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Mike's America, Flopping Aces.net

 

It’s bad when the White House Press Corps (pronounced “core”) stops laughing it up in your daily briefings. It get worse when one after another of your former friends in the “news” media start writing stories asking what went wrong?” You know you’re headed downhill when the nation’s first black governor tells the first black President he’s got to shake things up. It’s downright scary when the latest CNN poll has a majority (including many who voted for you) saying you don’t deserve to be re-elected.

 

How did it happen? Simple. The top two issues for most Americans in 2009 and again in 2010 were the economy and jobs. President Obama promised in his State of the Union speech that “jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010.” But just as Obama and fellow Democrats promised jobs were their big focus in 2009 (video), he again is spending his immediate political capital to push through yet another version of big government health care.

 

President Obama used his weekly radio address to once again attack the insurance companies and give a renewed push for his big government solution. I’ve lost count on the number of speeches he’s made trying to sell his snake oil and convince people government can do a better job but it’s clear he needs to do more listening and less talking. Read article.

 

Critical condition - 'Reconciliation.'

Jeffrey H. Anderson, NRO.com

 

Both the Congressional Budget Office and the Medicare Chief Actuary have said that, under Obamacare, insurance premiums would be higher than under current law. So, the solution to high premiums is to pass legislation that would raise them?

 

In each of these ways, the disconnect between cause and effect, problem and solution, rhetoric and reality, is astounding.

 

Of course, the biggest disconnect is between the Obama administration and the American people. Americans have made it abundantly clear that they don’t want Obamacare. President Obama has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t care.

 

But House and Senate Democrats are unlikely to continue to turn such a deaf ear toward their constituents. Read article.

David Limbaugh.com

 

When you're president of the United States and your primary claim to fame is your economic prowess but your economic record fails by all objective measures, what do you do? You call on your skills as a virtuoso propagandist.

 

With the perceived catastrophic economic crisis of 2008-09, President Barack Obama captured the presidency at the perfect time in America's modern history for him to unleash his grandiose socialist policies -- policies so ambitious that the American people would never have tolerated them under any other circumstances.

 

With the nation in near panic over the impending doom of the economy, Obama presented his now-infamous "stimulus plan" to artificially create government demand by spending more than $800 billion of borrowed money to "jump-start the economy."

 

Being a die-hard Keynesian, Obama probably believed his program would create jobs. But given his attitude about the wealthy being undeserving of their good fortune, he probably wasn't risking too much in the event it didn't work. The funds would redistribute wealth to those less fortunate and whom society, in Obama's view, has cheated. It would also force allocations of money to "green" enterprises that would never be pursued if left to the sanity of private-sector consumer demand, further expand the public sector in general and provide ample slush money to reward unions and other supporters to shore up his re-election efforts.

 

According to Keynesian theory, as I understand it, it doesn't matter much where the government spends other people's money -- just as long as it spends it. Once the money is injected into the economy (never mind that an equal amount is taken out of the economy from the private sector), a multiplier effect unfolds to stimulate economic growth and jobs.

 

But just to hedge his bets, Obama was careful in choosing his words in predicting the coming prosperity. He said he would "save or create 3 million jobs" -- or whatever number suited his purposes at the particular speech he was giving. Reasonable people said at the time that this was a bizarre formulation -- that it would be impossible to prove or disprove such a claim -- but the media dutifully ignored the skeptics. Read article.

Ben Feller, Yahoo News.com

 

Thrust into office on the veracity of hope, President Barack Obama is trying to get himself on the right side of a remarkably different national sentiment these days: anger.

 

Obama's expansive domestic goals are largely the same, but his message is changing, now constructed around a concession that the public is disillusioned and wanting results. If he cannot show people that he understands their frustration and is working to fix it, the risks are real.

 

All that angst that Obama wants to harness as a force for change — as he did in his campaign — will turn against him. That means eroding public support for his agenda and potentially big losses for his party this year in congressional midterm elections.

 

So it was telling when Obama offered this take on Republican Scott Brown's Senate win in Massachusetts last month, one that weakened the president's hand: "The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry, and they're frustrated."

 

A new White House talking point was born, and it was hardly hope and change.

 

On that same day of postelection analysis, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs used some description of anger, frustration or both 12 times to describe what people were feeling, including this one: "That anger is now pointed at us, because we're in charge. Rightly so." Read article.

Lloyd Marcus, NewsWithViews.com

 

Patriotism cooling did not happen overnight. Incrementally, - la death by a thousand cuts, America has been dissed by television, Hollywood, schools, Democrats, the left, and most outrageously, even the President of the United States. Democrat Congressman Jack Murtha accused our military of rape and murder. Democrat Senator Dick Durbin accused the America's treatment of GITMO detainees as being equal to the Nazis' death camps, the Soviet gulags, and the genocidal campaigns of Pol Pot. President Obama accused the U.S. of arrogance. He chastised us for consuming too much and settings our thermostats too high. Obama travels the world bowing to foreign leaders and apologizing for our country.

 

Unquestionably, the Left's constant bashing has instilled in some Americans a negative perception of their country. Actor Danny Glover even blamed, believe it or not, the earthquake in Haiti on the U.S. I received the following e-mail from a grandmother who agrees. She wrote, "...we are the ones who are killing the world with our own destructive ways. It just goes to show you we have to change the way we live." Hogwash!

 

Truth be told, America is the greatest, most generous, and most compassionate nation on the planet.

 

Private citizens gave an estimated $240.92 billion to aid the victims of hurricane Katrina.

 

The U.S. has donated billions to Haiti over the years. Thousands of missionary organizations have been attempting to help Haiti for years. Haiti earthquake relief contributions from the U.S. far exceed the contributions of all other countries combined. Read article.

 

L. Brent Bozell III, Pittsburgh Trib-Review.com

 

It was only a year ago that liberal elites in Washington were shoveling dirt on conservatism. James Carville was writing books about 40 years of Democrat dominance, boasting in his typical way that he could call "time of death" on the Republican Party. Liberals believed their hype that Barack Obama would be that black FDR they pictured on the cover of Time magazine.

 

Now newspaper headlines read otherwise: "Where did the hope for Obama go?" The hot-air balloon has crashed to Earth, and you can tell conservatism is back with a swagger. You can tell because the media's daily output has gone from breathless valentines for Obama to angry denunciations of tea party protesters.

 

MSNBC's Chris Matthews was apoplectic about this conservative uprising. "What's going on out there in the Republican Party is kind of a frightening, almost Cambodia re-education camp going" where "if you're not far-right, you're not right enough." It didn't seem to matter to Matthews that millions of people were executed in those communist Cambodian "re-education camps." Read article.

 

Jeffrey Young, The Hill.com

 

Unlikely though it is that Obama would reverse positions on malpractice lawsuit caps or other proposals, it would not mark the first time he aggravated his liberal allies during the healthcare reform debate.

 

Despite campaigning against taxation of employer-sponsored health insurance, Obama put himself at odds with unions by endorsing a Senate-passed excise tax on high-cost insurance plans that organized labor and most House Democrats passed. The White House also struck a controversial deal to win the support of the pharmaceutical industry for healthcare reform, frustrating liberals who think Obama went too light on their long-time nemesis.

 

The House and Senate bills each contain provisions aiming to improve patient safety and offering grants to states that develop alternate ways to resolve disputes over medical errors. Proponents of broader malpractice reforms dismiss these proposals as inadequate while trial lawyers have rejected another possible compromise, the creation of special “health courts” that would hear cases and medical errors and malpractice.

 

Moving toward the middle on medical malpractice reform is no guarantee of winning GOP support, however. Any concession that Republicans would view as meaningful would prompt an outcry from Democratic lawmakers and the trial bar, a close ally of the party.

“I don’t see that as a credible place to go if the object is to pass the bill,” said Lipsen, noting that legislation to enact malpractice award caps could even not advance through the Republican-controlled Senate several times in the last decade.

 

Moreover, Republicans have stood so strongly opposed to the Democratic healthcare bills that even full capitulation on medical malpractice reform would not produce instant bipartisanship, Rickard noted. “There are so many issues that are in dispute in this bill,” she said, “that malpractice reform in and of itself isn’t going to overcome them.” Read article.

 

Ralph R. Reiland, Spectator.org

 

Whatever happened to the Constitutional concept of equal protection under the law?

 

Whatever happened to the recognition that it's overwhelmingly the nation's private sector that delivers the jobs, goods and services, and our overall well-being? Or as Calvin Coolidge succinctly put it, "After all, the chief business of the American people is business."

 

With his proposed change in forgiveness rules on student loans, President Obama, revealing his pro-statist biases and anti-business prejudices, is calling for the establishment of clearly unequal treatment.

 

"Let's tell another 1 million students that when they graduate," said Obama in his recent State of the Union address, "they will be required to pay only 10 percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after 20 years, and forgiven after 10 years if they choose a career in public service."

 

Why the bias against business majors, against entrepreneurial students who choose to go into the private sector and create jobs?

 

"Jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010," said Obama in the same speech, and "the true engine of job creation in this country will always be America's businesses." 

 

So why is he calling for students who go into the job-creating private sector to pay back their loans for 20 years while students who end up on government payrolls get to shift the cost of their unpaid college loans onto the backs of the nation's taxpayers after 10 years? Read article.