The must read of the day is from former Lieutenant Governor of NY, Betsy McCaughey, who warns of the stealth health care provisions in the Porkulus/Patronage Package AKA Generational Theft Act which is on the verge of being passed in Congress:
Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.
Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).
Seniors hardest hit:
Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.
Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464).
The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.
In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.
Ironic, isn’t it? Seniors are the ones Democrats try to scare every election cycle: those evil Republicans are going to take away their health-care. Yeahp.
Hat tip: Michelle Malkin – See her updates for the tepid, mumbling responses of Senators who were asked about this.
Obama keeps claiming that most economists agree that a massive spending bill is needed to help America out of the recession.
Yet, The Patriot Room reports today, that Harvard Economist, Dr. Robert Barro, one of the most influential economists in the world is not at all impressed with The $1,000,000,000,000 (let’s just say infinity at this point) Porkulus/Patronage Bill.
This is probably the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s. I don’t know what to say. I mean it’s wasting a tremendous amount of money. It has some simplistic theory that I don’t think will work, so I don’t think the expenditure stuff is going to have the intended effect. I don’t think it will expand the economy. And the tax cutting isn’t really geared toward incentives. It’s not really geared to lowering tax rates; it’s more along the lines of throwing money at people. On both sides I think it’s garbage. So in terms of balance between the two it doesn’t really matter that much.
with the names of 200 economists, including some Nobel laureates and other highly respected scholars, who “do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance” — contrary to widespread claims that “Economists from across the political spectrum agree” on a massive fiscal stimulus package. Of course, many economists don’t like to sign joint statements, so this is only a fraction of stimulus opponents in the profession.
People like Robert Reich, who try to back up the claims of President Obama and Vice President Biden that “economic advisers across the political spectrum support Obama’s plan,” have managed to come up with two names of economists who support the stimulus plan and would not be regarded as left of center: Martin Feldstein of Harvard, a former top economic adviser to President Reagan, and Mark Zandi of Moody’s, who was an adviser to John McCain last fall. And now the Washington Post has blown both of those names out of the water. Leaving — by my count — exactly zero libertarian or conservative economists on that much-touted spectrum. As the Post notes this morning:
Democrats lost Feldstein on Thursday when the Harvard professor published a Washington Post op-ed declaring the House bill “an $800 billion mistake” laden with ineffective provisions.
Zandi, it turns out is a registered Democrat.
Many more economists who are against the bill were noted in this CBS News report from Jan. 28 which admits:
You may have heard that respectable economists, including Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, say stimulus spending should be high or higher. But some news organizations have been less than diligent in telling you that other respectable economists are deeply skeptical of the idea, flatly oppose it or favor competing proposals such as additional tax relief.
News organizations “less than diligent?” You don’t say. Huh. Maybe that’s why Obama, and his acolytes keep repeating the lie.
Another lie I’m getting sick of hearing:
- That there’s no pork - “there are no earmarks in this package”.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air calls Obama out on this repeated assertion. Heck, even the friggen’ A.P. has called him out on that one.
…the stimulus bill is essentially an Omnibus Earmark Package. It consists entirely of local and state projects that would normally only get funded as earmarks on other appropriations. Even the Associated Press calls shenanigans on this claim:
THE FACTS: There are no “earmarks,” as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill. Still, some of the projects bear the prime characteristics of pork – tailored to benefit specific interests or to have thinly disguised links to local projects.
See Ed Morrissey again, for still more lies from Obama’s Presser.
When Barack Obama explained his economic package last night to the American people in a prime-time press conference, he made two flat-out false statements regarding his opposition. He also added a completely incorrect reading of history, one that turns out to be very instructive about his own economic incompetence.
Just words.
MORE:
Obama puts the Republicans in Congress on the defensive when he charges them with wanting to “do nothing”, (which is, of course, a lie). But, there is a very credible school of thought that believes that doing nothing, and letting the recession run its course, is preferable to this suicidal stimulus bill. Another economist who doesn’t agree with Obama, explains.
This morning the Heritage Foundation, in conjunction with the Club for Growth, held a conference on the supposed stimulus bill. Here’s what one of the speakers, CATO Economist Arnold Kling, had to say about the Democrat’s economic plans:
“I think about the stimulus as an economist but I feel it as a father. Barack Obama is destroying my daughters future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs. That’s how I feel, now back to how I think.”
The event was liveblogged on Heritage’s blog, The Foundry. There’s a lot more on the event there.
That’s how I feel, too.
UPDATE II:
Another economist, (an attractive one) can be seen at Hot Air talking up her alternative idea to the “Stimulus”.
“I am calling on Congress to pass this bill immediately,” Obama said. “Folks here in Elkhart and across America need help right now, and they can’t afford to keep on waiting for folks in Washington to get this done.”
Obama said an independent, bipartisan board would oversee spending to make sure the money was not wasted.
“We’re going to set up an independent board made up of Democrats and Republicans to review how the money is being spent, because we’ve got to make sure that it’s not being wasted on somebody’s special project that may not actually create help for people,” he said.
???
The Republicans in Congress are trying to help with that right NOW, and he’s not listening to them. What makes Obama think that we would have any confidence in his phony “bipartisan board” later on? Empty promises.
Here are some questions I’d like people to ask Obama at one of these town hall appearances.
•Since you’re interested in bipartisanship, President Obama, how about scrapping that $1 billion for the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Program that would be funneled to ACORN, which of course only benefits Democrat election prospects? The Vitter Amendment to ban ACORN funding failed 45-51. The Republicans sure could use some help in stopping this wasteful spending.
•At the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5th, you stated:
“Instead of driving us apart, our varied beliefs can bring us together to feed the hungry and comfort the afflicted; to make peace where there is strife and rebuild what has broken; to lift up those who have fallen on hard times. This is not only our call as people of faith, but our duty as citizens of America, and it will be the purpose of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that I’m announcing later today.
That sounds awesome…..but it seems at odds with the provision in your stimulus bill that bans any university or college receiving funds to renovate buildings, from allowing “sectarian instruction” or “religious worship” within the facility. This provision would in effect bar the use of campus buildings for groups like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Campus Crusade for Christ, Catholic Student Ministries, Hillel, and other religious organizations. The Demint Amendment to strike that language from the Stimulus bill was voted down by the Democrats. That seems designed to “drive us apart”, doesn’t it?
• How is $264 billion (32 percent) in new means-tested welfare spending, stimulative? What about the budgetary gimmicks that will result in an estimated $523 billion in new welfare spending? Does spending like this really belong in a stimulus bill?
There’s no end of good questions that could be asked of Obama about the “Stimulus”. I just haven’t heard any, yet.
Reports of a “done deal” are wrong. This is on the razor’s edge. Take a stand by signing our online petition TODAY!
The Pelosi bill was going down in flames in the Senate until two so-called moderate Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins and Arlen Specter, agreed to vote with Democrats. (For more on the deal, check the facts section.)
Harry Reid knows he needs every vote, and is flying in Sen. Ted Kennedy for the vote, expected Monday evening around 5:30. It could take just one Democratic senator to vote “no” to beat this bill. Or Collins and Specter could feel the heat and pull the plug on the deal.
The more pressure from back home that comes in over the next couple of days, the more likely it is to happen.
Thanks for fighting back!
UPDATE:
Here’s The Old Glory Network with some background on “the dumbest town in America”, Elkhart, Indiana:
Rush thought Obama’s performance at the town hall was uninspired:
UPDATE II:
Well I see Obama had his first press conference. I missed most of it….(okay, I admit it, I didn’t have the stomach to watch it). Did he get one hard question?
Mark Hemingway at NRO has some thoughts on the press conference. I thought the same thing he did about Obama’s arrogant assumption that the question of the New Deal’s helpfulness was a settled question, when it’s widely believed that it actually extended the depression.
Doug Ross heard this interesting tidbit from “Chicago Bob” calling into a radio talk show:
I was in a meeting after Obama got elected and I was told by the Democratic officials in that meeting that we were gonna give billions of dollars that was gonna come down the pike, our way, and what we were to do with it was we were supposed to do with it…
We are gonna build an army of Democratic patronage jobs…. gonna completely freeze up the Republicans forever and ever…
I think there was some spending in the bill that was makeup for a starvation diet under the Bush Administration,some important priorities of our party,(corrects herself) frankly of the American people.
How can the Republican RINO compromisers not see what’s going on?
Hat tip: Gateway Pundit who discusses the latest fear mongering from Obama.
The very heart of the widely applauded Welfare Reform Act of 1996 is a cap on the amount of federal cash that can be sent to states each year for welfare payments.
But, thanks to the simple phrase slipped into the legislation, the new “stimulus” bill abolishes the limits on the amount of federal money for the so-called Emergency Fund, which ships welfare cash to states.
“Out of any money in the Treasury of the United States not otherwise appropriated, there are appropriated such sums as are necessary for payment to the Emergency Fund,” Democrats wrote in Section 2101 on Page 354 of the $819 billion bill. In other words, the only limit on welfare payments would be the Treasury itself.
“This re-establishes the welfare state and creates dependency all over the place,” said one startled budget analyst after reading the line.
In addition to reopening the floodgates of dependency on federal welfare programs, the change once again deepens the dependency of state governments on the federal government.
Harry Reid refuses to allow a commonsense bipartisan amendment to the floor that would require local governments and businesses that receive stimulus money to use the federal E-Verify citizenship check system.
On the House side, a long term extension of the E-Verify program passed there 407-2 (Conservative Oasis).
But Democrat Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to allow it to come to the floor. Now, we’re headed for cloture.
“While it is difficult to believe that Senate leaders might insist that illegal aliens have the same chance at new stimulus jobs as unemployed Americans, this scenario may now be at hand,” says Roy Beck of Numbers USA. “SA 239 is now unlikely to receive a floor vote.”
Yes, it’s oh-so difficult to believe…..*rolls eyes*.
Analysts expect that in addition, another 20 states may see similar measures introduced this year, including Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nevada, Maine and Pennsylvania.
Last year, Judd appeared on a panel of the Clinton Global Initiative and promoted her pro-abortion agenda. She declared to our gang at CNSNews.com that ”a woman voting for McCain and Palin is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.” So let’s get this straight. According to the humanitarian ethics of Ashley Judd, Sarah Palin shouldn’t allow wolves to be shot from an airplane, but she should allow human babies to have their skulls vacuumed out and killed in a partial-birth abortion. Who here is in favor of “senseless savagery” again?
I’m not sure where Judd proclaimed that she was for partial birth abortion, but Planned Parenthood certainly is, and I suspect that someone as stridently pro abortion as Judd knew of Obama’s extreme postion on abortion before she happily voted for him. So I’m guessing she’s okay with it.
Anyhoo…you might want to visit Moonbattery for an interesting photoshop, and an awesome link to a story by someone who spent some time with Ashley on a humanitarian trip to Africa with Youth AIDs in 2005. Primadonna doesn’t even begin to cover it…
“I think there was some spending in the bill that was makeup for a starvation diet under the Bush Administration, some important priorities of our party, frankly of the American people. And, the question is does it belong in the stimulus bill or does it belong in the appropriations bill. I think some of the money that we cut in the compromise to get the votes that we have was in fact spending that more appropriately should go in an appropriations bill.“
Senator Claire McCaskill
On the Obama Stimulus Bill Meet the Press February 8, 2009
Yep. Claire McCaskill admits that democrats are going to spend the $100 billion cut away in the senate for a compromise whether it is put back into this bill or another one.
So McCaskill, at least, recognizes that the “compromise” is not a real compromise. The spending “cuts” which induced Republican Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Spector to support the “compromise” Senate bill are a ruse. There has been no agreement by Democrats not to spend the money, only not to spend it in the “stimulus” bill.
My favorite part of the transcript:
I think there was some spending in the bill that was makeup for a starvation diet under the Bush Administration,some important priorities of our party,(oopsie! I mean) frankly of the American people.
Yes, of course that’s what we’re witnessing right now. I’ve been convinced that the Dems were engaged in something of this nature for some time, now. Only a few months ago did I learn that there was actually a name for this strategy.
Because these programs are financed with deficit spending, the effect of the Cloward/Piven Strategy becomes doubly destructive. Talk about a perfect storm! The Democrat stimulus plan is a mechanism whose goal is the destruction of the traditional American way of life. It is bitter irony that the American taxpayer will actually fund the destruction of his own ability to live according to the values of our Founding Documents. It is not alarmist to identify this situation as a coup d’etat.
Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) thinks the White House decision to strip Commerce Secretary-nominee Judd Gregg of control over the Census Bureau is a bad idea — and giving control to the White House is even worse.
Hill sources tell Politico that the bureau — which collects data used for the 2010 redistricting — could fall under the control of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, former head of the DCCC.
And that caught the attention of McHenry and Darrell Issa (R-Calif).
“We are deeply concerned about Rahm Emanuel getting control of the Census Bureau,” said McHenry, who has a history of run-ins with the hot-tempered former Illinois congressman. “The concern is that he would politicize the bureau.”
Asked if he was suggesting the move was an Emanuel power play, he replied, “Sure.”
The Census Bureau is a major agency within the Commerce Department, and the decennial census — the next one is in 2010 — is a mammoth undertaking. After years of mismanagement and underfinancing by the Bush administration, the bureau is so ill prepared to conduct next year’s count that Congressional investigators have warned that it is at high risk of failure unless corrective action is taken immediately.
Mr. Gregg was never a friend of the census. As chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the Commerce Department’s budget, he frequently tried to cut the bureau’s financing. In 1999, he opposed emergency funds for the 2000 census requested by President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled House.
Here are The Fox News All Stars talking about it
With all that stimulus money going to Acorn and other Democrat special interests, and with Raum Emanuel’s control of the Census, the Republicans are going to be sitting pretty in 2012, eh?
I remember asking if we were witnessing a slow motion coup d’etatback in October. Obama continues to reinforce my worst fears.
As new jobless numbers Thursday testified to further deterioration in the economy, Obama’s impatience showed through during a talk at the House Democrats’ retreat in Williamsburg, Va., Thursday night, when he demanded prompt action and accused his Republican critics of wanting to return “to the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin.”
Rich Lowry reminds us of what Obama told us back on the campaign trail:
The president should read the transcript of the third presidential debate. He claimed his program represented “a net spending cut.” He called himself “a strong proponent of pay-as-you-go. Every dollar that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.” He added, “We need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don’t work.”
How does this man sleep at night?
Reid warned that he would not allow the president’s program to be held “hostage.” Asked if he had 60 votes already to ensure Senate passage, Reid said. “We believe we do.”
This is what’s being “held hostage”: 90% pork, welfare, and Democrat empowerment spending like ACORN. This is no stimulus bill, and the Democrats know it. Excuse the Republicans for desperately trying to talk some sense into these maniacs before they torpedo our already besieged economy. Remember the Democrat golden rule: What’s bad for the country is good for Democrats. So even though the American economy as a whole will suffer as a result of the passage of this bill, key Democrat constituencies will become more dependent on government, and that’s all that really matters to them.
Will the nearly trillion dollar porkulus abomination pass, today? Well, Senator Demint couldn’t even get one line stripped from the bill that discriminates against students of faith on college campuses.
Today,U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) made the following statement after Democrats voted 43-54 against his amendment to strike language from the economic stimulus bill that discriminates against students of faith. Senator DeMint’s amendment would have eliminated a provision that bans any university or college receiving funds to renovate buildings, from allowing “sectarian instruction” or “religious worship” within the facility. This would in effect bar use of campus buildings for groups like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Campus Crusade for Christ, Catholic Student Ministries, Hillel, and other religious organizations.
Nearly all of the Democraps (+ Olympia Snowe) voted against Demint’s amendment; not a good omen.
Here’s Senator Demint, making too much sense to be taken seriously by Democrats:
News reports indicate there may be an effort to pass the nearly $1 TRILLION pork-laden “stimulus” package TODAY. We’ve got to take immediate action to tell the Senate to VOTE NO on the “stimulus” plan.
The staff of the conservative group, Our Country Deserves Better Committee, has put together a database of phone numbers, fax numbers, and emails for each Senator. See the listing below, contact the two Senators from your state and if you want, work through the rest of the list as well. In terms of effectiveness, phone calls and faxes are most important, followed by emails.
And yet more damaging to Obama’s image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
(Yeah, I used the same word).
It’s not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It’s not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.
It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’s own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
Stalled; No Vote Today? Carl Cameron reporting that Reid can’t get Collins, Snowe, and Specter on board.
This is good news. The Republic is safe…for now. Since the Crap sammich gets more unpopular with every passing day, we should be in a better position to defeat it on Monday.
President Barack Obama decried as “inexcusable and irresponsible” the delay of his economic recovery legislation in Congress with an estimated 3.6 million Americans losing their jobs since the recession began.
Obama’s remarks were some of his most direct and pointed in support of the massive economic package that the Senate considered Friday and tried to pare down below its $900-billion-plus price tag. Obama acknowledged it was not perfect and pledged to work with lawmakers to refine the measure, which he called “absolutely necessary.”
“But broadly speaking, the package is the right size, it is the right scope, and it has the right priorities to create 3 to 4 million jobs, and to do it in a way that lays the groundwork for long-term growth,” Obama said at a ceremony in the White House East Room.
It’s funny how much he’s been using that word, “irresponsible”! What’s inexcusable and irresponsible is his sad farce of a stimulus bill.
And no, the package is not the “right size”…is he kidding? A bloated $900 billion? He’s not willing to compromise at all on that? The whole thing is gonna slip through his fingers….
A group of Senate moderates working on an amendment to cut up to $100 billion in spending from the economic stimulus package have completed a tentative proposal that will be presented to Senate Democrats at a 5:30 p.m. caucus meeting, Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad told reporters. “There is a proposal that is sufficiently fleshed out and we will have a caucus and discuss it,” Conrad said after emerging from talks in Senate Majority Leader Reid’s office. Democrats hope the proposal, developed by Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Ben Nelson, R-Neb., will attract several GOP supporters and be acceptable to all Democrats, which would allow for passage of the plan as early as tonight.
So Collins and Specter have signed on. Incredible. Even by RINO standards they’re reprehensible turncoats. And now, Teddy Kennedy has been roused from his sickbed in Florida to cast the 60th vote, reportedly to happen tonight.
This may turn out to be Teddy’s last action in the Senate. It seems fitting for him.
UPDATE V:
It’s official. A deal has been reached. The country’s descent into madness is now complete: A pork filled spending abomination of 780 billion to 827 billion, disguised as an emergency stimulus bill is a done deal in the Senate, thanks to three Republican turncoats,Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
To pretend that this was in any way a bipartisan effort, with only the support of these three RINOs is a joke.
… Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, told reporters he and others hoped that some of the funds on the chopping block would be restored next week when negotiations open on a House-Senate compromise.
The House Democratic Caucus spent more than $500,000 in taxpayer money over the past five years for its annual retreats at resorts in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
On Thursday, Democrats will head to the Kingsmill Resort and Spa in historic Williamsburg, Va., for the three-day planning powwow. The resort boasts multiple championship golf courses, a full-service spa and six restaurants.
Individual lawmakers pay for most of the expenses related to retreat lodging through their campaign committees, but the Democratic Caucus subsidizes some of the costs for what aides consider “official business” — to the tune of nearly $100,000 each year, according to a Democratic aide involved in retreat planning.
For instance, the caucus picks up the hefty transportation tab, as well as the thousands of dollars in expenses each year for guest speakers, food and entertainment, according to financial disbursement records.
Democratic leadership sources were reluctant to talk about any aspect of the trip, but they defended it as an important planning session for the entire country.
“This retreat is strategic planning for the country,” said Democratic Caucus spokeswoman Emily Barocas. “The president, vice president and three Cabinet secretaries will be meeting with the caucus to plan the direction we are taking the country in.”
The topic is particularly sensitive this year after several Democratic lawmakers slammed American International Group (AIG) executives for spending more than $440,000 at a company retreat in Monarch Beach, Calif., just days after the federal government bailed the company out with $85 billion in taxpayer funds.
Yes, several Democratic lawmakers did slam AIG rather brutally, last October. For instance:
But Democrats, residing at the luxury resort in Williamsburg, this weekend on the taxpayers’ expense, during a recession, are working for us, you see:
“We’re very mindful” of perceptions, House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson told reporters Thursday camped outside of the sprawling Kingsmill Resort & Spa in Williamsburg, Va., where House Democrats were on their annual three-day retreat, which by some estimates has cost $100,000 in the past. “It’s serious and it’s from morning till night. We’ve been dwelling, rightfully, on the economy,” said Larson, D-Conn.
Uh huh.
In case you’re wondering, yes, Republicans go on an annual retreat, as well….but not on the public dime:
Republicans spend no public money on their retreat, which occurred last month at the historic Homestead resort in Hot Springs, Va., spokesman Matt Lloyd said.
Lawmakers pay for their own transportation and room costs, roughly $190 per night, including food, according to one Republican who attended but spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the trip were not made public.
But Republicans allow special guests to join them: lobbyists who are part of the Congressional Institute, a nonprofit organization that arranges events for both political parties. They pay $25,000 to join the institute, which allows them to attend the first night’s dinner at the Republican retreat as well as other events throughout the year.
Obama dogged Wall Street by saying there would be a time “for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses. Now’s not that time. And that’s a message that I intend to send directly to them.”
Cramer made this comparison: “There was a little snippet last week that was, ‘Now is not the time for profits.’ Look – in Lenin’s book, “What Is to Be Done,” is simple text of what I always though was for the communists. It was remarkable to hear very similar language from ‘What Is to Be Done?’ which is we have no place for profits.”
Obama pressured lawmakers on Wednesday to quickly pass the increasingly unpopular “porkulus” bill by reminding them again, that “he won”:
But after days of absorbing rhetorical attacks, Obama and Senate Democrats mounted a counteroffensive against Republicans who say tax cuts alone can cure the economy.
Obama said the criticisms he has heard “echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place, the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems.”
“I reject those theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change,” said the president, who was elected with an Electoral College landslide last fall and enjoys high public approval ratings at the outset of his term.
In other words, he doesn’t have to listen to Republican objections. It was their “failed economic theories” that got us into this mess to begin with, you see.
His (Obama’s) effort is failing. He can’t even get his own party to sign on to the plan. So far, at least, Obama doesn’t appear willing to recognize this. In a CNN interview on Tuesday, Obama was asked what was nonnegotiable in the stimulus bill. His answer, in short, was pretty much everything.
On his list of nonnegotiables: Infrastructure, weatherizing homes, health IT spending, and education spending, investments in science and technology research, health insurance for the unemployed, relief to states, and aid to families.
That’s basically what the House passed last week with zero Republican support, and what the Senate admitted this week that it can’t pass — despite being one vote shy of a filibuster-proof Democratic supermajority and despite the repeated and public urgings of a very popular new president.
“I think, in fairness to the House Democrats . . . if you tally up all of the programs that have been criticized . . . that amounts to less than 1% of the total package,” Obama said.
But clearly, the concerns aren’t about a tiny amount of waste in an otherwise good bill. If that were the case, the fix would be simple.
The fact is it’s Obama’s effort to get much of his domestic agenda enacted under the guise of stimulus that has lawmakers — on both sides — increasingly agitated.
And make no mistake, a significant portion of the stimulus spending comes right out of the agenda Obama announced last summer — long before the need for a massive stimulus bill emerged.
Take the home weatherization program. On CNN Obama argued that this $6 billion program was nonnegotiable because: “First of all, you can employ people weatherizing those homes.”
But Obama announced plans to weatherize a million homes a year last summer. Except back then it was touted as part of a plan to create a “clean energy future” — not as a jobs program.
How about investment in health information technology? In his Blueprint for Change, issued in August, Obama vowed to “Make an upfront investment of $50 billion in electronic health information technology systems to reduce errors, and save lives and money.”
So why is this now a nonnegotiable part of a stimulus package?
Ditto the $1 billion in “Comparative Effectiveness Research” in the stimulus bill. Last year, Obama called that “a comprehensive effort to tackle health care disparities” to cut health care costs.
Transportation spending, education spending, money for science and technology — all were also key parts of Obama’s Blueprint.
To be fair, Obama admits he’s trying to marry short-term stimulus spending with, as he put it, investments that “lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth.”
But it’s a marriage that shouldn’t be saved.
Obama is trying to ram through his domestic agenda under the guise of a stimulus bill, and that’s not how it’s done. They need to scrap it, and start from scratch.
On Capitol Hill, you can feel the Republicans’ growing sense of confidence. They’ve scored a lot of hits on the stimulus bill, and now they’re aiming higher. “We’ll try to make the bill better,” Sen. Jim DeMint said a few moments ago, “but this bill is so bad…you can’t fix it by tweaking around the edges…The best thing to happen would be for President Obama to lead, to call a time out.” Several Republicans now want to throw the whole bill out and replace it with a package that is nearly all tax cuts — “twice the jobs at half the price.”
After the Republican news conference, I asked DeMint how many Republican senators oppose the bill — and how many might be won over by a minimum number of changes stripping the bill of its notorious spending provisions, rather than demanding a complete overhaul of the bill. “I think we’ve got nearly 100 percent of Republicans who are going to vote against this bill unless it is fundamentally changed to include real economic stimulus,” DeMint said. “I think just about every Republican has come around to the realization that this is a massive spending bill, it’s a grab bag full of the Democrats’ wish lists, and they’re shamefully using the economic troubles we’re having as a country as an excuse to pass their wish list of spending. I think as that grows on people, it makes them more and more outraged.”
I like it. I also like that conservatives are beating liberals by 100 to 1 in phone calls to the Senate.
Nevermind the fact that with the MSM squarely on his side, there’s no need for the POTUS to write his own opeds. Yuvel Levin thinks it’s an odd move on Obama’s part for other reasons, too:
It makes a case for refusing to compromise on the stimulus bill that Obama is clearly about to compromise on, and it makes the argument of his opponents: that the bill is not really emergency legislation to give the economy a short-term boost but an ambitious move to enact a much larger long-term liberal agenda in one fell swoop rather than working through the normal legislative and budget process. Why not wait a day or two for a compromise measure to emerge in the Senate and then make a case for why it’s better than the original bill and how it reflects your bipartisan outreach and whatnot? Instead we have a collection of campaign talking points that don’t make much sense when you’re the guy running the show, and that will make you look weak when you accept a different bill later this month.
News reports indicate there may be an effort to pass the nearly $1 TRILLION pork-laden “stimulus” package TODAY. We’ve got to take immediate action to tell the Senate to VOTE NO on the “stimulus” plan.
The staff of the conservative group, Our Country Deserves Better Committee, has put together a database of phone numbers, fax numbers, and emails for each Senator. See the listing below, contact the two Senators from your state and if you want, work through the rest of the list as well. In terms of effectiveness, phone calls and faxes are most important, followed by emails.
I think this was meant to tug at our heartstrings, but instead it will tickle your funnybones:
It looks like it was designed to persuade 10 year olds and PETA types – a sure sign that the global warming alarmists are losing the debate with grown ups.
Victor Davis Hanson at NRO thinks that the Obama administration may already be in the process of imploding. I agree that his first weeks in office have featured an unprecedented number of missteps, but I’m not sure the media will ever totally turn on him, after their slobbering two year love affair, no matter how mortifying it gets, they’ve got too much invested in him. If Obama goes down, he brings them down with him.
Here’s VDH’s rundown of Obama’s mistakes, thus far:
First, there were the sermons on ethics, belied by the appointments of tax dodgers, crass lobbyists, and wheeler-dealers like Richardson—with the relish of the Blago tapes still to come. (And why does Richardson/Daschle go, but not Geithner?).
Second, was the “stimulus” (the euphemism for “borrow/print money”) that was simply a way to go into debt for a generation to shower Democratic constituencies with cash.
Then third, there were the inflated lectures on historic foreign policy to be made by the clumsy political novice who trashed his own country and his predecessor in the most ungracious manner overseas to a censored Saudi-run press organ (e.g., Bush is dictatorial, the Saudi king is courageous; Obama can mend bridges that America broke to aggrieved Muslims—apparently Tehran hostages, Rushdie, serial attacks in the 1990s, 9/11, Madrid, London never apparently occurred; and neither did feeding Somalis, saving Kuwait, protesting Chechnya, Bosnia/Kosovo, billions to Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinians, help in two Afghan wars, and on and on).
Fourth, there was the campaign rhetoric of Bush shredding the Constitution—FISA, Guantánamo, the Patriot Act, Iraq, renditions, etc.—followed by “all that for now stays the same” inasmuch as we haven’t ben hit in over seven years and can’t risk another attack.
Fifth, Gibbs as press secretary is a Scott McClellan nightmare that won’t go away, given his long McClellan-like relationship with Obama (McClellan should have been fired on day hour one on the job). Blaming Fox News for Obama’s calamities is McClellan to the core and doesn’t work. He already reminds me of Reverend Wright’s undoing at the National Press Club—and he will get worse.
Six, Biden is being Biden. Already, he’s ridiculed the chief justice, trashed the former VP, bragged on himself ad nauseam in Bidenesque weird ways, and it’s only been two weeks.
And the result of all this?
At home, Obama is becoming laughable and laying the groundwork for the greatest conservative populist reaction since the Reagan Revolution.
I wish, but I have little hope that an electorate misinformed enough to vote for Obama to begin with, will ever know enough to correct their mistake, unless something truly drastic happens, which is entirely possible if you listen to Dick Cheney:
In the interview, Cheney revealed no doubts about his own course — and many about the new administration’s.
“If it hadn’t been for what we did — with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth — then we would have been attacked again,” he said. “Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”
Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.
“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.
“I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt. Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.”
If Obama’s incompetency causes his administration to meltdown, so be it. But it had better not lead to one or more of our cities suffering a similar fate.
MORE:
Michelle Malkin does something I’ve been meaning to do: She compares Obama’s screwup infested transition period with George W. Bush’s nearly flawless one.
“Keep a sharp eye out in the coming weeks and months. Let’s hope the O’s will see reason somehow. But so far, the signals sent by their actions are ominous”.
