May 21, 2012
FSM HOT TOPICS
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Monday, February 16
by OVAL OFFICE WATCH February 16, 2009
Obama's pork barrel is open – and it is stinking
Gerald Warner, Scotlsman.com
The most blatantly sinister item is the allocation of $4.2bn to "neighbourhood stabilisation," the programme that will enrich the far-left organisation ACORN which played so controversial a role in voter registration during the recent presidential election. In tandem with that goes $1bn to forward Obama's ambition to control the 2010 census, rich in electoral opportunity for the promoters of the one-party state.
This pork barrel is open and stinking. Senate majority leader Harry Reid had concerns about re-election, so he lobbied Obama and was duly gifted $8bn to develop high-speed rail lines between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Presumably easier access for punters to Sin City is designed to stimulate the economy. New York Democrat senator Chuck Schumer insouciantly claimed last week that the American people really don't care about "little tiny, yes, porky amendments".
The plummeting support for Obama's confidence trick – down to 37% in one poll – suggests that they do care. They will care even more when they see this toxic package within the context of America's overall indebtedness.
No wonder Barack Obama, bereft of his auto-cue, was uncharacteristically hesitant at his press conference last week. The messiah has to borrow $3.5 trillion over the next two years. This could prove a burden that even the legendarily resourceful and productive citizens of the United States cannot shoulder. Read article.
So far, it's been Obamateur Hour
Mark Steyn, OC Register.com
The new president has been tripping himself up, rather than being blown off course by events.
Few pieces of political "wisdom" are more tediously recycled than a well-retailed bon mot of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Asked what he feared most in the months ahead, he gave an amused Edwardian response: "Events, dear boy, events." In other words, you can plan all you want, but next month, next year some guy off the radar screen will launch a war, or there'll be an earthquake, or … something. Governments get thrown off course by "events."
It requires a perverse kind of genius for the 44th president not to have waited for a single "event" to throw him off course. Instead, he threw himself off: "Is Obama tanking already?" (Congressional Quarterly) "Has Barack Obama's presidency already failed?" (The Financial Times). Whether or not it's "already" failed or tanked, the monthly magazines still gazing out from their newsstands with their glossy inaugural covers of a smiling Barack and Michelle waltzing on the audacity of hope seem like musty historical artifacts from a lost age. The ship didn't need to hit an iceberg; it stalled halfway down the slipway.
Obama's new 'patriotism'
Kirsten Powers, Prairie Pundit.blogspot.com
SO, it's come to this: The man who was maligned as unpatriotic for not wearing a flag pin is playing the patriotism card.
The New York Times reported Saturday that President Obama called three Republican senators who were supporting his stimulus plan "to thank them for their patriotism in helping to advance the bill at a critical time."
Robert Borosage, head of The Campaign for America's Future (which calls itself "the strategy center for the progressive movement") echoed the sentiment in a statement blasting opponents of the plan: "The overwhelming majority of conservatives chose partisanship over patriotism."
It seems like only yesterday that Obama and liberals - including me - were chastising the GOP for playing this game.
Of course, Obama's statement implies that if you don't support the stimulus package, you're unpatriotic. Read article.
Murphy's Law, the Peter Principle and Barack Obama
Kyle-Anne Shiver, American Thinker.com
What happens when everything that can go wrong in a person's character formation does go wrong, and that person continues to be promoted to his level of incompetence?
President Barack Obama happens.
I'm well into my sixth decade of life and have yet to see a more perfect collision of Murphy's Law with the Peter Principle in a single individual.
Proper character development is the overriding aim of good parents in raising their children. Mature parents, especially those Judeo/Christian parents with faith, believe it sinful to raise a child without strong self-constraint, a well-formed conscience, ingrained humility and an ironclad respect for the rights of others. Children raised thusly become self-supporting adults, honest in their dealings with others and prone to be contributing members of the society at large.
The world is purely chock full of bad parents, however. Plum chock full.
Barack Obama was conceived out of wedlock to an eighteen year-old girl, who was herself the product of non-religious, rebellious parents, intent on unraveling the fabric of WASP America. Stanley Ann Dunham met Barack Obama Sr., an already-married African Muslim man, in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii in her very first year there. According to President Obama's memoir, his biological father married his mother about three months into the pregnancy, even though he already had a wife and children on his home continent. Hence, very shortly, the father abandoned the new mother and her child to seek his own fortune and yet another wife-to-be at Harvard.
Bigamists are not known for fidelity, are they? Read article.
Barack Obama is 'screwing up' on the economy. Be very afraid.
Iain Martin, telegraph.co.uk
It's a little early to right-off Barack Obama's presidency you might think. He's only been in the post for a few weeks, there are wonderful pictures in circulation of him and his wife looking preternaturally cool like the Kennedys and he is very popular. The consequences of him failing do not bear thinking about.
So, we all want him to be the calm guy in the Oval office in the disaster movie who gets the world through a terrifying crisis. Unfortunately, real life is usually a little more complicated.
To that end, if you didn't get a chance to read Martin Wolf's column in the FT yesterday, then take the time. It makes a powerful case which is genuinely troubling.
Wolf thinks Obama may already have fluffed his biggest calls on the only subject that matters right now - the economy - and that he's in trouble.
"Hoping for the best is what one sees in the stimulus programme and - so far as I can judge from Tuesday's sketchy announcement by Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary - also in the new plans for fixing the banking system. I commented on the former last week. I would merely add that it is extraordinary that a popular new president, confronting a once-in-80-years' economic crisis, has let Congress shape the outcome. Read article.
Reading Obama’s Balance Sheet
The Editors, NRO.com
If one were to judge by the market alone, one would be forced to conclude that President Obama’s economic team has gotten off to a wretched start. Stocks have tumbled throughout the week, plunging most precipitously on Tuesday as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced his plan to save the banking system—or, rather, announced that he has a plan, but declined to describe it in any detail. But we don’t need to read the market tea leaves to know that Obama is on the wrong track—a simple analysis of his actions this week yields the same conclusion.
The week began with a Senate vote that cleared the way for a stimulus package that almost no one outside Congress believes to be the proper size or to contain the best mix of programs. It will add nearly a trillion dollars to the deficit, and most of the spending will kick in after the recession is over—too late to have any stimulative effect, but just in time to ignite inflation and to crowd out private investment in the recovering economy. Read article.
Obama: This doesn't work, I lose
Jonathan Martin, Politico.com
Three weeks after being sworn in, President Barack Obama acknowledged in plain terms last Tuesday that his prospects for winning a second term may depend on the whether he can revive the nation’s plummeting economy.
“I’m not going to make any excuses,” Obama said at a town hall meeting here, in perhaps the most pivotal political state in America. “If stuff hasn’t worked, if people don’t feel like I’ve led the country in the right direction then you’ll have a new president.”
Despite his frank admission, Obama used the question-and-answer session, his second in two days, to brace Americans for a long recovery, frequently going off script at the start of what is sure to be a long campaign of expectation-setting. Read article.
The Tragedy That Causes No Scandal
Michael Gerson, Townhall.com
If Barack Obama's presidential campaign was smooth and deep like the rivers, his first few weeks in Washington have been turbulent and shallow like the rapids. It began with the quick end of the Richardson nomination, revealing a vetting process with the thoroughness of a subprime loan application. Then came an inaugural address so flat that both supporters and detractors wondered if the flatness was intentional -- a subtle game of strategic mediocrity.
Then the broad violation of an overbroad lobbying ban, which made no distinction between lobbying for the Iranian regime and lobbying against teenage smoking. Then a spate of IRS troubles, leaving the impression of an administration more interested in raising taxes than paying them. Read article.
Obama’s Cool Fire Side Chats - Hubris, Anyone?
Skip Press, Big Hollywood.com
In classical Athens, hubris was a crime and considered the greatest sin in Greek society. In American society it is simply defined as an arrogant self-confidence, an overweening excessive pride. As most Americans know by now, you’re most likely to see it displayed on Wall Street, in Hollywood, or in the nation’s capitol where Wall Street and Hollywood collided with a vengeance during the most recent election.
President Obama - technically the first President created by Hollywood beginning with Oprah Winfrey declaring him “the one” - made plans to have three one-hour TV sessions on all the major networks over the course of the next three weeks in order to pitch Americans on the “glories” of the economic stimulus bill whose popularity fell with the public with each passing hour. As TV columnist Lisa de Moraes pointed out in the Washington Post, this presidential posturing could cost the networks millions and millions of dollars. One must wonder what he has to say that is so lengthy it can’t be said in one broadcast? Read article.
Is Obama Insane?
U4prez.com
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, I must content our president is insane.
The so-called stimulus plan is nothing new. Governments in Japan, France, Sweden, Argentina, Brazil and countless others have tried this approach. The United States tried it under Roosevelt during the Great Depression, it did not work then, it will not work now.
A few specific examples.
Germany after World War I
Brazil in 1990 (inflation rate reached 30,000%
The lost decade in Japan
My question to Mr. Obama is thus:
What leads you to believe that this will work? Read article.
Eligibility issue: McCain checked but not Obama: Lawsuit contends Congress failed to qualify Democrat for Oval Office
Bob Unruh, WorldNetDaily
A lawsuit that accuses Congress of failing to investigate President Obama's birthplace before approving the Electoral College vote giving him the presidency has been amended to include additional claims of rights violations, including unequal treatment, because Congress did such an investigation into GOP candidate Sen. John McCain.
That word comes from Mario Apuzzo, the lawyer handling the case on which WND previously has reported.
The case raises many of the same arguments as dozens of other cases that have flooded into courtrooms around the nation since the November election.
The case was brought by Apuzzo on behalf of Charles F. Kerchner Jr., Lowell T. Patterson, Darrell James Lenormand and Donald H. Nelson Jr. It names as defendants Barack Hussein Obama II, the U.S., Congress, the Senate, House of Representatives and former Vice President Dick Cheney along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Apuzzo told WND that Congress last year raised the issue of whether McCain was a "natural born" citizen, a requirement set out in the U.S. Constitution for the president, because of his birth to U.S. citizens in the Panama Canal Zone.
Where's the proof Barack Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the "natural-born American" clause in the Constitution? If you still want to see it, join more than 235,000 others and sign up now!
According to a report in the Washington Post, the Senate unanimously declared McCain to be a "natural born" citizen, meeting the demand of Article 2 of the Constitution, which states, "no person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of president." Read article.
Who are the 'extraordinary' Muslims?
Spengler, Asia Times.com
"My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives," United States President Barack Obama told an Arabic television channel on January 26. Really? What are their names? Word has come to the West of no extraordinary Muslim thinker since the 12th century.
Where are the Muslim scientists, novelists, entrepreneurs, athletes and musicians?
Apart from political leaders, a reasonably diligent reader of a quality newspaper in the West will not be able to name a single Muslim distinguished in any field of human endeavor. Excluding the politically awarded Peace Prize, Muslims have won only three Nobel prizes since their inception more than a century ago, or one for every 450 million Muslims alive today. By contrast, there have been 169 Jewish Nobel Laureates (excluding the Peace Prize), or about one for every 89,000 Jews alive today. During the past century, a Jew was 5,000 times more likely to win the Nobel than a Muslim. Read article.
Our Clever President
Tony Blankley, RCP.com
President Barack Obama's first presidential news conference was performed feebly by the once-ferocious White House press corps and shrewdly -- if deceptively -- by the president. In the six years I did communications on former President Ronald Reagan's White House staff, I don't recall a single news conference in which there were no follow-up questions, no challenges to anything the president had said recently, no assertions of fact that the president was challenged to deal with. In fact, I don't remember former President Bill Clinton, either, ever getting a full 45-minute prime-time news conference pass.
Yet Monday night, all the questions but one were of the "please, sir, could you tell us how you plan to deal with x?" variety. Only Major Garrett of Fox News raised even a slightly embarrassing question: What was Vice President Joe Biden referring to when he said the administration had a 30 percent chance of failing at some initiative? And I must confess that if I had been the vice president, I would not have been happy with the president's answer, which was, in essence: I don't know what Biden was talking about, but that sounds like him. Read article.
Obama in Prime Time: 7 Questions Left on Cutting Room Floor
Larry Elder, Townhall.com
President Barack Obama this week conducted his first prime-time press conference. After blaming the "failed theories of the last eight years" for today's economic crisis, he pushed for massive, unprecedented government spending.
Lefty radio talk show host Ed Schultz -- who once called Republican presidential candidate John McCain a "warmonger" -- sat in the front row, appropriately next to "reporter" Helen Thomas. Thomas used to attack then-President Bush with her statements masquerading as questions. In her question to Obama, she referred to our Islamofascist enemies as "so-called terrorists" -- which failed to elicit even a raised eyebrow from the President.
What, no Rush Limbaugh?
Obama even took a question from a "reporter" for the hyper-liberal Web site The Huffington Post. And, unlike Bush, the Obama administration preselected the reporters to be called upon and notified them in advance. Read article.
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Occupy Chicago freakout: The LRAD is coming, the LRAD is coming!
May 21, 2012 00:57 AM
Here is an LRAD. It’s a Long Range Acoustic Device better known as a sound cannon and it’s used to disperse unruly crowds. Here is an Occupy Chicago freakout over the LRAD (led by the same livestreamer who freaked out last night over a brief police stop): Two #LRAD s spotted heading to march.— Tim [...]
Michael Moore spreads hysterical, anti-police fable from his Occupy comrades
May 21, 2012 00:37 AM
The crockumentary film-maker should have read Twitchy first. As we told you Saturday night, the trio of Occupy Chicago livestreamers who freaked out over a brief, Chicago police pullover didn’t have their apartment raided, didn’t have any of their equipment damaged, were not “held at gunpoint,” and had none of their high-priced cameras, phones, and [...]
It will rain: Awww, Occupy Chicago's all wet; finally, free showers for all!
May 20, 2012 11:09 PM
Mother Nature is Chicago law enforcement’s best friend. Tonight, the rabble-rousers’ plans for anarchy got spoiled by rain. Twitter had fun as the Occupiers and their fearless livestream crews ran for cover, while a few of the mobsters hung around to harass officers on duty and break out in senseless chants: Fkin Streamers afraid of [...]
Marion Barry has change of heart after being saved by Filipino hospital staff
May 20, 2012 10:00 PM
In what reads like a bad Hollywood movie script Marion Barry has changed his mind about Filipino nurses. Just a few weeks after complaining about how many Filipino nurses work in Washington DC Barry's life was saved by Filipino nurses. That's right, the same people he wanted to push our of DC hospitals ended up treating his potentially life threatening blood clot.
May 20, 2012 06:15 PM
Violence erupts at the end of the NATO Summit protests. Earlier today, members of Black Bloc were arrested for plotting to attack police stations, Mayor Emanuel's home and President Obama's campaign headquarters. Their violence then turned to the protest; police in riot gear move in, wearing gas masks. Protesters are throwing things at police according to video, live photos and reports from on the ground in Chicago.
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