Outrageous. Disgusting.
I really hope this is not true.
Obama and Holder are just bad news ...
Obama's Weekly Friday Night Bad News Dump: Transfer Gitmo Detainees to Illinois [Andy McCarthy]
Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site breaks the news — in the form of a memo, dated Thursday, from President Obama to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder* — directing that the terrorists being detained at Guantanamo Bay be transferred to a prison in Thomson, Illinois (the Thomson Correctional Center).
It's an outrage. It will inevitably result in trained terrorists being released in the United States — bank on it. More to come on this.
_________________________
* Andrew's site describes the document as "a leaked DOJ memo" from Holder to Gates. But, assuming it is authentic, it is clearly a memo from Obama to Holder and Gates — the constitutional powers relied on are those of the president, not the attorney general, and the memo gives directions to both Holder and Gates. (Holder has no power to order Gates to do anything — they are peers, and the Constitution vests all the executive power in the president, not members of the president's cabinet.)
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
ObamaCare - Is it Imploding ? Make It So !
Tottering [Rich Lowry]
The Reid bill is really tottering now.
"If this thing falls apart, you can look back to today as the tipping point," says a Republican aide in the Senate, echoing what Lamar Alexander notes in the Costa post below. First, there was last night's CNN poll showing 61 percent opposition. Then, there was the devastating CMS report today. "Nobody went to the floor that I could see to defend it on the Democratic side," says the aide. The back-drop for all this is the non-deal that Reid hyped as a break-through earlier this week, only to have it unravel almost immediately. Even Bill Nelson says the Medicare buy-in is basically a "non-starter." "You're starting to see other Democrats nibbling around the edges," the aide says. He predicts that if one Democrat comes out clearly against the Reid bill, others will follow, in a dynamic like the unexpectedly decisive defeat of the amnesty bill a few years ago. Reid also has to worry about the clock. He needs everything to break exactly right—a CBO score coming in on Monday, a score that's good, no intervening, unexpected drama—to force a final showdown next weekend. If he goes to Christmas break without a bill, it gets much harder to pick up the pieces in January. Since the Senate debate began, the bill has only gotten more unpopular. It’s all still in flux obviously, but we just might be watching the bill fall apart before our eyes.
Humpty Dumpty Harry Reid [Robert Costa]
Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and GOP conference chair, tells NRO that Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) is “all tied up in a knot.”
“All of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men may not be able to put 60 together again,” says Alexander, in reference to the (barely) 60 votes Reid got last month to bring his bill to the floor. “With two weeks until Christmas, Democrats find themselves in the awkward position of trying to pass a 2,000-page bill — a bill which most of them admit they don’t know much about.”
Alexander cites the new report from the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as a potential death blow to Reid’s cause. The CMS, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, says that if Reid’s bill became law, America would spend $234 billion more on health care over the next decade.
“Add the CMS report to the Mayo Clinic’s devastating letter against the expansion of Medicare, as well as the opposition of the American Medical Association and hospitals to Reid’s Medicare idea, and it’s clear that the more people find out about this, the less they like it,” says Alexander. “I’m not ready to make a prediction (on whether it will fail), but things aren’t looking good for the majority leader.”
Looking back at the health-care debate this week, Alexander mused about how awkward Reid has been in managing the debate. “Senator Reid moved up the appropriations bill because he didn’t want a drug importation,” says Alexander. “He was afraid that the (Dorgan-McCain) importation proposal would pass and blow up his deal with Big Pharma, who has been the principle funder of Obamacare’s ad campaign. Then you had the public-option compromise and the furor over his proposal to expand Medicare. Then last night’s CMS report. Senator Reid doesn’t know where to turn. He surely doesn’t have 60 votes yet, because if he did, he’d move to close debate.”
“Friday, December 11 may turn out to be a seminal day for the health-care debate,” says Alexander. “The majority leader has been trying to create a sense of inevitability, but this debate is beginning to feel a lot like the 2007 immigration debate. The sense of inevitability is rapidly diminishing. Every new survey shows public support fading. CNN says that 61 percent of Americans are opposed to this bill.”
Why is there such growing public frustration with Reid’s bill? “Health care is not the only issue at work here,” says Alexander. “Health care has become a proxy for public restlessness and anger about bailouts, spending, and debt. All of these issues are tied up
Chalres Krauthammer
On Rep. Anthony Weiner’s statement that the expansion of Medicare is “an unvarnished, complete victory for people like me who have been arguing for a single-payer system”:
What Weiner did today is: He committed the classic Kinsley gaffe. [Michael] Kinsley defined a Washington gaffe as a politician who accidentally speaks the truth — and then you have to apologize and retract.
He [Weiner] spoke the truth on this because what you're getting in the [Senate health-care] bill now — if you have expansion of Medicare to include a younger decade — you have got an enormous expansion of government control: You have an expansion in Medicaid, which is for the poor; an expansion of S-CHIP which is for the near-poor children; and you add on to that expansion of Medicare — and you have got about three-quarters of the population under a direct system of government insurance.
What's left is a shrunken private sector which is heavily regulated. And you have individual mandates, penalties, and a huge amount of regulation — 118 commissions and other regulatory bodies … As Weiner has said, you're on the road — you're almost there — to a government takeover.
Now, if we want to have that — and there are arguments in favor of that: Canada and the U.K. are humane countries and they work with a government-run system. But we ought to have an open debate on that and not have it shoved in in the middle of the night with eight days to go in a self-imposed deadline on a radical change in one-sixth of the American economy.
The problem here is the substance, and also the process, which is out of control and makes no sense at all. …
Look at the madness of this [Medicare expansion]. Why are the doctors and the hospitals opposed to it? Because the existing system of Medicare repayment is ruining them.
We are killing the golden goose. We have the best doctors, the best hospitals in the world. This is going to be catastrophic. Without doctors and hospitals, you don't have a health-care system. All you have are politicians in Washington.
Sticker Shock for Dem 'Deal' [Daniel Foster]
Americans will face steep premiums under the government-negotiated private plans and massive expansion of Medicare at the core of Harry Reid's new “public option.” A family of four making $54,000 would pay more than $825 per month for one federally-managed plan — that even after a $10,100 government subsidy
.A 55-year-old couple buying into the Medicare expansion could pay $15,200 per year under the Reid plan, and it remains unclear how much if any of that cost would be subsidized. The Medicare buy-in would only be available to individuals 55-and-over, not younger family members, and it would be attached to premium and financing structures separate from the rest of Medicare, with no cap on out-of-pocket expenses.
And these, alas, are only the direct costs of the bill.
The NYT has the full story here, and you can track the latest on Obamacare at NRO On the News.
The Reid bill is really tottering now.
"If this thing falls apart, you can look back to today as the tipping point," says a Republican aide in the Senate, echoing what Lamar Alexander notes in the Costa post below. First, there was last night's CNN poll showing 61 percent opposition. Then, there was the devastating CMS report today. "Nobody went to the floor that I could see to defend it on the Democratic side," says the aide. The back-drop for all this is the non-deal that Reid hyped as a break-through earlier this week, only to have it unravel almost immediately. Even Bill Nelson says the Medicare buy-in is basically a "non-starter." "You're starting to see other Democrats nibbling around the edges," the aide says. He predicts that if one Democrat comes out clearly against the Reid bill, others will follow, in a dynamic like the unexpectedly decisive defeat of the amnesty bill a few years ago. Reid also has to worry about the clock. He needs everything to break exactly right—a CBO score coming in on Monday, a score that's good, no intervening, unexpected drama—to force a final showdown next weekend. If he goes to Christmas break without a bill, it gets much harder to pick up the pieces in January. Since the Senate debate began, the bill has only gotten more unpopular. It’s all still in flux obviously, but we just might be watching the bill fall apart before our eyes.
Humpty Dumpty Harry Reid [Robert Costa]
Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and GOP conference chair, tells NRO that Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) is “all tied up in a knot.”
“All of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men may not be able to put 60 together again,” says Alexander, in reference to the (barely) 60 votes Reid got last month to bring his bill to the floor. “With two weeks until Christmas, Democrats find themselves in the awkward position of trying to pass a 2,000-page bill — a bill which most of them admit they don’t know much about.”
Alexander cites the new report from the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as a potential death blow to Reid’s cause. The CMS, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, says that if Reid’s bill became law, America would spend $234 billion more on health care over the next decade.
“Add the CMS report to the Mayo Clinic’s devastating letter against the expansion of Medicare, as well as the opposition of the American Medical Association and hospitals to Reid’s Medicare idea, and it’s clear that the more people find out about this, the less they like it,” says Alexander. “I’m not ready to make a prediction (on whether it will fail), but things aren’t looking good for the majority leader.”
Looking back at the health-care debate this week, Alexander mused about how awkward Reid has been in managing the debate. “Senator Reid moved up the appropriations bill because he didn’t want a drug importation,” says Alexander. “He was afraid that the (Dorgan-McCain) importation proposal would pass and blow up his deal with Big Pharma, who has been the principle funder of Obamacare’s ad campaign. Then you had the public-option compromise and the furor over his proposal to expand Medicare. Then last night’s CMS report. Senator Reid doesn’t know where to turn. He surely doesn’t have 60 votes yet, because if he did, he’d move to close debate.”
“Friday, December 11 may turn out to be a seminal day for the health-care debate,” says Alexander. “The majority leader has been trying to create a sense of inevitability, but this debate is beginning to feel a lot like the 2007 immigration debate. The sense of inevitability is rapidly diminishing. Every new survey shows public support fading. CNN says that 61 percent of Americans are opposed to this bill.”
Why is there such growing public frustration with Reid’s bill? “Health care is not the only issue at work here,” says Alexander. “Health care has become a proxy for public restlessness and anger about bailouts, spending, and debt. All of these issues are tied up
Chalres Krauthammer
On Rep. Anthony Weiner’s statement that the expansion of Medicare is “an unvarnished, complete victory for people like me who have been arguing for a single-payer system”:
What Weiner did today is: He committed the classic Kinsley gaffe. [Michael] Kinsley defined a Washington gaffe as a politician who accidentally speaks the truth — and then you have to apologize and retract.
He [Weiner] spoke the truth on this because what you're getting in the [Senate health-care] bill now — if you have expansion of Medicare to include a younger decade — you have got an enormous expansion of government control: You have an expansion in Medicaid, which is for the poor; an expansion of S-CHIP which is for the near-poor children; and you add on to that expansion of Medicare — and you have got about three-quarters of the population under a direct system of government insurance.
What's left is a shrunken private sector which is heavily regulated. And you have individual mandates, penalties, and a huge amount of regulation — 118 commissions and other regulatory bodies … As Weiner has said, you're on the road — you're almost there — to a government takeover.
Now, if we want to have that — and there are arguments in favor of that: Canada and the U.K. are humane countries and they work with a government-run system. But we ought to have an open debate on that and not have it shoved in in the middle of the night with eight days to go in a self-imposed deadline on a radical change in one-sixth of the American economy.
The problem here is the substance, and also the process, which is out of control and makes no sense at all. …
Look at the madness of this [Medicare expansion]. Why are the doctors and the hospitals opposed to it? Because the existing system of Medicare repayment is ruining them.
We are killing the golden goose. We have the best doctors, the best hospitals in the world. This is going to be catastrophic. Without doctors and hospitals, you don't have a health-care system. All you have are politicians in Washington.
Sticker Shock for Dem 'Deal' [Daniel Foster]
Americans will face steep premiums under the government-negotiated private plans and massive expansion of Medicare at the core of Harry Reid's new “public option.” A family of four making $54,000 would pay more than $825 per month for one federally-managed plan — that even after a $10,100 government subsidy
.A 55-year-old couple buying into the Medicare expansion could pay $15,200 per year under the Reid plan, and it remains unclear how much if any of that cost would be subsidized. The Medicare buy-in would only be available to individuals 55-and-over, not younger family members, and it would be attached to premium and financing structures separate from the rest of Medicare, with no cap on out-of-pocket expenses.
And these, alas, are only the direct costs of the bill.
The NYT has the full story here, and you can track the latest on Obamacare at NRO On the News.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
ObamaCare - Can Congress IMPOSE a health insurance mandate ?
An Unconstitutional Mandate [Hans A. von Spakovsky]
When Nancy Pelosi was asked where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance, she dismissed the question by saying, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” According to CNSNews, her press spokesman said that this authority comes from Congress’s “constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce.” However, as a new legal memorandum from Heritage points out, Speaker Pelosi is completely wrong: The individual insurance mandate is both unconstitutional and unprecedented (there is a two-page executive summary for anyone who does not have time to read the entire memorandum).
There is no question that the Supreme Court has upheld extensive regulation of economic activity through the Commerce Clause, but it has never upheld any requirement by Congress that an individual participate in economic activity. There is nothing in the Constitution that allows Congress to punish you if you don’t engage in commerce. Liberal law professors and editorial writers such as Erwin Chemerinsky of UC-Irvine and Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post try to gloss over this point, and won’t admit that the Supreme Court has never approved any such requirement.
The new Heritage paper points out that the penalty imposed on individuals who don’t comply with this mandate is also a capitation tax, and therefore unconstitutional, because it is not assessed evenly based upon population. The paper also explains why a federal mandate to buy health insurance would be totally different from state requirements to buy automobile-liability insurance. The federal government does not have the inherent police powers of the states that authorize such mandates; the state requirements are imposed on those who engage in a voluntary activity (driving a car), while the health-insurance mandate would be imposed on everyone; you only have to buy liability insurance if you drive on public roads; and finally, states only require you to get insurance that protects third parties that you may injure through your driving — you are not required to buy insurance to protect yourself from injury or your own car from damage.
If Congress can impose a health-insurance mandate, then there is no limit to what Congress can do, and the Constitution’s limits on congressional power will have essentially been eliminated. As Will Rogers once said, with Congress, every time they make a joke it’s a law, and every time they make a law it’s a joke. Unfortunately, none of us will be able to laugh over this pending abuse of power.
When Nancy Pelosi was asked where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance, she dismissed the question by saying, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” According to CNSNews, her press spokesman said that this authority comes from Congress’s “constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce.” However, as a new legal memorandum from Heritage points out, Speaker Pelosi is completely wrong: The individual insurance mandate is both unconstitutional and unprecedented (there is a two-page executive summary for anyone who does not have time to read the entire memorandum).
There is no question that the Supreme Court has upheld extensive regulation of economic activity through the Commerce Clause, but it has never upheld any requirement by Congress that an individual participate in economic activity. There is nothing in the Constitution that allows Congress to punish you if you don’t engage in commerce. Liberal law professors and editorial writers such as Erwin Chemerinsky of UC-Irvine and Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post try to gloss over this point, and won’t admit that the Supreme Court has never approved any such requirement.
The new Heritage paper points out that the penalty imposed on individuals who don’t comply with this mandate is also a capitation tax, and therefore unconstitutional, because it is not assessed evenly based upon population. The paper also explains why a federal mandate to buy health insurance would be totally different from state requirements to buy automobile-liability insurance. The federal government does not have the inherent police powers of the states that authorize such mandates; the state requirements are imposed on those who engage in a voluntary activity (driving a car), while the health-insurance mandate would be imposed on everyone; you only have to buy liability insurance if you drive on public roads; and finally, states only require you to get insurance that protects third parties that you may injure through your driving — you are not required to buy insurance to protect yourself from injury or your own car from damage.
If Congress can impose a health-insurance mandate, then there is no limit to what Congress can do, and the Constitution’s limits on congressional power will have essentially been eliminated. As Will Rogers once said, with Congress, every time they make a joke it’s a law, and every time they make a law it’s a joke. Unfortunately, none of us will be able to laugh over this pending abuse of power.
I Thought O's Nobel Speech Sucked Too ...
But then again; don't most of them ?
Bolton: Obama's 'Pedestrian, Turgid, and Uninspired' Address [Robert Costa]
Earlier today, Pres. Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in a ceremony in Oslo. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells NRO that President Obama’s address in the Norwegian capital was “pedestrian, turgid, and uninspired.”
“It followed the standard international leftist line,” says Bolton. “He played to the crowd and filled the speech with clichés from the American and international left by saying ‘America cannot act alone’ and that he ‘prohibited torture.’ The speech was also typical of Obama in its self-centeredness and ‘something for everybody’ approach.”
“It was so diffuse that though I wouldn’t call it incoherent, it was getting close,” says Bolton. “It was a lot about him, again, especially with his comments about being at the ‘beginning, not end’ of his labors for the world.”
Obama made some “breathtakingly simpleminded statements in his section on humanity’s history of war and the ‘hard truth’ that war will not end in our lifetimes,” adds Bolton. “No kidding. I don’t know what that is supposed to prove.”
Sheikh Obama and His Two Wars [Daniel Pipes]
Obama’s Nobel “lecture” offers critics the usual cornucopia of opportunities, but I shall focus on just two statements:“I am the commander-in-chief of a nation in the midst of two wars.” And here I thought there were three wars. Obama’s two are Iraq and Afghanistan; missing is what George W. Bush termed the War on Terror and I call the “war on radical Islam.” Obama apparently reduces that third one to al-Qaeda and counts it as part of the Afghan war. His mistake has real consequences; long after American troops have left Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamists will be attacking and subverting us. If we don’t see their efforts as a war, we lose.
“Religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam.” Here, Obama follows his predecessor in presenting himself as an interpreter of Islam. I ridiculed “Imam Bush” for telling Muslims about true Islam and its distortion, and now I must ridicule “Sheikh Obama” for the same. He’s a politician, not a theologian. He’s a Christian, not a Muslim. He should steer completely clear from the topic of who are good or bad Muslims.
— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
Obama’s Bad War [Victor Davis Hanson]
The president said some good things, but unfortunately, his long academic lecture on the nature of war itself had all the characteristics of we have come to accept from a Barack Obama sermon:
1) Verbosity (4,000 words plus!) and extraneousness (he finally even referenced the world’s farmers); 2) I/me exhaustion (34 times) and the messianic cult of personality; 3) the 50/50, split-the-difference trope; 4) the straw man: on the one hand there are realists, on the other idealists, and I Obama singularly reject this either/or dichotomy (as if no one else does as well); 5) veiled attacks on the previous administration; 6) reference to his own unique personal story; 7) good-war/bad-war theory of Afghanistan and Iraq; 8) the hopey-changy rhetorical flourish.
Is there a Microsoft program somewhere that writes these things out?
Obama did not mention the word “Iraq” a single time, instead presenting his good-war/bad-war dichotomy thus: “One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 43 other countries — including Norway — in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.”
The president apparently does not realize that in Iraq too there was a coalition, that the Iraq War was approved by both houses of Congress on 23 grounds (only two dealing with WMD), and that more and more evidence is emerging concerning the terrorist ties between Saddam and radical Islam. And why, exactly, is it “winding down”?
Maybe a word of praise for the U.S. soldiers who took a genocidal thug out and later ensured that the war, whose name cannot be spoken, would be “winding down”?And why emphasize Afghanistan’s supposedly better coalition when later in the speech you plan to emphasize that unilateralism can be justified as well? “There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”
Keep reading this post .
Wrong about Past and Present [David B. Rivkin Jr. & Lee A. Casey]
President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech was disappointing on several key issues. At the most fundamental level, it distorted history and misstated the nature of the enemy we face in al-Qaeda and its allies. These rhetorical failures, coming in the middle of a protracted and difficult struggle, which are always taxing for democracy, have serious implications; they cause real harm.
As far as the re-writing of history is concerned, there was the predictable, and increasingly tiresome, criticism of the Bush administration — particularly unfortunate when speaking to a global audience in a foreign city. In this regard, in describing the need to use force legitimately — a key element of both the just-war theory and international law governing self-defense — President Obama identified the war in Afghanistan and the first Gulf War as examples. The 2003 Iraq War was conspicuously absent from this list. Indeed, in case his listeners somehow missed the point, the only thing that the president said about the Iraq War is that it “is winding down.”
Going beyond the events of the last few years, the president provided an erroneous, but very politically correct, version of how men have tried to leash the dogs of war. For example, he mentioned that “the United States Senate rejected the League of Nations — an idea for which Woodrow Wilson received this prize,” implying that this rejection had something to do with the league’s profound failure to maintain the peace. However, few serious students of the league would argue that it would or could have fulfilled Wilson’s hopes even with American participation. Only if the Western powers has been willing to use force in the early in the 1930s could the Second World War have been averted; none were — including the United States. Let’s just say that, if Winston Churchill had perused this portion of the speech, his disdain would have been manifest.
Going back even farther in history, political correctness remained the president’s dominant leitmotif. In trying to provide some historical context for the current wave of Jihadist violence, Obama noted that “these extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded.” In fact, the Crusades were no more or less violent and cruel than any other form of medieval warfare and, in contrast to the naked aggression of al-Qaeda, the Crusaders’ stated goal was to recover areas that had been violently conquered during the first wave of Islamic Jihad, from the 7th to 11th centuries. Whether this effort was justified is a question for medievalists.
Keep reading this post . .
Bolton: Obama's 'Pedestrian, Turgid, and Uninspired' Address [Robert Costa]
Earlier today, Pres. Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in a ceremony in Oslo. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells NRO that President Obama’s address in the Norwegian capital was “pedestrian, turgid, and uninspired.”
“It followed the standard international leftist line,” says Bolton. “He played to the crowd and filled the speech with clichés from the American and international left by saying ‘America cannot act alone’ and that he ‘prohibited torture.’ The speech was also typical of Obama in its self-centeredness and ‘something for everybody’ approach.”
“It was so diffuse that though I wouldn’t call it incoherent, it was getting close,” says Bolton. “It was a lot about him, again, especially with his comments about being at the ‘beginning, not end’ of his labors for the world.”
Obama made some “breathtakingly simpleminded statements in his section on humanity’s history of war and the ‘hard truth’ that war will not end in our lifetimes,” adds Bolton. “No kidding. I don’t know what that is supposed to prove.”
Sheikh Obama and His Two Wars [Daniel Pipes]
Obama’s Nobel “lecture” offers critics the usual cornucopia of opportunities, but I shall focus on just two statements:“I am the commander-in-chief of a nation in the midst of two wars.” And here I thought there were three wars. Obama’s two are Iraq and Afghanistan; missing is what George W. Bush termed the War on Terror and I call the “war on radical Islam.” Obama apparently reduces that third one to al-Qaeda and counts it as part of the Afghan war. His mistake has real consequences; long after American troops have left Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamists will be attacking and subverting us. If we don’t see their efforts as a war, we lose.
“Religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam.” Here, Obama follows his predecessor in presenting himself as an interpreter of Islam. I ridiculed “Imam Bush” for telling Muslims about true Islam and its distortion, and now I must ridicule “Sheikh Obama” for the same. He’s a politician, not a theologian. He’s a Christian, not a Muslim. He should steer completely clear from the topic of who are good or bad Muslims.
— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
Obama’s Bad War [Victor Davis Hanson]
The president said some good things, but unfortunately, his long academic lecture on the nature of war itself had all the characteristics of we have come to accept from a Barack Obama sermon:
1) Verbosity (4,000 words plus!) and extraneousness (he finally even referenced the world’s farmers); 2) I/me exhaustion (34 times) and the messianic cult of personality; 3) the 50/50, split-the-difference trope; 4) the straw man: on the one hand there are realists, on the other idealists, and I Obama singularly reject this either/or dichotomy (as if no one else does as well); 5) veiled attacks on the previous administration; 6) reference to his own unique personal story; 7) good-war/bad-war theory of Afghanistan and Iraq; 8) the hopey-changy rhetorical flourish.
Is there a Microsoft program somewhere that writes these things out?
Obama did not mention the word “Iraq” a single time, instead presenting his good-war/bad-war dichotomy thus: “One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 43 other countries — including Norway — in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.”
The president apparently does not realize that in Iraq too there was a coalition, that the Iraq War was approved by both houses of Congress on 23 grounds (only two dealing with WMD), and that more and more evidence is emerging concerning the terrorist ties between Saddam and radical Islam. And why, exactly, is it “winding down”?
Maybe a word of praise for the U.S. soldiers who took a genocidal thug out and later ensured that the war, whose name cannot be spoken, would be “winding down”?And why emphasize Afghanistan’s supposedly better coalition when later in the speech you plan to emphasize that unilateralism can be justified as well? “There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”
Keep reading this post .
Wrong about Past and Present [David B. Rivkin Jr. & Lee A. Casey]
President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech was disappointing on several key issues. At the most fundamental level, it distorted history and misstated the nature of the enemy we face in al-Qaeda and its allies. These rhetorical failures, coming in the middle of a protracted and difficult struggle, which are always taxing for democracy, have serious implications; they cause real harm.
As far as the re-writing of history is concerned, there was the predictable, and increasingly tiresome, criticism of the Bush administration — particularly unfortunate when speaking to a global audience in a foreign city. In this regard, in describing the need to use force legitimately — a key element of both the just-war theory and international law governing self-defense — President Obama identified the war in Afghanistan and the first Gulf War as examples. The 2003 Iraq War was conspicuously absent from this list. Indeed, in case his listeners somehow missed the point, the only thing that the president said about the Iraq War is that it “is winding down.”
Going beyond the events of the last few years, the president provided an erroneous, but very politically correct, version of how men have tried to leash the dogs of war. For example, he mentioned that “the United States Senate rejected the League of Nations — an idea for which Woodrow Wilson received this prize,” implying that this rejection had something to do with the league’s profound failure to maintain the peace. However, few serious students of the league would argue that it would or could have fulfilled Wilson’s hopes even with American participation. Only if the Western powers has been willing to use force in the early in the 1930s could the Second World War have been averted; none were — including the United States. Let’s just say that, if Winston Churchill had perused this portion of the speech, his disdain would have been manifest.
Going back even farther in history, political correctness remained the president’s dominant leitmotif. In trying to provide some historical context for the current wave of Jihadist violence, Obama noted that “these extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded.” In fact, the Crusades were no more or less violent and cruel than any other form of medieval warfare and, in contrast to the naked aggression of al-Qaeda, the Crusaders’ stated goal was to recover areas that had been violently conquered during the first wave of Islamic Jihad, from the 7th to 11th centuries. Whether this effort was justified is a question for medievalists.
Keep reading this post . .
Can Iran's regime fall despite Obama's feeble silence ?
Food for thought ...
'Silence from the White House as the future of the world revolves around the Iranian cauldron.' [Andy McCarthy]
That's the concluding line from the latest in a series of posts from Michael Ledeen at his Pajamas blog, Faster Please, where you can follow the breathtaking events underway in Iran. I also loved this line at the end of Amir Taheri's trenchant essay ("Iran's Democratic Moment") in this morning's WSJ: "Iran has entered one of those hinge moments in history. What is certain is that the status quo has become untenable."
The regime in Tehran, our enemy, is teetering on the brink of collapse. All it needs is a little push from the United States — a strong statement of support for the Iranian people's revolt from the American president. The Iranian people may be able to do this for themselves, but they need our open exhortations of support and encouragement, coupled with some modest measures like (as Michael said in an interview with Bill Bennett yesterday morning) logistical and communications support for the dissidents, and policies aimed at exploiting Iran’s dependence on refined gasoline and access to shipping insurance markets that have been advocated by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Michael has been saying for years that the regime can be toppled without a military invasion. I haven’t been as confident about that — but he has been right about everything else, hasn’t he? One thing is for sure: as a number of us have been saying for a long time, the national policy of the United States — the organizing principle based on which we should make all decisions that touch on Iran — should be regime change. The mullahs may have 30 nuclear facilities; they only have one regime, and if the regime was replaced by something better, we wouldn’t be nearly as worried about the nuclear facilities.
I got some heat a while back for saying out loud that I think President Obama would rather see the regime prevail. Now here is a hinge moment, right there for the taking, and . . . he is giving the regime exactly what it needs to hang on: his deaf ear to the protests and his dogged concession of the regime’s legitimacy.
About a week ago, I wrote a column called “Alinksy Does Afghanistan” in which I noted that Obama — who has spent most of his adult life, including his presidency, talking down America — suddenly found it expedient to tell a hall full of cadets that America is the one nation that “tends to the light of freedom, and justice, and opportunity, and respect for the dignity of all peoples.” Did he mean it? I don’t think so — I think he says whatever he thinks he needs to say in the moment. But here’s his big chance to prove me and others wrong. Far more importantly, it is his opportunity to do a tremendous service to our nation while moving Iran closer to the light of freedom he claims to be tending.
'Silence from the White House as the future of the world revolves around the Iranian cauldron.' [Andy McCarthy]
That's the concluding line from the latest in a series of posts from Michael Ledeen at his Pajamas blog, Faster Please, where you can follow the breathtaking events underway in Iran. I also loved this line at the end of Amir Taheri's trenchant essay ("Iran's Democratic Moment") in this morning's WSJ: "Iran has entered one of those hinge moments in history. What is certain is that the status quo has become untenable."
The regime in Tehran, our enemy, is teetering on the brink of collapse. All it needs is a little push from the United States — a strong statement of support for the Iranian people's revolt from the American president. The Iranian people may be able to do this for themselves, but they need our open exhortations of support and encouragement, coupled with some modest measures like (as Michael said in an interview with Bill Bennett yesterday morning) logistical and communications support for the dissidents, and policies aimed at exploiting Iran’s dependence on refined gasoline and access to shipping insurance markets that have been advocated by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Michael has been saying for years that the regime can be toppled without a military invasion. I haven’t been as confident about that — but he has been right about everything else, hasn’t he? One thing is for sure: as a number of us have been saying for a long time, the national policy of the United States — the organizing principle based on which we should make all decisions that touch on Iran — should be regime change. The mullahs may have 30 nuclear facilities; they only have one regime, and if the regime was replaced by something better, we wouldn’t be nearly as worried about the nuclear facilities.
I got some heat a while back for saying out loud that I think President Obama would rather see the regime prevail. Now here is a hinge moment, right there for the taking, and . . . he is giving the regime exactly what it needs to hang on: his deaf ear to the protests and his dogged concession of the regime’s legitimacy.
About a week ago, I wrote a column called “Alinksy Does Afghanistan” in which I noted that Obama — who has spent most of his adult life, including his presidency, talking down America — suddenly found it expedient to tell a hall full of cadets that America is the one nation that “tends to the light of freedom, and justice, and opportunity, and respect for the dignity of all peoples.” Did he mean it? I don’t think so — I think he says whatever he thinks he needs to say in the moment. But here’s his big chance to prove me and others wrong. Far more importantly, it is his opportunity to do a tremendous service to our nation while moving Iran closer to the light of freedom he claims to be tending.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Charles Krauthammer vs. Obama on TARP spending; Obama's ungraciousness towards Bush & Obama Care
On President Obama’s intention to use TARP monies to pay for a jobs program:
Look, it proves, as if we need any extra evidence, that Democrats have a congenital inability to claim an unclaimed pot of money and not seize it and spend it.
Everyone knows how this money was to be used. It was not intended for spending. It was supposed to be a loan. It was supposed to be [for] a dire emergency — when the banking system (and the economy) was at risk. It was money that was going to go out, and a lot of it — most of it — would be returned.
And now, as it is returned as the banks are getting healthy, the Democrats want to spend it.
Now, I said last week that the Democrats would be completely unable to resist any temptation in this regard, (a), because it will allow a “Stimulus 2” and it will look as though it will not increase the deficit, and secondly, because (as we saw in that [sound] bite from Obama) they will be able to portray it in the perfect populist way: Money intended to go to Wall Street will end up, because of our munificence, on Main Street.
It is a perfect political ploy. The Democrats will not resist it. And even though it is against the law as written in the TARP law — [the monies are] supposed to be returned — today the Democrats are the law, and they will change it if necessary.
On Obama’s blaming the Bush administration for the problems with TARP:
But there was also somebody else in the collateral damage of his attack on Bush. Who, after all, was at the center of the TARP in the Bush years? It was Geithner, his own treasury secretary.
So if he's going to attack the program administered under the previous administration, he is attacking his own treasury secretary — in the same way that when Obama attacked the Bush administration over the supposed lack of troops [for Afghanistan] that were requested at the end of the second Bush administration, well, who was in charge of the Defense Department at the time? Who, if Obama is correct, had hurt his country in denying the request at the request of the [military] commanders? The secretary of defense — Bob Gates, who is the secretary of defense today under Obama and who was under the Bush administration.
So he [Obama] has a way of attacking everybody — even if they are serving him today — simply because of the tic he has about attacking President Bush.
On ultimate Congressional passage of Obamacare:
Yes, I think in the end the left will give up on its objections because it knows [that this] is a historic occasion in which the [federal] government will seize control of health care — and they won't allow [the opportunity] to die over small details or smaller issues.
Look, it proves, as if we need any extra evidence, that Democrats have a congenital inability to claim an unclaimed pot of money and not seize it and spend it.
Everyone knows how this money was to be used. It was not intended for spending. It was supposed to be a loan. It was supposed to be [for] a dire emergency — when the banking system (and the economy) was at risk. It was money that was going to go out, and a lot of it — most of it — would be returned.
And now, as it is returned as the banks are getting healthy, the Democrats want to spend it.
Now, I said last week that the Democrats would be completely unable to resist any temptation in this regard, (a), because it will allow a “Stimulus 2” and it will look as though it will not increase the deficit, and secondly, because (as we saw in that [sound] bite from Obama) they will be able to portray it in the perfect populist way: Money intended to go to Wall Street will end up, because of our munificence, on Main Street.
It is a perfect political ploy. The Democrats will not resist it. And even though it is against the law as written in the TARP law — [the monies are] supposed to be returned — today the Democrats are the law, and they will change it if necessary.
On Obama’s blaming the Bush administration for the problems with TARP:
But there was also somebody else in the collateral damage of his attack on Bush. Who, after all, was at the center of the TARP in the Bush years? It was Geithner, his own treasury secretary.
So if he's going to attack the program administered under the previous administration, he is attacking his own treasury secretary — in the same way that when Obama attacked the Bush administration over the supposed lack of troops [for Afghanistan] that were requested at the end of the second Bush administration, well, who was in charge of the Defense Department at the time? Who, if Obama is correct, had hurt his country in denying the request at the request of the [military] commanders? The secretary of defense — Bob Gates, who is the secretary of defense today under Obama and who was under the Bush administration.
So he [Obama] has a way of attacking everybody — even if they are serving him today — simply because of the tic he has about attacking President Bush.
On ultimate Congressional passage of Obamacare:
Yes, I think in the end the left will give up on its objections because it knows [that this] is a historic occasion in which the [federal] government will seize control of health care — and they won't allow [the opportunity] to die over small details or smaller issues.
Obama, Dems & their affinity for voter fraud
This piece to me incapsulates the sheer hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party:
Voter Fraud? What Voter Fraud? [Hans A. von Spakovsky]
We all know that liberals think voter fraud does not exist, and that President Obama’s new White House counsel believes anyone who talks about it should be investigated by the Justice Department for engaging in voter intimidation. So what does the Obama administration do with people who actually commit voter fraud? Why, it rewards them with political positions in the administration!
The American Thinker has a great post about this. You may recall that during the 2008 election election, it was discovered that about a dozen staffers for Obama’s presidential campaign who were assigned to work in Ohio had actually registered to vote and cast ballots in the state. They were accused of committing voter fraud, because you cannot register to vote in a state when you are merely working there temporarily and have no intention to make it your actual residence. After this news came to light, a local prosecutor warned the campaign that its employees had broken the law. To avoid being charged with felonies, the staffers sent a letter asking that their registrations and ballots be canceled. (Members of the Kerry campaign did the same thing in 2004 in Wisconsin, according to a special report released by the Special Investigations Unit of the Milwaukee Police Department.)
One of the Obama campaign staffers who registered illegally in 2008 and signed the letter was Olivia Alair, who worked for White House press secretary Robert Gibbs as the campaign’s regional communications director in Ohio. Despite her commission of felony voter fraud, Alair was not only given a job on the transition team, but she is now the press secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation. In the Obama administration, no bad deed goes unrewarded.
Voter Fraud? What Voter Fraud? [Hans A. von Spakovsky]
We all know that liberals think voter fraud does not exist, and that President Obama’s new White House counsel believes anyone who talks about it should be investigated by the Justice Department for engaging in voter intimidation. So what does the Obama administration do with people who actually commit voter fraud? Why, it rewards them with political positions in the administration!
The American Thinker has a great post about this. You may recall that during the 2008 election election, it was discovered that about a dozen staffers for Obama’s presidential campaign who were assigned to work in Ohio had actually registered to vote and cast ballots in the state. They were accused of committing voter fraud, because you cannot register to vote in a state when you are merely working there temporarily and have no intention to make it your actual residence. After this news came to light, a local prosecutor warned the campaign that its employees had broken the law. To avoid being charged with felonies, the staffers sent a letter asking that their registrations and ballots be canceled. (Members of the Kerry campaign did the same thing in 2004 in Wisconsin, according to a special report released by the Special Investigations Unit of the Milwaukee Police Department.)
One of the Obama campaign staffers who registered illegally in 2008 and signed the letter was Olivia Alair, who worked for White House press secretary Robert Gibbs as the campaign’s regional communications director in Ohio. Despite her commission of felony voter fraud, Alair was not only given a job on the transition team, but she is now the press secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation. In the Obama administration, no bad deed goes unrewarded.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Obama @ Brookings - Continues To Dissemble About Jobs
After all, what does Obama know about creating a job ? Not too much ...
Unintentional Comedy [Stephen Spruiell]
Barack Obama might have chosen a better opener for his speech today:
Almost exactly one year ago, on a cold winter’s day, I met with my new economic team at the headquarters of my presidential transition offices in Chicago. Over the course of four hours, my advisors presented an analysis of where the economy stood, accompanied by a chilling set of charts and graphs, predicting where we might end up. It was an unforgettable series of presentations.
Was this one of those charts?
Blame Game [Tevi Troy]
Fox News has an instructive piece on President Obama’s finger-pointing jobs speech at Brookings today. According to the piece, Obama described Republicans as “an opposition party which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve.” This is wrong on many levels, but most obviously in the sense that the GOP somehow “decided” to hand the reins over to Obama. That decision came from the American people. However, the recent poll showing media darling Obama running only a scant point ahead of the mercilessly mocked Sarah Palin on the favorability scale suggests that the American people may be in the process of rethinking things.
Obama's economic team predicted in January that without the stimulus plan, unemployment would rise to 9 percent. It rose to 10.2 percent before leveling off last month. Yet, in his speech today, Obama said that thanks to the stimulus, we've avoided those terrible scenarios his economic team predicted in that series of "unforgettable" presentations. If that's what he thinks, those presentations must have been quite forgettable. The jobs picture is currently worse than his team predicted it would be.
Gregg, Cantor 'Unimpressed' With Obama's Jobs Speech [Robert Costa]
In a speech at the Brookings Institution today, President Obama outlined a wide-ranging new jobs program focused on infrastructure investment and small-business initiatives. “It was nothing but ‘Stimulus 2,’” says Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.) to NRO. “Clearly the White House has taken the position that deficits don’t matter.”
Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.), the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, tells us that he was “not impressed” with Obama’s remarks. “This concept that ‘TARP money’ can be used is a total fraud,” says Gregg. “It’s nothing more than political cover. There is no TARP money to use. TARP was authorized to draw down debt by $700 billion. They’ve drawn down about $600 billion, so theoretically there is $100 billion more they could draw down, but then they would have to issue more debt.”
Gregg is adamant that adding debt to support a massive expansion in government would be a mistake. Besides, he says, the law is clear: “Using these funds for stimulus projects is not legally allowed. The law is precise — I wrote it. The funds are meant to address systemic risk and financial crises. Building roads and giving dollars to local projects is not that. The money they want to use doesn’t exist.”
Agreeing with Cantor, Gregg adds that Obama’s program is another major stimulus package. “The last one took a huge hit on the deficit and debt,” says Gregg. “It just became ‘walking around money’ for appropriators in the House and Senate. According to Chairman Bernanke, we’re moving out of recession. I doubt that this proposal will help to lower unemployment. We’ll be well out of the recession by the time Congress acts. Instead of this measure, fiscal balance and solvency have to be brought back into the equation — not more federal dollars for green jobs or whatever the cause du jour is at the White House.”
Cantor adds that Obama’s plan misses the core ingredient of job creation: a strong marketplace. “The government is trying to create jobs that they like, rather than encouraging the market. How does increased government spending create an environment where investors, families, and businesses can count on federal fiscal responsibility? In the past we’ve seen government spending miss the mark by an incredible amount.”
Walker: Obama Didn't Address Key Issues [Robert Costa]
In his speech today at the Brookings Institution, did President Obama outline an effective proposal for job creation? To find out, NRO asked David Walker, the former Comptroller General of the United States and current president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
“It’s possible to make targeted investments to deal with job challenges and economic growth, but America has a large, known, and growing structural problem with deficits,” says Walker. “I didn’t hear anything concrete in this speech that addresses that long-term issue. Washington is continuing to kick the can down the road.”
The administration, says Walker, needs to be “more intelligent” about how they make infrastructure investments. “We need to make sure they promote economic growth and efficiency and are not just make-work projects,” says Walker. “The simple fact is that this country doesn’t do a good job at long-range planning for key infrastructure projects. When the country tries to put money in the pipeline, there often aren’t enough meritorious projects ready to be executed. We end up spending lots of money on make-work projects that may or may not increase growth and efficiency. Shovel-ready projects generate short-term employment opportunities but they don’t fix the problem.”
Congress Can't Resist the Sight of Money [Veronique de Rugy]
Yesterday, I mentioned that I was worried that Congress and the administration might start thinking about ways to use the $200 billion of the reduced estimate of the losses from TARP for new spending programs. Never mind that this $200 billion does not translate into $200 billion in new spending but, rather, has a value of roughly $50 billion.
Today the Washington Post has this story:
The official said the Treasury expects a total of $175 billion in repayments from banks by the end of next year.
Politics may ultimately play into the decision of how to use the unspent bailout funds, analysts said. The administration is aware that worries over high unemployment often trump voters' concerns about budget deficits, said analysts and economists in contact with Obama's aides. Democrats on Capitol Hill say the idea of using a Wall Street bailout to help small businesses has a lot of appeal among lawmakers and voters.
Keep reading this post . . .
Bailing Out the States' Bailout [Nicole Gelinas]
In his jobs speech today, President Obama proposed infrastructure investment “beyond what was included in the Recovery Act.”
Achieving this goal won’t be difficult, as only half a percent of the $787 billion stimulus bill went toward crumbling roads, bridges, dams, and subway systems.
But infrastructure spending will be effective only if the new funds address an old problem: states and cities are spending too much money on their workforces and not enough on physical assets. The spring stimulus made this problem worse instead of better, since it threw more money where the old money already goes.
The president should send new infrastructure money only to the states and cities that spend the next three months enacting plans to cut their labor costs. Otherwise, municipalities won’t have the money to maintain anything they build or expand.
The bailouts of Chrysler and GM were disasters whose costs to the economy are just beginning.
But at least the auto companies and unions had to acknowledge that their labor costs were outdated and unaffordable, and not just in the context of the recession.
States such as California and New York still haven’t acknowledged that fact.
— Nicole Gelinas, contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, is author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street — and Washington.
Obama Argues that Ramping Up Spending Can Shrink the Deficit [Stephen Spruiell]
Most liberals mock the supply-side idea that, in certain cases, tax cuts can actually increase revenue by spurring economic growth. So what to make of the Democrats' sudden embrace of the inverse of that argument?
At Brookings today, the president argued:
There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits on the one hand, and investing in job creation and economic growth on the other. But this is a false choice. Ensuring that economic growth and job creation are strong and sustained is critical to ensuring that we are increasing revenues and decreasing spending on things like unemployment so that our deficits will start coming down.
The economic literature supporting the link between tax cuts and growth is fairly solid. The link between government spending and growth is not nearly as well-established, relying more on Keynesian theories than actual evidence. In fact, there is quite a bit of evidence that the opposite is true: Reducing the size of the government's footprint in the economy would be conducive to growth.
Shlaes: Obama's Content Problem [Robert Costa]
Amity Shlaes, a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, tells NRO that President Obama’s jobs speech “sounded good but fell short on the content.”
“You see Obama’s impulse to be fiscally responsible — the Romer-Summers impulse — and you see the impulse for social equity — his Bob Reich impulse,” says Shlaes. “This kind of tension was also very typical of Franklin Roosevelt: you’d hear two conflicting things in the same speech. That’s because he saw the world politically and not economically. The same is true for Obama.”
“The language of the president’s speech is encouraging because it references small business and growth. It’s also initially encouraging to see him talk about his education program, Race to the Top, which sounds like the opposite of No Child Left Behind,” says Shlaes. “But here is an example of how the content doesn’t live up to its billing. Race to the Top sounds like we’re rewarding competition and helping students with scholarships — a sort of October Sky scenario where boys compete in missile-building contests. Instead the money really flows to institutions via the state to pay teachers or low performers, i.e. it’s aimed to move the weak forward rather than incent the strong. That’s nice, but it’s a Bush repeat.”
Obama is not addressing the core problem of what creates growth, adds Shlaes. “He’s throwing money in the general direction of economic activity. With the same level of commitment, however, he could have instituted permanent tax cuts instead of temporary gimmicks.” Doing that, she says, could permit more small business growth, since many of them often find “federal stimuli uncertain.”
Keep reading this post . . .
More Politics as Usual? [Burton Folsom Jr. ]
"This is not politics as usual," President Obama promised during the 2008 campaign, but his TARP speech on Tuesday displayed even more duplicitous politics than usual. It was pure bait and switch. Congress passed TARP as emergency loans available to some banks—with the money to be repaid as soon as possible. Now President Obama, contrary to the written law in the bill, wants to use the repayments to finance new (or old) programs of his choice.
Even FDR was not that audacious. His "TARP of the 1930s" was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which made federal loans to troubled banks and industries. When those loans were repaid, the cash did not go directly into other programs (in particular FDR's WPA campaign slush fund). Instead, as promised the RFC repayments became government receipts—used to offset the costs of other programs passed by Congress.
Character and trust are precious commodities and reneging on promises is one way to erode that precious trust—forever.
One final point—the president's efforts to spark economic growth through tax cuts and huge capital gains cuts are to be commended. But here is an important caveat. Make these cuts permanent not temporary—and always make them across the board, not to targeted groups. Our Constitution promise "equal protection of the laws to all citizens," and tax cuts need to be made with that in mind. Also, a capital gains cut limited to only one year will not help create the stable long-term investment climate that is needed to induce businessmen to take the risks that will ultimately create jobs and expand the economy.
— Burton Folsom Jr. is a professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan and author of New Deal or Raw Deal? He blogs at BurtFolsom.com.
Unintentional Comedy [Stephen Spruiell]
Barack Obama might have chosen a better opener for his speech today:
Almost exactly one year ago, on a cold winter’s day, I met with my new economic team at the headquarters of my presidential transition offices in Chicago. Over the course of four hours, my advisors presented an analysis of where the economy stood, accompanied by a chilling set of charts and graphs, predicting where we might end up. It was an unforgettable series of presentations.
Was this one of those charts?
Blame Game [Tevi Troy]
Fox News has an instructive piece on President Obama’s finger-pointing jobs speech at Brookings today. According to the piece, Obama described Republicans as “an opposition party which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve.” This is wrong on many levels, but most obviously in the sense that the GOP somehow “decided” to hand the reins over to Obama. That decision came from the American people. However, the recent poll showing media darling Obama running only a scant point ahead of the mercilessly mocked Sarah Palin on the favorability scale suggests that the American people may be in the process of rethinking things.
Obama's economic team predicted in January that without the stimulus plan, unemployment would rise to 9 percent. It rose to 10.2 percent before leveling off last month. Yet, in his speech today, Obama said that thanks to the stimulus, we've avoided those terrible scenarios his economic team predicted in that series of "unforgettable" presentations. If that's what he thinks, those presentations must have been quite forgettable. The jobs picture is currently worse than his team predicted it would be.
Gregg, Cantor 'Unimpressed' With Obama's Jobs Speech [Robert Costa]
In a speech at the Brookings Institution today, President Obama outlined a wide-ranging new jobs program focused on infrastructure investment and small-business initiatives. “It was nothing but ‘Stimulus 2,’” says Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.) to NRO. “Clearly the White House has taken the position that deficits don’t matter.”
Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.), the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, tells us that he was “not impressed” with Obama’s remarks. “This concept that ‘TARP money’ can be used is a total fraud,” says Gregg. “It’s nothing more than political cover. There is no TARP money to use. TARP was authorized to draw down debt by $700 billion. They’ve drawn down about $600 billion, so theoretically there is $100 billion more they could draw down, but then they would have to issue more debt.”
Gregg is adamant that adding debt to support a massive expansion in government would be a mistake. Besides, he says, the law is clear: “Using these funds for stimulus projects is not legally allowed. The law is precise — I wrote it. The funds are meant to address systemic risk and financial crises. Building roads and giving dollars to local projects is not that. The money they want to use doesn’t exist.”
Agreeing with Cantor, Gregg adds that Obama’s program is another major stimulus package. “The last one took a huge hit on the deficit and debt,” says Gregg. “It just became ‘walking around money’ for appropriators in the House and Senate. According to Chairman Bernanke, we’re moving out of recession. I doubt that this proposal will help to lower unemployment. We’ll be well out of the recession by the time Congress acts. Instead of this measure, fiscal balance and solvency have to be brought back into the equation — not more federal dollars for green jobs or whatever the cause du jour is at the White House.”
Cantor adds that Obama’s plan misses the core ingredient of job creation: a strong marketplace. “The government is trying to create jobs that they like, rather than encouraging the market. How does increased government spending create an environment where investors, families, and businesses can count on federal fiscal responsibility? In the past we’ve seen government spending miss the mark by an incredible amount.”
Walker: Obama Didn't Address Key Issues [Robert Costa]
In his speech today at the Brookings Institution, did President Obama outline an effective proposal for job creation? To find out, NRO asked David Walker, the former Comptroller General of the United States and current president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
“It’s possible to make targeted investments to deal with job challenges and economic growth, but America has a large, known, and growing structural problem with deficits,” says Walker. “I didn’t hear anything concrete in this speech that addresses that long-term issue. Washington is continuing to kick the can down the road.”
The administration, says Walker, needs to be “more intelligent” about how they make infrastructure investments. “We need to make sure they promote economic growth and efficiency and are not just make-work projects,” says Walker. “The simple fact is that this country doesn’t do a good job at long-range planning for key infrastructure projects. When the country tries to put money in the pipeline, there often aren’t enough meritorious projects ready to be executed. We end up spending lots of money on make-work projects that may or may not increase growth and efficiency. Shovel-ready projects generate short-term employment opportunities but they don’t fix the problem.”
Congress Can't Resist the Sight of Money [Veronique de Rugy]
Yesterday, I mentioned that I was worried that Congress and the administration might start thinking about ways to use the $200 billion of the reduced estimate of the losses from TARP for new spending programs. Never mind that this $200 billion does not translate into $200 billion in new spending but, rather, has a value of roughly $50 billion.
Today the Washington Post has this story:
The official said the Treasury expects a total of $175 billion in repayments from banks by the end of next year.
Politics may ultimately play into the decision of how to use the unspent bailout funds, analysts said. The administration is aware that worries over high unemployment often trump voters' concerns about budget deficits, said analysts and economists in contact with Obama's aides. Democrats on Capitol Hill say the idea of using a Wall Street bailout to help small businesses has a lot of appeal among lawmakers and voters.
Keep reading this post . . .
Bailing Out the States' Bailout [Nicole Gelinas]
In his jobs speech today, President Obama proposed infrastructure investment “beyond what was included in the Recovery Act.”
Achieving this goal won’t be difficult, as only half a percent of the $787 billion stimulus bill went toward crumbling roads, bridges, dams, and subway systems.
But infrastructure spending will be effective only if the new funds address an old problem: states and cities are spending too much money on their workforces and not enough on physical assets. The spring stimulus made this problem worse instead of better, since it threw more money where the old money already goes.
The president should send new infrastructure money only to the states and cities that spend the next three months enacting plans to cut their labor costs. Otherwise, municipalities won’t have the money to maintain anything they build or expand.
The bailouts of Chrysler and GM were disasters whose costs to the economy are just beginning.
But at least the auto companies and unions had to acknowledge that their labor costs were outdated and unaffordable, and not just in the context of the recession.
States such as California and New York still haven’t acknowledged that fact.
— Nicole Gelinas, contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, is author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street — and Washington.
Obama Argues that Ramping Up Spending Can Shrink the Deficit [Stephen Spruiell]
Most liberals mock the supply-side idea that, in certain cases, tax cuts can actually increase revenue by spurring economic growth. So what to make of the Democrats' sudden embrace of the inverse of that argument?
At Brookings today, the president argued:
There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits on the one hand, and investing in job creation and economic growth on the other. But this is a false choice. Ensuring that economic growth and job creation are strong and sustained is critical to ensuring that we are increasing revenues and decreasing spending on things like unemployment so that our deficits will start coming down.
The economic literature supporting the link between tax cuts and growth is fairly solid. The link between government spending and growth is not nearly as well-established, relying more on Keynesian theories than actual evidence. In fact, there is quite a bit of evidence that the opposite is true: Reducing the size of the government's footprint in the economy would be conducive to growth.
Shlaes: Obama's Content Problem [Robert Costa]
Amity Shlaes, a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, tells NRO that President Obama’s jobs speech “sounded good but fell short on the content.”
“You see Obama’s impulse to be fiscally responsible — the Romer-Summers impulse — and you see the impulse for social equity — his Bob Reich impulse,” says Shlaes. “This kind of tension was also very typical of Franklin Roosevelt: you’d hear two conflicting things in the same speech. That’s because he saw the world politically and not economically. The same is true for Obama.”
“The language of the president’s speech is encouraging because it references small business and growth. It’s also initially encouraging to see him talk about his education program, Race to the Top, which sounds like the opposite of No Child Left Behind,” says Shlaes. “But here is an example of how the content doesn’t live up to its billing. Race to the Top sounds like we’re rewarding competition and helping students with scholarships — a sort of October Sky scenario where boys compete in missile-building contests. Instead the money really flows to institutions via the state to pay teachers or low performers, i.e. it’s aimed to move the weak forward rather than incent the strong. That’s nice, but it’s a Bush repeat.”
Obama is not addressing the core problem of what creates growth, adds Shlaes. “He’s throwing money in the general direction of economic activity. With the same level of commitment, however, he could have instituted permanent tax cuts instead of temporary gimmicks.” Doing that, she says, could permit more small business growth, since many of them often find “federal stimuli uncertain.”
Keep reading this post . . .
More Politics as Usual? [Burton Folsom Jr. ]
"This is not politics as usual," President Obama promised during the 2008 campaign, but his TARP speech on Tuesday displayed even more duplicitous politics than usual. It was pure bait and switch. Congress passed TARP as emergency loans available to some banks—with the money to be repaid as soon as possible. Now President Obama, contrary to the written law in the bill, wants to use the repayments to finance new (or old) programs of his choice.
Even FDR was not that audacious. His "TARP of the 1930s" was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which made federal loans to troubled banks and industries. When those loans were repaid, the cash did not go directly into other programs (in particular FDR's WPA campaign slush fund). Instead, as promised the RFC repayments became government receipts—used to offset the costs of other programs passed by Congress.
Character and trust are precious commodities and reneging on promises is one way to erode that precious trust—forever.
One final point—the president's efforts to spark economic growth through tax cuts and huge capital gains cuts are to be commended. But here is an important caveat. Make these cuts permanent not temporary—and always make them across the board, not to targeted groups. Our Constitution promise "equal protection of the laws to all citizens," and tax cuts need to be made with that in mind. Also, a capital gains cut limited to only one year will not help create the stable long-term investment climate that is needed to induce businessmen to take the risks that will ultimately create jobs and expand the economy.
— Burton Folsom Jr. is a professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan and author of New Deal or Raw Deal? He blogs at BurtFolsom.com.
Copenhagen's Prophets of Doom
Evidence to the contrary and fraudulent data / science / hucksterism be damned !
'Climate of Doom' [Rich Lowry]
Here's my Copenhagen column today. I mention the video that opened the summit, but only glancingly. It's beyond parody, like a short version of "2012" — the earth cracking beneath the girl's feet directly parallels the California earthquake scene — except even more treacly and without the character development. In her excellent column today, Mona compares the panic over climate change to the panic over over-population a couple of decades ago. It also reminds me of the nuclear-freeze movement, in its exploitation of children and their fears, in its doomsday rhetoric, and in its simplistic, absolutist, and blatantly unrealistic proposed policy.
And then, there is the EPA;
Charles Krauthammer:
On the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act:
Look, it's blackmail. It is a way of saying to Congress: Either you do cap-and-trade or we will do cap, no trade. We will regulate every aspect of American life if the EPA now has in its power — and perhaps it will enact it over time — to intrude on every aspect of American life. Essentially what it can do is to regulate emissions from any institution, any enterprise, any apartment block that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 in a year, which is a very low level.
It [EPA] says it will raise that higher but it doesn't actually have the authority to actually raise it. ...
It really is what Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, said: Environmentalism is the new socialism. It is a way for the feds — for the best and brightest in the federal government — to regulate all aspects of life. It used to be in the name of socialism, which was social equality. Now it's in the name of the planet.
It is a smart strategy on the part of the left, but it is a hell of a way to do it. If you want to do it, at least you do it by the consensus of Congress. If you do it by regulation, there will be a revolution on the administration's hands.
'Climate of Doom' [Rich Lowry]
Here's my Copenhagen column today. I mention the video that opened the summit, but only glancingly. It's beyond parody, like a short version of "2012" — the earth cracking beneath the girl's feet directly parallels the California earthquake scene — except even more treacly and without the character development. In her excellent column today, Mona compares the panic over climate change to the panic over over-population a couple of decades ago. It also reminds me of the nuclear-freeze movement, in its exploitation of children and their fears, in its doomsday rhetoric, and in its simplistic, absolutist, and blatantly unrealistic proposed policy.
And then, there is the EPA;
Charles Krauthammer:
On the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act:
Look, it's blackmail. It is a way of saying to Congress: Either you do cap-and-trade or we will do cap, no trade. We will regulate every aspect of American life if the EPA now has in its power — and perhaps it will enact it over time — to intrude on every aspect of American life. Essentially what it can do is to regulate emissions from any institution, any enterprise, any apartment block that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 in a year, which is a very low level.
It [EPA] says it will raise that higher but it doesn't actually have the authority to actually raise it. ...
It really is what Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, said: Environmentalism is the new socialism. It is a way for the feds — for the best and brightest in the federal government — to regulate all aspects of life. It used to be in the name of socialism, which was social equality. Now it's in the name of the planet.
It is a smart strategy on the part of the left, but it is a hell of a way to do it. If you want to do it, at least you do it by the consensus of Congress. If you do it by regulation, there will be a revolution on the administration's hands.
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