Liar-In-Chief Obama Distorts Ronald Reagan As A ‘Wild-Eyed, Socialist, Tax-Hiking Class Warrior.’ Versus the Truth.

Even CBS wouldn’t buy Obama’s latest whopper of a lie:

CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley was barely able to contain his laughter Wednesday night after playing a clip of President Obama invoking Ronald Reagan on behalf of his “Buffett Rule” tax hike quest. Nearly breaking into a laugh, a baffled Pelley wondered to CBS News political analyst John Dickerson: “So a vote for President Obama is a vote for Ronald Reagan?!”Dickerson snickered too. (Watch the video to see Pelley’s puzzled reaction.)

[The video is available at the above link].

Oliver Knox goes a little bit further to point out in his Yahoo News analysis that Barack Obama literally points a finger at Barack Obama and screams, “You lie!” to HIMSELF.

Today’s Republicans might view Ronald Reagan as a “wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior,” and the late conservative icon’s views on taxes might have disqualified him from the party’s nomination in 2012, President Barack Obama said Wednesday.

Obama, defending his “Buffett Rule” call for higher taxes on the very rich, said in a speech that he was “not the first president to call for this idea that everybody has got to do their fair share.” He went on to say:

Some years ago, one of my predecessors traveled across the country pushing for the same concept. He gave a speech where he talked about a letter he had received from a wealthy executive who paid lower tax rates than his secretary, and wanted to come to Washington and tell Congress why that was wrong. So this president gave another speech where he said it was “crazy”—that’s a quote—that certain tax loopholes make it possible for multimillionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary. That wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior was Ronald Reagan.

He thought that, in America, the wealthiest should pay their fair share, and he said so. I know that position might disqualify him from the Republican primaries these days, but what Ronald Reagan was calling for then is the same thing that we’re calling for now: a return to basic fairness and responsibility; everybody doing their part. And if it will help convince folks in Congress to make the right choice, we could call it the Reagan Rule instead of the Buffett Rule.

Yet Reagan also championed the very same “trickle-down” economics that Obama has roundly denounced—the idea that tax cuts for the wealthy lead to investment that generates growth and thereby jobs. Obama on Tuesday described this economic policy in harsh terms, saying its supporters “don’t seem to understand how it is that America got built.”

“In this country, prosperity has never trickled down from the wealthy few,” he said. “Prosperity has always come from the bottom up, from a strong and growing middle class.”

Obama lumped trickle-down economics among “old broken-down theories” that he blamed for the 2008 global economic meltdown.

The Blaze further points out that Obama’s demagogic claiming of the Reagan mantle gets even more warped, pointing out:

The comparison is equally confounding when you consider President Reagan’s historic tax reform:

The video comes from Ronald Reagan speaking at the signing ceremony for his 1986 Tax Reform Act.  What exactly did Reagan say that Obama can cling to?

Ronald Reagan, speaking at signing ceremony for Tax Reform Act, October 22, 1986

Thank you all, please be seated. Well, thank you, and welcome to the White House. In a moment I’ll be sitting at that desk, taking up a pen, and signing the most sweeping overhaul of our tax code in our nation’s history. To all of you here today who’ve worked so long and hard to see this day come, my thanks and the thanks of a nation go out to you.
 
The journey’s been long, and many said we’d never make it to the end. But as usual the pessimists left one thing out of their calculations: the American people. They haven’t made this the freest country and the mightiest economic force on this planet by shrinking from challenges. They never gave up. And after almost 3 years of commitment and hard work, one headline in the Washington Post told the whole story: “The Impossible Became the Inevitable,” and the dream of America’s fair-share tax plan became a reality.
 
When I sign this bill into law, America will have the lowest marginal tax rates and the most modern tax code among major industrialized nations, one that encourages risk-taking, innovation, and that old American spirit of enterprise. We’ll be refueling the American growth economy with the kind of incentives that helped create record new businesses and nearly 11.7 million jobs in just 46 months. Fair and simpler for most Americans, this is a tax code designed to take us into a future of technological invention and economic achievement, one that will keep America competitive and growing into the 21st century.
 
But for all tax reform’s economic benefits, I believe that history will record this moment as something more: as the return to the first principles. This country was founded on faith in the individual, not groups or classes, but faith in the resources and bounty of each and every separate human soul. Our Founding Fathers designed a democratic form of government to enlist the individual’s energies and fashioned a Bill of Rights to protect its freedoms. And in so doing, they tapped a wellspring of hope and creativity that was to completely transform history.
 
The history of these United States of America is indeed a history of individual achievement. It was their hard work that built our cities and farmed our prairies; their genius that continually pushed us beyond the boundaries of existing knowledge, reshaping our world with the steam engine, polio vaccine, and the silicon chip. It was their faith in freedom and love of country that sustained us through trials and hardships and through wars, and it was their courage and selflessness that enabled us to always prevail.
 
But when our Founding Fathers designed this government-of, by, and for the people-they never imagined what we’ve come to know as the progressive income tax. When the income tax was first levied in 1913, the top rate was only 7 percent on people with incomes over $500,000. Now, that’s the equivalent of multi-millionaires today. But in our lifetime we’ve seen marginal tax rates skyrocket as high as 90 percent, and not even the poor have been spared. As tax rates escalated, the tax code grew ever more tangled and complex, a haven for special interests and tax manipulators, but an impossible frustration for everybody else. Blatantly unfair, our tax code became a source of bitterness and discouragement for the average taxpayer. It wasn’t too much to call it un-American.
 
Meanwhile, the steeply progressive nature of the tax struck at the heart of the economic life of the individual, punishing that special effort and extra hard work that has always been the driving force of our economy. As government’s hunger for ever more revenues expanded, families saw tax cuts-or taxes, I should say, cut deeper and deeper into their paychecks; and taxation fell most cruelly on the poor, making a difficult climb up from poverty even harder. Throughout history, the oppressive hand of government has fallen most heavily on the economic life of the individuals. And more often than not, it is inflation and taxes that have undermined livelihoods and constrained their freedoms. We should not forget that this nation of ours began in a revolt against oppressive taxation. Our Founding Fathers fought not only for our political rights but also to secure the economic freedoms without which these political freedoms are no more than a shadow.
 
In the last 20 years we’ve witnessed an expansion and strengthening of many of our civil liberties, but our economic liberties have too often been neglected and even abused. We protect the freedom of expression of the author, as we should, but what of the freedom of expression of the entrepreneur, whose pen and paper are capital and profits, whose book may be a new invention or small business? What of the creators of our economic life, whose contributions may not only delight the mind but improve the condition of man by feeding the poor with new grains, bringing hope to the sick with new cures, vanishing ignorance with wondrous new information technologies? 

And what about fairness for families? It’s in our families that America’s most important work gets done: raising our next generation. But over the last 40 years, as inflation has shrunk the personal exemption, families with children have had to shoulder more and more of the tax burden. With inflation and bracket-creep also eroding incomes, many spouses who would rather stay home with their children have been forced to go looking for jobs. And what of America’s promise of hope and opportunity, that with hard work even the poorest among us can gain the security and happiness that is the due of all Americans? You can’t put a price tag on the American dream. That dream is the heart and soul of America; it’s the promise that keeps our nation forever good and generous, a model and hope to the world.
 
For all these reasons, this tax bill is less a freedom-or a reform, I should say, than a revolution. Millions of working poor will be dropped from the tax rolls altogether, and families will get a long-overdue break with lower rates and an almost doubled personal exemption. We’re going to make it economical to raise children again. Flatter rates will mean more reward for that extra effort, and vanishing loopholes and a minimum tax will mean that everybody and every corporation pay their fair share. And that’s why I’m certain that the bill I’m signing today is not only an historic overhaul of our tax code and a sweeping victory for fairness, it’s also the best antipoverty bill, the best profamily measure, and the best job-creation program ever to come out of the Congress of the United States.
 
And now that we’ve come this far, we cannot, and we will not, allow tax reform to be undone with tax rate hikes. We must restore certainty to our tax code and our economy. And I’ll oppose with all my might any attempt to raise tax rates on the American people and I hope that all here will join with me to make permanent the historic progress of tax reform.  I think all of us here today know what a Herculean effort it took to get this landmark bill to my desk.  That effort didn’t start here in Washington, but began with the many thinkers who have struggled to return economics to its classical roots-to an understanding that ultimately the economy is not made up of aggregates like government spending and consumer demand, but of individual men and women, each striving to provide for his family and better his or her lot in life.
 
But we must also salute those courageous leaders in the Congress who’ve made this day possible. To Bob Packwood, Dan Rostenkowski, Russell Long, John Duncan, and Majority Leader Bob Dole; to Jack Kemp, Bob Kasten, Bill Bradley, and Dick Gephardt, who pioneered with their own versions of tax reform-I salute all of you and all the other Members of the Senate and House whose efforts paid off and whose votes finally won the day. And last but not least, the many members of the administration who must often have felt that they were fighting a lonely battle against overwhelming odds-particularly my two incomparable Secretaries of the Treasury, Don Regan and Jim Baker-and I thank them from the bottom of my heart. I feel like we just played the World Series of tax reform- [laughter] -and the American people won.

Barack Obama is the most conniving and dishonest weasel to ever occupy (or should I capitalize that word to denote the Occupy Movement that are serving as Obama’s brown shirts today?) the White House.

If Ronald Reagan were alive today he would walk up to Obama after his incredibly slanderous and dishonest words, slap him right in the face, and say, “How DARE you?” But genuine and profound coward that he is, Obama goes after the legacy of a dead man rather than all the men Reagan named who are still alive to defend the record.

For the factual record to correct Obama’s lies, everything that Reagan said was in perfect harmony with the principle I expressed in the title of one of my articles: “Tax Cuts INCREASE Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues.”

Reagan repeatedly referenced the menace of inflation in his speech.  I had the following to say about Jimmy Carter versus Reagan and by extension Reagan versus Barack Obama:

The numbers told the sad story of the Jimmy Carter presidency: interest rates of 21%; inflation at 13.5%, and an unemployment rate of 7%. And a relatively new economic device called “the misery index” – the combination of the unemployment and inflation rates which Carter had himself used to great effect in his 1976 campaign to win election – was at a shocking 20.5%.

And those who went through those dark and difficult times may soon be looking back to that period as “the good old days.”

Welcome back, Carter.

When Ronald Reagan took office from Jimmy Carter, inflation was at a meteoric 13.3% and the country was in the throes of a fierce recession. There was a real question as to whether workers’ wages would keep up with the costs of living, which made people afraid to either spend or save. And nobody knew how to control inflation – which had risen from 1.4% in 1960 to the aforementioned 13.3% in 1980 – causing a real erosion of confidence in the future. Jimmy Carter answered a reporter’s question as to what he would do about the problem of inflation by answering, “It would be misleading for me to tell any of you that there is a solution to it.”

But Ronald Reagan had a solution. And by the time he left office, he had solved the problem of creeping inflation increases and had actually reversed the trend: he left behind a healthy inflation rate of 4.1%.

Reagan’s policies set the trajectory for growth that would last for 20 years.

And the only thing that could truly destroy the fruit of Reagan’s policies was the coming of another Jimmy Carter.

That’s exactly what we’ve got in Barack Obama: a dishonest and Marxist version of Jimmy Carter.  And everything that Reagan accomplished refutes Barack Obama, Barack Obama’s economic plan and pretty much everything about Barack Obama.

Jimmy Carter’s policies gave us shocking inflation and a catastrophic misery index; Ronald Reagan’s policies saved America from a monster that Jimmy Carter could not understand and acknowledged he had no solution for.

Now let’s consider the shocking inflation that Barack Obama has cursed America with:

Obama loves the poor: that’s why he’s created so damn many of them.

In the God damn America of Barack Obama, the poor people that Obama promised his policies would save are (of course) unable to buy a house while watching their rents skyrocket.

They could live in their cars, but damn it’s too expensive for them to pay the regressive tax of Obama’s gas prices.

Of course, it used to be that you could always at least find a minimum wage job to help make ends meet – but Obama in his abundant compassion kept millions from that kind of drear and drudgery.

The thing is, Michelle Obama would never say, “Let them eat cake” and is frankly offended that cake is being wasted on the proletariat who clearly don’t deserve cake until November when it’s time to vote again.

There is a shocking increase in food prices:

As is often the case, there is a big difference between what the government statistics are reporting and what’s going on in the real world. According to the most recent inflation reading published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), consumer prices grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% in August.

The government has an incentive to distort CPI numbers, for reasons such as keeping the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security payments low. While there’s no question that you may be able to get a good deal on a new car or a flat-screen TV today, how often are you really buying these things? When you look at the real costs of everyday life, prices have risen sharply over the last year. For simplicity’s sake, consider the cash market prices on some basic commodities.

On average, our basic food costs have increased by an incredible 48% over the last year (measured by wheat, corn, oats, and canola prices). From the price at the pump to heating your stove, energy costs are up 23% on average (heating oil, gasoline, natural gas). A little protein at dinner is now 39% higher (beef and pork), and your morning cup of coffee with a little sugar has risen by 36% since last October.

And of course Reagan also talked about how his policies would ultimately benefit the poor.  Did you notice that first link in the article above, which documented that Barack Obama has given America the highest poverty in 52 years??? 

The poor need Reagan; but they are cursed with Obama.

The same day I wrote the above article I had stuff to add in about other ways Obama has created inflation and hurt the poor.

I pointed out previously that “Everyone But Obama And Obama’s Fed Knows That Prices Are Rising Drastically.”

And I pointed out some facts after Obama’s state of the disaster speech about the “REAL State Of The Union: Under Obama, Price of Gas Has Jumped 83 Percent, Ground Beef 24 Percent, Bacon 22 Percent.”

Under Obama, fully 85% of businesses say America under Obama is on the wrong track.

Going back to the years that Carter waged war on the American economy, the misery index has been the HIGHEST EVER under Obama’s failed leadership.

Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner points out that at anything remotely beyond the most superficial level, Obama’s lie fails the laugh test:

Yes, it’s true that on June 28, 1985, Reagan gave a speech to Bloom High School in Chicago Heights, Illinois about problems with the tax code in which he told an anecdote about an executive who was paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. But if you read the whole speech, it’s clear that Reagan was telling the story as part of his pitch for tax reform.

In that same Reagan speech that Obama is demagoguing, Reagan explained precisely what he meant when he brought up the issue of tax rates and “fairness”:

It stands to reason that the more complex our tax code is, the more open it is to abuse. So, we’re making it simple to make it fair. America’s tax plan will do away with special breaks for a few so we can lower the tax rates for all. Our simpler, three-bracket design will assure that no American pays one penny more than his fair share.

Phillip Klein continues, pointing out:

So there are several key differences with Obama. To start, Reagan was talking about simplifying the tax code, whereas Obama’s Buffett Rule would add another layer of complexity. Reagan was arguing for allowing people to keep more of their own money and reduce the burden of government. By contrast, Obama is arguing for instituting the Buffett Rule so that more money is available to pay for government programs.

Reagan’s push for tax reform helped lead to landmark reform legislation the following year that broadened the tax base, consolidated the nation’s 14 brackets into just two and lowered the top marginal income tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent. This is actually pretty close to the framework that Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., outlined in the House GOP budget and couldn’t be more far off from Obama’s Buffett Rule gimmick.

And, yes, Ronald Reagan in the 1980s talked about simplifying the tax code, lowering rates across the board and eliminating myriad and byzantine deductions.

How DARE Barack Obama so thoroughly disrespect the legacy of Ronald Reagan and try to slanderously steal the credibility that Reagan EARNED by standing for everything that Obama has stood against???

Fact-Checking Obama’s Bogus Bullpuckey Stimulus Claims

Obama’s fearmongering Congress into rushing the stimulus through so fast that no one in Congress could even read it was utterly demagogic.  His continuous dishonest claims since about the “success” of this pork-ridden slush fund have been deceitful and despicable.

Obama doesn’t just lie, he tells giant lies.  Big Lies, to cite a phrase from history.

Here’s one of the Big Lies that Obama told during his stimulus anniversary media blitzkrieg:

“And economists from across the political spectrum warned that if dramatic action was not taken to break the back of the recession, the United States could spiral into another depression.”

But Obama’s claim that economists “across the political spectrum” had sided with him was an utterly contemptible lie a year ago, and it is an even bigger lie now.  Last February I preserved the following.  Please note the title:

With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

And there were a whopping load of economists who signed on to that statement – at least a couple hundred, just at a glance.

That’s 200 economists saying, “YOU LIE!”

The truth was rather this: “‘Economists across the Spectrum’ Continue to Flee Stimulus bill.”

Obama supporters provided exactly two names of conservatives whom they claimed constituted their “across the spectrum.”  Both claims were bogus.

Another Big Lie was the invention of the never-before-seen category of “saved or created” jobs.  It’s a load of rotting baloney.  Harvard economics Professor Gregory Mankiw has said, “There is no way to measure how many jobs are saved.” Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University has said “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason: how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?” If George Bush had EVER tried to use this same “saved or created” category, he would have been simultaneously mocked as a fool and attacked as a criminal who was trying to deliberately deceive the American people.  But a liberal Democrat did it, so the mainstream media has merely duly reported the totally-made-up self-serving “statistic” as though it weren’t a frankly horrifying lie.

Now, according to a CBS/New York Times poll, only six percent of the people believe that the stimulus has actually created any jobs:

No matter what the truth is about the stimulus act, public perception is the real battle Democrats have to fight politically as 2010 elections loom. And they are fighting that battle hard, based on the amount of e-mail traffic and stimulus promoting events Democrats are holding across the country today. It’s not going to be easy based on a CBS News/New York Times poll released last week that showed just 6 percent of the American public thinks the stimulus created jobs. Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steele ran with that figure yesterday saying that more people believe that Elvis is still alive than believe the stimulus is working.

For the record, Michael Steele is correct: 7% believe that Elvis is alive.  About the same percentage who believe space aliens anally probed them, I imagine.

Unfortunately, that six percent largely consist of the mainstream media.

It’s nice to see someone in the media take him on over some of his claims, particularly an economist with the prestige of a John Lott.  He apparently limits his takedown to the content provided during one particular interview.  But it is still a devastating, point-by-point, presentation of an administration that could care less about the truth, or about reality:

Updated February 19, 2010
Fact Checking Team Obama’s Stimulus Claims
By John Lott
– FOXNews.com

A look at what the White House said about the stimulus and what they didn’t say…

On Wednesday, Fox News Channel’s Bill Hemmer interviewed Austan Goolsbee, the chief economist for the White House Recovery Board, on the one-year anniversary of the stimulus.

Here is a simple fact check of Mr. Goolsbee’s claims:

Hemmer: “What does the White House predict a year from now?”

Goolsbee: Let’s remember, you’re citing the claim that the unemployment rate wouldn’t go above 8 percent, but if you remember in that same projection they said that if we didn’t pass the stimulus it would only go to 9 percent, and it was above that before the stimulus even came into effect. What the administration and everyone else missed was the depth of the recession that was in place at the end of 2008 and at the beginning of 2009 when the President came into office.

In April, President Obama was busy touting the stimulus as having “already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.” Press releases from the administration were already being sent out claiming saved jobs on April 1. Even well before that, on January 25, Lawrence Summers, Obama’s chief economic adviser, promised that the benefits from the stimulus bill would be seen “within weeks” after passage. Yet, despite Mr. Goolsbee’s claim, the unemployment rate did not rise above 9 percent until May, well after these claimed jobs were supposedly being created.

As for the statement that the president was “surprised” by how bad the economy was, during his first radio address to the nation on Jan. 24, Obama claimed, “We begin this year and this administration in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that calls for unprecedented action.” In Obama’s first national press conference he talked about the United States finding itself in a crisis *12 times* and also took pains to emphasize that it was an “unprecedented crisis.” Given that the unemployment rate in 1983 reached 10.7 percent, if the president believed that we were indeed in an “unprecedented crisis” or at least the worst shape since the Great Depression, it is hard to see how the unemployment numbers could surprise him or those on his team.

The Obama administration has frequently claimed that they didn’t realize how bad the GDP numbers for the 4th quarter 2008 were when their first unemployment predictions were released, but the February 28 estimates were released well after the GDP numbers were out.

Mr. Goolsbee states that the economy was worse than he expected it to be. But there is another alternative explanation and that is that the stimulus created higher unemployment. In fact, my columns in this space predicted that during at the beginning of February 2009 that would be the case. Moving around a trillion dollars from areas where people would have spent it to areas where the government wants to spend it will move a lot of jobs away from those firms that are losing the money to those who are now favored by the government. Since people won’t instantly move from one job to another, there will be a temporary increase in unemployment.

But there’s still more. Here’s this from Hemmer’s interview:

Hemmer: “So you are saying that you are standing by the numbers and you guys were right all along.”

Goolsbee: What I’m saying is that the impact of the stimulus is very much what they predicted it to be. What they missed — and what everyone missed — was the depth of the baseline that was in place as the president came into office, yes.

Two graphs illustrate Obama’s promises versus what actually happened. Whether one uses the president’s predictions when he came into office or his later predictions as provided on February 28, the actual unemployment rate lies well above either of those predictions.

See the figure here.

If one looks at both the number of people unemployed and the number who have left the labor force, “I can’t see any [employment] benefit from the stimulus,” Professor Stephen Bronars, a labor economist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me.

See the figure here.

And then there’s this from Hemmer’s interview with Goolsbee:

Hemmer: [What if you] Use the unspent stimulus of $514 billion to pay down the national debt?

Goolsbee: Well, Bill, I got to tell you when the people who burned down the back half of the house are complaining about how much it costs to rebuild it, I think we’re in a bit of a strange spot. As you know, the deficit was projected, before the president took office, to be $1.3 trillion, and that’s because we were teetering on the edge of a depression and we needed to put the focus — as we did — on getting us away from the abyss. If we hadn’t done that the deficit would be catastrophically worse even than it is this year and than it was projected to be when the president came in. We should not reverse the second half of the stimulus. It’s needed to get us out of the woods. Look out the window, the unemployment rate is near 10 percent. Now, the stimulus was never capable of restoring the 8 million jobs hole that was created by the recession beginning in 2007. It did part of it and the private sector needs to the rest.

During the middle of October, 2008, after the bailout bill had been passed, then-Senator Obama claimed (during the third presidential debate): “we are now looking at a deficit of well over half a trillion dollars.” Virtually all of the huge 2009 budget deficit of $1.4 trillion has been blamed on the Bush administration — as if Mr. Obama’s $862 billion stimulus (over two years) and his $410 billion supplemental spending bill in March had nothing to do with it. Mr. Obama also asked for $350 billion in TARP money to be released by the Bush administration immediately before he entered the White House. Bush had no plans to spend that money, but, by releasing it before he took office, Mr. Obama is able to claim that the spending should be counted towards the Bush administration.

Then there was this:

Hemmer pointed out that the White House is starting a pushing to focus on the deficit. Isn’t that a contradiction from this administration?

Here’s the response:

Goolsbee: [No.] Because you’re getting confused between the short term and the long term. What we need is to put a focus on deficit reduction in the long term. Everyone agrees with that, [and] the president wants to put a focus [on it]. The reason the budget commission failed, as you know, is because 7 Republicans that sponsored the bill turned around and voted against it when it became clear it was going to pass.

Actually, it isn’t clear how the administration can blame Republicans for the defeat of the budget commission. Democrats controlled 60 seats in the Senate at the time, and they could have approved the commission without a single Republican vote. Sixteen Republicans did vote for the commission (along with 37 Democrats), but 23 Democrats and 23 Republicans voted against the commission. The Republicans voted against it because they worried that the commission would rely heavily on new — and higher — taxes to reduce the deficit.

This came next…

Hemmer noted that a new CBS News/New York Times poll shows that only 6 percent of Americans think that the stimulus has created jobs and 48 percent think that it will never create jobs.

Goolsbee: Well, look, that may be true. I’m just a policy guy. I’m not an expert on spinning and convincing. What I would say is if you go get the data from the private sector forecasters, from the non-partisan congressional budget, or you look at Recovery.gov or the reports coming out of the Council of Economic Advisers, you see they are all hovering around the creating or saving of 2 million jobs thus far. And so the key is [that] the hole was extremely deep. This brought us part of the way up out of this abyss hole. But we need to do more. The president has never said that this is sufficient.

It is a bit of an exaggeration that everyone is in agreement with these claims. Cary Leahey, an economist and senior managing director with Decision Economics, one of the forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal, provided me with one explanation for why the stimulus increased unemployment: “With transitional moves in government spending [from the stimulus], there will be dislocations in the economy that will lead to higher unemployment.” But he emphasized that he thought those effects would be “short-lived, six to nine months, definitely not more than a year.” Of the other three sources, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, or if you look at recovery.gov or the reports coming out of the Council of Economic Advisers, all are controlled by Democrats.

Then there was this…

Hemmer raised the point that only two places in the country have gained jobs during the last year: North Dakota and Washington, D.C.

Goolsbee: Well, certainly, if they’re going to be treated to the kind of rationale that you’re describing, it’s going to be very tough. But if you look at what, as I’m trying to describe, the recession began in 2007 – 8 million jobs were lost. If you restore 2 million jobs, that’s 2 million people who are at work, who would have been out of work had we not done that. But that doesn’t fill the entire 8 million hole. And so for you to say they only created jobs in North Dakota, you’re making the mistake of saying, well, the stimulus should have created more than 8 million jobs or else it didn’t have an impact. But that’s just logically incorrect.

Mr. Goolsbee simply isn’t answering Hemmer’s question. Hemmer was asking about the change in jobs since the beginning of last year to evaluate the impact of the stimulus, while Goolsbee is also discussing job losses from the end of 2007. There was nothing “logically incorrect” with Hemmer’s question.

There is also a simple math error in Mr. Goolsbee’s statement. He claims that things would have been even worse than the 8 million drop in jobs if the stimulus hadn’t been passed. What he may have meant to say is that without the stimulus 10 million jobs would have been lost (the 8 million that were lost plus the 2 million that were saved by the stimulus and would have been lost without it). But if the Obama administration really believes this, the unemployment rate in January would have been 11 percent, not 9.7 percent, and the Obama administration never predicted that the unemployment rate would go to 11 percent without the stimulus.

In any case, Goolsbee’s reluctance to explain why jobs, since the beginning of last year, have only increased in the District Columbia, where a lot of government jobs have been created, and North Dakota is understandable.

John R. Lott, Jr. is a FoxNews.com contributor. He is an economist and author of “Freedomnomics.”

The first article that Lott linked to in the link titled “” has the following graph.  I leave you with it, as it pretty much shows at a glance just what a whopping load of failure Obama’s trillion dollar stimulus truly was:

Contrary To Obama Democrats’ Demagogic Lies About Private Insurerer Profits

Do you want to have one-sixth of the economy – and literally life and death decisions – to be taken over based on lies and demagoguery?  If not, you’d better start calling your elected officials and demanding that Democrats finally start dealing with facts rather than demagogic lies.

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON — In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making “immoral” and “obscene” returns while “the bodies pile up.”

But in pillorying insurers over profits, the critics are on shaky ground. Ledgers tell a different reality.

Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.

Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans.

Insurers are an expedient target for leaders who want a government-run plan in the marketplace. Such a public option would force private insurers to trim profits and restrain premiums to compete, the argument goes. This would “keep insurance companies honest,” says President Barack Obama.

The debate is loaded with intimations that insurers are less than straight, when they are not flatly accused of malfeasance.

The insurers may not have helped their case by commissioning a report that looked primarily at the elements of health care legislation that might drive consumer costs up while ignoring elements aimed at bringing costs down. Few in the debate seem interested in a true balance sheet.

A look at some claims, and the numbers:

THE CLAIMS:

_“I’m very pleased that (Democratic leaders) will be talking, too, about the immoral profits being made by the insurance industry and how those profits have increased in the Bush years.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who also welcomed the attention being drawn to insurers’ “obscene profits.”

_“Keeping the status quo may be what the insurance industry wants. Their premiums have more than doubled in the last decade and their profits have skyrocketed.” Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, member of the Democratic leadership.

_”Health insurance companies are willing to let the bodies pile up as long as their profits are safe.” A MoveOn.org ad.

THE NUMBERS:

Health insurers posted a 2.2 percent profit margin last year, placing them 35th on the Fortune 500 list of top industries. As is typical, other health sectors did much better — drugs and medical products and services were both in the top 10.

The railroads brought in a 12.6 percent profit margin. Leading the list: network and other communications equipment, at 20.4 percent.

HealthSpring, the best performer in the health insurance industry, posted 5.4 percent. That’s a less profitable margin than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach and Molson and Coors beers.

The star among the health insurance companies did, however, nose out Jack in the Box restaurants, which only achieved a 4 percent margin.

UnitedHealth Group, reporting third quarter results last week, saw fortunes improve. It managed a 5 percent profit margin on an 8 percent growth in revenue.

Van Hollen is right that premiums have more than doubled in a decade, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study that found a 131 percent increase.

But were the Bush years golden ones for health insurers?

Not judging by profit margins, profit growth or returns to shareholders. The industry’s overall profits grew only 8.8 percent from 2003 to 2008, and its margins year to year, from 2005 forward, never cracked 8 percent.

The latest annual profit margins of a selection of products, services and industries: Tupperware Brands, 7.5 percent; Yahoo, 5.9 percent; Hershey, 6.1 percent; Clorox, 8.7 percent; Molson Coors Brewing, 8.1 percent; construction and farm machinery, 5 percent; Yum Brands (think KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell), 8.5 percent.

Half of Americans are actually covered by not-for-profit insurers.

A pro-liberal, pro-government universal health care proponent has the following:

But this is not “change.” Nonprofit organizations have always had an important role in the financing and delivery of health care services in the United States. Nonprofit health care organizations are part of the U.S. economy’s “third sector,” the other two sectors are government and for-profit businesses. In the early 1900s the first health care prepayment/insurance plan was founded as a nonprofit organization—Blue Cross—by a nonprofit hospital in Texas. Today, nearly 50 percent of people with private health insurance coverage are enrolled in nonprofit health plans.

Unfortunately, the strong and persistent presence of private nonprofit health insurance companies has not prevented any of the structural problems leading to our current health care crisis.

So the Democrats are deceitfully and demagogically claiming that insurance companies are the villains due to their “excessive” and “immoral” profits when in fact they DON’T have such profits – and HALF of them are NON-PROFITS – and they are offering a “solution” to a problem which isn’t even part of the problem to begin with.

I’m sorry to have to point out that what the Democrats are doing is right out of Adolf Hitler’s and Joseph Goebbels’ playbook, but it is.  They are telling lies about innocent companies.  They are deceitfully trying to create villains using propaganda and demagoguery so that they can then impose their “final solution” onto one-sixth of the national economy.

The clearest one sentence explanation of the result of the Democrats’ health care agenda comes from the mouth of Obama economic adviser Robert Reich:

“… So we’re going to let you die.”

The so-called “crazy claims” about death panels turn out to be all too real.

Democrats claim that you can keep your private health insurance if you want to.  It’s a lie.  And they know it’s a lie.

Their real goal is to put health care under total government control, so that they have the power to reward their allies and punish their opponents.  They are using their current legislation as a backdoor to universal, socialized, government-controlled health care.  And again, when they say that isn’t true, their own words reveal their lies.

Right now, Democrats are trying to take over life and death decisions.  And they are the documented liars.  Trust them at your peril.

The Obama Media’s Dishonest Attempt To Smear Rush Limbaugh

Barack Obama’s White House Communications Director said that Fox News is not a legitimate news organization.  Apparently, in order to BE a “legitimate” news organization, a media outlet must engage in leftwing propaganda, demagoguery and lies.

Anita Dunn went on to say:

“They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

The news organization that determined itself to fact check an SNL sketch critical of Barack Obama – after having done absolutely nothing to verify the accuracy of weekly withering attacks on Sarah Palin throughout the presidential campaign that went on and on for months – is what passes for “legitimate” today.

And, it turns out, reporting flat-out lies and character assassinations against a conservative without bothering to perform even the most rudimentary check of the sources is what passes for “legitimate” today.  Amazingly, the network that “fact-checked” an SNL comedy sketch refused to engage in the most rudimentary of fact checking before smearing Rush Limbaugh.

Stop and consider: only days after looking like the in-the-Obama-tank-propagandists they truly are for “fact-checking” Saturday Night Live, and the VERY NEXT DAY following Obama’s White House Communications Director demonizing Fox News and holding up CNN as the model of legitimate journalism, CNN YET AGAIN proved how biased and in fact dishonest it truly is.

CNN joined MSNBC in “quoting” Rush Limbaugh to effect that he is a racist.  And as a result of these “bigoted remarks,” Rush Limbaugh was thrown out of an ownership package to purchase the St. Louis Rams.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez did the following:

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez read a disputed racist quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh about antebellum slavery on Monday’s Newsroom: “Limbaugh’s perceived racist diatribes are too many to name. Here’s a sample- he once declared that ‘slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back. I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.’”

And that certainly wasn’t all that Rick Sanchez said.  Go to the link for more, and for the embedded video of the “reporting.”

Now, Rick Sanchez is a very different creature than, let’s say, Glenn Beck.  Rick Sanchez is paid to be a journalist, and in fact a NEWS ANCHOR.  Fox News’ Glenn Beck, by stark contrast, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Fox News’ news division.  He offers OPINION and analysis.  There’s a fundamental difference.  News anchors are supposed to report the facts, and ONLY the facts.  Fox News distinctly separates their journalists from their commentators.  Few other networks bother.

But that’s not all.  I mean, think about it.  Sanchez all but labels Rush Limbaugh as a racist, and says Limbaugh’s “perceived racist diatribes are too many to name.”  And as PROOF of that claim, he then proceeds to offer unsubstantiated LIES as his “evidence.”

Here are a couple of other “statements” by Rush Limbaugh and their “source” which were uncritically offered by Obama’s “legitimate news networks” as fact:

Here are two quotes attributed to Limbaugh in a 2006 book, 101 People Who Are Really Screwing America, by Jack Huberman.

• “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray (Dr. King’s assassin). We miss you, James. Godspeed.”
• “Let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: Slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back. I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.”

Well, it turns out that Huberman’s “source” was a Wikiquote that appeared, and then was later removed.  Rush Limbaugh has decades of audio available, and he has never said these things.

Such was the “reporting” of the mainstream media.  So much for their “legitimacy.”

Media Research Center President Brent Bozell issued the following statement:

“CNN and MSNBC must immediately and publicly source when Limbaugh uttered this phrase. He has unequivocally denied it. Now it is up to the same news media that reported it as fact to prove that it was, indeed, stated. […]

“Either Rush Limbaugh is lying or these networks – willfully or not – are participants in the worst form of character assassination imaginable.   They can prove their innocence by documenting this accusation. If they can’t, then they are 100% guilty of character assassination.

And what was the conclusion of this false and malicious reporting, in what amounted to an obvious act of character assassination?

First MSNBC ‘fessed up with a non-apology:

DAVID SHUSTER: And Tamron, speaking of influence, we do have an update involving talk show host Rush Limbaugh and the controversy over his effort to help buy an NFL football team. Limbaugh denies he said quote, ‘slavery has its merits,’ it was a quote that appeared on MSNBC this past Monday and Tuesday. MSNBC attributed that quote to a football player who was opposed to Limbaugh’s NFL bid. However, we have been unable to verify that quote independently. So, just to clarify.

Then Rick Sanchez of CNN offered a similar non-apology apology:

Earlier this week we provided quotes attributed to Rush Limbaugh to illustrate why some people and players felt that Limbaugh was too divisive to be an NFL owner.

One of these quotes, which was in a column in the St. Louis Post Dispatch and in a book largely about conservatives, was refuted by Limbaugh. We have been unable to independently confirm that quote.

We should not have reported it and for that, I apologize. I feel it is important to hold folks accountable when they make mistakes, and that should include myself and my team.

Sorry we tried to destroy you.  Our mistake.  And we can assure you that it won’t happen again until next time.  The tone of the “apologies” was that the networks were trying to illustrate something that they wanted you to continue to think was still true, but due to some minor glitch they merely happened to use false facts to prove it.

Virtually everything they reported were lies.

There’s a little more to say.  Newsbusters reported this:

During Wednesday’s Morning Joe program on MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough warned of false Limbaugh quotes being touted by his own network: “And a lot of those comments were actually not true.  The quotes that we heard the most of, the people we interviewed on our shows came with articles, waving articles with quotes – completely made up.  And Mike Barnicle, the dangerous thing is, that the media just flew right into it.”

So the media outlet that features Keith Olbermann and the media outlet that fact checks SNL sketches for one political party “just flew into” a demagogic propaganda campaign that was literally right of of the Coach Joseph Goebbels playbook.

And those are the “legitimate” networks for Barack Hussein Obama, a man who has taken his own cues right out of the Nixonian “enemies list” to attack and damage a privately owned company and a member of the press that has constitutional rights.  Rather than respect those rights, the Obama White House has used taxpayer dollars to attack a major news organization.

I can’t end this without pointing out that it is a fact that Barack Obama’s Communications Director is a self-acknowledged Marxist.  And Marxists have never once in history been kind to a free and fair press.

I also can’t end it without saying that if you want to see what documented racism and bigotry that ought to be exposed really looks like, you should go to Barack Obama’s own official website.  Big Government – the people who exposed ACORN for the slime they are – provided the evidence that Obama’s people are antisemitic bigoted haters.  Whereas Rush Limbaugh’s “bigotry” is a media-created lie, the liberals’ racism is very real, indeed.

You KNOW CNN Is Beyond Biased When It FACT CHECKS AN SNL SKIT

Last week SNL did one of its incredibly rare skewerings of Barack Obama.  And CNN was so offended that their deity had been violated that they raced to fact check the offensive skit and “correct the record.”

At the very least, in the words of Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, Obama is “sort of God” for media liberal elites as he hovers “above the world.”

Here’s the SNL Obama skit, reminding viewers that Obama has basically failed to accomplish anything, and that liberals should be far angrier at him for all of his broken promises and failures than conservatives should be.

And here is Wolf Blitzer and the CNN team desperate to defend the honor of their Messiah from being besmirched by Philistines:

I mean, you can almost hear the exclamation of, “Oh, the humanity!” as Wolf Blitzer rebuked SNL:

WOLF BLITZER: It seems no politician is safe from Saturday Night Live. While many people think SNL has mostly spared President Obama, what they’re doing now is not necessarily all that kind. They essentially cast the leader of the free world as a do-nothing president, at least so far. Even though SNL deals in comedy, what they said about the President rings true for a lot of you, apparently. So, did the show accurately capture a mood, or did it go off track for comedic effect?

I mean, poor Wolf.  Just a couple of weeks ago children were singing some of his favorite hymns praising Obama:

Going from the praise of public school children to the SNL smackdown must have been like a heroin addict coming off a high to the cold, cruel world.

Of course, one must immediately point out that nothing even remotely CLOSE to this ever happened while Tina Fey was relentlessly hammering Sarah Palin every single Saturday night for months.

The pathological ideological bias of the mainstream media is beyond shocking.  It’s repulsive.  It’s obscene.  And it is most certainly pathetic.

Obama Loses On ‘Don’t Think, Just Vote’ Health Care: Grandma Gets A Reprieve

Barack Obama gave a national presidential news conference on July 22.  And he did such a great job selling his Obamacare that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put the kibosh on Obama’s imperious August deadline the very next day.

Even the New York Times turned on Obama’s presentation and faulted his “facts.”  And in the lexicon of liberal heresies and heretics, that’s almost like the Apostles turning on Jesus.  The Associated Press also found plenty of Obama’s “facts” to be somewhat deficient of truth content.  The biggest gripe of all about Obama’s news conference is that he didn’t actually tell us anything.  When you’re talking about taking over 1/5th of the US economy, a few details would have been nice.

That said, it would have helped Mr. Obama if he had bothered to actually bother to read the legislation before calling a national infomercial to sell it.  Eventually Democrats are going to have to actually read the provisions of the major legislation they ram down the country’s collective throat, after all.

But no, it was a lot easier to just go out and demonize the Republicans as being the fearmongering forces opposing reform instead.  Campaigning on vague notions of “hope” and “change,” without ever bothering to really describe what “hope” and “change” actually meant – and at the same time demagoguing against those opposing said amorphous “hope” and “change” – has worked wonderfully for Obama thus far.  So it’s really no surprise that he would go back to that same magician’s hat again.

The good news, though, is that the Frankenstein monster of health care has been driven back into the castle for at least the time being.  Grandma and grandpa have a reprieve.

Obama’s answer to a question that a woman asked about her mother’s health care is incredibly illustrative as to the bullet the elderly dodged today:

Member of the audience. Jane Sturm: “My mother is now over 105. But at 100, the doctors said to her, ‘I can’t do anything more unless you have a pacemaker.’ I said, ‘Go for it.’ She said, ‘Go for it.’ But the specialist said, ‘No, she’s too old.’ But when the other specialist saw her and saw her joy of life, he said, ‘I’m going for it.’ That was over five years ago. My question to you is:  Outside the medical criteria for prolonging life for somebody who is elderly, is there any consideration that can be given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, a quality of life, or is it just a medical cutoff at a certain age?”

Obama: “I don’t think that we can make judgments based on people’s ’spirit.’ Uh, that would be, uh, a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that, uh, say that, uh, we are going to provide good quality care for all people. End-of-life care is one of the most difficult sets of decisions that we’re going to have to make. But understand that those decisions are already being made in one way or another. If they’re not being made under Medicare and Medicaid, they’re being made by private insurers. At least we can let doctors know — and your mom know — that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the painkiller.”

You can watch the exchange for yourself:

What is remarkable is the fact that this woman Jane Sturm was seeking reassurance that Obama would clearly and unequivocally affirm the elderly mother’s right to life, and Obama responded by telling her that maybe mom should just take a painkiller and die as a drugged-out zombie-veg due to government-sanctioned medical neglect.

This is nothing new: Democrats have been pursuing rationing as an antidote to the costs of their government system all along.

It is simply a fact that the vast majority of health care resources are consumed at the end of life.  And as costs explode – and the CBO director has already told us the ugly truth that the cost of the Democrats’ plan WILL EXPLODE – it’s going to be the “resource-hogging” and “unproductive” senior citizens who are going to start seeing the short end of the health care stick.