Obama Campaign Falsely Quotes Mitt Romney Saying: ‘We Don’t Need Any More Teachers. We Don’t Need More Any Firefighters.’ YOU LIARS!!!

I heard Obama’s top campaign guru TWICE directly quote Mitt Romney as saying, “We don’t need more teachers.  We don’t need more firefighters.”  Here’s one of those:

AXELROD: Governor Romney chose to jump on the word, but what was most interesting is how he reacted to the spirit of the thing, because his statement was we don’t need any more teachers, we don’t need any more firefighters or police. The president is out of touch. Out of touch? We have lost 250,000 teachers in the last 27 — couple of years. Every community in the country is feeling it. It’s bad in the short term for our economy, because those are good middle-class jobs, and it’s bad in the long term for our economy because we’re not going to win and our kids aren’t going to win unless we invest in education.

So I would suggest he’s living on a different planet if he thinks that’s a prescription for a stronger economy.

As soon as Axelrod said that, I knew it was a pure lie from a pure liar.  I knew that there was no way Mitt Romney said, “We don’t need any more teachers.  We don’t need any more firefighters or police.”

For the record, when Axelrod said “Governor Romney chose to jump on the word,” “the word” he was referring to was Barack Obama’s incredibly stupid and incredibly wrong statement that “the private sector’s doing fine.”  And because Barack Obama said an incredibly stupid thing, David Axelrod decided to deceitfully and falsely attribute a bogus remark to Romney so that he could demonize him for the lie that Axelrod fabricated.

This is what Mitt Romney actually said:

Romney said in Iowa that Obama “wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”

Two very different statements.  There is a rather huge difference between saying “We can’t afford what Obama has already TWICE tried and which the American people have now clearly flatly rejected” and “We don’t need more teachers.”  Romney accurately points out the fact that Barack Obama says we need to do the son of the son of stimulus – yet another massive government spending program that has already twice failed America – and pointed out that Obama justifies expanding government and expanding the (liberal union) government workforce by citing firemen, policemen and teachers.  It’s basically that scam that cities use when they have bloated budgets: you never hear them say, “If you don’t pay more taxes we’ll fire all our bureaucrats!”  Rather they say we’re keeping every single bureaucrat but we’ll fire all the policemen and firemen and teachers and then you’ll be sorry.  And Romney also points out that if you look at Wisconsin, if you look at San Diego, if you look at San Jose – uberliberal places ALL – you will see that the American people are now OVERWHELMINGLY rejecting what Obama is demanding.

In San Jose, fully 70% of the residents voted to cut back pensions that allowed firefighters to retire at the age of 48 with 90% of their salary – which is consistent with California public sector workers.  These benefits DWARF what private sector workers have any chance of ever receiving.

Wisconsin “public workers” get on average $14,500 more than their private sector counterparts with similar qualifications; they receive more than twice the health care benefits than their private sector counterparts, and they get 4.5 times more in pension.

It is frankly immoral.  If the left actually wanted more policemen, firefighters and teachers THEY WOULD CUT THESE UNSUSTAINABLE BENEFITS AND FREE UP FUNDS TO ALLOW GOVERNMENTS TO HIRE MORE POLICEMEN, TEACHERS AND FIREFIGHTERS. 

As it is, take a look at the unfunded liability of California according to the Los Angeles Times:

California’s $500-billion pension time bomb
April 06, 2010|By David Crane

The staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Note to anyone who has a functioning brain cell: we’re bankrupt.  We don’t have the money.  We can’t keep allowing Democrats to give public unions fat contracts in exchange for those public unions giving back the Democrats a kickback in the form of campaign contributions.  Our children will starve and die in the burning streets if we keep doing that.  And I mean that very literally.  The United States of America is going to collapse.  And first there will be riots and then we will descend into complete anarchy.  And our children will very much starve and die in the burning streets.

America’s actual debt is no trivial $16 billion (it was $10 trillion when Obama took office, with George Bush having grown it by $4 trillion over eight years); it is now way, WAY over $200 TRILLION.  And Democrats have saddled us with 99.9 percent of that unpayable debt bomb that is waiting to explode.

I keep trying to warn people.  It’s right out of the Bible.  There is a spirit of delusion on us that is going to kill us just as it has killed other nations before us.  We think we’re fine, that everything is fine, and that we can go on doing what we’ve done before.  One day soon we’re going to collapse – and when that collapse comes it’s going to happen with staggering, stunning speed and it’s going to catch nearly all Americans completely off guard.  Your money will be virtually worthless literally overnight.  And your family is going to suffer horribly in the ensuing chaos.

There’s a line from a song: “You can’t always have what you want.”  That idea is completely foreign to liberals, who believe with Obama that he can slash the size of government and massively expand the size of government at the exact same time.  But under Obama, people are buying the lie that we can have mutually exclusive things that fundamentally contradict one another.  Mitt Romney isn’t saying, “We don’t need any more teachers.”  Mitt Romney is saying, “We can’t afford any more Obamanomics.”

I was watching Neil Cavuto’s program, and a liberal was arguing that not only should the public sector and the unions that give 95% of their campaign contributions to Democrats continue to receive these out-of-control and unsustainable benefits, but private sector workers ought to have them too.  And instead of cutting public sector employee benefits to be more in line with private sector workers, we should instead force every business in America into bankruptcy by forcing them to pay the kind of insane benefits that we’re paying Obama’s government class of elites.  And Cavuto kept repeating versions of “you are completely insane.”

The liberal was basically saying that if you can’t get that square peg to fit into that round hole, you use a bigger government-powered hammer until you force your peg to fit wherever the hell you want it.  Government is God, and our God can do anything He wants.

Cavuto kept asking, “Where are you going to get the money?”  And that dose of reality simply didn’t matter: because liberals are as immune from reality as you can get.  Liberalism is ultimately the incoherent intolerance of reality.  They live in their little world of “isms” and talking points.

David Axelrod is a liar without shame.  And so is the evil president he is pimping for.

Pawlenty on Obama: ‘You can’t be pro-job and anti-business. That’s like being pro-egg and anti-chicken.’

Tim Pawlenty just went way up on my list of candidates after that particular remark in my title.

Is Obama anti-business?  Well, how about this for a factoid: 77% of investors think he is.  He was anti-business in 2009.  He was anti-business in 2010.  And he is still anti-business in 2011.  How many eggs are you going to get when you’re out to get all the chickens and when the chickens know you’re out to get them?

Here’s an article that talks about this former governor who has been successful where Obama has failed, failed and failed some more.  What is interesting is how we hear Pawlenty talk about how to fix our broken economy, and Obama talking about wtf???

Republican presidential candidate Pawlenty: ‘We are in deep doo-doo’
By Abdon M. Pallasch Political

How badly has President Barack Obama managed the United States’ economy?

Pretty badly, says plain-talking former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty in a campaign stop in Chicago Tuesday.

“We are in deep doo-doo. We are in deep crap,” Pawlenty said Tuesday, in a locale meant to drive home the Republican presidential candidate’s differences with the president.

In a classroom at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies, located across the street from the law school where Obama used to teach, Pawlenty laid out his tax-slashing, budget-cutting proposal that he says will save the U.S. economy:

There would be only three tax rates: Zero, for low-income earners who currently pay no federal tax; 10 percent, for single people earning up to $50,000, or married couples who earn up to $100,000; and 25 percent, for people who earn more than that (down from a top rate of 35 percent now). He would cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent and end the estate tax.

Those tax cuts, plus a freeze on federal spending, would spur growth of 5 percent a year, he said.

Democrats immediately said Pawlenty’s proposed tax cuts would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

Obama senior advisor David Axelrod, who finished a speech on the North Side just before Pawlenty started his, credited Pawlenty with “good stagecraft” for holding the speech on Obama’s old stomping grounds. But he said Obama’s budget-fixing recipe is better.

Pawlenty “left his own state with a $5 billion deficit and now he’s counseling the rest of the country on how to handle finances,” Axelrod said. “He proposes massive new tax cuts for upper-income Americans … that would produce huge new deficits. He wants to replay the same formula that got us into the jam in the first place.”

But Pawlenty told the classroom full of students at the university that people should not focus on “whether this makes some group a little more wealthy or a little less wealthy. You can’t be pro-job and anti-business. That’s like being pro-egg and anti-chicken.”

Flirting with the so-called “third rail” of American politics, Pawlenty said he would raise the retirement age for younger workers to start collecting Social Security in the future. People nearing retirement now would not be affected, he said.

“If you’re coming in new to the work force, gradually, over time, we are going to raise the retirement age,” Pawlenty said. “If you’re wealthy, you’re not going to get the cost-of-living adjustment.”

Proposals that can be short-handed as “cutting Social Security” can kill campaigns, but Pawlenty said, “It’s going to be the ‘Jack Nicholson election.’” Referring to the movie “A Few Good Men,” Pawlenty said, “There’s that famous line when he’s on the witness stand and he said, ‘You can’t handle the truth.’ The American people, I think, can handle the truth. It doesn’t mean we freak ’em out. It doesn’t mean we scare ’em. … I’m only doing this because I love the country. We’ll only get it to a better place if people are willing to tell the American people the truth. I am. President Obama isn’t. He’s ducking, bobbing, weaving.”

In a speech at the Misericordia, a home for children and adults with disabilities, Axelrod told the story of how, back in April, he and Obama were crafting a joke about Pawlenty for Obama to use at the White House Correspondents Association dinner. The two were interrupted by a National Security Council staffer who had to brief Obama on something, so Obama asked Axelrod to leave the room.

When Axelrod came back in, Obama rejected a suggestion for a joke about how Pawlenty “could really be a strong candidate but for his unfortunate middle name: bin Laden.”

“ ‘That’s so hackneyed, bin Laden, that’s so yesterday, Why don’t we take that out,’ ” Obama said, Axelrod recalled. “ ‘We’ll put in “Hosni.’’ ’ ” Axelrod didn’t think that was as funny, but he agreed to it.

“It was only the next day that we realized that he had not only eliminated Bin Laden from the joke. He had given the order to eliminate bin Laden from the face of the Earth,” Axelrod told the crowd.

Later, speaking to reporters, Axelrod laughed when asked if he agreed with potential Republican candidate Sarah Palin, who said over the weekend that Paul Revere’s famous ride was an attempt to “warn the British’’ — that the British were coming.

“I think that’s a good reflection of why we can’t abandon education,” he said. “We need good education so everybody knows their history lessons and gets them properly.”

Pawlenty just laughed when asked the same question. He proceeded to a fund-raiser.

Well, first of all,we are – to put it in Pawlenty’s accurate term – ” in deep crap” – and the best Axelrod can do is talk about a joke that Obama’s people are going to go after Sarah Palin for an impromptu remark about Paul Revere when their guy is on the record saying he’d visited 57 states with one more yet to go?

And Obama’s going to talk about Pawlenty’s $5 billion deficit?  Seriously?  And just how many TRILLIONS of deficit does he have just so far???  Obama’s budget just for this term would add THIRTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS to the national debt.  From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama proposed a $3.73 trillion budget Monday  for fiscal 2012 that he said will start reining in runaway budget deficits, but  his plan envisions the gross national debt swelling by almost $13 trillion over  a decade.

Obama’s budget sets up a clash with the  Republican-led House of Representatives over how to recover from the deep  recession of recent years and strengthen the economic foundation for the future,  with federal spending the pivotal battleground.

Obama added $3 trillion to the deficit in less than two years.  Another way to put it: In just nineteen months, Obama added more to the debt than every single US president from George Washington to Ronald Reagan – combined.

And this idiot is talking about $5 billion???  Like we’re not supposed to laugh our asses off and then impeach Obama as a clear and present danger to the United States?  Particularly when in fact Pawlenty in fact DID actually leave office with the budget balanced?  If you’re going to talk about devastating developments after the guy was gone – especially when that characterization is being made by the guy’s political enemies – at least have the courtesy to do the same sort of redacting with Bill Clinton’s legacy – who managed to take all the credit for balancing the budget but wasn’t in any way responsible for the disastrous Dotcom crisis that unfolded on his watch.

Which is to say, Democrats should either give Tim Pawlenty plenty of credit for balancing the budget or at least shut the hell up.

Tim Pawlenty as a man has a good, solid life.  And he’s got the background and the bona fides to get behind.  He is a candidate worthy of consideration.

On Cavuto’s Fox News program on Friday, Cavuto pointed out that the White House was questioning whether Tim Pawlenty was being realistic about whether he could create the kind of 5% GDP that he is talking about.  Pawlenty’s response was almost as good as his quip in my title.  I don’t have an exact quote, but basically he said “I’m an optimist, and I have an optimistic view of America’s future.  We’ve been great before, and I believe we can be great again.  And if Barack Obama could say that he was going to provide jobs for the all the jobless, slow the rising oceans, heal the planet, end all the wars and basically remake our nation, I think I can talk about doubling our GDP.”

Touché.

Tim Pawlenty wants to increase our GDP and grow our economy and create jobs by NOT being anti-chicken while claiming to be pro-egg.  In other words, the man actually makes sense.

Obama has spent three years demonizing and attacking businesses while demanding that they create more jobs.  That, by stark contrast, is 100% pure insane, no additives or preservatives.

Pawlenty wants profound tax cuts.  And while liberals want to ignore history and argue that the more you tax, the more you collect in tax revenue, Pawlenty cites the fact that every single time we have cut tax rates, we have dramatically increased our tax revenues.  See my article “Tax Cut’s INCREASE Revenues; They have ALWAYS Increased Tax Revenues” for that documented history.

Think of it in terms of gas (as I’ve argued before in more detail).  As the price of gas went up and up and up, did people buy the same amount of gas?  No way; they very quickly cut back on their driving.  If you increase the price of something, you sell less of it.  And in the same way, if you increase tax rates, you invariably end up encouraging counter-productive behavior, as the wealthy find it worthwhile to quit investing and instead pursue tax shelters and loopholes to protect their assets.

It is simply a repeatedly documented fact that every single time we have cut tax rates, we have ended up with increased revenues, as businesses and individuals were encouraged to invest because they were being rewarded with the ability to actually keep more of their own profits.  It comes down to this: if I give you a job, and you work hard, but at the end of the day the tax man comes and takes it all away, you’re not going to bother to take my job.  With total taxes exceeding 50% in a number of states, businesses and individuals are put in a position in which they take all the risks in hiring and investing – and if they lose they lose big – but even if they win they aren’t allowed to keep enough of their money to make the risks worth taking.

Democrats claim that the deficit has increased with lower tax rates.  And that is true.  But that isn’t the fault of the lower tax rates – WHICH AGAIN ACTUALLY INCREASED THE GOVERNMENT REVENUES DRAMATICALLY.  The bizarre argument that Democrats are making is analogous to the argument that the guy who lives in his parent’s basement and makes minimum wage and lives within his modest means actually makes more money than the multi-millionaire who buys multiple mansions, yachts and cars and then finds himself in debt.  It was the reckless spending that put us into the hole, not the tax policies that resulted in the politicians who spent that money having more money to spend.  Pawlenty is arguing that we need to profoundly cut tax rates and simultaneously have a balanced budget amendment and dramatically cut our spending.

That isn’t even mentioning the constant hypocrisy of the Democrats as they fail to live up to their own demagogic rhetoric.

Then there’s the issue of the Bush tax cuts.  Democrats say we’ve had the Bush tax cuts, and look what’s happened.  Two things.

First, consider this: Obama signed the compromise to extend the Bush tax cuts for two more years on December 17, 2010.  Many experts believed Obama would be forced to do this as a result of the Republican landslide victory that changed the political landscape in early November.  So let’s look at what has happened to the jobless rate since November:

November 2010: 9.8%
December 2010: 9.4%
January  2011: 9.0%
February 2011: 8.9%
March    2011: 8.8%
April    2011: 9.0%
May      2011: 9.1%

Interestingly, Obama initially appeared to be reaching out to the business leaders he had been attacking.  After getting his head handed to him in November 2010, Obama began to reach out to Republicans.  And then in mid December, he began to reach out to business – with his signing of the Bush tax cuts extension a major part of that reaching out.  In early January, he appointed as his new chief-of-staff a man who had a “business-friendly” persona.

And the market, the investors, the businesses, ordinary Americans, liked what they heard.  The public clearly, overwhelmingly wanted to see Obama reach out to the party that had just won massively.  Republicans are the party of business; reach out to business.  Let’s get to work growing this economy rather than attacking the people who grow the economy.

But even as people liked what they heard, there was always a question, as asked in this case by CNN Money:

“So is Obama really changing his tune on big business? Or is the president merely glad-handing big business while plowing ahead with his 2012 goal of making the rich pay more?”

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long before the business and investment community realized that Obama hadn’t changed his spots at all.  It’s either “same lies, different tune,” or “different lies, same tune” with this guy.

Before hardly any time had passed, “William Daley” became an afterthought and Obama was right back to attacking business with the same ferocity as before.

Obama’s senior economist Austan Goolsbee – now the FIFTH senior Obama economist to jump Obama’s HMO Titanic (with “HMO” standing for “His Majesty Obama” had this to say shortly before HE left.  And this according to an obvious liberal:

When Amanpour asked [Goolsbee] what the Administration could or should be doing to improve conditions, he ticked off items you’d expect to hear from a typical GOP Presidential adviser:  we’ve got to get the debt under control; we have a White House effort to identify and get rid of governmental regulations that are preventing the private sector from growing the economy; we should pass “free trade” agreements backed by the Chamber of Commerce; and we should leverage limited public dollars to release billions in private funding for investments.

Goolsbee’s bottom line:  “It’s now up to the private sector.”  That’s exactly what you’d expect from President Romney’s economic adviser.

And, of course, that brief flash of clarity was immediately followed by Goolsbee’s resignation.  We won’t be having any anti-Marxist heresies on Comrade Obama’s watch, no sir commissar.

Just in case you’re wondering why the economy seemed to be improving before going back into the toilet, there’s your answer.  The people who actually create jobs began to think that Obama finally had some level of actual awareness about how the economy and business and job-creation works, before Obama slammed the door on that idiotic thesis.  They believed Obama’s lies right after the election, then Obama demonstrated (“dictated” is more like it) that he hates business as much as he ever did, then he renewed his war on business, and it’s right back into the crapper with the U.S. economy.

So there’s the backstory behind the economy appearing to improve before diving headfirst back into the gave.  Obama is right back to being “pro-job” but “anti-chicken.”

Up above, I said there were “two things” about the Bush tax cuts and their impact on the economy.  The first point is that the extension of the Bush tax cuts DID work for five months of straight improvement – at least until Obama and the Democrats made sure that businesses and investors knew that they were as hated as ever.

The SECOND point about the Bush tax cuts – or ANY other tax cuts, for that matter – is that they have to be consistent and long-term before they will truly succeed.  This is because businesses need to know their operating environment before they will be willing to take risks such as hiring more workers.  They need to have a clear, long-term picture (most think at least five years) of what their tax liability will be.  And they need the same kind of knowledge about their health care liability and their regulatory liability.  If you start or expand a business, you’ve got one primary question: “Am I going to be able to make this work?”  And in order to answer that fundamental question, you need to know what your costs will be.

Obama signed the Bush tax cut extension for two years – and then very quickly went back on that signature by demagoguing the very thing he’d signed.  Will these tax rates be there for them in two years?  Certainly not, if Obama wins.  And there goes the window to make important investment/growth decisions.  Obama made sure that business owners wouldn’t have a long-term understanding of their taxes.  ObamaCare has thousands of pages being written as we speak; Obama’s regulations are being written as we speak; and nobody knows anything about how any of it will affect them.

Hence the paralysis.

Tim Pawlenty knows that no nation and no economy has ever had a recession that lasted forever – save when leftists have been allowed to run those nations/economies.  He also knows that economic growth and expansion are there just waiting for Obama to leave us the hell alone and get off our backs so that business owners can build better lives for themselves and their families – and create the jobs that result from those businesses growing – by allowing wealth creators to keep more of their own money.

He knows that if you really want to be pro-job, you had better be pro-business.  And that is something that Barack Obama has now proven he will never be, regardless of what he might say to the contrary.

[Update, 8/13]: Today, Michelle Bachmann won the Iowa Straw Poll, versus Pawlenty – who had spent a lot more time and money – coming in a very distant third.

I can’t explain why Iowans basically walked away from Pawlenty, but I can tell you why I’ve been annoyed with him.  It’s simple: his non-stop attack on Michelle Bachmann.

You want to go after people, Tim?  Go after Obama.  Heck, go after Mitt Romney like a lot of people said you should have done during the first debate.  But to go after Michelle Bachmann is just dumb.

To not go after Romney and then go after Bachmann makes you look like a guy who was afraid to fight the star quarterback and then started punching a cheerleader to show you were still “tough.”

You’re trying to present yourself as a true-blue conservative.  Everyone KNOWS Michelle Bachmann is a true conservative.  So why go after her when you could be going after a Mitt Romney who has held whatever position made him look good at the moment?

To continue, some of your attacks against her are just stupid.  Like the one that Michelle Bachmann didn’t stop things like cap and trade and ObamaCare being passed in the House.  As if she was somehow the Imperial Queen of the chamber rather than one minority Republican (at the time) in a chamber with 434 other representatives.  That was just a plain dumb attack.

You finished a distant third, Tim.  Which apparently will allow you to survive.  But if you keep tee-ing off on Bachmann, you won’t be around much longer.

Fox News Most Demonized By Obama, Most Trusted By Americans

Fox News is now far and away the most trusted name in news, even according to left-leaning Public Policy Polling.

I didn’t need a poll to know that.

Last week I wrote an article entitled, “In Hindsight Of Massachusetts, Who Presented The Truth: Obama, Or Fox News?”  And my contention was that Fox News was basically the only news organization that was broadcasting the truth all along, while the “Obama media” reported propaganda.

But now common sense is confirmed by polling:

Poll: Fox most trusted name in news
By ANDY BARR | 1/27/10 7:38 AM EST

Fox is the most trusted television news network in the country, according to a new poll out Tuesday.

A Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, 10 percentage points more than any other network.

Thirty-seven percent said they didn’t trust Fox, also the lowest level of distrust that any of the networks recorded.

There was a strong partisan split among those who said they trusted Fox — with 74 percent of Republicans saying they trusted the network, while only 30 percent of Democrats said they did.

CNN was the second-most-trusted network, getting the trust of 39 percent of those polled. Forty-one percent said they didn’t trust CNN.

Each of the three major networks was trusted by less than 40 percent of those surveyed, with NBC ranking highest at 35 percent. Forty-four percent said they did not trust NBC, which was combined with its sister cable station MSNBC.

Thirty-two percent of respondents said they trusted CBS, while 31 percent trusted ABC. Both CBS and ABC were not trusted by 46 percent of those polled.

“A generation ago you would have expected Americans to place their trust in the most neutral and unbiased conveyors of news,” said PPP President Dean Debnam in his analysis of the poll. “But the media landscape has really changed, and now they’re turning more toward the outlets that tell them what they want to hear.”

The telephone poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

Democrats – who completely rely on mainstream media propaganda to win elections – are panic-stricken.  Here’s what the Democratic Senatorial Committee said in a new pitch:

Republicans think Massachusetts was an endorsement of their stall tactics and personal attacks. A new poll names Fox News Channel as the most trusted news outlet. Sarah Palin has 1.2 million fans on Facebook and is the $100,000 headliner at the national tea party convention. If we don’t fight back, and stand up for America, then their version of America will get the upper hand.

We cannot let that happen. And with your help, we will not.

Republicans “don’t think” here; they simply recognize the obvious.  An unknown Republican running against the Obama agenda pulling out a win against a well known Democrat running for “Ted Kennedy’s seat” is a no-brainer confirmation of Republican opposition to Obama’s many high-spending boondoggles.

Sarah Palin has such a huge following on Facebook because in a few paragraphs she can destroy an eternity’s worth of Obama mistatement of the union lies.  Palin is routinely slandered as being dumber than a box of rocks, but she saw the failures of Obama a year-and-a-half before the brilliant liberals were able to comprehend the same things about him.

And let’s talk about the Tea Party protesters.

A recent Rasmussen survey ran under the following title: “WSJ/NBC News Poll: Tea Party Tops Democrats and Republicans.”  Which means they are clearly a major force.  But there’s more to say:

The loosely organized group made of up mostly conservative activists and independent voters that’s come to be known as the Tea Party movement currently boasts higher favorability ratings than either the Democratic or Republican Parties, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll coming out later today.

More than four in 10, 41%, of respondents said they had a very or somewhat favorable view of the Tea Party movement, while 24% said they had a somewhat or very negative view of the group. The Tea Party movement gained notoriety over the summer following a series of protests in Washington, D.C. and other cities over government spending and other U.S. economic policies.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which controls both the White House and Congress, has a 35% positive rating compared with a 45% negative rating.

Who nailed that story right from the beginning?  Who charted the progress of the what may very well be the most important political story in decades?  Fox News.  Who completely dismissed it?  Everybody else.

It was the same kind of mainstream media ostrich that buried its head in the sand with the ACORN scandal, in which a couple of kids posing as a pimp and prostitute got ACORN office after office to demonstrate that they were willing to help a couple buy a house and cheat on their taxes  set up a prostitution ring of underage illegal immigrant girls.  ABC network news anchor Charles Gibson hadn’t even heard about the story, it was so low on their radar:

Gibson: HAHAHAHAHA. HEHEHE. I didn’t even know about it. Um. So, you’ve got me at a loss. I don’t know. Uh. Uh. But my goodness, if it’s got everything including sleaziness in it, we should talk about it this morning.

Roma: This is the American way!

Gibson: Or maybe this is just one you leave to the cables.

And note that in that story I AGAIN lambast the media for refusing to honestly cover the Tea Party events.  I showed the picture of the massive crowds at the event (and you KNOW they would have covered a NOW rally with eight feminists marching in a tight little circle):

The UK Daily Mail reported that one million people showed up for that Tea Party event in Washington D.C. What was the mainline media response?  To either not report the event at all, or to try to dismiss the massive crowds as a few nuts.

Time Magazine didn’t even bother to mention the massive Tea Party movement in it’s ‘Year in Review’ edition.  Like it never happened at all.  Nothing to see here, folks.

Obama trivialized, ridiculed, and attacked both the Tea Party movement and Fox News in one swoop:

“So, when you see – those of you who are watching certain news channels that on which I’m not very popular and you see folks waving tea bags around, let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security”

He finally met with Republicans after Scott Brown’s victory kicked him hard right in the gonads.  After a full year of completely shutting them out.  In the one meeting he had with them he arrogantly smirked, “I won,” when Republicans tried to share their clearly-in-hindsight legitimate concerns.  And every single one of his “town halls” have been carefully scripted events in which Tea Party people are most definitely not invited.

Obama’s senior media representatives – one a self-admitted Maoist – proceeded to repeatedly attack the credibility of what is now recognized to be the most trusted name in news.

I wrote about how the mainstream media ridiculed the Tea Party movement.  Anderson Cooper used the sexually disgusting phrase “tea bagging” to refer to them.  And Keith Olbermann just went to straight rabid frothing hatred of them.  His interview with Janeane Garofalo on the Tea Party was so vile that I quit watching ’24’ as long as she was one it.

Keith Olbermann’s ratings have plunged 44% since last January as people get sick of his rabid lies.  Meanwhile Fox News not only runs circles around Olbermann in the ratings, but runs circles around the circles that they run around him and all the media leeches like him.

Obama is a liar and a demagogue, and he is the leader of a party of demagogues, supported by media propaganda.

Which is why the news organization that he demonized becoming the most trusted name in news is every bit as much of a slap in the face of the tiny degree of credibility he has remaining as it is a justification of Fox News.

Lying, Demagogic White House Finally Gets Its Media Smackdown

I like the title from Moe Lane best: “White House tries to muzzle media; draws back a bloody stump.”

But Allahpundit exposes the true deceit and hypocrisy of the White House that led to its bloody stump:

Decide for yourself what the most disgraceful aspect of this is. Was it the fact that Gibbs told Jake Tapper explicitly on Monday that the White House wouldn’t try to dictate to the press pool who should and shouldn’t be included — before doing precisely that? Was it Anita Dunn going out of her way to say she respects Major Garrett as a fair reporter — before the administration decided he didn’t deserve a crack here at Feinberg? Or was it the repeated insistence by Dunn and Axelrod that of course the administration will make its officials available to Fox — before pulling the plug today?

The other networks deserve the praise they’re getting for standing up to the Baby-in-Chief, but if they had acquiesced in this freezeout, a precedent would have been set that would have been eagerly used by future Republican presidents to close them off too.  And don’t think they weren’t all keenly aware of it.

Hot Air does a very good job of showing what Obama and his cockroaches are full of.

The video is a great watch for anyone who likes to see the good guys win and the bad guys lose:

[Youtube link]

The Hot Air piece exposes the pattern of constant lies coming out of this White House.  They are as dishonest as the sun is hot.

The White House’s petulant demagoguery of Fox News has been utterly great for Fox News as their ratings have gone through the roof.  They nearly outstrip all of their competitors combined.  Even liberals are acknowledging that Fox News has been “undamaged” by the demagogic White House campaign against them.

Meanwhile, only 43% of voters would be willing to re-elect this whiner-in-chief.  And he’s seen the fastest drop in the polls of any president in 50 years.

So you just keep demonizing Fox News, you demon.  I think it’s workin’ just great for ya.

Politico Article Reveals Obama’s Cloward-Piven Strategy Backfiring

Allow me to refresh your memories concerning the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy, which was the brainchild of two leftist professors to take total control of America by overwhelming its social support structures to create a “crisis”:

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

I genuinely believe that Barack Obama – a follower of Saul Alinsky as well as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate when he belonged to it to go along with a long and deep relationship with leftist radicals – is pursuing a “heads we win, tails you lose” strategy. If the economy somehow miraculously picks up under all of this massive spending and even more massive debt, then Democrats win big and Republicans lose. If – far more likely – the economy crashes under its own massive weight due to hyperinflation as interest payments on the debt soar and the Obama Treasury devalues the currency by printing money, then a starving, terrified people will scream for help from their government. And Democrats will – in solving the “crisis” they themselves created – secure the pure-socialist totalitarian state they have always envisioned. Either way, Obama liberals believe they will win big.

Government by crisis is a tried and true fascist approach.  It is up to you to decide whether it is a coincidence or not that Barack Obama is using the same approach, as described by his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel:

EMANUEL:  “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.  What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.  This is an opportunity. What used to be long-term problems — be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area — things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now immediate and must be dealt with.  And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.”

Obama began his presidency by fearmongering a crisis to get his way.  He fearmongered the stimulus through the Congress, predicting terrifying scenarios if it failed and hyping claims that have turned out to be completely false if he got his way.  Republicans were completely shut out of the stimulus, and the legislation was rushed through Congress so quickly that not one single Representative or Senator had any chance to read the bill that Obama then took leisurely four days to sign.

There was just one problem: Cloward-Piven depended for its success upon a death by incrementalism, as vividly depicted by a frog placed in a pot of water.  If you put the frog in boiling water, it will leap out immediately.  But if you put the frog in cool water and gradually turn up the heat, you can literally cook the frog to death.  Obama’s problem is that he turned the heat up too fast for the American people, and they are now leaping out of the boiling cauldron he created for them.

Or, perhaps another illustration will do to depict the American people-as-frog:

Note that the article that follows is written from a clear liberal slant (e.g., “Then Obama lost control of the health care debate by letting Republicans get away with their bogus claims about “death panels.”). Nevertheless, the article clearly admits to the crisis-style mentality that Obama used to try to push through his entire agenda at once.

Obama’s Big Bang could go bust
By: Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei
August 21, 2009

Barack Obama’s Big Bang is beginning to backfire, as his plans for rapid, once-in-a-generation overhauls of energy, financial regulation and health care are running into stiff resistance, both in Washington and around the country.

The Obama theory was simple, though always freighted with risk: Use a season of economic anxiety to enact sweeping changes the public likely wouldn’t stomach in ordinary times. But the abrupt swing in the public’s mood, from optimism about Obama’s possibility to concern he may be overreaching, has thrown the White House off its strategy and forced the president to curtail his ambitions.

Some Democrats point to a decision in June as the first vivid sign of trouble for Obama. These Democrats say the White House, in retrospect, made a grievous mistake by muscling conservative Democrats in swing districts to vote for a cap-and-trade energy bill that was very unpopular among their constituents.

Many of those members were pounded back home because Democrats passed a bill Republicans successfully portrayed as a big tax increase on consumers. The result: many conservative Democrats were gun-shy about taking any more risky votes — or going out on a limb on health care.

The other result: The prospects for winning final passage of a cap-and-trade bill this year are greatly diminished. And, while most Democrats still predict a health care bill will pass this year, it is likely to be a shadow of what Obama once had planned.

“The majority-makers are the freshman and sophomores from conservative districts where there’s this narrative building about giveaways, bailouts and too much change at once,” said a top House Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to discuss internal politics candidly. “There’s this big snowball building in those districts. That’s why those folks are so scared.”

David Axelrod, Obama’s political architect, said it was “very clear early in the transition” that Obama would have to attack a number of festering issues simultaneously.

“The times demanded it,” he said in an interview. “We didn’t have the luxury of taking things sequentially, year after year, and hoping we got there. That’s the reason that all these major issues had been deferred for decades: Change is hard.”

Axelrod said the president is “looking forward to an active fall” when he returns from next week’s vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, and is not as worried about the outlook as the denizens of Washington, where “every day is election day.”

But the “Big Bang” theory of governance, as some White House insiders called it, is not without risk and consequences.

By doing so much, so fast, Obama gave Republicans the chance to define large swaths of the debate. Conservatives successfully portrayed the stimulus bill as being full of pork for Democrats. Then Obama lost control of the health care debate by letting Republicans get away with their bogus claims about “death panels.” The GOP also has successfully raised concerns that the Obama plan is a big-government takeover of health care — and much of Middle America bought the idea, according to polls.

By doing so much, so fast, Obama never sufficiently educated the public on the logic behind his policies. He spent little time explaining the biggest bailouts in U.S. history, which he inherited but supported and expanded. And then he lost crucial support on the left by not following up quickly with new and stricter rules for Wall Street. On Friday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman echoed a concern widely shared among leading liberals. “I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing.”

By doing so much so fast, Obama jammed the circuits on Capitol Hill. Congress has a hard time doing even one big thing well at a time. Congress is good at passing giveaways and tax cuts, but has not enacted a transformative piece of social legislation since President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996. “There’s a reason things up here were built to go slowly,” said another Democratic aide.

By doing so doing so much, so fast, he has left voters — especially independents — worried that he got an overblown sense of his mandates and is doing, well, too much too fast. A Washington Post-ABC News poll published Friday found that independents’ confidence in Obama’s ability to make the right decisions had dropped 20 points since the Inauguration, from 61 percent to 41 percent.

Axelrod and others argue Obama had no choice but to tackle all of these issues at once. That might be true for a stimulus bill and the bank and auto bailouts — but that case is harder to make for energy and health care, which have been the focus of intense debate for decades past and probably will for decades to come.

Go-big-or-go-home isn’t the only theory of the case that a new president can adopt. The most promising alternative is to build public support over time by showing competence and success, then using that to leverage bigger things.

So imagine if Obama had focused on fixing the economy, and chosen presidential power over congressional accommodation and constructed his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a true, immediate stimulus without the pork and paybacks.

He then could have pushed through tougher regulation of financial institutions, making it clear people were paying for their sins, and would have a much harder time doing it again. This would have delighted the left and perhaps bought Obama more durable support among independents. Instead, the left thinks he’s beholden to investment banks, and much of the public sees no consequences for the financial mess.

Add in some serious budget cuts, and Obama would have positioned himself as a new kind of liberal with the courage to tame Washington and Wall Street, as promised. Under this scenario, Obama might be getting more credit for the economic recovery that appears to be under way. This would have positioned him to win health care reform starting next year — a mighty achievement, and clear vindication against the doubters. Some White House officials said they are skeptical of moving controversial bills in an election year, when lawmakers are often more timid.

White House officials say they never seriously considered a more incremental approach to the year, though they did privately discuss trying to get regulation of the financial sector done right after the stimulus bill. There was too much disagreement among Democrats at the time over how far to go with regulation to proceed.

If the current strategy fails, the same person who got much of the credit for the crisp first 100 days will get some of the blame: White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. It was Emanuel who has strongly advocated the big-bang approach, declaring during the transition: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Now, what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do.”

The confidence of Obama’s aides was bolstered by their fresh memory that a similar approach had worked very effectively for then-President George W Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. With the public on edge, Bush was able to enact restrictive policies under the banner of protecting American soil, and build an entire new department of government that voters otherwise might have opposed. The economic meltdown would be Obama’s Sept. 11 — the predicate for sweeping legislation that he wanted to enact anyway.

Just past halftime in his first year, the president has won passage of a long list of bills that the White House points to as proof of their approach. In addition to the stimulus, Obama signed major bills on tobacco, pay equity, children’s health insurance, national service and the mortgage rescue. If he gets health care and either energy or regulation this year, it would be hard to argue the big-bang plan wasn’t a success.

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), now president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, cautions that any verdict on Obama would be “kind of like judging a major surgical operation in the middle of the operation.”

With Obama reaching the defining season of his freshman year, Hamilton said the current agenda reminds him of the scale of the Great Society programs Congress was tackling when he came to Congress in 1965. “This president thinks big but I also think he acts pragmatically,” Hamilton said. “So many things in a congressional session come together at the last few hours, the last few weeks.”

But sometimes they just come undone.

Zachary Abrahamson contributed to this report.

A number of points of order: Politico says that “Congress…has not enacted a transformative piece of social legislation since President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996.” But Bill Clinton did not transform anything; it was the Republicans under the Contract with America who imposed the welfare reform of 1996 – and Bill Clinton was forced to sign the thing he subsequently took credit for.

Politico cannot stop itself from falling into blaming Republicans for their  health care demonizing.  But there is an admission that even before health care came up on Obama’s timetable, it was DEMOCRATS who were worried and frightened at the agenda: “There was too much disagreement among Democrats at the time over how far to go with regulation to proceed.” It would be nice if the mainstream media finally reported honestly and acknowledged that if health care doesn’t pass, it is because Democrats are worrying about their seats as an outraged electorate gets its revenge.

Another problem the Politico article glosses over is summed up in the statement: “By doing so much, so fast, Obama never sufficiently educated the public on the logic behind his policies.” But the issue isn’t that Obama never educated the public on the logic behind his policies; it’s that his policies don’t have any logic beyond the most superficial big-government liberalism that most Americans reject.  Other than the argument, “This is a naked power-grab intended to secure Democrat control for perpetuity,” there simply IS no argument.

There’s another point that the Politico article glosses over that emerges from the statement: “There’s a reason things up here were built to go slowly,” said another Democratic aide.” That reason is the Constitution.  We were never set up to be a fascist dictatorship or a totalitarian state disconnected from the deliberation of the people.  Our founders made us to be a nation of laws, and follow a tried-and-true process that would slow us down to avoid tyranny.

But liberals have trampled on the Constitution for years.  Too many leftist intellectuals regard it as the irrelevant product of a cadre of dead, white, sexist, slave-holding males.  Barack Obama has derided the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you.” The Constitution becomes a problem for Obama.

We have the right to assemble, but the government is not obliged to transport us to protest sites.  We have the right to speak, but the government is not required to provide us with a megaphone or a platform.  The “negative liberties” allow us our basic freedoms while preserving our individual liberties and responsibilities.  Obama wants to fundamentally do away with the Constitution in order to impose an entirely different system which creates a mega-state that will have innumerable duties to take care of us.

If he succeeds, the America that the founding fathers created will officially cease to exist.  The nanny state isn’t in the Constitution, no matter how many penumbras and emanations liberal justices might claim to see in their crystal-ball-gazing.

As for the “death panels” being a bogus claim, do you want to know where the death panels are?  They are right here:

The whole damn maze of bureaucracy is a “death panel.”  Anyone who thinks that the government will be able to expand their government health care – which is already about to go bankrupt – to tens of millions more people, and save money doing it, is a fool.  They are people who cannot see the facts through their ideology.

The Cloward-Piven strategy appears to be having a problem due to Barack Obama’s arrogance and unwillingness to continue to use the system to “get there” gradually.

The only question, given the massive debts Obama has already accumulated – deficits that literally are more than every president has accumulated from George Washington to George W. Bush, combined – is whether the Cloward-Piven strategy will yet have its chance to work.  It might already be too late.  When you look at our real national debt of more than $100 TRILLION and realize that we cannot possibly repay it, if you have any sense you should get more than a little bit concerned that our leaders simply WILL NOT control their spending.

The Democrats have an endgame: when the system collapses, the panicked people will turn to the very government that created the calamity and demand that it take care of them.  And that is precisely what big government liberals have always preached.

One thing is clear: if Obama wins his “public option” in any form, it will become the anvil that broke the camel’s back.

If Obama’s “Big Bang” doesn’t go bust, America will be the one that goes bust and ends up exploding in a big bang of debt.

Democrats Demand Private Insurers Assist In Demagoguing Themselves

Suppose I decide to target you for a demonization campaign, and rather than just go through your garbage and go through the whole process of gathering dirt on you, I just demand you provide all the dirt on yourself.  And I’ve got the full power of the government behind me.

We’re out to demagogue you, and you’d better help us.

Two House Democrats Seek Information From Insurers

WASHINGTON — Two powerful House Democrats have sent a letter to insurance companies asking them to provide detailed information about their conferences and retreats, executive pay, and other business practices.

The letter comes in the midst of a campaign by Democrats, as part of their push to build support for a health overhaul, to portray the insurance companies as the villains of the health-care system. Insurers say they are working with Congress on an overhaul and resent being cast as the bad guy.

The letter is from Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.), who heads the panel’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

More:

An industry source replied when asked for comment: “This is nothing more than a taxpayer-funded fishing expedition designed to silence health plans.”

By Sept. 4, the firms are supposed to supply detailed compensation data for board members and top executives, as well as a “table listing all conferences, retreats, or other events held outside company facilities from January 1, 2007, to the present that were paid for, reimbursed, or subsidized in whole or in part by your company.”

Democrats seem to like going “fishing” these days.  The White House set up it’s own site to collect information on Americans who said anything “fishy” about their government takeover of health care before public pressure made them alter their operation.

These Democrats have raw, naked chutzpah.  They are the kind of people who shrilly demonized CEOs for flying private planes, and only to try to spend half a billion dollars to buy the very sort of planes they demonized private businesses from using.

These rat bastards routinely go on junkets to exotic lands, never fail to give themselves more pay raises and more benefits, and then self-righteously damn private businesses for looking after their own.

Waxman is a demagogue par excellence:

“It appears that the Republican Party leadership in the Congress has made a decision that they want to deny President Obama success, which means, in my mind, they are rooting against the country, as well,” [Waxman said].

Obama is America, and Waxman is the law.  And to fail to recognize either is its own form of treason.  He is a man who has long used the power of his gavel as a club to attack his political opponents.  Whether he was spearheading constant investigations into Bush White House for pure political retribution, or whether he was going after baseball players for public circus, he has always been the same demagoguing pig.

A liberal trumpets, “Henry Waxman strikes fear in every Republican!  Woohoo!”

And right now he is trying to strike fear in every insurance company CEO to intimidate them into meekly going along with the Democrat Party’s takeover of the health care industry.

Hope you don’t complain when a “Republican Waxman” comes along to strike fear in the heart of every Democrat when Republicans take over again.  It’s what you’ll deserve, and it’s what you get if you don’t stop using the most thuggish tactics in order to impose your agenda.

This IS a fishing expedition.  These companies haven’t broken any laws; and Congress doesn’t have any right to such information (which they could actually obtain on their own online if they had the first clue how to think for themselves).  Without question, Democrats just want to obtain this information which they will use in their campaign of demagoguery to attack and humiliate private businesses in order to impose their will upon them.

Letters demanding to allow Democrats to examine executive compensation and other business practices were sent out to 52 of the largest health insurers in the country – and not to any other industry groups – in a clear effort to threaten and intimidate those companies and the industry.

Harrad Sar wrote:

This move is nothing more than a flagrant violation of the office in which Waxman and Stupak hold. There is no constitutional authority or mandate that allows congress to intimidate and threaten the private sector through arbitrary investigation of private property ownership. This is a blatant move to silence all opposition to H.R. 3200 starting at the top.

And he is exactly right.

This is simply a continuation of the Constitution-be-damned tactics that the White House and Democrats have undertaken.  First they had their “fishy” effort to use the power of the White House to turn supporters into snitches.  This was so blatantly illegal that even the hardcore partisan liberal ACLU was forced to acknowledge that “the White House blog is a ‘bad idea that could send a troublesome message.'”  Then it started sending out unsolicited political emails from the White House – in fact from White House political adviser David Axelrod – urging people to support ObamaCare.  Can you even imagine the outcry of “constitutional crisis” that would have ensued had Karl Rove sent out unsolicited White House emails urging people to support the Iraq War?  And now Democrats are seriously talking about using budget reconciliation in a flagrantly unconstitutional manner: the Constitution requires that the federal government pass a budget, which is the only reason why the reconciliation process exists.  The Constitution does NOT require Congress to pass government health care.

Obama has been using thuggish tactics from the getgo of his administration.

An article entitled “A Study in Contrast” demonstrates the profound differences between the way that the Bush administration dealt with its critics versus the “Chicago thug” style Obama has taken.

Allahpundit points out:

The One can’t stop demagoging his critics for the simple reason that his image won’t allow it. As the risen Christ of American politics, his agenda is ipso facto good and just; treating his critics’ concerns as valid instead of the ravings of a lunatic mob would be like Jesus telling Satan, “Well, you’ve got a point there.” The whole Hopenchange mythos is at its core demagoguery.

Nancy Pelosi described ordinary Americans as “un-American” for exercising their rights of free speech and free assembly.  But she, Henry Waxman, and Democrats are the ones who are truly un-American.  Because they are using tactics right out of the classic book of fascism to impose their will on a country that obviously does not want what the Democrats are trying to impose by force.