Category Archives: President Obama

Punch Drunk Nation

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Last week reported that entrepreneurial activity in Minnesota was the worst in the entire US.

But the whole country is reeling.

Usually the “recovery” from a recession is a great time to start a business; in the “creative destruction” cycle, it’s the time when creativity happens; as money starts to flow again, people start businesses.

But not this time.

Glenn Reynolds:

So what’s to blame for this change? A lot of things, probably. One reason, I suspect, for a job market that looks more like Europe is a regulatory and legal environment that looks more like Europe’s. High regulatory loads — the product of ObamaCare and numerous other laws — systematically harm small businesses, which can’t afford the personnel needed for compliance, to the benefit of large corporations, which can.

Likewise, higher taxes reduce the rewards for success, making people less likely to invest their money (or time) into new businesses. And local regulatory bodies, too, make starting new businesses harder.

But I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t cultural. Since 2008, this country hasn’t celebrated achievement or entrepreneurialism. Instead, we’ve heard talk about the evils of the “1%” ” about the rapaciousness of capitalism, and the importance of spreading the wealth around. We’ve even heard that work in the public sector is somehow nobler than work in the private sector.

Countries where those attitudes prevail tend not to produce as much entrepreneurialism, so it’s perhaps no surprise that as those attitudes have gained ascendance among America’s political class and media elite, we’ve seen less entrepreneurialism here.

The process of changing this nation from a culture of building and innovating into one of consuming and demanding has taken decades.  But Obama seems to be close to closing the circle, creating the first nation to go from benign tyranny to freedom and all the way back.

300 Million Hostages

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No news here; the Sequester, like every “school layoff” in every city that isn’t Detroit, is basically the same as everyone’s old alcoholic significant other threatening to kill themselves; an abusive, co-dependent way of browbeating and bullying people into giving in.   The “cuts” – really a whiz-in-the-wind reduction of an increase – are designed to gull the gullible and intimidate the weak and dependent.

The FAA Controller furloughs were a great example; the furloughs will save a fraction of the FAA’s consulting budget, or travel budget, or any number of other expendables that don’t directly affect the agency’s mission.

But squeezing the flying public shows the peasants who’s boss.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Local community celebrations suffer from Obama Administration tax-hike hostage-taking: “Give us the money or the fly-boys get it.”

Note this quote: “Maj. Darrick Lee, spokesman for the Thunderbirds, said a typical season averages about $9.75 million and the Air Force needs to focus its resources now on its mission in Afghanistan.”

Seriously? We’re cutting back airshows all the sudden because we need a lousy $10 million to fight the war in Afghanistan? Dude, we spend that every hour over there and there’s no end in sight.

An entire season of Air Force goodwill (and recruitment advertising) that also directly boosts local economies costs about the same as two Obama vacations; a grant to redesign Southwest Canyon Road in Beaverton, Oregon; or the missing first payment on bankrupt car maker Fisker’s federal Green Energy subsidy loan.

I could understand cutting airshows if the federal government suddenly got Libertarian Fever and cut airshows IN ADDITION to these other boondoggles . . . but the administration shows no sign of fiscal prudence, only political punishment. Longer lines at airport security, laying off air traffic controllers, grounding military flying teams: these are directly aimed at making life miserable for ordinary taxpayers who haven’t demanded higher taxes quickly enough, so they must be punished for it.

Hostage-taking used to be a gangster tactic, now it’s Democrat standard operating procedure. That should tell us something.

Joe Doakes

Spare the rod, spoil the taxpayers.

Open Letter To President Obama

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To: President Barack Obama
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Optics

President Obama,

You made a big show of flying the “Newtown Parents” – white, upper-middle-class suburban Americans all – to the White House on Air Force One.

I have nothing but sympathy for the parents of Newtown.  Losing a kid is the worst thing I can imagine.  And God willing, imagining is all I have to do so far.  Knock wood.

But I’m wondering – were there any bereaved parents from Chicago on the plane?   Any standing with you in the Rose Garden yesterday?

No, Mr. President.  You surrounded yourself with bereaved parents who looked like NPR producers and CNN reporters, rather than residents of projects and parents of “working families”.  Why was that?

Because it looks to me like you’re trying less to make America – including the parts of it where black people are being gunned down daily – safer, and more like you’re trying to get white, upper-middle-class people to dig deeeeeep for the next Congressional election.

That is all.

Crisis Wasted

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President Obama’s effort to jam down a gun grab died yesterday in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

The effort was politically dodgy from the beginning; even with the saturation media coverage of the Newtown massacre, most Americans weren’t fooled; the facts remain that mass shootings are at low historical rates and violent crime overall is dropping (outside Chicago).   Only 4% of the American people consider controlling guns a vital issue.

But that didn’t stop The One from trying.

Krauthammer put it well; the entire push was emotional blackmail (emphasis added):

“If you’re going to make all of these emotional appeals,” he said, “you’ve gotta show that if this had been law, it would have stopped Newtown. It would not have. It’s irrelevant. I wouldn’t have objected, I might’ve gone the way of McCain or Toomey on this, but it’s emotional blackmail to say ‘You have to do it for the children.’ Not if there’s no logic in this, and that I think is what’s wrong with the demagoguery that we’ve heard out of the president on this issue.”

And in defeat, the emotional badgering only got worse.  From the President’s Rose Garden speech immediately after the vote (emphasis added):

“The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill,” Mr. Obama said in the White House rose garden about 90 minutes after the vote. “It came down to politics.” …

“This pattern of spreading untruths … served a purpose. A minority in the U.S. Senate decided it wasn’t worth it. They blocked common-sense gun reforms, even while these families looked on from the Senate gallery. It’s not going to happen because 90 percent of Republicans just voted against that idea.” …

And, as always, he accused Republicans of politicizing the issue.

Remember Berg’s Seventh Law:  ”When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”   When President Obama accuses Republicans of “politicizing the issue”, he’s saying he’s angry because they politicized it better than he did.

The gun legislation was never about controlling guns, and it was never “about the children”.

John Hinderaker at Power Line spelled it out clearly (emphasis added):

As we have noted more than once, pretty much everything Obama does is intended to stir up the Democratic Party’s base to drive turnout in 2014. Obama knows he can’t do much of anything as long as the GOP holds the House, so his primary goal is to stoke outrage on the left, in hopes that 2014 will look like 2008 and 2012, and not like 2010. So no doubt he hoped that some gun control measure–any gun control measure!–could get through the Senate, so that pressure, probably irresistible, could be brought to force a vote on the same proposal in the House. Not so that it might pass, but so that House Republicans would be on record voting against gun control. Obama could have raised countless millions from his fervently anti-gun base to go after the more vulnerable such Republicans. Now, the issue won’t even come up in the House, and Obama and the Democrats will have to find something else.

That, I think, is the best explanation for the profound disappointment that Obama showed today.

If those children hadn’t promised Obama a way to save the second half of his term, Obama would have never attached his political future to it.   They’d have been of no more use to him than, say, the people killed in Benghazi.

And the media would have let it fade into tragic history three months ago.  Like Benghazi.

The Ultimate “Public-Private Partnership”

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Liberals will occasionally try to sound “moderate” by claiming to favor “partnerships” between government and business.

These “partnerships” usually amount to one of a couple of things:

  • The worst of both worlds; the inefficiency of government combined with the lean capitalization of a business
  • The government picks a winner

In neither case do things work out well, as a general rule.

Except with this example, perhaps the most successful public private “partnership” in all history.

Just saying; if my financial planner hasn’t put a ton of money into Glock USA and Sturm Ruger, we’re gonna have to talk.

This Is Your Obama Economy, April Edition

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The topline number has all the mainstream media bobbleheads a-tingling; unemployment is “down to 7.6%”.

It’s wind in sails, of course; the labor participation rate has dropped to 63.3%, the lowest it’s been in ten years of measuring, and the lowest it’s been so far in this recession.

Which means the actual share of the work force above the age of 16 actually working is 58.49%.

That number is…:

  • Almost 2.5% lower than the day Barack Obama took office (60.58%)
  • Statistically the same as October, 2010 (58.5%), when unemployment peaked at 10%.
  • Marginally up from December of 2010 (58.2%), when the recession bottomed out (and which looks like a statistical fluke, coming between two months in the 58.5% range)
  • Marginally better than the low-points in this calculation (58.18, in November 2010 and July 2011, when the unemployment rates were 9.8% and 9.1%, respectively).

It takes a lot of lipstick to make this look like anything but a pig.

Game Show Of The Year, 2016

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

To hear the President tell it, the sequester cuts are so deep, so devastating, the very existence of the nation is threatened: mass poverty, rain of fire, dogs and cats living together, the end of days.

The actual amount of spending cuts that take effect in 2013 is around $50 billion.

By odd coincidence, the US foreign aid budget for 2013 is also around $50 billion.

Seems to me any fifth grader could figure out a way to implement the sequester cuts without harming a hair on any American’s head.

The question then becomes: is the President smarter than a fifth grader?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Perhaps a more relevant question:  does he need to be?

Clue Come Lately

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John Cusack asks the question most of us had the answer to five years ago.  I add emphasis:

“One is forced to asked the question: Is the President just another Ivy League A**hole shredding civil liberties and due process and sending people to die in some sh*thole for purely political reasons?” asked actor John Cusack in a recent piece published yesterday on TruthOut.org.

Cusack was sharply critical of President Obama’s decisions to continue President George W. Bush’s drone program and continuing the war in Afghanistan.

Yep.

And he’s an Ivy League as*hole for having a Homeland Security director who turns peaceful right-wing protesters into a fearsome fascist terror network, dabbles with reinstating the “Fairness Doctrine”, squatted on the Fourth Amendment, accelerated the militarization of the nation’s police, nationalized healthcare and tore the Constitution to shreds.

Glad you’re finally catching on.

Open Letter To The Entire American People

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To:  Everyone in the USA
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant who’s been through it all before
Re:  ”Sequestration”

Hey, everyone,

You may not remember this, but we’ve been through all this before.  Remember the “partial government shutdown”, back in the nineties?  It was a whole big nothing-burger.

Oh, the Clinton Administration tried to make sure that the people felt whatever pain was generated – closing parks, cramping down on the voters.  But as a rule, the whole thing affected nobody.

And here in Minnesota, we had a “complete” shutdown two years ago (which, again, wasn’t – the courts kept most of the government going as “essential”).  It lasted a few weeks.  Then Governor Messinger Dayton abandoned it, when he realized Minnesotans, for all his efforts to squeeze and scare them – shutting down state parks and highway rest areas, threatening to lay off teachers – barely noticed any difference.  While the media did its best to prop up the Messinger Dayton line, the people of Minnesota heard the gales of calumny but saw and felt a big fat nada burrito.  Even Governor Messinger Dayton – as cosseted and isolated from reality as his staff keeps him – noticed; on his trip around the state to whip up support for the DFL budget, he saw tepid crowds of union droogs, and a few professional protesters, and realized he had nothin’ (which may be why Dayton makes so few public appearances these days).

So it’s time for “sequestration” – the “radical” budget cuts that Obama and the super-di-duper commission agreed to as a stick to lead everyone to the “carrot” of an actual federal budget.  We’ve been waiting nearly 1,400 days for a budget from the Democrat-addled Senate, so Washington figured a “stick” was needed.

By the way – how radical and drastic are those cuts?:

Yep. They’re not even cuts.  They’re reductions in the increase.  Indeed, almost completely worthless, if cutting spending is your goal, but really nothing but a fart in the wind; sort of like “dropping HBO” in your family budget, even though your gas bill is rising and your teenage kids are costing more and more.

Obama will try to make “sequestration” hurt; he’ll slow down the TSA lines, he’ll gundeck some ship overhauls and clamp down some military maintenance budgets, he’ll inveigle some big cities to lay off a few cops and teachers, he’ll shut down Yellowstone as the cameras record photos of crestfallen children.  Hell, Joe Biden may even personally try to close the gates at Disney World.

But there is no there, there.  It’s a scare tactic, engineered by Obama and his compliant media.

It needs to be ignored.

That is all.

 

Window-Dressing

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To: President Obama
From: Mitch Berg, Cranky Peasant
Re: Your visit.

Mr. President,

Your visit to the Twin Cities yesterday, the media assures us, was not just because it was yet another city that is utterly safe territory for you.  It’s because, supposedly, Minneapolis is a leader in “curbing gun violence”.

Let’s put it on the table.

While Minneapolis has the highest violent crime rate in Minnesota, its crime rates have been dropping over the years not because of anything the Minneapolis DFL establishment has done – they have been utterly useless, in fact – but because Minnesota is, despite being a purple-addled state, a very gun-friendly place.  State law prohibits cities from having different gun laws from the rest of the state – and the rest of the state is as solidly pro-Second-Amendment as anyplace west of the Mississippi.  We have good, solid carry permit law; law-abiding Minnesotans aren’t harried by excessive stupid laws…

…like people in your native, crime-ridden Chicago are, and like you want the rest of us to be.

Minneapolis, along with Saint Paul, are the parts of this state that most aggressively hassle gun law-abiding gun owners.  Left to their own devices, both would happily turn into little Chicagos (in more ways than just guns).  And they are the parts with the most crime.

That, as they say, is all.

(PS – Well, OK – not “all”.  Henco Sheriff Stanek actually has the right idea:

As a strong supporter of the 2nd amendment, Sheriff Stanek talked about how the problem is one of access.

“Gun ownership isn’t a privilege, it’s a right guaranteed by the Constitution,” said Sheriff Stanek. “We have an access problem; people already prohibited by law from owning or buying a gun should never have access to firearms. We shouldn’t impose on the rights of law abiding citizens to try to solve this problem. Gun control alone will not solve the complex problem of guns and extreme violence.”

Indeed, as Chicago shows us, it’ll only make it worse).

Barack Rex

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The President issued a secret Executive Order directing the United States military to kill American citizens because the President thinks they’re suspicious characters or possibly terrorists.

The President considers a proposed Executive Order directing the United States law enforcement agencies to seize privately owned firearms because the President doesn’t like firearms.

The President considers a proposed Executive Order directing the United States Treasury to issue a worthless coin to “pay” the national debt because the President doesn’t like the constraints of a budget.

Common theme: the law is an obstacle to doing what the President wants to do, so rather than obey the law or work through the democratic process to change it, he flouts it.

This is the attitude and those are the actions of a King, not a President.

We don’t have a King in America.

That attitude and those actions are un-American.

The President’s attitude and actions are un-American.

I oppose the President’s attitude and actions.

The President is Black.

I am a racissssssssssssss.

Never mind, nothing to see here, move along.

Joe Doakes

It’s only “overeach” if consequences are exacted.

Change A Vogon Can Believe In

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

No less respected economist than Paul Krugman is recommending the US pay down its national debt by minting a Trillion-Dollar Coin. He suggests it be made of platinum because that’s really valuable. I say it should be rubber, not only because “rubber check” accurately captures its value, but because there’s precedent.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.”

Obviously, we won’t call it a Ningi, that sounds weird (and we’d owe Doug Adams royalties). We’ll call it a $1 trillion dollar coin. But why stop at one? Why not go all out and issue 16 trillion-dollar coins to pay off the entire national debt completely?

And while we’re at it, why not raise the minimum wage to $100 so we’ll all be rich? And throw in free cosmetic surgery, paid for by Obamacare.

Rich, handsome, debt free . . . now THAT’s the kind of Hope and Change I was looking for.

Joe Doakes

Como Park.

I’m afraid to ask an esteemed economist like Prostetnic Vogon Krugman how we’re going to pay for a trillion dollars worth of platinum – or what that’ll do to the world’s platinum supply.

 

Depardieu’ed

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

As our “leaders” debate how to solve the fiscal cliff, the President seems intent on making sure the rich pay most of it.

Let me just note some of the “tax the rich” schemes that already have been tried and found to be failures at best, counterproductive at worst: Window tax,Brick tax, Wallpaper tax,Hearth tax, and Yacht tax.

Look, here’s the deal:  rich people are rich, they’re not stupid.  Jack tax rates too high and they’ll simply move and take their money with them.

In every one of these schemes, the rich altered their behavior to avoid the taxes, the poor didn’t pay taxes anyway, so the burden fell squarely on the middle class – too “rich” to be exempt, too poor to escape.

President Obama is a Harvard scholar.  His advisors are the smartest in the world.  He cannot be unaware of history.  Why is he intent on repeating it?

Why are Republicans even thinking about letting him repeat it?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Because some GOP leaders are under the impression that you get points for losing gracefully.

From An Undisclosed Policy

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The State Department’s internal report is out and as a result, Congress is rushing to fortify the barn door.

What I still want to know is: whose idea was it to tone down American consulate security to present a more welcoming, more open appearance to Mid-East locals to enhance America’s image in the world? Who decided Benghazi should be a temporary facility, and an unguarded one at that?

The “welcoming appearance” theory of diplomacy always held the danger our diplomats could be attacked because we intentionally did not cower behind machine-gun toting Marines. But if it was the correct theory, then Benghazi was an unfortunate incident but not cause to fortify and arm up. The fact we’re abandoning the theory makes it look as if we’re rebuking the proponent of the theory and wasn’t that . . . President Obama himself?

So, the President’s idea was wrong: dangerously, stupidly and perhaps even criminally so? Is that what we’re saying? Cuz that’s certainly what it sounds like we’re saying, just not in so many words. Spell it out for me. Was Barak Obama’s signature diplomatic initiative flat wrong?

Joe Doakes

Como Park.

That’d be a great question for our Secretary of State.

If we can ever find her.

A Date Which Will Live In Innumeracy

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

December 11, 2008, Bernie Madoff charged in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

December 11, 2012, President Obama’s “fiscal cliff” negotiating position: “Madoff was a piker.”

Joe Doakes

Como Park

What was it Stalin said?  ”Fifty Billion is a crime, Twenty Trillion is a statistic?”

Something like that.

Obama’s War On Women

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NOW notes that Obama’s cabinet is about 30% women, and they are not amused:

Currently, the president, who garnered 55 percent of the women’s vote on Election Day, has eight females in his 23-member cabinet. According the National Organization for Women, that number isn’t nearly high enough.

NOW president Terry O’Neill, in an interview with The Daily Caller, explained that she would like to see complete gender parity in Obama’s second-term cabinet.

To pay back all the chits that the Administration owes, it also needs to have 2-3 Afro-Americans, 3-4 Latinos, an Asian, a gay secretary (maybe two for affirmative action)…

…and it’d probably be the right thing to do to make ‘em all unionized.

Read more:

Obamnesia

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There was never a problem in the Rockaways, Winston.  There was never a problem in the Rockaways:

With the media’s silence and the public’s amnesia over the impact of the hurricane, President Obama has once again received a free pass on yet another issue of national importance. The media’s outcry over the devastation after Katrina led to a massive influx of aid in the form of governmental agency involvement, subsidies, and private charitable organizations’ assistance. Without that outcry, the victims of Sandy should be wondering what kind of attention they would be receiving if the president’s party began with an R, not a D.

Silence.  We are now moving forward.

Heckuvva job, Obama-y.

Let’s Check Those Results Again

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Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Instapundit reports:

“KATRINA ON THE HUDSON EAST RIVER: Occupy Sandy Volunteer Sounds Alarm on ‘Humanitarian Crisis,’ Near-Complete Absence of Government Aid in Coney Island Projects. “Just three hours ago I was speaking with seniors for whom I was the first person they talked to since the storm. . . . People literally have no power, no food, no water, no bathrooms–they’re defecating in buckets. And there is no one to answer to for it.”

We were assured Bush’s hatred for Black people was the reason FEMA’s response to Katrina was so bad in New Orleans. Appears Bush didn’t limit himself to hating New Orleans Blacks. He must have hated Black New Yorkers with a passion, to be motivated to reach out 4 years later to foul up this disaster response. For a guy so roundly reviled as an idiot, he certainly does have a long reach.

Too bad for poor President Obama. No wonder Clint Eastwood’s “empty chair” speech stung so much, hit too close to home. We should be more sensitive. The pathetic response to Hurricane Sandy plainly is not President Obama’s fault. In fact, we should pity him: must suck to be a completely powerless figurehead after four years on the job, facing the prospect of four more years of total uselessness.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

You’re doin’ a great job, Obama-y.