Are Barack Obama’s “Dreams” Ruining America?

The President's own words, laid out in his books before he sought any office, may explain why those who adored him are disappointed, and those who feared him are convinced they were right.
It appears that the "Dreams of [his] Father" are the key to understanding Barack Obama's actions as President, and what he sees as the future of America and American government.

Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.
These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse.

Dinesh D'Souza, "How Obama Thinks" www.forbes.com...

With election season uponus, we are getting a reminder of “the Campaigner Obama,” whose rhetoric once galvanized and energized a core of liberal American support as it never had been before.
It also brings to mind the warnings that I and others had tried to spread that all was not as it seemed with Barack Obama II. More than once, I have implored those who seek to understand his true motivations and aspirations to read and contemplate Obama’s past; both as a politician and as an author.
Today, many once avid, if not rabid, followers are disillusioned. Those who saw in him a threat to American greatness and leadership, and as an antagonist, at best, of capitalism and free markets have seen their worst fears and predictions realized.
Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative scholar and author, has provided what may be the best insight into what, exactly, shapes Barack Obama’s vision and plans for his presidential agenda and the future of this country. It will ring true to those on both sides, and will reveal the underlying agenda driving Obama in his “transformation” of America.

What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

How Obama Thinks

As he related in his first book, President Obama's life and goals are driven by the “Dreams From My Father,” Barack Obama, Sr.:
D’Souza sums it up thusly:

Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."

How Obama Thinks


We can trace the elder Obama’s life as an anti-colonial leader and activist, showing how the focus of his rage against “imperial” governments shifted from the Europeans to the United States; and, how these feelings have colored and influenced all of his son’s actions as an adult, in and out of government. In fact, you could take some of the father’s own words, and easily work them into one of the son’s speeches:

"We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now."

The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."
Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.

Do his father’s views really fit in with Obama’s present-day principles?

From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.
For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West.

Now, we have a conservative scholar laying out, in simple terms, not only where Barack Obama comes from, but where he plans to take us, and the rest of the world.

It’s not too late to gain a deeper understanding of the man in the office of the Chief Executive of the United States. It may be too late to do much about it, though.

jw

Dinesh D'Souza, formerly of the Hoover Institution and Stanford University, is currently the President of The King's College in New York City.  D'Souza is a noted conservative who has described conservatism as

"the belief that there are moral standards in the universe and that living up to them is the best way to have a full and happy life."

Mitch Daniels sounds off on health care reform bill

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has spoken out recently on several occasions about the effects of federal health care legislation on states’ economies, and on the effectiveness of consumer-driven health care, such as under programs in effect in Indiana.

Daniels signed landmark health care legislation during his first term, called Healthy Indiana, providing health insurance for those who earn too much for Medicaid but too little to afford their own coverage.  Under the plan, the state contributes permanent funds to individual health savings accounts.  Participants may also contribute; and when the account is depleted, a catastrophic insurance plan kicks in to cover any additional expenses.  The plan promotes preventive care and encourages citizens to become more value-conscious consumers of health care.  A similar plan offered to state employees now has over 70% participation (including the Governor); and only 3% have chosen to opt-out for an alternative PPO.

Appearing on Fox News’ “Journal Editorial Report” with Wall Street Journal editor Paul Gigot, Daniels spelled out his belief that Indiana’s legislative contingent should turn down the pending federal legislation.  One of his greatest concerns is for the state’s programs.  Calling the federal bill “very ill conceived,” Daniels went on to add that, “[Indiana’s] program for uninsured citizens would be wiped out,” by passage of the healthcare reform bill.

Calling the proposed reforms “a vey large mistake,” Daniels said he would advise his state’s Congressional delegation to focus more on incremental improvements, adding that he believed that health care reforms (such as the Indiana HSA program) should “individualize tax benefits” and “trust people more with their own decisions about their own health.”.

In an interview with CBS’ Nancy Cordes, Daniels emphasized the contrasts between current health care programs and the Indiana HSAs: “It's our current system that favors the wealthy and the healthy.  [Healthy Indiana] … respects the autonomy and dignity of its participants.”  Daniels also noted, "It's saving a lot of money for the employee and the employer."

Mitch Daniels takes a populist position that health care consumers are the best decisions makers where costs and choice of health care are concerned.  He wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, “The Indiana experience confirms what common sense already tells us.  … There will be no meaningful cost control until we are all cost controllers in our own right.  Americans can make sound, thrifty decisions about their own health. If national policy trusted and encouraged them to do so, our skyrocketing health-care costs would decelerate.”