and independents by talking about jobs and the economy.

In his first major national speech, according to the excerpts, McDonnell echoed many of the themes in his inaugural address two weeks earlier, calling for limited government and individual responsibility.

"The circumstances of our time demand that we reconsider and restore the proper, limited role of government at every level," he said.

McDonnell was expected to praise Obama for supporting charter schools and for sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. But he also prepared to say that Republicans have serious concerns over recent steps the government has taken regarding terrorism suspects.

Across Virginia, Organizing for America, an arm of the Democratic National Committee, was holding State of the Union parties, and Republicans were throwing their own parties to watch their new governor take his turn in the national spotlight.

Republicans in Richmond reveled in the moment, but Democrats continued to criticize McDonnell for giving the speech while failing to provide more guidance on how to close a multibillion-dollar budget.

"He's going to give a response having been in office for two weeks, on a country that goes from sea to shining sea," said Sen. A. Donald McEachin (D-Richmond). "He's going to be talking about a budget that has a nearly trillion-dollar deficit. He's going to be talking about, potentially, wars in foreign countries. He's had enough time to be able to talk to us about the State of the Union. But he hasn't had enough time to talk to tell me and the 9th Senatorial District or my colleagues on this floor about $4 billion in cuts?"

House Minority Leader Ward L. Armstrong (D-Henry) said he was invited to attend the speech late in the day through a personal call from McDonnell. "It may be a little late, but I'm not offended," Armstrong said.

McDonnell will be the third Virginian to deliver the response in five years: Kaine gave it in 2006, just after he took office, and U.S. Sen. James Webb (D) delivered it in 2007.


Source:washingtonpost.com/

George Michael: The man who was must-see TV

Through word of mouth in the community of people that revolved around and adored George Michael, I'd come to know in recent days that he was sicker than he would ever let on. And anyway, when the phone rang one recent Sunday morning George was in vintage form. He was having a good day and was in full voice, which is to say very loud, jumping from one topic to another. The Redskins stunk, the Wizards stunk, he hated a column I'd written a few days earlier. It was George unplugged, George wanting to know the latest, the same old George who'd just gotten off the phone with The Squire or Abe or Dan, George who hadn't slept because he'd been watching some NBA game on the West Coast until 1:30 in the morning.

After the conversation ended, my wife asked how George was doing, how he really and truly was. And I told her I had no idea. Like typical men, I didn't ask and he didn't tell me. In this case, I didn't have the courage to ask. He was fabulous in those 30 minutes, like it was 10:50 p.m. and he was minutes from a newscast. And if that was going to be the last conversation we'd ever have -- and it was -- then that's the way I wanted to remember George Michael: funny, informed, irreverent, a little profane, always engaged.

I spent Thursdays with George for 13 years, 40 Thursdays a year for nearly a dozen of those years. "Redskins Report" with Sonny and Riggo during football season, "Full Court Press" with Tony Kornheiser and David DuPree during basketball season. My professional life has been greatly influenced by two indomitable men named George. Solomon, who brilliantly ran The Washington Post sports section for a quarter-century and Michael who became the only sportscaster in America to develop a dominant national profile while working a local gig nightly for a quarter-century.

Before cable TV was in millions of homes George Michael brought us the world weekly, with a tiny little band of men and women who worked on Nebraska Avenue and produced an unthinkable volume of award-winning work. Every other sportscaster worked in a confined space; George worked wherever he wanted and did it all: football, basketball, baseball, hockey, golf, tennis, 'rasslin', rodeo, racin', here, there, everywhere. You think there was anybody else who could comfortably engage Wayne Gretzky, Dale Earnhardt Sr. and Cal Ripken, and tell them on-camera they were full of it? There wasn't.

George Michael left us as Wednesday night turned into Thursday morning.

Those closest to him, starting with his saintly wife Pat, were relieved because the suffering had become too great. In the 70 years before that he was an American original. He outworked just about everybody, never conceded stories to newspapers like just about every other TV sportscaster, was at times an insufferable perfectionist and commanded a room no matter who else was in it. Twenty-five years ago, before I began spending Thursdays with George, I walked into a room -- I don't recall the occasion -- and there stood Joe Gibbs, John Thompson and Sonny Jurgensen all being hassled in full voice by George Michael. It took awhile before I realized he could do it not because his personality was so outsized, which it was, but because they found him outside of all the showmanship to be credible. They respected him. Even better, they trusted him.

Just about everybody did.

By will and force of personality as much as anything, George Michael made himself must-see TV in Washington. When the Redskins stunk you wanted to know what George thought. When Abe Pollin decided to build a downtown arena you wanted to know what George was going to say.

Didn't mean he was the sweetest man in the world. God, George had a temper.

Source:washingtonpost.com

Only nice words will be said in public

First Published : 27 Nov 2009 12:12:00 AM ISTLast Updated : 27 Nov 2009 12:18:07 AM IST

Whatever the spin doctors of Manmohan Singh in the South Block may say, it is plain as daylight that the Obama administration in Washington DC is not taking India seriously. True, our prime minister is the first to be formally invited for a State visit after Obama took over the presidency. However, we cannot be blind to the many indicators scattered across the last few months on what the president thinks about the place of India vis-à-vis China in global affairs.


America is upset whenever human rights are violated anywhere in the world. Remember how it had denied visa to Narendra Modi in the wake of Gujarat riots. China which is a centralised authoritarian country does not allow any dissidence; it has imposed censorship on the Internet. If Obama objected to all this, it is not there in the joint statement between the two presidents. What do you make out of this guilty silence?

The president could not get his host to commit on the worldwide demand that China revalue its currency to its natural level, at least 20 per cent upwards. China has contributed to the global imbalance in currency by keeping its currency valued at the same level as in 1980s with only a marginal upward valuation in mid-90s and then withdrawing it. This gives enormous advantage, making Chinese goods cheaper for the rest of the world.

What a climbdown for the great power that its president had to give up meeting the Dalai Lama simply because he did not want to annoy China’s obdurate rulers. Then Obama concedes to China that Tibet “is part of the People’s Republic of China” and a weak rider “the United States supports the early resumption of dialogue between the Chinese government and the representatives of the Dalai Lama” — this when the Tibetan leader has already announced that such dialogue is futile, after trying this way for several years.

Obama got almost nothing from China’s rulers. But that is only one part of the story. The other part is that he virtually conceded to China the whole of South Asia as its play field by allowing this potent sentence to be part of the joint communiqué: US recognises China’s role in South Asian peace and specifically in India-Pakistan dialogue. The US has endorsed what China has been seeking to do through its support to insurgent groups in India, its aggressive naval expansion in the Indian Ocean and its intervention in Pakistan.

No doubt, our external affairs ministry reacted strongly to this time bomb planted in the Hu-Obama joint communiqué. But its coming right on the eve of Manmohan Singh going to Washington on a State visit was even more significant. It should only make perceptive observers in Delhi wonder whether any purpose would be served in Singh’s visit to the US now.

Newsweek’s international editor Fareed Zakaria has rightly commented on what you could expect from the visit: “There will be nice words said in public about the ties between two great democracies. But underneath this lies an unease.” A historic parallel is in President Nixon’s overture to Maoist China behind the back of India in the early 70s that stunned the Indian foreign policy establishment and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The danger of the prime minister being his own foreign policy maker also and of having a minimal person as external affairs minister was prominent in the history of post-Independence India. But this Congress practice continues even now. S M Krishna was nowhere in the Indo-Pak meeting in Egypt and he could hardly explain the key surrender sentence in the joint communiqué there.

Now once again he is simply a hanger-on and Manmohan Singh seems to believe that he is best suited to conduct foreign policy because he succeeded in winning the previous US administration’s support in getting the Indo-US civil nuclear agreement through. Compare that episode with what Vajpayee as PM did in talks with Pakistan president in Agra, getting his colleagues to go through the proposed agreement. As a result, he clearly rejected the trap that Musharraf proposed in it.

The core of Washington’s perception in South Asia is that it needs a face-saver in Afghanistan to get out of this situation and Pakistan with its influence on the Taliban alone could provide that face-saver. This is a departure from the Bush administration’s determined stand that Taliban should be exterminated. This country wants to know from Singh whether he would stand up to President Obama and tell him that such a move in Afghanistan would be interpreted in India as a surrender to Pakistan’s use of terror as an instrument of foreign policy aimed specially against India and that it would only further endanger India’s security.

If the PM is not able to talk his host in Washington out of such surrender, out of accepting Pakistan’s claim to ‘see a pro-Pak government in Afghanistan’ as Zakaria puts it, all the talk about India being a ‘strategic partner’ of America is simply meaningless chatter. Has Singh an alternative policy in position to tell America that it can move on its own strength and build a strong India that can counter a growing China-Pakistan-US axis once again?

To get Washington administration to perceive the Indian advantage and reorient its foreign policy, India must have a government that believes in building national strength through a framework that inspires a billion people with one purpose. In the ruling Congress in India, nationalism and national culture are dirty words. So Singh has to appeal to his celebrity host. All the while the prime minister’s spin doctors have to spot the glitter in the lunch and dinner that President Barack Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton host and the quality of the reception he gets in Washington to obfuscate the audience back in India.

Sourceexpressbuzz.com