Just Remember:
Given that this actually is Obama’s supporters best line (literally – “Bush did it first, so don’t be teh hypocret” is the gyst of not a few lefties’ responses to criticsm), it’s hard to even call it “satire”.
Call it “Journalism”.
Victor Davis Hanson documents how h Obama’s crippling naiveté on human nature is devolving into dark comedy:
The almost eerie hatred for Obama seen in Egypt — among the military, the Islamists, the Egyptian Street, and even the secular pro-Western reformists — in part derives from a sense that Obama tried to cajole them all with cheap commonalities [the Muslim elements in his family history, his cosmopolitan childhood, his ethnically-mixed ancestry] and mytho-histories rather than negotiate often conflicting national interests through tough transparent talks.
A good way to get beaten up in the hallway at a tough school is to assure the local king-of-the-hill thug that both of you really have a lot in common. In some sense, Obama’s entire Middle East policy mirrors the hilarious scene in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, where the white punk attired in pseudo-gang attire believes he can out-jive gangbangers into leaving his girl alone. He can’t. Obama has unfortunately become such a wannabe in the eyes of unapologetic Middle East gangsters.
Read the whole thing.
Sometime today, The One will be giving his second speech (in Chattanooga) of his tenth attempt, give or take, to “pivot to the economy” in the past five years.
I’ll invite you to read this short but deep piece by Richard Epstein at the Hoover Institution, about the shallowness of Obama’s understanding – he’s more of a sloganeer, really – of how economies actually work, and how it’s manifested itself in a middle class that’s been largely bludgeoned into submission.
Read the whole thing, but here’s the conclusion:
Indeed [President Obama] constantly thinks of his greatest regulatory failures as his great successes. No other president has “saved the auto industry,” albeit by a corrupt bankruptcy process, or “taken on a broken health care system,” only to introduce a set of unworkable mandates that are already falling apart, or “investing in new technologies,” which tries to pick winners and ends up with losers like Solyndra. The great advances in energy have come from private developments, most notably fracking, and not from the vagaries of wind and solar energy, which no one has yet figured out how to store for future use when needed.
The President seems utterly incapable of seeing the downside to any of his policy choices. They are announced from on-high as all gain and no pain. In the face of stagnant growth, weak corporate earnings, and continued high unemployment, he shows not the slightest recognition that some of his programs might have gone amiss.
It is easy to see, therefore, why people have tuned out the President’s recent remarks. They have heard it all countless times before. So long as the President is trapped in his intellectual wonderland that puts redistribution first and regards deregulation and lower taxation as off limits, we as a nation will be trapped in the uneasy recovery that will continue to dog us no matter who is chosen to head the Federal Reserve.
If there were ever a time for someone to come onto the scene – or re-emerge, perhaps – with something on the order of “A Time For Choosing”, this would be it.
…but her slander of conservative groups lives on. A group of Campus Republicans in Missouri were barred admission to Obama’s big Economic speech because of the “safety risk”:
Despite the fact that the students had tickets to the event, security personnel turned them away at the door to the recreation center where Obama gave a speech on economic policy, telling the group it wasn’t about their politics but the president’s safety, University of Missouri College Republicans Treasurer Courtney Scott told The College Fix.
The clear goal? Slander conservatives and their groups at every turn, knowing that the media will ignore the mistakes, carry the apologies at face value, and never, ever question the Administration.
The IRS Scandal has its roots in DC. It’s not local to Cincinnati, it’s not non-partisan, and President Obama is not isolated from it:
Ms. Hofacre of the Cincinnati office testified that when she was given tea-party applications, she had to kick them upstairs. When she was given non-tea-party applications, they were sent on for normal treatment. Was she told to send liberal or progressive groups for special scrutiny? No, she did not scrutinize the applications of liberal or progressive groups. “I would send those to general inventory.” Who got extra scrutiny? “They were all tea-party and patriot cases.” She became “very frustrated” by the “micromanagement” from Washington. “It was like working in lost luggage.” She applied to be transferred.
For his part, [IRS lifer and tax exemption expert Carter] Hull backed up what he’d told House investigators. He described what was, essentially, a big, lengthy runaround in the Washington office in which no one was clear as to their reasons but everything was delayed. The multitiered scrutiny of the targeted groups was, he said, “unusual.”
This goes all the way to Obama-appointed officials; it’s absurd to think that the President’s inner circle wasn’t intimately involved in the persecution of dissent.
The Administration is running the Clinton-era play, the one they always run when they’re up against it; Delay, Deny, Destroy.
Maryland Rep. Cummings is doing the Deny part, and doing it absurdly badly:
It was Maryland’s Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel’s ranking Democrat, who, absurdly, asked Ms. Hofacre if the White House called the Cincinnati office to tell them what to do and whether she has knowledge of the president of the United States digging through the tax returns of citizens. Ms. Hofacre looked surprised. No, she replied.
It wasn’t hard to imagine her thought bubble: Do congressmen think presidents call people like me and say, “Don’t forget to harass my enemies”? Are congressmen that stupid?
Mr. Cummings is not, and his seeming desperation is telling. Recent congressional information leads to Washington—and now to very high up at the IRS. Meaning this is the point at which a scandal goes nowhere or, maybe, everywhere.
By Cummings’ logic, Nixon was innocent because he didn’t jimmy the door at the Democrat office at Watergate.
Almost three in four small businesses plan to lay off workers, cut hours, and replace full-time employees with part-timers due to Obamacare:
“Small businesses expect the requirement to negatively impact their employees. Twenty-seven percent say they will cut hours to reduce full time employees, 24 percent will reduce hiring, and 23 percent plan to replace full time employees with part-time workers to avoid triggering the mandate,” said the Chamber business survey provided to Secrets.
Under Obamacare, just 30 hours — not the nationally recognized 40 hours — is considered full-time. Companies with 50 full-time workers or more are required to provide health care, or pay a fine.
I’m wondering if Obama’s apologists in the media have figured out that if the unemployment rate is “dropping” but the underemployment rate is rising, something might be going wrong?
Its’ been a mainstay of totalitarian life, from Lenin and Stalin through Orwell to today’s North Korea; “If you see something, say something – to the komissar!”
And now it’s coming to America (with emphasis added):
Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”
Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.”
Potential for abuse, you think?
On the other hand, if there’s a toll-free number, it’d be a monkey-wrencher’s dream.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
USDA buys food products from eligible vendors, then gives them away to schools and eligible poor people.
The purpose of the program: “The Agricultural Marketing Service’s Commodity Procurement Staff purchase a variety of food products in support of the National School Lunch Program and other food assistance programs. These purchases also help to stabilize prices* in agricultural commodity markets by balancing supply and demand.
*Euphemism for price supports, aka subsidy to food producers.
Lots of foods are available including raisins. Raisins? We need to create an artificial shortage to support higher prices for grape growers? Yes, except one of the growers is pissed the government forces him to hand over his crop and brought a Takings claim. The case went to the Supreme Court which ruled he didn’t have to pay the fine for failing to turn over his crop before he could bring a Constitutional challenge to the law requiring him to turn over his crop or pay a fine. The government didn’t pay for raisins, they took them, to feed the poor. Barak “Raisin Robin Hood” Obama.
The whole system is insane. We buy food and store it in warehouses to make food artificially expensive and therefore more profitable to producers, but then poor people can’t afford food so we truck it around the country and give it to them for free. Stop The Madness! Don’t buy the food, let the market decide how many producers can produce food and still be profitable, let Cub and Rainbow warehouse and ship it, let prices slip so poor people can afford it. The market will take care of everything if we just get the hell out of the way!
Why is that so hard to understand?
Joe Doakes
If you leave out the forced labor (so far) and use of food as a terror weapon, the similarity to the Soviet agriculture plans of the 1930s will make you pound your head on the desk.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The Benghazi story keeps getting weirder.
Notice the FBI is on the job. The first 5 suspects have been identified, but not enough evidence has been gathered to try them in court. Enough exists to kill them if the Big O says so, but not enough to capture and try them. Is it just me, or is this administration’s War on Terror policy bewildering?
The guy who made that Mohammad video must have been the greatest filmmaker of all time, to provoke this much response with one low-budget flick.
Joe Doakes
And the “Poles” who attacked the radio station at Gleiwitz must have had some serious momentum to have started all that fuss by themselves.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Bush put tracking devices in assault weapons and let them go to Mexico so we could track down drug cartels. Obama gave assault weapons to drug cartels to up the body count to justify gun controls in the US.
Bush tracked a few international calls to find terrorists. Obama tracked all of Verizon’s domestic calls to find terrorists.
Obama supporters are quick to remind us Bush Did It First and when Bush did it, it was illegal but now, it’s not. But there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between the two administrations’ actions. And Bush didn’t specifically run on a platform promising never to do that again.
The Democrats’ logic is: My brother stepped on an ant so I blew up a school bus full of nuns. Because he started it. And while I’m no better than he – in fact, I’m worse – he started it. So what I did was okay.
“Only a little worse than Bush,” that’s the Democrats’ new defense.
Joe Doakes
This is the sort of thing that makes a parent ground their kids.
How do we ground a government, again?
Especially one that is actively suppressing any attempt to ground it?
As an annoying leftyblogger might say, “Oh, noes!” – The One’s popularity has dropped below that of George W. Bush:
In a Gallup tracking poll released Tuesday, former-President George W. Bush currently stands with a favorability rating of 49%, compared to 46% who see the 43rd president unfavorably. Meanwhile, another Gallup poll shows President Obama with only a 47% approval rating, with 44% disapproving.
And perhaps that makes sense; Obama has carried on all of Bush’s policies; he merely shifted the bad ones into hyperdrive (Obamacare is really just Medicare Part D strapped to a rocket).
And in retrospect, as bad as Bush was on spending, he was and remains a minor-leaguer compared to the Obamessiah.
Dare we say…Bush league?
If you think about it, this makes perfect sense.
After all, Obama fooled everyone when he ran as the anti-Bush in 2008.
Everyone thought Obama meant he would be less hawkish than his predecessor. But as we have seen, Obama apparently has no problem killing American citizens via remote control with drones or greatly expanding upon Bush’s surveillance state. This, even though Obama told us he had pretty much won the War on Terror.
Therefore, it appears that what Obama meant by promising to be the anti-Bush is that, unlike George W. Bush, Obama would not get us out of a recession and into many years of economic prosperity. There would also be successful terror attacks on American soil during Obama’s watch and a litany of scandals unseen in almost a half-century.
Maybe the next time a former community organizer raised in a creepy church runs for president, the media will work a little harder to dig into his real agenda.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I’m sure the Governor’s campaign manager sits in on meetings with Revenue Commissioner all the time. What’s the big deal?
By that, do they mean the actual revenue commissioner, or Alida Messinger?
I mix them up.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
If the dice at your casino come up seven every single time – about which you are shocked to learn and know nothing – I’m eventually going to wonder why these dice defy the odds and I will begin to question your credibility.
If the scandals in your administration – about which you are shocked to learn and know nothing – run against conservatives every single time, I’m eventually going to wonder why this long string of incidents defies the odds and I will begin to question your credibility.
Joe the Plumber
New Black Panthers
Fast and Furious
IRS audits
IRS Tea Party
IRS Israel supporters
Sebelius’ HHS shakedownI’m beginning to wonder if President Obama is playing completely fair.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
It’s the Chicago way.
Less than half of the wealth lost in the recession has come back in the “recovery”:
From the peak of the boom to the bottom of the bust, households watched a total of $16 trillion in wealth disappear amid sinking stock prices and the rubble of the real estate market. Since then, Americans have only been able to recapture 45 percent of that amount on average, after adjusting for inflation and population growth, according to the report from the St. Louis Fed released Thursday.
In addition, the report showed most of the improvement was due to gains in the stock market, which primarily benefit wealthy families. That means the recovery for other households has been even weaker.
To the extent unemployment is down, it’s in part-time jobs. The average hours worked per week has dropped in recent months.
No. You are not better off than you were four years ago.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Rogue IRS Agents targeted conservatives.
Rogue low-level AFT agents in Phoenix ran machine guns to Mexican drug lords.
What does it say about the leadership, when low-level employees feel emboldened to break the law while on the clock?
Best case scenario: When the cat’s away, the mice will play. It could be the underlings ran amuck from lack of leadership.
Worst case scenario: There’s a new sheriff in town. It could be the underlings did exactly as they were told.
Joe Doakes
Why, it’s almost like they’re having a big party over there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
They warned us that if I voted for Mitt Romney, we’d be flirting with fascism before too long.
And they were right.
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…:
It takes a lot of lipstick to make this look like anything but a pig.
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?
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