George Neumayr, Spectator.org

 

Barack Obama's rhetoric about the economy I n recent days has been a blizzard of excuses, euphemisms, denials, and scapegoating attacks. Notice that Democrats are more upset that he is caricaturing Las Vegas than Wall Street.

 

By telling people not to "blow" their money in casinos, Obama is killing business there, they say. But what about demonizing and discrediting bankers and "fat cat" employers? How is that good for business and job seekers who depend upon them? Obama's sophomoric reliance on quasi-Marxist fragments, clichés, and favored villains in the place of real economic thought explain his ill-considered gibes at Nevada and New York.

 

Obama is hurting business all around, even for allies at his unofficial headquarters, MSNBC. Keith Olbermann's ratings, according to reports, have plunged under the weight of anti-Obama ennui.

 

"You don't blow a bunch of cash in Vegas," says Obama. No, you do it with him in D.C. What's "greed" in the private sector counts as "good government" in the public sector. It is always more virtuous to waste other people's money than your own. Read article.

Jonah Goldberg, JWR.com

 

Every president is subject to forces beyond his control. If unemployment were at 5 percent, President Obama would be doing fine. If the Christmas bomber's pants had exploded successfully, Obama would be in far worse shape.

 

Obama's progressive base thinks his problems stem from not being ambitious enough. Conservatives argue the opposite. And what about the independents who've been running from Obama like residents of Tokyo fleeing Godzilla? Everyone has a theory, but one thing is clear: People think Obama took his eye off the ball.

 

If there's a single event for which Obama himself is to blame, one decision that explains his predicament, it is his mishandling of the stimulus at the dawn of his administration. Put aside the debate over whether it has "worked," and forget the White House's absurd trick of talking about jobs "saved or created" (for the record, I save or create 500 push-ups every morning). Obama made a rookie mistake outsourcing his first major domestic policy decision to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the Old Bulls of the Democratic Party, and that blunder has done lasting damage to his presidency.

 

The GOP learned that opposing Obama was not a losing proposition, but potentially a path back to power. Obviously, Obama would be in better shape if the Republicans hadn't learned that lesson so early.

 

A year ago, the GOP was more irritant than opposition. Now it is a major force, completely outside his control. Read article.

Heritage.org

 

Last Friday, President Barack Obama accepted an invitation from House Republicans to speak and answer questions at the Republican House Issues Conference. During the Q&A period, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) pressed the President: The spending bills that you’ve signed into law, the domestic discretionary spending has been increased by 84 percent. You now want to freeze spending at this elevated level beginning next year. … So my question is, why not start freezing spending now?”

 

President Obama replied: “The fact of the matter is, is that most of the increases in this year’s budget, this past year’s budget, were not as a consequence of policies that we initiated but instead were built in as a consequence of the automatic stabilizers that kick in because of this enormous recession. So the increase in the budget for this past year was actually predicted before I was even sworn into office and had initiated any policies. … Now, the reason that I’m not proposing the discretionary freeze take into effect this year — we prepared a budget for 2010, it’s now going forward — is, again, I am just listening to the consensus among people who know the economy best. And what they will say is that if you either increase taxes or significantly lowered spending when the economy remains somewhat fragile, that that would have a de-stimulative effect and potentially you’d see a lot of folks losing business, more folks potentially losing jobs. That would be a mistake when the economy has not fully taken off.”

 

First of all, note that the President never contradicted Rep. Ryan’s factual claim that discretionary spending under President Obama has increased 84%. But more importantly, notice how eagerly the President attempts to make it seem like he had no choice in the matter by shifting the blame for our nation’s deficits to other administrations. Read article.

 

David E. Sanger, NY Times.com

 

The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.

 

But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.

 

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded. Read article.

 

Andrew McCarthy, NRO.com

 

Reality has yet again dragged the Obama administration, kicking and screaming, toward a more sensible policy. Like the decision to close Gitmo, which was announced without regard for the imperative of detaining committed jihadists, the decision to hold civilian trials for alien enemy combatants was made without regard for security, costs, the prospect of surrendering national-defense information to the enemy during wartime, or the betrayal of humanitarian law caused by rewarding the worst war criminals with gold-plated due process. Read article.

 

Andrew McCarthy, NRO.com

 

It is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this hole of its own making.

 

The president seems more poised to move his error than to correct it. Reports indicate that the administration thinks the challenge now is to find a new location in which to proceed with the same ill-advised civilian prosecution. Instead, the idea at this point should be to build a sensible strategy going forward: military commissions for now, and, ultimately, a new system for handling national-security cases.

 

No such luck. Rather than learn from this experience, the Left is doubling down on civilian due process. Its agitprop du jour is a bogus numbers game. Read article.

 

James Taranto, WSJ.com

 

In November, after the Obama administration announced its intention to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and other terrorist enemy combatants as civilians, Eric Holder was asked by a Democratic senator what the administration planned to do in the event that a conviction was blocked or overturned due to "legal technicalities." As we noted at the time, Holder replied, "Failure is not an option"--making clear that the administration has no plan.

 

The Obama administration's failure to plan for a contingency doesn't mean it won't materialize--just ask Martha Coakley. So what would happen in the event that a conviction was thrown out? Blogger Morgen Richmond notes that a federal judge, John Coughenour, has offered one possible answer. Speaking at a conference sponsored by George Soros's Open Society Institute, Coughenour, a Reagan-appointed trial judge from the Western District of Washington, said this:

 

 

 

 

Turn 'em loose, let them attack us again. This is one approach to the question. We'll call it the Coughenour Doctrine, since the judge actually enunciated it. But surely if Obama and Holder had the courage of their ideological convictions, they would agree with it. Read article.

 

T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII, Iowahawk.Typepad.com

 

Those who have followed my missives in this space are also aware of my growing concerns about the President himself. While he enjoys the continuing allegiance of our nation's smart set, it now appears that the unhinged insolent mobs of the town halls have successfully conspired to inflict some damage on the once-unassailable fortress of his approval ratings. This unforeseeable turn of events has culminated in the recent coup in Massachusetts, where the House of Kennedy was unceremoniously deposed from its ancestral Senate estate by some ill-bred populist pickup trucker.

 

The better journalistic organs have published soothing reassurances that this latest insult to American birthright was a fluke, having more to do with Mr. Brown's erotic appeal to the Bay State's famously nymphomaniacal womenfolk than any significant disagreement with the President's legislative agenda. Still, I am afraid that Mr. Obama must accept some of the blame. The corollary to le droit de seigneur is the obligation of the ruler to maintain a modicum of rapport with his subjects, and in this respect the President has been found curiously wanting. But therein lies a conundrum; how does a man of such prodigious oratorical and intellectual gifts lower himself to the base enthusiasms and simian grunts of the commons? Read article.

 

Print This E-mail This

Share It: