Obama Bashing Du Jour

So much to choose from regarding this target rich Presidency ....


Krauthaumer On Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview:

He has an easy laugh and one of the great presidential smiles of all time, so why not deploy it. I found that OK.

What I found interesting is when he asked about governing, how he likes to govern. He says he likes it and it comes naturally to him.

Well, I'm glad he thinks so. There are 299 million other Americans who aren't quite sure yet eight weeks in. I hope it's natural, because he has no experience at all. He has never managed a candy store.

But it tells you a bit about him. He is the man who does not lack for self-confidence. There is always the issue of hubris. That was always an issue in the campaign, and it remains so.

In the interview, he tried to offload a lot of his problems onto George Bush, but after you pass a stimulus budget and a Geithner plan of over $2 trillion, you now own the economy, so that's not going to work.

And despite all the foibles and the gaffes and the missteps, everything is going to hinge on the Geithner plan. If it succeeds, he succeeds. If it doesn't, he fails.


Sen. Judd Gregg:

Yesterday, Sen. Judd Gregg gave a scary-yet-accurate picture of what America’s fiscal outlook will look like if President Obama gets his budget adopted. The president’s plan means:

Seventeen trillion dollars worth of debt at the end of 10 years, $11 trillion at the end of five years. This translates into a debt-to-GDP ratio which we have not seen in this country since the end of World War II when we were trying to pay off the war debt. Basically, you take national debt up to about 80 percent of gross national product. That's the public debt. Historically, it's been about 40 percent.

Gregg explains the implications: “When you get up to an 80 percent ratio, where your public debt is 80 percent of your gross national product, and you maintain that ratio for years to come, you're basically running your country into the ground.”


Obama's Cap & Trade Regulation:

A new report by Moody's Investors Services finds that electricity rates will increase by 30% as a result. No wonder that Big Steel, as well as arguing for carbon tariffs, is also arguing that it should be given free permits to emit. Energy policy in this country has finally left sanity behind in the dark, which is where the rest of us will be soon.


Rep. John Boehner on the Budget:

In a presser on Capitol Hill this afternoon, Minority Leader John Boehner (R, Ohio) denounced President Obama's budget, using charts to illustrate its multi-trillion dollar contribution to the national debt.

Setting the stage for Obama's presser tonight, Boehner said that the president's budget "includes irresponsible levels of spending...It doubles the debt on our kids and grandkids over the next six years...I just think that this may be the most irresponsible piece of legislation that I've seen in my legislative career."

Boehner also bristled at White House claims that Republicans were nay-sayers, simply obstructing his agenda. "Eric Cantor (R, Va.) and I personally delivered our stimulus proposal to the President in January," he said. "The White House pretended they never even saw it."


Yet Another Bad Appointment / Nomination:

Transnational Progressive Nominated as Legal Advisor for State [John Fonte]


The Transnational Progressive assault on the sovereignty of the American liberal democratic nation-state has just kicked into high gear with the nomination by the Obama administration of Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh to be the Legal Advisor to the U.S. State Department. Dean Koh wants to “trigger a transnational legal process” that will “generate legal interpretations that in turn can be internalized into domestic law.” Put simply, he favors opening a transnational legal space beyond the Constitution and the democratic decision-making process of our liberal democracy. My comments on Koh’s theories below are excerpted from my Bradley Symposium essay of June 2008, “Global Governance vs. the Liberal Democratic Nation State: What is the Best Regime?”

Harold Koh, the dean of Yale University Law School, served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor during the Clinton Administration. In a detailed article in the Stanford Law Review responding to the Bush foreign policy, Koh articulates the central viewpoint of the American governing left.

Koh chastises the US for failing to “obey global norms.”America, Koh tells us, “promotes double standards” by refusing to ratify the International Criminal Court treaty; “claiming a Second Amendment exclusion from a proposed global ban on the illicit transfer of small arms and light weapons”; and “declining to implement the orders of the International Court of Justice with regard to the death penalty.”Indeed, Koh complains: “The World Court finally found that the United States had violated the Vienna Convention” (on the death penalty), but “American courts have essentially ignored” the ruling of the ICJ.

Koh’s proposed remedy to American exceptionalism is for “American lawyers, scholars and activists” to “trigger a transnational legal process,” of “transnational interactions” that will “generate legal interpretations that can in turn be internalized into the domestic law of even resistant nation-states.”For example, Koh suggests that, “human rights advocates” should litigate “not just in domestic courts, but simultaneously before foreign and international arenas.”Moreover, they should encourage foreign governments (such as Mexico) and transnational NGOs to challenge the US on the death penalty and other human rights issues.

Supporters of the International Criminal Court should, Koh recommends, “provoke interactions between the United States government and the ICC” that might lead to the US becoming enmeshed in the ICC process (by, for example, having the US provide evidence in ICC trials). These interactions with the ICC would show cooperation with the tribunal and therefore “could be used to undermine” the official US “unsigning” of the treaty because it might “constitute a de-facto repudiation” of the “act of unsignature.”


Re: Transnational Progressive Nominated as Legal Advisor for State [Andy McCarthy]

To add to the sage observations of my friends John Fonte and Ed Whelan, I offer this from Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny (I think we're going to be saying that a lot):

Thomas Jefferson, in an 1803 letter to Senator Wilson Cary Nicholas of Virginia respecting the Louisiana Purchase, explained:

Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. I say the same as to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives. It specifies & deliniates the operations permitted to the federal government, and gives all the powers necessary to carry these into execution....

This will be the battle ahead. Those John has brilliantly coined the transnational-progressives will attempt to impose unconstitutional, sovereignty-sapping arrangements by treaty and other international agreements. It will be up to the Republicans to block ratification by mustering 34 no votes. But an important bedrock principle must be: The Constitution cannot be changed by a treaty. A treaty is only "the supreme law of the land" in the same sense that a statute is, meaning: If it violates the Constitution, it is invalid.