Hannity’s radio show today featured some interesting dish from former NYTs Magazine Editor, Ed Klein, the author of the explosive new book about Obama; The Amateur.
The book gets its title from the words Bill Clinton utteredwhen he was trying to encourage Hillary to take on Obama in the Democratic primary of 2012:
Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s…he’s…Barack Obama’s an amateur.
I’ve always suspected that Bill Clinton despised Obama, so I’m always aghast when I see him give interviews propping him up, or even starring in campaign ads for him. It makes them look like BFFs, and I wonder what the hell is going on. Why would you do that for someone you hate? Klein has a very simple answer for that.
Clinton says there is no loyalty in politics, but he’s been pretty loyal to Obama this year,for someone who hates him.
As the Washington Beacon aptly put it, The President fired up his base, (aka the MSM) today in a speech before the Associated Press luncheon at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in Washington, D.C.
He viciously attacked the GOP budget resolution proposed by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) to the delight of the media toadies in attendance.
The president accused Republicans of promoting a failed theory of “trickle-down” economics driven by large tax cuts for the wealthy financed at the expense of federal spending on the middle class.
The GOP vision, as outlined in the Ryan budget, was “nothing but thinly veiled Social Darwinism” and “a Trojan horse designed as a deficit reduction plan,” the president said.
“I don’t think people fully appreciate the nature of [the GOP] budget,” he said.
History has proven “their theory” wrong, Obama argued, before chastising Republicans for refusing to “show some humility and moderate their views.”
“Instead of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down,” he said, describing Ryan’s budget as “so far to the right it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal.”
Though he did not mention Ryan by name, Obama did call out GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney, who has praised Ryan’s budget as “marvelous.”
“He even called [the Ryan budget] marvelous,” the president said of Romney. “Which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing the budget. It’s a word you don’t often hear generally.”
Today we witnessed something truly remarkable. Barack Obama managed to out-do himself by uncorking what very well may have been the most dishonest, demagogic, and bitterly partisan speech of his presidency.
In an interview with CBS News’ Chip Reid in Wisconsin on Tuesday, Rep. Paul Ryan was also laughing, but not with the President — at the President’s comically demagogic criticism of his budget proposals. He said, “unfortunately, we’re used to the President acting like this”, called him the “Campaigner in Chief”, and went on to say instead of offering real solutions to fix this country’s problems, Obama offers “these baseless, partisan attacks.”
“You know, I don’t think history is going to be kind to a President, that when confronted with one of country’s most pressing challenges – the debt crisis – chooses to do nothing about it, and then waits for those of us who offer solutions, to attack us in these baseless ways… I think what the President is trying to do is offer this big government populism and in an effort not to propose solutions, but in an effort to divide and distract this country for the purposes of his reelection, and I just don’t think people are going to buy this stuff.”
So annoying – embedding not allowed, watch on YouTube…
UPDATE:
Video of some of Obama’s outrageous remarks via Townhall:
I hadn’t realized he also made a “joke” telling reporters to feel free to transmit his speech to Vladamir…Wow…that wasn’t very funny at all, was it?
Talking to Fox News after the President spoke at the Associated Press’s annual luncheon, Ryan said, “I seem to have three certainties in my life – death, taxes and bitter partisan attacks from President Barack Obama” (video follows with transcribed highlights and absolutely no need for additional commentary):
An interesting discussion between lefty Thom Hartmann and Peter Ferrara, Senior Fellow at the Carleson Center for Public Policy / author-America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb.
Website: http://theccpp.org/
The Obama administration aggressively rushed the approval process of the Solyndra loan to pay back big Obama donors.
It was a crony socialism debacle, and now because he’s slumping in the polls, Obama, (weasel that he is) is trying to shift blame to Congress, and even has the unmitigated gall to make Republicans and Democrats equally complicit.
APM: With all respect, it was a gutsy move I think to come to a solar facility. Your administration has staked a lot on clean technology, green jobs – the biggest item most people know about that strategy is, of course, a company named Solyndra, which your administration gave loan guarantees to, then went bankrupt and has been the subject of many investigations. Are you doing your ‘all of the above’ strategy right if that’s what we have to show for it, Solyndra?
OBAMA: We are doing the all of the above strategy right. Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn’t gone bankrupt. Part of the reason they did was because the Chinese were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn’t compete. But understand, this was not our program per se.
Congress–Democrats and Republicans–put together a loan guarantee program because they understood historically that when you get new industries–it’s easy to raise money for start-ups, but if you want to take them to scale sometimes there’s a lot of risk involved, and what the loan guarantee program was designed to do was to help start-up companies get to scale. And the understanding is that some companies are not going to succeed, some companies are going to do very well, but the portfolio as a whole ends up supporting the kind of innovation that helps make America successful in this innovative 21st century economy. Do I wish that Solyndra had gone bankrupt? Absolutely not. And obviously it’s heartbreaking it happened for the workers who were there.
As Doug Powers says: “It takes a big bus to be able to back it up over all of Congress, and an even bigger one to back it up over a party that wasn’t anywhere near the bill that funded Solyndra…”
Obama thinks the American people are stupid enough to believe his increasingly brazen lies. It is imperative that he is run out of town on a rail in November.
More at TownHallas Guy Benson further fisks Obama’s disingenuous words.
Where to begin? (1) Obama says Solyndra couldn’t compete because of its heavily subsidized Chinese competitors. Does the president believe we can win a government subsidization war with the Chinese? Is out-spending China a viable path forward? Does he recall that our gross national debt has eclipsed 100 percent of GDP, and that China is already our biggest foreign creditor?
Today Barack Obama continued his fraudulent energy tour in Cushing, Oklahoma. The purpose of his visit to petroleum-producing areas is to convince the American people that he is a pro-energy, pro-development president. Today Thomas Pyle, President of the Institute for Energy Research, released this statement in response to Obama’s speech in Cushing:
President Obama wants to deceive the American people into believing that he’s somehow responsible for the southern segment of the Keystone XL pipeline, much like he wants them to think he’s responsible for increased oil and gas production in the United States.Neither claim is true, and the president knows it.
The administration has blocked full development of the Keystone XL pipeline, from delays last fall to the outright rejection of the pipeline permit earlier this year. The president wants to reject the pipeline, and yet take credit for approving it. Similarly, he’s closed development of millions of acres of onshore and offshore federal lands for oil and gas production, while attempting to take credit for production increases on state and private lands where he has no role.
Read the whole thing – Hinderaker concludes with a good question:
How long do you think it will be before a White House reporter calls Obama on his constant misrepresentation of the facts relating to energy?
Don’t hold your breath, John.
Rush started off his show, today , slamming the AP for its dishonest reporting:
Meanwhile, the President is still beating the drums for his energy strategy, which he highlighted yesterday in a visit to the Copper Mountain Solar 1 Facility in Boulder City, Nevada. Anticipating the obvious criticism — that his investment in the Solyndra solar plant went belly up, costing American taxpayers $535 million — the President mocked those who question his ideas, saying they “lack imagination,” and he turned to name calling in order to deflect legitimate concerns about the viability of his green pipe dream and the fact that it has not produced the jobs that he promised:
One member of Congress who shall remain unnamed called these jobs ‘phony’ — called them phony jobs. I mean, think about that mindset, that attitude that says because something is new, it must not be real. If these guys were around when Columbus set sail, they’d be charter members of the Flat Earth Society.
But as Heritage’s Nick Loris points out, those who criticize the President’s policies aren’t opposed to new ideas. The Administration’s record of burning billions in taxpayer dollars to somehow transition America to a new energy economy have not produced results that earn confidence. The American people’s money is being used to offset private-sector investments and artificially prop up industries until they go bankrupt, like Solyndra, Beacon, Ener1, Abound, and so on. Only when technologies such as solar, wind, and biofuels become affordable and reliable will consumers embrace them.
But that was before the Obama camp began their full court press strategy of steering the debate away from a religious freedom issue to a women’s rights issue. They accused the hapless GOP of waging a war on women with an assist from feminist plant, Sandra Fluke. Rush Limbaugh unintentionally aided and abetted the faux narrative when he used rhetoric more characteristic of left-wing commentators to describe the 31 year old reproductive rights activist.
What happened next was predictable. The institutional left erupted in spasms of sputtering faux outrage and numerous craven sponsors left the Rush Limbaugh Show. Rush apologized for sinking to the level of discourse that he did, and the Stalinist left, smelling blood in the water, didn’t accept his apology, and instead opted to ramp up the pressure on his sponsors.
As should be obvious, this is not really a reaction to a bad word, or the left would be spending more of its time policing its own side. It’s simply an excuse to continue their jihad against talk radio, because that is the only place where conservative speech dominates.
The Obama war room probably thought they were going to kill two birds with one stone — flip the contraception narrative from their toxic war on religion to a phony GOP war on women and drum Rush off the air, once and for all. The White House’s contraception narrative had been forming since early January, after all – before anyone knew why it was an even an issue. The Rush thing was just an added bonus.
Unfortunately for Obama and his minions, though, conservatives were on to their Alinsky tactics, and rallied around Rush. We brought up example after example of lefty commentators saying worse things about conservative women. We brought up the million dollar misogynist, Bill Maher, and wondered why Obama’s PAC would accept the tainted money of one of the biggest creeps on the air. We exposed the left’s flaming hypocrisy and threw their words back in their stupid simpering faces. We put them on the defensive. The latest fallout: David Axelrod bails out of Bill Maher appearance.
And we’re not through. Since the left wants to play this game, we’re happy to oblige. Because when it comes to unhinged, ugly, demented, hateful and insane rhetoric – the right cannot begin to compete with the left. .
Take Al Sharpton. Back in the day – before he had teleprompters to help him to say “resist we much”, Al had some pretty — exotic things to say about all sorts of people.
Breaking today at the American Spectator is more bad news for a network devoting so much of its airtime to creating a rule that says someone should be pulled off the air for anything he or she has said that might be considered offensive.
Using MSNBC’s own standards, should the man who once said the following be allowed to hold a primetime MSNBC slot?
David Dinkins, you wanna be the only nigger on television, only nigger in the newspaper, only nigger that can talk. Don’t cover them, don’t talk to them, ’cause you got the only nigger problem. ‘Cause you know if a black man stood up next to you, they would see you for the whore that you really are.
That’s MSNBC’s Al Sharpton–many years ago, but just as shocking today. I can already hear the excuse — that it’s okay for him to use the N-word because he’s black. But I wonder what CNN’s Roland Martin will think of this:
White folks was in the cave when we were building empires. We learned to admire them, but they knew to admire us. We built pyramids without a ____, ____ new architecture ____. We talked philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.
“Greek homos.”
Just a few weeks ago, Roland Martin was suspended from CNN after GLAAD took offense to a few Super Bowl tweets few but GLAAD could ever find offensive — tweets that never even broached the subject of homosexuality.
“Homo,” of course is an anti-gay slur, especially within the context you hear in Sharpton’s words.
But that’s not all! How about a side order of “Chinaman” to go with that “homo”:
You the best chicken ____ in the universe. Gonna buy some Colonel Sanders chicken. Then the Chinaman come in and throw some hot ___ [cough] ___. Then the Korean sells us watermelon. ___ watermelon all my life. They’re gonna cut it up and put it in a bucket with a rubber band around it, and then we’re gonna buy it like it’s somethin we didn’t know what it was.
And finally we have this:
“___ uh, white interloper I said I was wrong. uh, uh, cracker, though I think cracker is a certain personification of a certain type of person down south, just like redneck. I mean, you know some people misinterpret cracker meaning all whites, it’s not true. But the confusion means you shouldn’t use it. I mean, sometimes being flippant you say things you shouldn’t say, cause it gets in the way of your message and people don’t really understand what you’re saying.”
“White interloper.” I don’t even know what that means, but “cracker” is a slur against white Southerners — end of story.
As Nolte notes, MSNBC President Phil Griffin added Sharpton to the MSNBC lineup, knowing that he said this sort of stuff regularly. But as MSNBC is the media arm of the Obama White House, Sharpton’s main role at the network is to deploy the race card in promiscuous fashion as an election year racialist tactic to shore up the white guilt vote.. And he’s been doing just that. He wasn’t meant to be a liability.
So you might wonder – how does all this look to the average Joe?
Today, Obama sits at 41% in opinion polls — his lowest approval rating ever. Part of this poll collapse most certainly has to do with a stagnant economy and gas prices, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that Obama has started a stupid war against a nonexistent war on women (which is really Obama’s war against the Catholic Church and religious liberty), and the fact that he has once again been found hanging out with another divisive, radical racialist.
But surely most people agree with Obama on contraception?
Sure enough, when asked, “Should health insurance plans for all employees have to cover the full cost of birth control for female employees or should employers be able to opt out for moral or religious reasons?” women favored opting out by a 46-44 margin. The margin increased to a decisive 53-38 for “religiously affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university.”
That’s among women. Unbeknownst to those who read only the Times‘ main story, the poll asked the same question to men. They were not split. Men favored opting out by a 20 point margin (57 vs. 37), except when a “religiously affiliated employer” was involved, in which case the margin increased to 25 points. Combining men and women, a substantial majority (51-40) favors allowing an opt-out–increasing to 57-36 where religiously-affiliated institutions are involved.
These are not close results. It’s hard to read this poll and not conclude that, contrary to some accounts, Obama wasn’t such a genius to pick a fight over mandated contraception coverage–because he appears to be losing the public debate on the question.
Rick Santorum is being painted as right wing extremist who is obsessed with social issues and wants to take away a woman’s right to contraception. How’s that working out?
Pollster Evolving Strategies conducted a sophisticated poll they call a “message experiment,” and found “Santorum does not do worse with women than he does with men” and that “Santorum doesn’t appear to be seriously harmed by social issues, however there is evidence that he is harmed by a lack of focus on economic issues.”
Here’s the heart of it:
When we look to the data, we see that being socially conservative or liberal has a significant impact on a respondent’s vote, but men and women are fairly similar, with women a bit less conservative overall.
Furthermore, there is no significant interaction between being socially conservative or liberal and the Santorum treatment. In other words, there does not seem to be a significant backlash against Santorum in response to his social policy views.
Doh!
In light of all this, Andrew Breitbart, (who continues to inspire us even after his death) has a special message for the Obama White House:
I was going to say “Bart Stupak hardest hit” because the world’s biggest chump lost his job and lost his dignity over the issue. But obviously, there will be many, many little others harder hit than Stupak.
It’s official. The concern pro-life organizations had about the ObamaCare legislation funding abortions has been confirmed, as the Obama administration has issued the final rules on abortion funding governing the controversial health care law.
Nestled within the “individual mandate” in the Obamacare act — that portion of the Act requiring every American to purchase government — approved insurance or pay a penalty — is an “abortion premium mandate.” This mandate requires all persons enrolled in insurance plans that include elective abortion coverage to pay a separate premium from their own pockets to fund abortion. As a result, many pro-life Americans will have to decide between a plan that violates their consciences by funding abortion, or a plan that may not meet their health needs.
The Department of Health and Human Services has issued a final rule regarding establishment of the state health care exchanges required under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
As a knowledgeable pro-life source on Capitol Hill informed LifeNews, as authorized by Obamacare, “the final rule provides for taxpayer funding of insurance coverage that includes elective abortion” and the change to longstanding law prohibiting virtually all direct taxpayer funding of abortions (the Hyde Amendment) is accomplished through an accounting arrangement described in the Affordable Care Act and reiterated in the final rule issued today.
On May 11, 2010, in a letter to Democratic and Republican congressional leaders on implementation of the new law, DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote that “states may choose whether and how they participate in the program, which is funded entirely by the federal government.”
Johnson says that on June 28, Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner Joel Ario (a member of the appointed cabinet of Governor Edward Rendell, a Democrat) issued a press release announcing that the federal Department of Health and Human Services had approved his agency’s proposal for implementing the new program in Pennsylvania.
“The state will receive $160 million to set up the program, which will provide coverage to as many as 5,600 people between now and 2014,” according to the release. “The plan’s benefit package will include preventive care, physician services, diagnostic testing, hospitalization, mental health services, prescription medications and much more, with subsidized premiums of $283 a month.”
Johnson says the “much more” Ario refers to is abortion funding.
I didn’t see this one coming, did you? I mean, Obama was so adamant when he promised that his health care plan would continue the ban on federally funded abortions. He said so in countless speeches, includingone before a joint session of Congress.He said so in his“myth-busting” teleconferences with Pastors and Rabbis, last August, and in this “myth-busting weekly address from August 22…See how far you can get through the video before you start retching…:
But now that it’s two years later, well – we’re expected to have forgotten about all of the lies. Now, we’re expected to believe that the GOP is waging a war against women, and mean ol’ Catholic theocrats want to take away their contraception.
Obama has no respect for the intelligence of the American people. None.
Alexa Shrugs reminds us of this affecting image of Breitbart from Ben Howe’s Tribute video, looking straight at the camera and simply saying, “War.”
Over the weekend, a funny thing happened in the right wing blogosphere. While at first, the faint-hearted were inclined to throw Rush under the bus for using over the top, inappropriate rhetoric to point out the absurdity of Sandra Fluke’s pathetic testimony before Congress. But over the weekend, the tide turned, and conservatives have gone to war, just as Breitbart would have liked it.
This is war. I am going to defend Limbaugh from the radical Leftists who want to take him off the air. And I am going to call out our opponents by name. Starting with Sandra Fluke, David Gregory and David Friend.
Sandra Fluke is a 30 year old woman who is president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice and went to Georgetown Law despite knowing that their insurance does not cover birth control – because they are a Catholic institution – and made it her mission to force them to change their policy. Remember when I mentioned how feminazis lied and said a Congressional hearing on religious concerns about the Obamacare contraceptive mandate was only men? They had wanted Sandra Fluke to testify – I guess Allison Dabbs Garrett and Dr. Laura Champion, the two women who DID testify at the “all-male” panel, just don’t count as women because they don’t toe the radical feminist line.
When Rush made his comments about Sandra Fluke, I thought he was going overboard in order to bring media attention to the farcical nature of her testimony. If that was his m/o, it backfired because the media firestorm that predictably ensued led to the DNC fund-raising off of it, and Rush losing a number of sponsors. The Democrat Media Complex is doing what it does best – picking a (conservative) targeting it, freezing it, and doing its best to de-legitimize it. Never mind the fact that the left is so consistently vile in its treatment of conservative women, it’s barely worth mentioning it when they call Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, or Laura Ingraham, and let’s not be sexist, here – even Rick Santorum – a vile name. Yes, thanks to the efforts of gay activist, Dan Savage, we’ve got a major candidate for President of the United States whose name, according to Google is defined in the most vile and depraved terms imaginable. And the MSM calls that “Santorum’s Google problem.”(yuk, yuk.) Because it’s HIS problem that left-wing activists have done this to him, and Google refuses to fix it.
Couldn’t it thus be said that Sandra Fluke has a “talk radio problem”. Because after all, it’s her own extreme views that led this to happen to her.
You see, Carbonite is also the sponsor for a radio show you probably have not heard of, The Ed Schultz Show. Ed Schultz made a similar remark to Rush’s although his was less a question about the usage of the word (as it was for Rush) and more him just screaming that Laura Ingraham is a “right wing slut.”
Now I wonder why Friend’s daughters don’t’ come to mind here? Could this be a publicity stunt? Could they just be dropping sponsorship of Rush in an effort to gain some exposure to help their company get new customers? Because let’s face it, they’ll get more exposure from dropping Rush then they’ll ever get from keeping Shultz. And they could probably use it given that companies like DropBox have moved forward into advanced cloud backups and access while Carbonite seems hopelessly invested in remaining in the year 2006, but I digress.
I asked them on twitter and on FaceBook why the difference in treatment and so far haven’t gotten a reply.
In the twitter verse, fellow non-Carbonite user Amish Dude pointed me to one possible reason.
On the bright side,DaTechGuybelieves the sponsors who have left Rush have chosen poorly:
Rush has been on the radio now since the late 80′s. People who were listening to him now have children who are listening to him. This is a vast and self-sustaining audience base and nothing he said or the media did will cause that base to abandon him. He will be drawing huge radio numbers long after Sandra fluke is a media footnote. There are many talk radio shows out there but there is only one Rush Limbaugh.
However for Sleep Number, Legal Zoom, Carbonate and pro-flowers and the rest, it’s a different story.
There are many alternatives to all of these companies and all of them are merely a click or two away.
For all the bluster of the left for all the tweets and facebook posts and MSM stories the real pressure these companies will feel is on their bottom line. It will come from the orders unplaced, the subscriptions unrenewed and the business that will flow to their competitors by Rush’s listeners looking for alternatives to the companies that dropped him.
These companies married the left in haste, they will repent at leisure, if they last that long.
The Obama administration withered for several weeks under the intense criticism from Catholic leaders regarding the forced violation of religious liberty within the HHS mandate. In an effort to turn the tables, Democrats suggested that the GOP want to abridge women’s rights because Republicans expect women to obtain and pay for their own birth control. This afternoon John Boehner, Carly Fiorina, and Rick Santorum bravely provided cover for the President and the ridiculous narrative of “the war on women.”
Each of them utterly failed in this response, but unlike Santorum, Boehner and Fiorina aren’t running a presidential campaign with the hopes of becoming the nominee so they can battle the media in the general.
This reason right here is why Republicans defeat themselves: It doesn’t matter what Barack Obama’s record is if Republicans so willingly allow the media to reframe a debate about religious liberty as a fight over women’s rights.
More have admonished Limbaugh’s description of Sandra Fluke than admonished a 30 year-old woman embarrassing herself before congress by testifying that she simply cannot stop getting it on and her inability to control her urges constitutes infringing upon everyone else for a bailout.
Rather belatedly, we are becoming aware that this supposedly typical Georgetown coed is not very typical at all:
[B]irth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if “gender reassignment” surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.
The title of the article . . . is “Employment Discrimination Against LGBTQ Persons” and was published in the Journal’s 2011 Annual Review.
Remember, as Byron York previously reported, Fluke was rejected as a last-minute substitute witness at a Feb. 16 committee hearing because staffers for Chairman Issa were unable to discover Fluke’s claim to expertise relevant to the subject of the hearing.
WASHINGTON, February 14—At a Budget Committee hearing today, OMB Acting Director Jeffrey Zients refused, under direct questioning from Sen. Sessions, to answer whether the president’s budget would increase spending over current-law levels. The White House has repeatedly claimed that their budget contains $2.50 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. In truth, the budget plan submitted by the president would increase spending by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years relative to current projections. Over that time, the federal government will spend a total of $47 trillion, up from $45.5 trillion projected under the already enacted Budget Control Act—producing by the president’s own projections an additional $11.2 trillion in gross debt.
NOTE: To view a detailed breakdown of proposed spending increases using numbers from President Obama’s own budget, please click here: http://1.usa.gov/yRREwf.
Take in the smarmy sleaze as Zients tries to tell Sessions that Obama’s profligate tax and spend budget somehow cuts spending.
Sessions appeared on Mark Levin’s radio show, yesterday, to discuss the budget, and the Obama administration’s shady, irresponsible, and downright shocking manner they’ve been treating the American economy. Levin and Sessions agree that if some of the nefarious things they’re saying and doing were done in the private sector, they would be held legally accountable.
Somehow, the President of the United States is destroying the US economy, blaming it all on his opponents, and no one can do a damn thing about it.
The US Government continues actions that will result in its own demise. That might seem fitting, except that its failure will seriously harm the citizenry.
Government decisions and actions have assured an economic collapse that will result in another depression. Federal debts and promises are too large to be honored, a conclusion based not on economics but on simple arithmetic.
The government collapse will likely trigger the economic collapse, although the order could be reversed. Arguably, we are already in a depression which has been disguised by juicing GDP via excessive government spending. This spending has been funded increased government debt in magnitudes never seen before. To put matters into perspective, by the end of President Obama’s first four years, he will have added more to the federal debt than all 43 Presidents who preceded him.
The economic collapse, as a result of this borrowing and stimulus, will be terrifying and worse than it needed be. Whether it is preceded by hyperinflation or goes directly into a deflationary collapse is moot and immaterial regarding an ultimate depression. Resulting conditions will be worse than those experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
As frightening as the economic event will be, it will be superseded by the political damage. Given the state of our economy and the state of our government, there is a high probability that we lose our form of government. The confluence of the horrific economic events coupled with what H. L. Mencken foresaw long ago brings the very survival of freedom and liberty into question:
As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright moron.
Mencken’s “great and glorious day” is upon us. We have found our “moron,” not that he is the first or only one. His intent “to transform America” suggests that his actions will not be limited to methods considered appropriate by his predecessors.
Charles Krauthammer didn’t mince words this evening on Special Report in his assessment of the latest offering from the Obama administration, a budget he says is “worthy of Greece”, and “truly scandalous”:
One hopes that the Republican candidates heed his warning and shift the narrative away from Obama’s class warfare schtick to the cuts in spending most Americans want to see.
Lew is completely wrong when he claims that 60 votes are needed to “pass a budget in the Senate.” As he well knows, a budget resolution is one of the few things that are not subject to a filibuster. In fact, that is one reason why a bill based on reconciliation instructions cannot be filibustered.
You don’t even need 50 votes, just a simple majority. Here are a few of the recent close votes for the budget resolution, as listed by CRS: 48-45 (2009 budget); 51-49 (2006); 51-50 (2004); 50-48 (2001). Senate Democrats may have reasons for failing to pass a budget plan—such as wanting to avoid casting politically inconvenient votes—but a GOP filibuster is not one of them.
Unfortunately for Jeffery Zients and the liberal cable network, it is hard to hide the fact that the President’s proposal actually projects a budget deficit of $1.33 trillion for the fiscal year 2013, according to the Wall Street Journal.
When asked what he thought about the Republican Senate renaming the proposal ‘Debt on Arrival,’ Zients stated, “I think the President has put forward today a balanced budget.” For the country to have a balanced budget, its spending must match its revenue, and the country has not came close to that feat in some time now. Obama’s proposal would mark the fourth straight year of budget deficits exceeding a trillion dollars.
Or they could point to hapless Rachel Maddow, who’s doing her best to defend her boss’s abhorrent contraception mandate by claiming that 28 states already have a similar mandate, triggering the b.s. meter of fellow traveler Scary Larry O’Donnell, who is at least honest enough to admit he’s a commie, and is apparently not playing by team Soros’ rules.
We need “truth teams” all right. But they need to be focusing 95% of their attention on the miscreants in the Obama administration, and their media toadies. Instead, they’ll focus on the the people who are pointing out the lies. ATTAAAAACK WAAAAATCH!
UPDATE:
LOL.
Michelle Malkin kinda beat me to this deal by about 12 hours. So have probably about 500,000 people on Twitter.
Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper sums up the audacity: “Same White House that deliberately said it takes 60 votes to pass budget yesterday launches #TruthTeam today. Unbelievable.”
Who do they think they’re kidding with this crapola?
The Senate has effectively been in recess for weeks, and is expected to remain in recess for weeks. In an overt attempt to prevent the President from exercising his authority during this period, Republican Senators insisted on using a gimmick called “pro forma” sessions, which are sessions during which no Senate business is conducted and instead one or two Senators simply gavel in and out of session in a matter of seconds.
I defy you to find anything like a quarum – anything like even enough people to fill this room, You might find them in very warm places, or snowy places having fundraisers.
No Senate business, eh? They all flew off to “warm places having fundraisers”… (sound like anyone we know?)
…a simple review of the Congressional Record (“CR”) shows that claim to be categorically false.
Most senators left D.C. on Dec. 17 after scheduling pro forma sessions for December and January. The CR for Dec. 17 shows that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) received unanimous consent to schedule Dec. 23 as a pro forma session.
The CR for Dec. 23 shows that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid specifically asked for unanimous consent for H.R. 3765 so “that if the House passes and sends to the Senate a bill which is identical to the text extension of the reduced payroll tax, unemployment insurance, TANF, and the Medicare payment fix, the bill be considered read three times and passed.”
In that pro forma session, Reid received unanimous consent and the two-month extension of the payroll tax break that had caused such a political commotion in Washington was considered read and passed in the Senate after the House acted. That’s not a “gimmick.” That’s legislating.
That same CR for the Dec. 23 pro forma session records a series of other business actions taken by the Senate. The President pro tempore signed several enrolled bills. Other senators were designated as members of a conference committee to negotiate with the House over disagreements to H.R. 3630. The minority leader even made appointments to the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, pursuant to 22 U.S.C. § 7002.
Contrary to White House assertions, the Senate unquestionably conducted actual business during at least one of its supposedly pro forma sessions. This simple fact makes President Obama’s actions even more indefensible.
I somehow missed this whopper, yesterday – probably because I was more focused on Fast and Furious questions, and tended to ignore the Democrat boot-lickers’ questions.
Kerry Picket at The Washington Times Water Cooler flags this incredible moment that was probably designed to prop Holder up, but actually just highlighted what a bold-faced liar he is:
“The last administration was cited for political hiring within the civil rights division. Have you continued that political hiring in violation of the law?” asked Rep. Bobby Scott, Virginia Democrat.
“We hire people in the Civil Rights Division on the basis of their experience. Their commitment to that which the Civil Rights Division has historically stood for—people who are going to be good litigators. People who are going to work hard. We don’t hire people on the basis of political or ideological affiliations,” General Holder responded.
A.G. Holder’s response was curious, as Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation Hans von Spakovsky showed that the attorneys who have been hired since Holder was appointed have only been explicitly from the activist ideological Left.
Bryan Sells: Mr. Sells was recently hired as one of the Voting Section’s new deputy chiefs. He comes to the Department from the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, where he worked for nearly 10 years as a Senior Staff Counsel. During his tenure, his organization strongly opposed all voter ID laws, and challenged the right of states to verify the U.S. citizenship of individuals seeking to register to vote. He also characterized state felon disenfranchisement laws – which are expressly authorized in the Constitution — as a “slap in the face to democracy,” and consistently took the most aggressive (and generally legally unsupportable) positions on redistricting cases throughout the country.
Meredith Bell-Platts:The other new deputy chief hired by the Voting Section, Meredith Bell-Platts, also comes from the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, where she, too, spent nearly 10 years. Much of her time there was devoted to blasting voter ID requirements, which she claimed were motivated by people who do not want to see blacks vote (an issue on which she consistently lost in court). Before arriving at the ACLU, Ms. Bell-Platts was a founding member of the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, a publication whose stated “mission is to explore the impact of gender, sexuality, and race on both the theory and practice of law” and thereby “complement[] a long tradition of feminist scholarship and advocacy at the [Georgetown] Law Center.”
Read more from the list at the link, and weep.
Not only have they been hiring only people from the far left, according to J Christian Adams, they’ve been disqualifying better qualified attorneys in favor of far left loons. As he says, “Pure crazy radicalism”has been going on at Holder’s DOJ behind closed doors. A culture of lawlessness has taken over the Justice Dept.
In fact, according to Adams, millions and millions of dollars of court sanctions have been imposed against lawyers at the Holder’s Justice Dept for misconduct. During the Bush years, it was – $0.
Lachlan Markay over at Heritage notes that of the 15 lawyers hired under Holder:
“Social justice,” “gender identity,” “human rights,” “diversity,” and other such politically correct buzzwords pepper the summary of these hires’ professional backgrounds and educations. Attorneys have worked to give convicted felons voting rights, and asylum to illegal immigrants. Conspicuously absent is any hire who has devoted his or her career to constitutional scholarship or – heaven forbid – criminal prosecution or civil defense.
On Black Friday, the White House released more visitor log info — trumpeting disclosures it has fought tooth and nail.
I’ve started looking through the data. And you can, too, right here (suggestion: click on the release date and arrange with newest entries first – they’re dated 11/22/2011):
According to the newly released records, Creamer was at the White House five times in August 2011 meeting with various officials, including Jon Carson, Cecilia Munoz, and Stephanie Cutter. He’s listed nearly 60 times in visitor logs since the start of the administration.
Pursuant to an FBI investigation, Creamer in 2006 was indicted for bank fraud and tax evasion. During his trial, he received some 200 letters of support from such notables as Richard Durbin, Carol Browner, Jesse Jackson, and David Axelrod. Creamer ultimately was sentenced to five months in federal prison plus eleven months of house arrest. Upon his sentencing, he publicly pledged: “For the rest of my life I will continue to do whatever I can to work for social and economic justice.”
While incarcerated — or on “forced sabbatical,” as he called it — Creamer wrote a 628-page political manual titled Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win (published in 2007). In the Acknowledgements section of the book, Creamer stated that his political views had been deeply influenced by “the legendary community organizer” Saul Alinsky.
Stand Up Straight! advanced the notion that the Democratic Party could win a permanent majority in Congress by doing the following:
passing a national health care bill, thereby turning more people into wards of an ever-expanding government, and of the party that works to grow government; and
giving amnesty to all illegal immigrants, thereby creating, virtually overnight, a large new constituency of Democratic voters.
The author conceded that his desire “to reshape the structure of one-sixth of the American economy” (i.e., the health care sector) was contingent upon the Democrats being able to control 60 votes in the U.S. Senate, and upon the election of a “progressive Democrat” to the White House – conditions that could, in Creamer’s estimation, be achieved by the year 2009. Notably, his book was effusive in its praise of then-Senator Barack Obama.
Creamer’s book advocated a “public plan” that would guarantee every U.S. resident’s “right” to health care; this plan eventually would serve as a model for the “public option” in subsequent legislative proposals by Congressional Democrats.
This guy visited five times in August alone, and sixty times since Obama’s election. Amazing. He and the President must have some things in common – i.e. a fondness for Saul Alinsky, the “democratization of wealth” in America, and for “progressive control of governments around the world”. I wonder if he’s also a golfing buddy.
As Malkin notes, it’s up to conservatives to “crowd-source” the White House visitor log data, as WaPo and the NYTimes can’t be bothered with such trivialities. We’re not talking about mining for dirt in Sarah Palin’s private emails, or anything.
Item 2: According to documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee, Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler was keenly aware of all aspects of Operation Fast and Furious as early as March 2010. In a letter to A.G. Holder, Chairman Issa wrote… (hit link for rest.)
Item 3: Newly released White House Visitor Logs list Grindler as having visited the White House 40 times, but only four times with the President himself. All four meetings with the President occurred over a two-week period, between 7 May 2010 and 19 May 2010.
Think about the profound impact and historical significance of being the reporter who nails down the Obama White House’s involvement in Fast and Furious. Your work would contribute to an epic house cleaning not only in the White House, but the DOJ, and ATF which need a complete fumigation. The impact would be felt for years to come.
But would that help The Party? No – Must. Stop. Newt….must. protect. Precious….
Vice President Biden has been making headlines, this week, with his startling case that more people will be murdered or raped if Obama’s jobs bill isn’t passed. The Washington Post Factchecker, Glenn Kesslerhas done a thorough job dismantling Joe Biden’s repeated contention that in cities such as Flint, Mich., the murder and rape rates have soared because of fewer officers due to police force budget cuts.
Flint is certainly a violent city, ranked number one in many categories. The website of the Flint Police Department only gives data through 2008, but both the FBI and the Michigan State Police have more recent figures that are provided to them by the Flint police. The numbers are not precisely the same because of different reporting requirements, but they are roughly the same—and show a different picture than reported by Biden.
The Flint website for 2008 shows the same figures that Biden cited: 35 murders and 91 rapes.
RATE PER 100,000 INHABITANTS: murder, 13.8; rape 53.7
More important than the raw figures is the rate per 100,000 individuals. Murder did go up—though the rate did not double from 2009 to 2010, as Biden claimed. But rape has gone down. Biden actually asserted it had tripled.
What more, Kessler notes that Flint Public Safety Director Chief Alvern Lock, has repeatedly asserted that cuts in staffing had little effect on the crime rate.
As the Flint Journal reported in May: “Officials said the fact that 46 police officers were laid off last year had little to do with the escalating crime. Most of the crimes were between people that knew each other. ‘No matter how many officers we have, we can’t stop disputes between two people in their own homes,’ Lock said.”
Lock made a similar assertion in September, 2010, when FBI statistics were released showing violent crime in Flint had decreased in 2009. The Flint Journal reported: “A smaller police force doesn’t automatically mean more crime, said Flint police chief Alven Lock. ‘There’s been years when we had 300 officers and we still had more homicides,’ he said, referring to 1986, when he was in the homicide division and homicides hit an all-time high of 61.”
…the vice president should know better than to spout off half-baked facts in service of a dubious argument. Even if one believes there is a link between crime and the number of police—which is debatable and subject to many caveats—there is no excuse to make the dramatic claim that more people will die or be raped without additional funds for police. When making such a breathtaking charge, you had better have your facts straight.
Yesterday, White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney doubled down on the stupid, when a reporter asked him about Biden’s rape and murder claims:
Carney: “It would be hard to find anyone who doesn’t believe in the equation that fewer police officers on the street has a direct effect on the crime rate.”
Flint Police Chief Lock: “No matter how many officers we have, we can’t stop disputes between two people in their own homes.”
Carney: “Are Republicans arguing that is no correlation between the number of cops on the beat, and the crime rate? That would be an interesting argument to hear. It would be a new one – a novel one…”
Flint Police Chief Lock: “A smaller police force doesn’t automatically mean more crime. ‘There’s been years when we had 300 officers and we still had more homicides”
Four Pinocchios for Carney, too.
As you may have already heard, the Senate rejected what Rush Limbaugh calls the “President’s anti-rape anti-murder bill”, last night. So all the absurd propaganda Obama and Biden have been spouting has been a colossal waste of political capital. Back to the drawing board, I guess.
For all the propping up Obama has enjoyed from the MSM, his approval numbers compared to Bush’s first three years are truly stunning, according to this Gallup tracking chart. The American people are more resilient to left-wing propaganda than than the Obama administration would like.
Comment of the Day:
Found in the most unlikely of places – HuffPo, in a seemingly unrelated piece by Diane Diamond getting the HuffPo crowd up to speed on Fast and Furious:
It’s amazing that Joe Biden is screaming that people will be raped or murdered if the republican’s don’t pass Obama’s jobs bill (even though dems also refuse to pass it) when here we have the Obama administration directly responsible for the murder of a border agent and countless others with almost no coverage from the press. It is very scary when the media is in the government’s pocket and I must say that I was very pleasently surprised to see this article on the Huffington Post.
#OWS is the polar opposite of the tea party and the President damn well knows it.
The Tea Party says, stop spending our money! Taxed enough, already! Cut Spending! Live within your means! No more bailouts! They believe in a smaller, more limited government.
#OWS says: Tax the rich. Spend more. Pay my bills! Bail me out! They believe capitalism is the problem – more government is the solution. They are overwhelmingly far left, anti-capitalist radicals. The tea party was truly peaceful and law abiding. #OWS is on the verge of exploding into a riot every night. There have been over 1,500 arrests already. There is virtually nothing positive about it. Who does he think he’s kidding?
“I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests,” Obama told ABC Nws senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper in the interview to air this evening on ABC News “Nightline” from Jamestown, N.C.
“In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party. Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them,” he said.
Obama said the most important thing he can do as president is express solidarity with the protesters and redouble his commitment to achieving what he described as a more egalitarian society.
“The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you’re supposed to do, is rewarded,” Obama said. “And that people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don’t feel a sense of obligation to their communities and their companies and their workers that those folks aren’t rewarded.”
Obama alluded to his American Jobs Act, which would be funded in part by raising taxes on wealthier Americans and some corporations in order to make them pay “their fair share.”
And there he goes, stoking the poisonous class ware-fare rhetoric that has the anti-capitalist mob he supports so up in arms – just to promote his ridiculous non-starter of a jobs bill.
Yet for weeks, the so-called Occupy Wall Street protesters have camped out in the heart of America’s financial district–and have raised their voices in cities across the country and around the world–decrying the capitalist system as the root of all evil.
On Sunday, these anti-capitalist protesters got a helping hand from none other than the President of the United States. Barack Obama was all too glad to lend support to the protests–which have at times been marked by shows of violence and lawlessness–saying during a speech dedicating the Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial that King would have supported the movement. And yesterday, a White House official said that during his latest “jobs” bus tour, the President would be speaking to the ”the interests of the 99 percent of Americans”–echoing the protesters’ “99 percent” slogan.
It’s all very ironic. President Obama’s policies have helped create and prolong the economic conditions that are causing America’s frustrations. It’s not surprising that, at a time of 9.1 percent unemployment, there is great dissatisfaction with policies that hurt the economy while helping political cronies and bailing out banks and financial groups.
Since this spring, Mr. Romney has raised $1.5 million from employees of firms like Morgan Stanley; Highbridge Capital Management, a hedge fund; and Blackstone, a private equity firm. Mr. Obama has raised just over $270,000 from firms that were among his leading sources of campaign cash in 2008.
That’s still a shocking amount of money for a Wall Street firm to give an anti-capitalist candidate.
Employees of Goldman Sachs, who in the 2008 campaign gave Mr. Obama over $1 million — more than donors from any other private employer in the country — have given him about $45,000 this year. Mr. Romney has raised about $350,000 from the firm’s employees.
The first half of this edifying video shows you the union fueled demagoguery that Schultz is regurgitating, (without actually reading Ohio’s SB 5, himself.) In the second half, the journalist interviews the “son of a bitch” who authored the legislation”, Sen. Shannon Jones. She tells him her bill actually provides stronger safety protections for fighters and policemen than the existing law:
Will Schultz take Sen. Jones’ advice and actually read the bill? He would if he were interested in the truth, but obviously, the MSNBC host is much more interested in towing the Obamacentric pro-union line, so the drones will have to continue in their ignorance.
The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq.
It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud.
Since comments are once again turned off, I’ll use this space to beg the question: Can we please see some examples of this intimidation – these accusations of treason from the Bushies – any of them – Rumsfeld, Rove, Cheney, any Bush Republicans in the wake of 9/11?
The reason I ask is because while I distinctly remember the howls of outrage from Democrats that their patriotism was being questioned, I don’t remember any Republicans in power actually doing it. Who is he talking about? Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh? Ann Coulter doesn’t speak for the Republican party, and she certainly didn’t speak for the Bush administration. Limbaugh may call himself “the titular head of the Republican party”, but obviously, he speaks for himself, too. The Democrats’ howls of outrage were directed at the Republican party. I’d like to see some examples of this “terrible” intimidation of which they speak.
Krugman linked to Greg Sargent,who was able to dredge up a few examples of what could be deemed “political exploitation” of 9/11 by Bushies:
Here’s Karl Rove in the runup to the 2002 midterm elections (via Nexis):
President Bush’s top political adviser said today that Republicans will make the president’s handling of the war on terrorism the centerpiece of their strategy to win back the Senate and keep control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
“We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America,” Karl Rove said at the Republican National Committee meeting here.
Here’s Rudy Giuliani, at the 2004 Republican National Convention (via Nexis):
I looked up and seeing the flames of hell emanating from those buildings and realizing that what I was actually seeing was a human being on the 101st, 102nd floor that was jumping out of the building, I stood there; it probably took five or six seconds. It seemed to me that it took 20 or 30 minutes. And I was stunned. And I realized in that moment and that instant, I realized we were facing something that we had never, ever faced before…At the time, we believed that we would be attacked many more times that day and in the days that followed. Without really thinking, based on just emotion, spontaneous, I grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and I said to him, ‘’Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president.’’ I say it again tonight, I say it again tonight: thank God that George Bush is our president.
A top adviser to Sen. John McCain said that a terrorist attack in the United States would be a political benefit to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, a comment that was immediately disputed by the candidate and denounced by his Democratic rival.
Charles R. Black Jr., one of McCain’s most senior political advisers, said in an interview with Fortune magazine that a fresh terrorist attack “certainly would be a big advantage to him.”
So we have Karl Rove, (the Architect) noting the obvious, and Giuliani’s honest recounting of what he (and a whole lot of people) were thinking on 9/11. What McCain’s adviser said in 2008 was certainly crude, but I thought we were talking about the period of time immediately following 9/11 when this atmosphere of intimidation and gross political exploitation was so palpable.
Given how the Democrat Media complex really knows how to play up the missteps of Republicans, you would think Google with be rife with examples of Bushies accusing the Krugmans of the world of treason.
I can certainly cite for you examples of the Obami accusing Republicans and/or the Tea Party of treason, terrorism, (or worse).
Within hours of the tragic Tucson shooting in which nine people were shot, six fatal, last January, Paul Krugman himself, leaped to the outrageous conclusion that the shooter had to be a Tea Partier. He blamed conservatives for the attack that critically injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, accusing them of fomenting “a climate of hate.” I can’t think of a more shameful way to exploit a tragedy than to immediately, and without any evidence what-so-ever, blame political opponents for it. You could even call it an attempt to “intimidate” the opposition into silence.
Of course, the Democrats were, as usual, wrong. The gunman turned out not to be a conservative Tea Party supporter. His writings and obsessionsindicated if anything, the deranged, disordered mind of a left-wing lunatic.
I’d love to see some similar examples of unhinged venom and hatred against the opposition from Republicans during the Bush era.
But I’m not going to hold my breath. Because it didn’t happen.
Surely it is fair for any politician to take issue with his opponent’s official acts. And if those acts were motivated by something other than antipathy toward America–as any fair-minded observer must presume they were–they could have been defended on their merits. Instead, Democrats themselves raised the issue of patriotism by defensively denying that they lacked it. A cardinal rule of political communication is never to repeat an accusation in the course of denying it (“I am not a crook”). These candidates “repeated” a charge no one had even made.
Hannity’s radio show today featured some interesting dish from former NYTs Magazine Editor, Ed Klein, the author of the explosive new book about Obama; The Amateur.
