Star Lineup of Guests at White House Dinner to Honor President Hu
FoxNews.com | Associated Press
Published January 19, 2011
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama greet China’s President Hu Jintao at the Grand Staircase as they arrive for a state dinner at the White House in Washington. (AP)
WASHINGTON — Michelle and Barack Obama welcomed a mix of Hollywood A-listers, big business types and prominent Chinese-Americans to the White House as they threw a “quintessentially American” state dinner Wednesday night for the president of China, complete with ice cream and apple pie.
The first lady was clad in an elegant orange-red shoulder-baring gown that swished around her in soft folds, and the president sported a tuxedo, as the two welcomed Chinese President Hu Jintao on a red carpet at the White House portico. An honor guard stood at attention behind them.
Celebrity star power arrived in the form of singer Barbra Streisand, her hubby-actor James Brolin and action film star Jackie Chan. Big business turned out in force, too, including Microsoft’s Steven Ballmer and JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, among others. Among the big names: fashion’s Vera Wang, Vogue’s Anna Wintour, artist Maya Lin, Olympic figure skater Michelle Kwan, and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to add some gravitas. Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter made the cut, too.
The dinner’s all-star jazz lineup included trumpeter Chris Botti, two-time Grammy Award-winning vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater, jazz icon Herbie Hancock, rising star Lang Lang and four-time Grammy-winning vocalist Dianne Reeves.
Steve King: Obamacare ‘A Theft of Liberty’
Newsmax.com
By Jim Meyers and Kathleen Walter
Rep. Steve King, a leader of House Republicans seeking the repeal of Obamacare, tells Newsmax that the healthcare reform law constitutes “a theft of the liberty of the American people” and repeal is an ultimate certainty.
The Iowa Republican also declares that Obamacare was the “core issue” that ended Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats’ control of the House, predicts that the Senate will go along with the House and vote for repeal, and says if President Obama does not sign a repeal bill then Republicans will defund healthcare reform until Americans elect a president in 2012 who will support repeal.
Ahead of Wednesday’s anticipated vote in the House on Obamacare repeal, Rep. King is presenting hundreds of thousands petitions from Americans demanding the repeal. In an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV, King was asked what message he is hoping to send.
The GOP has won the debate over President Obama’s controversial healthcare law, says Rep. Steve King. The Iowa Republican is confident that the GOP will be able to repeal it if a vote is forced in the Senate. He expects support from House Democrats.
What Obama Has Said about His Own Birth
AmericanThinker.com
January 19, 2011
By Jack Cashill
While Democrat Congressman Frank Pallone read the “natural born Citizen” clause of the U.S. Constitution on the House floor last Thursday, a spirited female in the audience shouted out, “Except Obama! Except Obama! Help us, Jesus!”
Later that day, NBC’s Brian Williams improbably chose to assign blame for the woman’s outburst on newly elected House speaker John Boehner. “How much responsibility do you feel?” Williams asked pointedly.
“The state of Hawaii has said Obama was born there,” said Boehner, who is no more intimate with the “Birther” movement than Williams himself. “That was good enough for me.”
The person Williams should have been asking about “responsibility” is the president. Obama’s conspicuous fabrications over the years have caused even the sober among us to doubt his origins story.
In September 2009, President Obama addressed the nation’s schoolchildren writ large, an innovation that struck many on the right as a wee bit too Big-Brotherly. In the talk, Obama asked America’s students to take personal responsibility. That was all well enough.
Missed in the media hubbub, however, was his take on why this could be difficult for some students. “I get it,” he told the kiddies. “I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother.”
In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama made the same claim. “He had left Hawaii back in 1963,” he wrote of Obama Sr., “when I was only two years old.”
When Obama wrote this in Dreams, he may have been relating what he had himself been told. By 2009, he knew better, but so vested was he in the story, and so useful had it been in his rise, that he continued to dissemble, even before millions of schoolchildren.
Health Law Looks Shaky; Abortion Fight Renewed; China Won’t Blink
FoxNews.com
By Chris Stirewalt
Published January 18, 2011
Health Repeal Debate is More Than Symbolism
“13 Percent”
– The portion of American adults who want to see President Obama’s national health care law preserved in its current form, according to a new Gallup poll.
Proponents of President Obama’s national health-care law in politics and the press have been atwitter over a recent AP poll that shows hard opposition to the law decreasing.
You know you have an unpopular initiative on your hands when, as the AP poll suggests, having only a third of Americans passionately committed to its repeal and the nation evenly divided on the subject in general is considered good news. Hooray!
The poll number that really matters, though, is from the latest Gallup/USA Today survey. It shows only 13 percent of Americans like the law as it is written.
The plurality in today’s poll (32 percent) want the law repealed entirely. Twenty five percent want the law scaled back and 24 percent want it to be more liberal. So that’s 57 percent who want less of the law compared to 37 percent who don’t want any rollbacks.
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