Watch:
The Backlash That Wasn't (or Isn't) http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/266014/backlash-wasnt-contd-andrew-stiles
Friday, April 29, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Obama's Fantasy Budget - No Leadership; All Politics
The Hypocrite-In-Chief's (Obama) sad and unserious approach can be condensed as follows:
a) Attack Paul Ryan for putting forth a serious budget proposal that attempts to address some "third-rail" issues like Social Security and Medicare. Paul Ryan is an "extremist" out to kill children and grandma.
b) Put forth some make believe claims that kick the can down the road for a decade or more and do nothing to reduce the nation's debt. Very little in substance.
c) A lot of political grandstanding.
Keith Hennessey gives a detailed analysis here: "Understanding the President's New Budget Proposal
Analysis
Here are four broad reactions to the new proposal.
First, this is a short-term budget, not a long-term budget. There are three forces driving our long-run government spending and deficit problem:
- demographics;
- unsustainable growth in per capita health spending; and
- unsustainable promises made by past elected officials, enshrined in entitlement benefit formulas.
The President’s proposal addresses none of these forces. It instead spends most of its effort on everything but those factors. His proposed Medicare and Medicaid savings, while large in aggregate dollars, are quite small relative to the total amount to be spent on those programs, and he lets the largest program in the federal budget (Social Security) grow unchecked. While Bowles and Simpson focused their efforts on the major entitlements and also addressed other spending areas and taxes, the President’s proposal does the reverse, focusing on other mandatory spending, taxes, and defense. That’s a short-term focus.
Second, this proposal “feels” to me like the recently concluded discretionary spending deal. It’s the size of a typical deficit reduction bill that Congress usually does every five or so years. I’m sure the affected interest groups are even now preparing to invade Washington to explain how a 3-5% cut will devastate them. The problem is that our fiscal problems are now so big that they require much larger policy changes.
Third, while framed as a centrist proposal, the substance leans pretty far left. It’s deficit reduction through (triggered) tax increases on the rich, plus defense cuts, plus unspecified other mandatory cuts and process mechanisms that might cut Medicare provider payments. Centrist Democrat proposals do all of these things, but they also reform Social Security and Medicare, usually through a combination of raising the eligibility age, means-testing, and raising taxes.
Fourth, the President’s speech was campaign-like in its characterization of and attacks on the Ryan plan.
The President’s proposal could be the opening bid in a negotiation with Congressional Republicans. When you combine this substance with the President’s aggressive partisan attacks and framing of the Ryan budget, however, it’s hard to see how this leads to a big fiscal deal this year or next. A small incremental bill, which “cuts” spending by a couple hundred billion dollars over the next decade, is possible. But the chances of a long-term grand bargain in the next two years just plummeted from an already low starting point.
Michael Goodwin: O's in Fiscal Fantasyland
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/in_fiscal_fantasyland_Zv3ID2mIbVbl2hMuVpKkCM
Elections have conse quences, we are told, but the admonition usually refers to how results shape subsequent events. Yet as last week's huge battle over puny budget trims proved, America already is suffering from an election that is still 18 months away.
Blame President Obama. By waiting until Republicans offered a bold plan to address the staggering debt and deficit problems, then countering with a partisan attack that lacked any serious reforms, he signaled that no major changes will happen until voters speak in 2012.
Indeed, he defined his sketchy financial plan in pure political terms, saying it is "an attempt to clarify the choice that we have as a country right now."
Like many of Obama's claims, this one is both technically accurate and not true. Voters have a "choice" only to the extent that they must choose between fantasy and reality.
Obama's plan resides firmly in the fantasy camp. His vision is that America's financial problems can be fixed by raising taxes on 2 percent of the population. Everything else will take care of itself, or Congress will do something about it down the road.
His is not a plan as much as it is a placeholder while he tries to rally his party's ultra-liberal, anti-business base. He is already in cheap populism mode, telling supporters at a Chicago fund-raiser he "reformed Wall Street so you won't get cheated when you apply for mortgages or take out credit cards."
Contrast that with the more realistic vision of Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. While Ryan's plan, passed Friday by the House, is incomplete and far from perfect, his starting point is honesty: The nation cannot continue on its current path because entitlement spending, especially for health care, will take the country over the cliff. No amount of tax hikes can keep up with the explosion of climbing costs and existing debt, or, as Ryan puts it: "We don't have a problem with our budget because Americans don't pay enough taxes. We have problems with our budget because we spend too much money."
He proposes fundamental changes to save nearly $6 trillion over a decade, including making Medicaid a block-grant program so states can administer it more efficiently. He also proposes a voucher program for Medicare for those under 55. Those already in the program or age 55 and above would not see any reduced benefits.
While both Republicans and Obama are guilty of pushing plans they know the other side won't accept, they are not equally guilty with regard to the fundamental problem. As Ryan argues, comparing his plan to what exists now, as Obama does, is "measuring us against a fiscal fallacy . . . against a future that's not going to happen."
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/in_fiscal_fantasyland_Zv3ID2mIbVbl2hMuVpKkCM#ixzz1Jpu5degk
NY Post Editorial: "Daring To Demonize"
President Obama was the spirit of full bipartisan cooperation in discussing Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to reform Medicare and other fiscally challenged entitlement programs.
Fifteen months ago, that is.
“We’re not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterized . . . as, well, you know, that’s — the other party is being irresponsible; the other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens,” the president told House Republicans back in January 2010.
“If we’re going to frame these debates in ways that allow us to solve them,” he said, “then we can’t start off by figuring out: a) Who’s to blame? b) How can we make the American people afraid of the other side?
“Unfortunately, that’s how our politics works right now,” Obama lamented.
But that was then.
Fast-forward to Wednesday, when Obama again tackled the question of budget and debt — demonizing Ryan by accusing him and the GOP of trying to hurt (if not outright kill) senior citizens.
Ryan’s entitlements plan, Obama charged, “says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors . . . It says [that], instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy insurance, tough luck.”
He accused the GOP of trying to reduce the deficit on the backs of “50 million Americans.”
And who are they? “Many are someone’s grandparents, who wouldn’t be able to afford nursing-home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome.”
So much for “serious conversations about Medicare and its long-term viability.”
So much for refusing to accuse the GOP of “trying to hurt our senior citizens.”
So much for not “fighting each other in some sort of political steel-cage match to see who comes out alive.”
Fifteen months ago, Obama warned that “all of us have a choice to make: We have to choose whether we’re going to be politicians first or partners for progress, whether we’re going to put success at the polls ahead of the lasting success we can achieve together for America.”
It’s pretty clear now which choice the president has made.
And it’s not the one in which America wins.
Peggy Noonan:
http://www.peggynoonan.com/article.php?article=569
An excerpt:
We all get stuck in the day-to-day and lose sight of the overarching, but the overarching fact of Mr. Obama’s presidency is that he made a bad impression his first years in office and has never turned that impression around. He spent his first 14 months moving on what he was thinking about—health care—and not what the public was thinking about—the economic crash, jobs, spending. He seemed not to be thinking like everyone else, which underscored the idea that he was unresponsive to the crises they were seeing. It’s hard to get past that.
His speech this week brought together all the strands of his flawed leadership. It was at moments clever, but merely clever, not up to the needs of the moment—and cleverness in a time of crisis comes as an affront. The speech seemed oblivious to recent history, as if the president had just discovered something no one knows about, a problem with spending, and has decided to alert us to the danger. He said other politicians attempt to cut by focusing on “waste and abuse,” but he knows the real secret: The problem is entitlement spending. But addressing entitlements is all anyone serious has been talking about for years; it’s what the Ryan plan is all about!
The speech was intellectually incoherent. An administration that spent two years saying, essentially, that high spending is good is suddenly insisting high spending is catastrophic. The president appealed for bipartisan efforts but his manner and approach leave his appeals sounding like diktats. His attempts to seem above the fray leave him seeming distanced and unwilling to risk anything.
Most important, the speech signaled that the White House, after all this time, sees the question of spending as a partisan tool, a weapon to be deployed in an election, and not an actual crisis. This is disrespectful toward citizens who feel honest alarm.
Because of these flaws, the speech will have no afterlife, and a major speech with no afterlife might as well not have been given.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Libya -- heckuva job Brownie ! (er, Obama, Hilary)
Time to send another strongly worded email ... or fax ... or op-ed ...
Charles Krauthammer On what’s happening in Libya:
It’s not only Senator McCain who said the United States is not doing enough. It’s obvious that our closest allies and the ones who are nearest to the fight on the ground, the British and the French, are saying exactly that. They are complaining, yes, that the Turks and Germans and others aren’t helping. But what they are really talking about is the United States.
You’ve got Qaddafi defying us, going through the street in an open car the way the president of the United States or prime minister of England would not be able to do. He does that in Tripoli supposedly in the middle of a war that we are pretending he is losing. [Meanwhile,] the leaders of the three great countries of the United States, France, and Britain are penning an op-ed. That’s really going to worry Libya.
You’ve got the meeting of the allies and the Arab states in Doha declaring today that the changing of the regime is an objective. And yet there is a stalemate. We are not doing what we can. We are in fact doing far less than we did early in the campaign, and deliberately.
And again I say, if you are going to enter into a war, you are either serious or not. You don’t enter into a war to defend a UN resolution. You enter into a war to achieve a real strategic objective on the ground. If that is not what you will do, stay out of it.
I think everyone felt some grim, sad irony in watching Qaddafi’s tiny forces hold off a British-French NATO intervention, revealing the once-vaunted rebels to be mostly a Potemkin force — all as the U.S. outsourced its historic leadership role after less than two weeks. But that schadenfreude should have passed long ago, and at some point the U.S. is going to have to decide whether NATO is still a viable organization and worth saving, now that it is on the verge of being utterly humiliated in Libya. It was always a predominately U.S.-led alliance, but our engagement kept up appearances and seemed at times to provide the Europeans a measure of unity. No longer: The U.S. is detached, the European NATO members are bickering and squabbling, and no one in Washington can explain to them the mission in Libya, the methodology to achieve it, the ultimate results desired, or the extent of NATO commitment in the postwar aftermath. Meanwhile, NATO member Turkey is an open supporter of Hamas and hostile to most of what NATO is for. We are on the razor’s edge here, and it is not hard to see the alliance disintegrating — all at a time when the traditional supremacy of the dollar is questioned, the financial reputation of the U.S. is still sinking, the traditional use of affordable energy in America seems by intent to be over — and quite abruptly, unless the Obama administration, in its Libyan misadventure, finally decides to take the proverbial Vienna. |
Hail To The Campaigner In Chief
Will the whole country wake up to the facts about Obama that many already know ?
Charles Krauthammer On Obama opening his 2012 reelection campaign headquarters in Chicago:
I think it’s interesting that Obama is setting up his headquarters in Chicago. He wants to give the impression, as he has throughout his time in office, that he is not from Washington. He’s not really a politician. He’s not even a Democrat. He stands above the fray.
Look at the way he acted last week when the deadline approached on the budget. He said: You’ve got to act as grown-ups, addressing Republicans and Democrats in Congress — as if he isn’t a Democrat, he wasn’t behind the resistance to the Republican ideas.
He always does this game — the man who hovers above it all, the transcender who isn’t in the trenches.
It’s not going to work. He’s been the president. He is Washington.
If you want to understand why Paul Ryan has suddenly become the de facto leader of the sad, pathetic, shriveled thing known as the Republican party, you need look no farther than his response to the classless sandbagging he got from the Bringer of Kinetic Military Action and Vacationer-in-Chief:
“I thought the president’s invitation…was an olive branch. Instead, what we got was a speech that was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our country’s fiscal challenges… What we heard today was a political broadside from our campaigner in chief. This is very sad and very unfortunate. Rather than building bridges, he’s poisoning wells.”
As I said on the radio yesterday, if anyone had spoken like this to the princeling earlier in his life, he very likely never would have become president. Instead, Obama has been coddled and cosseted throughout his glide-path trajectory — maverick Democrat Mickey Kaus justcalled him “the biggest affirmative action baby in history,” and said he was a lousy politician to boot. No one, it seems, has ever sat him down and explained to him how thoroughly mediocre he really is. Call it the audacity of mope.
And yet there he is, partying it up in the White House and launching his billion-dollar reelection bid with a speech that would have made Rosa Luxemburg proud, so maybe believing your own myth can take you all the way from Punahou to the presidency without every having to accomplish a damn thing. As the saying goes, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Which is why it’s important that the handful of Republicans with spine speak sternly to Obama the way Ryan did. Pace all the number-crunchers and crystal-ball-gazers, he won’t be defeated by conventional means, or by hopeful comparisons to Jimmy Carter, or by competing programs, and certainly not by the weak-tea “collegiality” of Boehner & Co. Playing by the rules doesn’t work when the other team is playing a different game entirely.
There’s no there there with Obama, just the legend of his own invincibility. The sooner the Republicans come to grips with that, the sooner they’ll figure out how to beat him.
That is, if they really want to.
It’s difficult to discern an Obama “campaign speech” from any other that he gives. Partisanship is a hallmark of most of his speeches, vapidity a hallmark of all.
By attacking Ryan, who has forced him to address (however ineptly) the $14,500,000,000,000 debt and $1,700,000,000,000 deficit to which he’s contributed so substantially, Obama (further) reveals how profoundly small and frivolous he is.
This just in, from The Hill:
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Friday responded to President Obama’s criticism of Republicans that was caught on a live microphone during a fundraiser.
At a press conference before a vote on a series of budget proposals, Boehner appeared to take a subtle jab at the president.
“I didn’t see his remarks. But I think you mentioned it was a campaign speech,” he said.
Republicans have criticized Obama as the “campaigner in chief” ever since he announced he was officially beginning his reelection bid last week.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Hypocrisy Alert: Obama repudiates his 2006 vote against raising debt ceiling
Uh Huh.
White House: POTUS Regrets 2006 Debt-Ceiling Vote
White House press secretary Jay Carney just told reporters that President Obama regrets his 2006 vote against raising the debt ceiling. To refresh your memories, here’s what then-Senator Obama said at the time:
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
But today, Carney said Obama believes his vote was a “mistake” that he regrets, that the debt ceiling is too important to play politics. Carney didn’t say whether it was also too important to vote ‘present’ — something Obama did on debt-ceiling votes in 2007 and 2008.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Obama, the $14 Trillion Debt, the $1.7 Trillion Budget Deficit - The Great Pretender
In the event there are any suckers still left out there who believe that Obama is capable of addressing this Nation's massive debt in a serious and responsible manner .... well, you are hopeless.
Not that Congress is likely to do much better, but Obama will be dragged kicking and screaming to any meaningful spending cuts; will demonize Paul Ryan and his proposals; will propose again raising taxes (more revenue = more spending !).
Game on.
Read Andrew McCarthy: AndrewCMcCarthy
You’re kidding, right? http://tinyurl.com/6znu9a2
Read Michael Walsh: Bam's Fiscal Feint, The next round of Lip Service
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Richard Goldstone's kinda sorta mea culpa
This self hating Jew was the author of the infamous "Goldstone Report" a UN sanctioned hit job on Israel's self defense from Gaza terrorism and rocket attacks on civilians.
File this under "better late than never" and the damage he did cannot be repaired.
The U.N.’s Goldstone report — which forbade Israel to defend itself — has been the hardest blow to Israel’s image in a decade. Now, in the Washington Post, Richard Goldstone himself, a South African judge, writes: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”
Unfortunately, Goldstone’s “reconsideration” won’t have a real effect on the NGOs, global forums, and Western parliaments that used the report to blacken Israel’s name. The media that hyped Goldstone’s allegations of Israeli war crimes won’t allocate the same front-page space to Goldstone’s exoneration of Israel. Despite Goldstone’s penitence, Israel will remain a target for the United Nations.
The worst effect of the Goldstone report was giving to Israel’s enemies the impression that they could attack the Jewish state with global empathy on their side. The report has been a gift to terrorism from the United Nations.
Also important were the wave of hatred on behalf of the European and American ruling classes, the headlines from the “mainstream” international press that repeated condemnations without response, and the satisfied hate of academics and student movements. Goldstone’s report was a match falling into a pile of straw.
But there is a positive aspect of Mr. Goldstone’s reconsideration. The judge is reminding all of us that Israel’s struggle is the same as the Western democracies’. It is an unconventional war: a war where there are not two armies fighting each other, but an army fighting fanatic and terrorist militias that believe they have the right, indeed the duty, to use civilian populations to conduct their holy war.
We are still waiting for the moment when these NGOs and United Nations apparatchik will ride on Israeli buses and shelters to experience the truly unprovoked, homicidal nature of terrorism. Till this moment, the West should reject their approach to Israel — including the racist and anti-Semitic U.N. “Durban III” conference that will be held in New York for the tenth anniversary of 9/11.
— Giulio Meotti is author of The New Shoah.
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