Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
Apparently, that was Joe Biden’s – who by even both the liberals’ accounts (Kirsten Powers and Joe Trippi) on Fox News gave a better speech than did Obama – best line. Osama bin Laden is dead and G.M. is alive.
First of all, who seriously believes that if George Bush were still president Osama bin Laden would still be alive? Because unless you are so demon-possessed that you literally believe crap like this, that is as stupid as it is crazy (whereas if you DO believe that aforementioned crap like this it is as crazy as it is stupid).
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush pledged anew Friday that Osama bin Laden will be taken “dead or alive,” no matter how long it takes, amid indications that the suspected terrorist may be bottled up in a rugged Afghan canyon. The president, in an Oval Office meeting with Thailand’s prime minister, would not predict the timing of bin Laden’s capture but said he doesn’t care how the suspect is brought to justice. “I don’t care, dead or alive — either way,” Bush said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
You don’t think that George Bush would have approved the mission to kill that bastard? Seriously? I make the comparison between the way that the leftwing media gives John F. Kennedy exclusive credit for the 1969 moon landing even though the man had been dead for six years when we landed on the moon and Richard Nixon was president. It’s just funny how the same people who refuse to give the Republican any credit because it was the previous president’s vision would so hypocritically refuse to give the Republican any credit for the bin Laden killing even though getting bin Laden was his vision.
It was the intelligence that was developed by George Bush by means of WATERBOARDING that we ultimately got bin Laden:
Of all the terrorists we captured, we only waterboarded three of them. And it was those exact same three terrorists who told us that Osama bin Laden was living somewhere in the city of Abbottabad in Pakistan and that he was depending on a courier to stay in contact with al Qaeda. From that point on, it was just a matter of time to develop more information about identifying and tracking that courier to the precise location in that city.
Let me put it to you this way: what would have happened had Obama refused to get the terrorist leader who murdered 3,000 Americans and started a massive war? Don’t think for a second that fact wouldn’t have come out, because there would have been hundreds of military and intelligence professionals who had dedicated their entire lives to get that sonofabitch, and there is no question they would have leaked the cowardice of the president for refusing to do what had to be done. You can argue that Obama would have been criticized if he’d gone in there and the mission had ended in disaster; but if he hadn’t gone he would have been DONE. I literally believe that Republicans would have brought up articles of impeachment for Obama’s refusal to protect and defend the American people and enough Democrats would have voted for it to force Obama out of office. And I claim that because the American people would have been furious that American intelligence had identified precisely where the worst mass-murderer of Americans in history was and the president refused to take him out when he had the chance. As happy as we were that bin Laden was dead, we would have been TWICE as pissed if we learned he had been allowed to get away scott free.
If George Bush were still president, the American intelligence apparatus would have still done its job and tracked bin Laden down; and George Bush would have killed him just as dead as he killed Saddam Hussein. Unless you think that if Bush were president the SEALs wouldn’t have been able to pull of the mission; because the SEALs were afraid and prayed to Obama, “Oh, Messiah-Obama, steady my hand,” and Messiah Obama looked down from heaven and answered their prayers, and lo, Obama guided their hands such that their bullets found their mark.
If you’re not that stupid or just plain nuts, Osama bin Laden’s days were numbered from the moment the towers collapsed.
That is a fact. And if you’ve got a case to show otherwise, I welcome you to produce it. It’s going to be something like, “Only Barack Obama could have got bin Laden because he’s got unicorn-messiah power and Bush didn’t.”
Osama bin Laden would have been every scintilla as dead if George Bush were still president. And the only difference is he would have very probably been dead sooner – because Obama knew where bin Laden was for nine damn months prior to going in to get him which put the entire operation at substantial risk. Had bin Laden moved, we would have been back to square one – only we would have had a president who wouldn’t have waterboarded the information out of bin Laden’s followers.
And General Motors would have been just as alive if not more so.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — President Bush announced a rescue plan for General Motors and Chrysler LLC Friday morning that will make $13.4 billion in federal loans available almost immediately.
The money will come from the $700 billion fund set aside to bail out Wall Street firms and banks in October.
With these loans, Treasury will have committed virtually all of the $350 billion of that fund that it can hand out without additional authorization from Congress. Once Congress releases the other $350 billion, the two automakers will be able to borrow an additional $4 billion.
GM (GM, Fortune 500) will get $9.4 billion from the first allocation of federal loan money, while Chrysler would get the other $4 billion.
The loans are for three years, but the money will have to be repaid in full within 30 days if the firms do not show themselves to be viable by March 31.
Bush: “Preventing disorderly bankruptcy”
During brief remarks at the White House, President Bush said in normal times he would have not been in favor of preventing a bankruptcy of the two companies. But the current state of the economy and credit markets left him no choice but to act.
Bush kept G.M. and Chrysler alive as much as Obama did. If it hadn’t been for Bush,there wouldn’t have been anything left for Obama to bail out. And if the media weren’t anything other than rabidly biased and dishonest, they’d point that fact out.
The same rabidly biased and dishonest media that would rather spit in Bush’s face than give him credit for anything positive have deceitfully fabricated a line that they have since repeatedly demonized Mitt Romney over: “Let Detroit go bankrupt.” Nobody is more irresponsible or dishonest than liberal journalists. The dishonest New York Times literally provided the headline for Romney (writers almost NEVER get to title their pieces) and then demonized him for the title that THEY had given his op-ed. If you read the pieces that Mitt Romney wrote – here and here – what you will find is that Romney favored a managed bankruptcy in which G.M. and Chrysler would enter the bankruptcy process and the government would partner with the auto manufacturers and provide assistance as needed to ensure that the companies remained viable and ALIVE.
If you read the pieces, you will also see a fact mentioned that liberals never bother to mention when they demonize Mitt Romney for letting G.M. go bankrupt: G.M. DID FILE FOR BANKRUPTCY UNDER OBAMA, just as it would have under Mitt Romney.
Liberals are pathologically dishonest people who don’t give a DAMN about the facts or about truth when they can fabricate a straw man and then demonize their straw man with deceitful rhetoric.
There is simply no way that George Bush or Mitt Romney would have allowed General Motors to go the way of the Dodo bird. Any more than either of them would have passed up the opportunity to rid the world of bin Laden. As both Bush and Romney pointed out, General Motors and American auto manufacturing were too important to the nation. It was only a matter of how to get GM to health. All that Obama truly did was make sure the unions had enough power to ultimately destroy GM in the future, quite frankly.
Excuse my language, but whenever Democrats pull the lines out of their butts that Obama got bin Laden or Obama saved General Motors, realize that what they are really admitting is that the Obama presidency has been such a massive and catastrophic failure that they have absolutely nothing to run on but pure rhetorical bullshit.
Just imagine for a second if George Bush had this giant of an albatross hanging off his neck. Good thing it’s Obama’s complete policy and worldview failure so the mainstream media can “spin” failure into magnificent success:
The Jurassic Press is missing much in their reporting on the $50 billion bailout of General Motors (GM). The Press is open channeling for President Barack Obama – allowing him to frame the bailout exactly as he wishes in the 2012 Presidential election.
The President is running in large part on the bailout’s $30+ billion loss, uber-failed “success.” And the Press is acting as his stenographers. An epitome of this bailout nightmare mess is the electric absurdity that is the Chevrolet Volt. The Press is at every turn covering up – rather than covering – the serial failures of President Obama’s signature vehicle.
The Press has failed to mention at least five Volt fires, myopically focusing on the one the Obama Administration hand-selected for attention.
The Press has for the most part failed to mention how pathetic this “second-best sales month” actually is. And even when one Dinosaur does, the unwarranted enthusiasm is palpable.
The Press also fails to put this pathetic tally in perspective.
The Chevy Cruze is basically a Volt without the dead-weight, flammable 400-lb. electric battery. Which makes it $17,000, rather than the Volt’s $41,000.
Chevy in June sold 18,983 Cruzes – more than ten times the number of Volts. And that’s down 1/3 from last June’s 24,648.
But that feeble Volt tally has the Press all revved up.
According to multiple GM executives there is little or no profit being made on each Volt built at a present cost of around $40,000. Furthermore, the $700 million of development that went into the car has to be recouped.
Get that? GM makes “little or no profit” on the Volt.
Look, I get it, it’s fun. I just spent $1 million – of your money – advertising free air. On which my profit margin is just as good as GM’s is on the Volt.
(A)dd $240 million in Energy Department grants doled out to G.M. last summer, $150 million in federal money to the Volt’s Korean battery supplier, up to $1.5 billion in tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives, and some significant portion of the $14 billion loan G.M. got in 2008 for “retooling” its plants, and you’ve got some idea of how much taxpayer cash is built into every Volt.
Speaking of those “tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives” – as of November of last year that tally all by itself was $250,000 per Volt sold.
And that excruciating pain is ongoing. Again, a Volt sold makes GM no money – but costs We the Taxpayers a $7,500 bribe – I mean “incentive.” Oh – and President Obama wants to jack that bribe to $10,000 per.
I guess it’s good news after all that Volt sales remain so anemic.
And with GM’s new 60-day return policy, it looks like you can buy a Volt and cash the $7,500 bribe check. Then return the Volt – and keep the $7,500 bribe cash. How’s that for Taxpayer coin stewardship?
Keep all of this outrageousness in mind when next the Jurassic Press joins with the Obama Administration in celebrating the Chevy Volt.
But it (allegedly) helps President Obama get reelected. And nothing would make the Press happier – and for that there’s (almost?) nothing they won’t do.
Pardon me while I go get myself $7,500 of free money by “renting” a Volt long enough to cash my Obama bribe check.
It’s the least I can do to help destroy America while helping re-elect Obama – which ironically also means destroying America.
The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:
WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.
Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.
After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.
Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.
[…]
But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:
— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.
— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.
— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.
[…]
Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.
[…]
Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.
“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”
Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.
The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.
How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.
Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:
“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”
The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???
WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s? WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?
And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama??? And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:
Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”
Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.
”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”
In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.
[…]
”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”
And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared. So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.
These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums. Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology. There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.
I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather. And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.
Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???
It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure. It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.
The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein. The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.
The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”
The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.
There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading. Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements. The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford. And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes. Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs. Folsom provides the official data to back it up.
In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%. Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues. By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%). Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected. Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits. And they created millions of jobs in doing so.
And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN. Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations. They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money. And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone. Just like they did with FDR.
That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left. If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS. They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda. They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.
And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.
The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America. Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example. What did she say of the oil companies?
“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”
THAT’S what Hitler did, too. Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.
I stand by that sweeping statement. People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people. As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:
The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Timespointed out:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.
And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM. It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.
The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.” It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.” Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are. But Wallison is nonpartisan
That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle. This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office. And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.
Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:
Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.
I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.
Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.
Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations for their own industry because they know that they can handle all of the rules and paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can. After all, a large corporation with an accounting department can easily handle filling out a few thousand more forms, but for a small business with only a handful of employees that kind of paperwork is a major logistical nightmare.
When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has made the process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses that it is hardly worth it anymore. Things have gotten so bad that more small businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or independent contractors.
So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time employees.
And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help? Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.
A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011
In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.
That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.
The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.
While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.
“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.
“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.
So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?
And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.
An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs. That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits. And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden. Just to name a few. The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.
Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too. Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008. Did Obama make it better? Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.” Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.
The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job. Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.
Worst. President. Ever.
In January 2008 Barack Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle:
“Under my plan of a cap and trade system electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Businesses would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that cost onto consumers.”
He promised that his plan would cause electricity rates to skyrocket.
He wasn’t kidding. In January the Obama Administration, for the first time ever, blocked an already approved bid to build one of the largest mountaintop removal coal mines in Appalachian history.
And, on Wednesday it was reported that Obama’s energy plans will cause electricity rates to necessarily skyrocket…
Just as he promised.
Via US News and World Reports:
Two new EPA pollution regulations will slam the coal industry so hard that hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost, and electric rates will skyrocket 11 percent to over 23 percent, according to a new study based on government data.
Overall, the rules aimed at making the air cleaner could cost the coal-fired power plant industry $180 billion, warns a trade group.
“Many of these severe impacts would hit families living in states already facing serious economic challenges,” said Steve Miller, president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. “Because of these impacts, EPA should make major changes to the proposed regulations before they are finalized,” he said.
The EPA, however, tells Whispers that the hit the industry will suffer is worth the health benefits.
For the record… For every green job created by the Obama EPA, four jobs are lost in the economy.
This man is out to “fundamentally transform” America in a way that will fundamentally destroy America.
And he’s out to hurt ordinary Americans and make their children suffer.
Who do you think is ultimately going to pay this $180 billion TAX that Obama is imposing? If you guessed “the poor bastard customers” you win the prize. If you guessed anybody else, then you’re frankly too stupid to vote or reproduce. Please terminate your voter registration and then go sterilize yourself.
The next question is just as simple: if you make energy prices skyrocket on businesses, are they going to be in a position to create more jobs? If you think businesses are more likely to create jobs facing such gigantic price-hikes on their energy, I hope that you have already been spayed or neutered. Because you are simply unreal stupid. And this kind of dumb has got to end if this country is going to make it to the next generation.
After screwing the legitimate owners of GM, Obama imposed a $16 billion loss for the American people. But it’s only your money – and your money rewarded Obama’s union cronies who will of course return the favor to Obama with more of your dollars. In the case of Chrysler, Obama demonized and threatened bondholders, with the result that he practically gave Chrysler away to a foreign company (Fiat). And actually took credit for all of this as though it were a good thing!!!
Meanwhile, Obama is granting so few new permits for new oil drilling it is positively unreal, which will only make America more dependent on foreign oil and only make that heating oil and gasoline more and more expensive for us both now and down the line.
We now know what “hope and change” looks like: it looks like the American people freezing in the dark at night in the winter and sweltering in the dark at night in the summer, while all the while subsidizing huge write-offs to incentivize the purchase of electric clown cars.
President Barack Obama, in the heart of the U.S. auto industry, told a crowd of workers that the government bailouts of General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC are giving taxpayers a return on their investment.
Heading into a congressional election season in which polls show the public skeptical about the $84.8 billion rescue and anxious about economy, Obama is using the backdrop of Detroit- area plants owned by GM and Chrysler to promote what he says is an industry revival that has saved more than a million jobs.
“The fact that we’re standing in this magnificent factory today is a testament to the decisions we made,” Obama said at a Chrysler factory that recently added a second shift of workers to build the Jeep Grand Cherokee.
Obama told about 1,000 employees at the factory that, if his opponents had been successful in blocking aid for automakers, their jobs might not exist. Their efforts are “proving the naysayers wrong,” he said.
“They said we should just walk away and let those jobs go,” Obama said. “Today, this industry is growing stronger. It’s creating new jobs.”
Voter Skepticism
Voters aren’t persuaded. A Bloomberg National Poll conducted July 9-12 that shows the federal assistance package to automobile companies is becoming less popular: 48 percent say they became less supportive in recent months versus 17 percent who say they have become more supportive.
Steve Rattner, the former head of the president’s automotive task force, said that perception is disappointing.
“It appears that those of us behind it haven’t succeeded in convincing people that it’s worked,” he said in an interview.
Since GM and Chrysler exited bankruptcy a little more than a year ago, the industry — including Ford Motor Co., which didn’t seek federal aid — has re-hired 55,000 workers after shedding 334,000 in the year before.
So $84.8 billion spent, and 55,000 jobs rehired back.
Oh, and the 55,000 jobs that came back counts rehires for Ford, the company that didn’t take any of Obama’s bailouts. Or Bush’s, for that matter.
One million, five hundred and forty-one thousand, eight hundred and eighteen dollars per job. And Obama is pitching it as some kind of grand achievement worthy of a messiah.
Unions are happy. Of course, our children are ultimately going to be chained to giant millstones and forced to pull them in a circle for the rest of their lives. As will everyone else, including senior citizens – at least until they get “permanently retired” by a death panel. But unions are happy. And if you’re not happy, well, screw you, you racist.
And what do we get for our $85 billion besides a payoff to the labor unions that got Obama elected? Basically, we get a mostly electric clown car called the Chevy Volt that’s going to be “a car for idiots.” It will have some cache as the car for “for the intellectual elite who want to show what enlightened souls they are.” Which is tantamount to the central selling principle behind the emperor’s new clothes.
Every single Clown Car GM sells is going to lose money. But that’s okay. Because Barry Hussein – courtesy of the American taxpayer – will subsidize every Clown Car that is sold at a loss.
As for Obama’s claim that he’s “saved” a million jobs, that’s the kind of reasoning that only someone idiotic enough to buy a $41,000 clown car to show how superior they are would buy. How about this: Bush saved fifty million jobs. If you don’t think he did, you prove he didn’t. In fact, Bush saved the world. Because aliens with superior technology would have invaded earth had Bush not been commander-in-chief. Prove they wouldn’t have.
“One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved,'” said Carnegie Mellon University professor Allan Mentzler. “It doesn’t exist for good reason: How can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?” Which is to say, a purely rhetorical argument that no American president has ever in history had the naked chutzpah to use amounts to the heart of Obama’s economic policy.
Had George Bush used that asinine argument to justify his economic leadership and vision, he would have been laughed right out of the White House by the media. But Barack Obama is using the asinine argument, so it obviously must be true.
We are about to see why the Soviet Union failed. The government spent all kinds of money producing crap cars to keep the party proletariat employed. But they were crap cars. And nobody bought them. The same thing applies to Obama’s GM bailout and the Chevy Klown Kar. And the same with all the boondoggles Obama built with our trillion dollars (actually with what will become our $3.27 trillion, but who’s really counting any more?).
Obama’s boast about the auto industry jobs is a microchosm of the overall stupidity of Obama’s “stimulus.” We have spent over $534 BILLION (that’s the 62% of the $862 billion stimulus that has been spent so far) in order to create some 599,108 jobs.
Do the math.
That boils down to an average of $892,220 PER JOB.
I mean, that ridiculous figure is less than the even more ridiculous figure of more than $1.5 million for each union auto job. But then again, some of those nearly 600,000 jobs probably weren’t union, which accounts for the relatively trivial figure of $892,000.
Obama is cheering all this, but the term “Pyrrhic victory” comes to mind. These victories are going to implode America into a ruin unlike anything that even historians have ever heard of.
Stupid, lying, forever full of bull Rep. Barney Fwank (D-Mass.) (No relation to Elmer Fudd) was speaking at a forum on national housing policy back in December, 2006. Shortly after this speech, Fwank became Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Some of the comments he made at this forum go to prove that he and the Democrats are liars, thieves, incompetents, and will make up stories as they go to fit any situation. This is not leadership, it’s incompetence.
Here are some quotes from this video:
“You will see far less difference with Democrats taking over in the Financial Services regulatory area…..One of the things we did was try to reduce the reporting requirements from the banks to the financial detectives. Far too much has to be reported now in my judgment.”
Well, I guess if they reported more, it would be easier to prosecute all of the fraud that took place, or better yet, the fraud would never have occurred. Still willing to blame the economic mess on Bush?
Then he babbles about the now troubled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: “You could have cut back on their ability to borrow as cheaply or you could leave that benefit in place and distribute it more fairly. That’s what we chose to do with the affordable housing fund.”
So, welfare loans for those who could not afford them, and what did we get? A banking crisis related to all the foreclosures because we loaned money to people who couldn’t’ afford to borrow it. Still willing to blame the economic mess on Bush?
Fwank babbles about the housing bubble, before it went bust: “I do want to address this thing about the bubble. I think the bubble is an entirely inappropriate metaphor. Let me just be very clear, houses ain’t tulips. Houses today even with the drop in housing prices are more valuable than tulips were however many years ago when we had the tulip business.”
Fwank on the busted bubble: “I think it’s a good thing that housing prices are dropping…..A 10% drop in housing prices is a good thing. Housing was over-valued.”
Still willing to blame the economic mess on Bush?
Fwank on the busted bubble again: “…I don’t think that there’s a crisis, and I do think that the end result in a 10% drop in many parts of the country will be a more rational and healthier housing market.”
I’ve tried to tackle this issue in previous articles:
But Barney Frank might do a better job demonstrating that Democrats were all creating the housing mortgage meltdown that imploded our economy than anyone.
Frank acknowledges that the policies that led to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s implosion were DEMOCRAT policies.
And it was Fannie and Freddie that led to this massive economic disaster. From Bloomberg:
Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) — Taxpayer losses from supporting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will top $400 billion, according to Peter Wallison, a former general counsel at the Treasury who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“The situation is they are losing gobs of money, up to $400 billion in mortgages,” Wallison said in a Bloomberg Television interview. The Treasury Department recognized last week that losses will be more than $400 billion when it raised its limit on federal support for the two government-sponsored enterprises, he said.
The U.S. seized the two mortgage financiers in 2008 as the government struggled to prevent a meltdown of the financial system. The debt of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks grew an average of $184 billion annually from 1998 to 2008, helping fuel a bubble that drove home prices up by 107 percent between 2000 and mid-2006, according to the S&P/Case- Shiller home-price index.
The Treasury said on Dec. 24 it would provide an unlimited amount of assistance to the companies as needed for the next three years to alleviate market concern that the government lifeline for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest source of money for U.S. home loans, could lapse or be exhausted.
Lax regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to the mortgage companies taking on too many risky loans, Wallison said.
“It turns out it was impossible to regulate them,” he said. “They were too powerful.” He said no one knows how much will be needed to keep the companies solvent.
You can go to another couple of my articles to see that it was Democrats’ policies and refusal to regulate Fannie and Freddie that led to the 2008 economic collapse:
”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”
“These two entities – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – are not facing any kind of a financial crisis.” Unless you consider the biggest bailout in the history of the world a “financial crisis,” that is. The AIG bailout was $85 billion. The GM bailout was for $49.5 billion. Compare those to the $400 billion bailout Obama has been handing out to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
“Not facing any kind of financial crisis.”
“I think it’s a good thing that housing prices are dropping. . . A 10% drop in housing prices is a good thing. Housing was over-valued.”
“I think the bubble is an entirely inappropriate metaphor.”
“One of the things we did was try to reduce the reporting requirements.”
“You could have cut back on their ability to borrow as cheaply or you could leave that benefit in place and distribute it more fairly. That’s what we chose to do with the affordable housing fund.”
DEMOCRATS CAUSED THIS HELL. THEY WERE ALL OVER IT.
And the Democrat Party that caused this mess to begin with is out doing the same crap that imploded us in the first place all over again.
The pundits have rightly compared the gigantic ObamaCare bill with the Roosevelt administration – if nothing else than because we haven’t seen any government program so gigantic since then.
In a way that is very fitting. Because we can bookend December 7, 1941 and March 21, 2010 with the same prediction: a day that shall live in infamy.
December 7th was a disaster because FDR utterly failed to see a clear and present danger building on opposite sides of both oceans. We failed to take precautions. We failed to arm ourselves. We even failed to protect ourselves. What made it so criminal was that we had years of ample warning, but simply chose to ignore it.
March 21 was hardly a surprise, either. Just as with December 7, a lot of Americans saw it coming, but lacked the power to do anything but point and shout about the coming disaster. The major difference is that on December 7, 1941, our government failed to protect our way of life, whereas on March 21, 2010, our government actively attacked our way of life.
And now it is here. And now that it is here, it will grow like a cancer. Slowly at first – it doesn’t fully kick in until 2014 – and then it will erupt like a big poisonous mushroom.
“Nonetheless, it will be the law of the land as of tonight and we’re going to be a different country. We are on our way, there is absolutely no chance we are not going to end up with national health care. This is nationalizing health care, the insurance companies are now utilities, they are contractors. the government makes all of these decisions, only a matter of time and will probably happen after the Obama administration. But he will be remembered as the father of national health care as they have in Canada or Britain and it starts tonight.”
ObamaCare is a “giveaway to the insurance industry”
This bill is “not going to protect consumers from these rapid premium increases
It provides “no guarantees of any control over premiums”
It is “forcing people to buy private insurance”
It’s going to result in “five consecutive years of double-digit premium increases”
“I just don`t see that this bill is the solution”
“The insurance companies are the problem and we`re giving them a version of a bailout”
“This bill doesn`t change the fact that the insurance companies are going to keep socking it to the consumer”
It results in a “giveaway to the insurance industry”
“You`re building on sand. There`s no structure here”
If we pass this bill, “all we`re going to have is more poverty in this country”
If we pass this bill, “people aren`t going to get the care that they need”
This remaking of private insurance companies as utilities, as contractors for the government, is fascism, pure and simple. The government didn’t nationalize them, as it would do under communism, but it created a massive new set of regulations, and bureaucracies, and mandates, and taxes that quintessentially takes them over as agents of the state. And that is what fascism is all about:
Where socialism [i.e., communism] sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”–that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities.
And that is exactly what is happening. Liberals may not like my term, but it couldn’t be more applicable here. Obama demonized the insurance companies, and he will now regulate and control and dominate them “in the national interest.”
“I think that if you take a step back from this the real story here is is the deficit and that story. Everybody’s familiar with the debt clock; we’ve all seen how fast it moves. This is going to put it on double time or triple time because when you go back and you look at the history of entitlements in the country, that’s the pattern. There are promises that this is going to cut deficits or debt, and it never does. You look back at at what FDR said when he signed Social Security into law in July 1935. He said it would act as a protection for future administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. He also said this is a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States and economic structure of vastly greater soundness. Social Security today? $43 Trillion dollar unfunded liability – that’s 400 thousand dollars per household in the United States today. And you go back to 1965. LBJ did the same thing. You saw Nancy Pelosi carrying the gavel – it’s the same argument. He said it would be $1.50 a month for the average worker. $1.50 a month. Three dollars per month after you’re 65. Today, Medicare has a $57 trillion dollar unfunded liability. $500,000 dollars per American household. This will bankrupt the country.”
It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.
Does that sound like something that lessened the force of possible future ANYTHING? A protection to future administrations against the necessity of going deeply in debt??? Something that provides the United States with an economic structure of vastly greater soundness??? We’re doomed.
Maybe you don’t care that this giant boondoggle is going to crash and burn your country, and that your children or grandchildren will literally die as a result of your greed and selfishness. But I do.
They promised us a bogus Utopia, and that Utopia is about to collapse into the fiery pit of hell.
During your working years, the people of America–you–will contribute through the social security program a small amount each payday for hospital insurance protection. For example, the average worker in 1966 will contribute about $1.50 per month. The employer will contribute a similar amount. And this will provide the funds to pay up to 90 days of hospital care for each illness, plus diagnostic care, and up to 100 home health visits after you are 65. And beginning in 1967, you will also be covered for up to 100 days of care in a skilled nursing home after a period of hospital care.
And under a separate plan, when you are 65–that the Congress originated itself, in its own good judgment–you may be covered for medical and surgical fees whether you are in or out of the hospital. You will pay $3 per month after you are 65 and your Government will contribute an equal amount.
Let me tell you how Medicare affects me: It affects me with a $57 trillion unfunded liability. It affects me with a bill of $500,000 for every single household in America. It affects me with an individual bill (that every single man, woman, and child in this country owes) of $230,000.
And that’s $230,ooo on top of the $184,000 I owe for Medicare. I owe $414,000. And my household owns $900,000. And great googly moogly, we don’t got it. We’re on a speeding train that is going to keep hurtling along until it flies off a cliff and crashes.
Hey, I got an idea: let’s double that. Hell, let’s triple it.
And that “47 million” clearly includes 17 million illegal immigrants. The Democrats’ incredibly cynical plan is to take health resources from you and from your children and grandchildren and give those resources to illegal immigrants so they can capture the Hispanic vote.
The metaphor is a dozen people rushing into your house to eat your food and consume your resources while your own kids go hungry. No one would do this. But your government is doing it under Democrat Party tyranny.
The real cost of this bill is over $6 TRILLION. The Democrats filled their legislation with gimmicks, such as assuming they would cut doctors’ Medicare reimbursements by 21% when they know they won’t, then putting that “Doctor fix” in another bill. That will add $208 billion to the real cost of their plan. Then they falsely start the bill’s ten-year score in 2010, when the benefits don’t start getting paid out until 2014. That accounting deceit masks the fact that the REAL cost of the bill is $2.3 trillion.
In other words, your ObamaCare – which really isn’t even deficit neutral at all – was sold as “deficit neutral” because it doesn’t count the trillions and trillions of dollars that American citizens will be compelled by their government to pay for health insurance.
ObamaCare amounted to the slitting of the national wrists. And we’re going to start bleeding out until we either abandon it or die.
The Republicans have a few more tactics to fight this bill, but they amount to starting backfires to try to temporarily contain a massive hungry forest fire. It won’t be enough, and it probably won’t ultimately succeed.
Having this monster 2,700-page government takeover of health care may be the only chance this nation has of avoiding a very-near term financial implosion.
If this bill isn’t stopped, one day Americans will look back at the late great former United States of America and realize that that was the anvil that broke the camel’s back.
The problem with the liberal-glorified cash-for-clunker program was always obvious to anyone who would but contemplate: the spike in sales merely robbed future sales, or delayed past ones.
My own parents waited for at least a couple months to buy a car for the program to go into effect. Ultimately they walked away from it due to the massive aggravations of the program (my father is a very patient man unless and until things stop making sense – at which time he starts to lose it) and decided to keep their “clunker” until they needed to buy a new car.
The funny thing is, they very likely would have already bought a new car had it NOT been for the cash-for-clunker program.
U.S. auto sales likely fell in September back to the nearly three-decade lows of early 2009 without government incentives to spur buying, leaving in doubt the timing and pace of a recovery for the battered industry.
Nearly 700,000 new cars and trucks were bought by U.S. customers through the government “cash for clunkers” incentive program from late July through the first three weeks of August, a leap from recession-stunted sales earlier in 2009. […]
“There are still a lot of obstacles out there,” she said. “I think we are still going to see the hangover from ‘cash for clunkers’ both in September and almost potentially through the end of the year.”
Sales Drop at All Major Automakers
U.S. auto industry sales rose 1 percent to more than 1.2 million vehicles in August from a year earlier under the “clunkers” program, the first time monthly sales pierced the 1 million mark in a year.
However, none of the largest manufacturers are expected to post sales gains in September, and Edmunds has forecast a 23 percent industry sales decline for the month.
Edmunds expects Ford Motor to post a 9.7 percent sales drop, GM a 46.1 percent drop and Chrysler a 48.7 percent decline among the Detroit automakers.
Edmunds expects Toyota Motor to post a 9.7 percent sales decline, Honda Motor an 8.3 percent drop and Nissan Motor a 1.1 percent drop among Japan-based automakers.
The August sales gain represented a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 14.1 million vehicles, but did little to turn the tide on annual sales. U.S. auto industry sales were down nearly 28 percent through August 2009 versus last year.
Global Insight expects U.S. September auto sales to come in at a 9.33 million seasonally adjusted annualized rate, or well below the 12.5 million unit rate from a year ago when credit markets froze in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse.
The median forecast for U.S. auto industry sales was 9.5 million vehicles from 41 economists surveyed by Reuters, while J.P. Morgan believes the annualized rate could drop to 8.9 million vehicles — the lowest month since December 1981. […]
C4C disrupted the even flow of supply and demand. New car buyers held back in advance of the launch of the program; in fact, many prenegotiated with dealers to do so. And, now the promotion is over, expect year-on-year sales to be lower than they would have been because so much consumer demand has been concentrated in the promotion period.
The auto industry received a short-term “sugar high” at the expense of lower future sales when the program is over. The program apparently boosted sales by about 750,000 cars this year, but that probably means that sales over the next few years will be about 750,000 lower. The program probably further damaged the longer-term prospects of auto dealers and automakers by diverting their attention from market fundamentals in the scramble for federal cash.
And whaddyaknow? That’s basically exactly what happened.
Poor people – who couldn’t afford to buy a new car with the cash for clunker incentive – will also now lose out on billions of dollars’ worth of used cars that were destroyed under the program. The price of the cars that would have improved their lives (and their mileage) were shipped to China as scrap metal. And law of supply and demand guarantees that the price of used cars will go up for the people Democrats always say they’re trying to help.
The cash for clunkers program ought to sound eerily familiar to people who’ve done any reading about the Great Depression, because it was the same kind of program that led to the slaughter of hogs under the Agricultural Adjustment Act (which was intended to raise hog prices but led to famine instead). The issue here is the same one as back then: the profound arrogance of economic planners who think if they just get enough data, and they turn all the diodes exactly the right way, and if they get all the right memos and all the right forms, that they’re going to be smarter than free market would be.
Big government liberals invariably believe they know how to allocate resources better than markets do — just like the Marxist economic planners did. And the problem is like that fairy tale about the old woman who swallowed a fly; every single solution they come up with just creates another problem, and then you get this continual snowball effect that just keeps getting more insolvable.
And thus it is with the cash for clunkers thing. Maybe some of these people who bought a new car didn’t really need a new car; what they really needed was a new refrigerator or a new washing machine – but they got such a great deal on that car! The government knows better that they needed to buy a new car more than they needed to buy a new refrigerator or a washing machine or a host of other products. And so the government artificially incentivized people to buy the car that they really didn’t need. And instead of buying all the things that they really should have bought and WOULD have bought anyway WITHOUT the billions in taxpayer dollars, now people have taxpayer-funded cars they really didn’t need to buy.
So, as an example, were told that “Durable goods orders show unexpected decrease in August,” but it shouldn’t have been “unexpected” at all. What it was was the opportunity costs due to all the people buying cars instead of other goods. Like refrigerators and washing machines.
And at the same time, all we’ve really done is rob demand from a couple of years down the road, where these people were almost by definition ultimately going to buy new cars anyway. Why? Because they have CLUNKERS, dammit!
Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.
Obama said:
“For every day we wait or point fingers or drag our feet, more Americans will lose their jobs,” Obama said at a speech in Fairfax, Virginia. on Jan. 8
At the time Obama was fearmongering audiences in Fairfax, the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent. Obama claimed in that speech that the country would face double-digit unemployment without the stimulus package even though the Congressional Budget Office forecast was slightly lower: 9 percent unemployment by 2010.
And the politics of fear worked. Obama – who had promised an “end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics” – passed a stimulus bill which completely shut out Republicans, and rushed it through Congress so quickly no one was even allowed to read it.
Obama promised that his stimulus would “save or create” 3.5 million jobs. Aside from the simple fact that “save or create” is nothing more than a cheap marketing sleight of hand gimmick that neither Bush or Clinton were allowed to get away with, Obama also promised something that is now easy to disprove: his administration assured America “that the economic stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising above 8 percent.”
With the stimulus bill now becoming law, we’re digging even deeper into debt. The headline price tag of $787 billion doesn’t include the extra $348 billion it will take to finance the new debt, or what it will cost when Congress extends the spending programs in the bill, as is likely — as much as $2 trillion more. Add in the billions that are being used to prop up the financial system, and when the dust settles on 2009, with millions of baby boomers retiring and entitlement spending exploding, taxpayers will face a financial nightmare.
The media – who have been propagandists for this president since he began his campaign – managed to focus on “good news” about the fact that the unemployment has now risen to 9.4% – which is significantly higher than the unemployment figure the Congressional Budget Office anticipated over the course of a year had we done nothingat all. And it is MASSIVELY higher than the Obama administration promise “that the economic stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising above 8 percent.”
Let that sink in for a moment: OBAMA COMPLETELY BLEW IT ON THE ECONOMY. His stimulus has done more to harm the economy than help it by the official government numbers. Just as conservatives predicted all along!!!
The media have done everything they possibly could for Obama. From Newsweek (hardly a conservative source):
The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time. Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage? Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment, but no president since. On the whole, this is not healthy for America. […]
Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House.”
Barack Obama – both in terms of liberal ideology shared by the media, and the need to protect a president who represents big government bureaucracy – has been deemed too big to fail by the media establishment.
And thus they have offered him one rhetorical bailout after another from the very get-go.
Realize that this fawning media coverage has occurred during the very time that Obama has implemented one bailout after another that the public despised. For instance:
A new poll shows that a full 67 percent of U.S. voters oppose the Obama administration’s plan to bail out General Motors with nearly $50 billion – and 51 percent of all Americans say they would rather buy a car from Ford because it did not take a government bailout.
In a statement, the White House announced today that the U.S. Treasury will provide approximately $30.1 billion to GM through an expedited chapter 11 proceeding and transition the new GM through its restructuring plan.
How many jobs would the American people have been able to create had they had the $50 billion that Obama threw at GM? More importantly, how many jobs would the American people have been able to create had they had the $3.27 trillion of the porkulus bill?
Sadly, what we’re left with are Barack Obama’s politically ginned-up “saved” jobs.
Obama is now promising that 600,000 jobs will be “saved or created.”Don’t believe him. He is already a documented liar on this very subject. He is deliberately using statistical gibberish that is designed to allow him to conceal the truth from the American people, and it is in his political interest to continue lying.
If you’ve lost your job, just realize that your president is far more interested in playing games with statistics than he is in actually doing something that will help you find meaningful employment.
The president is a slick-talking incompetent fool. And the longer it takes for the American people to realize it, the worse it will be for us.
The good thing is that more and more people are now beginning to realize that Barack Obama is leading their country off a cliff into an economic fiasco that we will likely never recover from; the bad news is that it may already bee too late.
Right now, we’ve got “czars” appointed by Obama that are running roughshod over entire industries with absolutely no congressional or people’s oversight whatsoever. There are now FIFTEEN “czars” accountable to no one but Obama: a drug czar; an energy and environment czar; a health czar; an urban affairs czar; an economic czar; a regulatory czar; a technology czar; a government performance czar; a border czar, a WMD policy czar; an intelligence czar; a car czar; a Great Lakes czar; a Stimulus czar; and now a Cyber czar. Again, Czars dominating industrustries and whole sections of the massive government infastructure who are accountable to no one but the president.
To quote J.R. Dieckmann who describes the new “cyber security czar” and in so doing denounces the entire mindset that creates them in the first place:
We have seen the tactic used by this administration over and over again — find or create a crisis, then violate the people’s liberties to deal with it. We saw it with the banking industry. We saw it with the mortgage industry. We’re seeing it with the auto industry and the energy industry, the global warming hoax, and many others. This is a president who wants the federal government to control everything of any significance. Controlling the Internet would be most helpful to him in forcing his Marxist agenda down the throats of the American citizens.
[By the way, even as Obama plunges the economy of the nation into ruin by pursuing the radical global warming agenda, a new NASA study confirms that – surprise – the sun, NOT man, has been responsible for warming. Not that the obvious facts have ever mattered to liberals].
If you don’t think what Obama is doing is Marxism, as Dieckmann (and recently the Russian Pravda) describes it, try fascism. Or insert your own blatantly un-American “-ism” (examples: totalitarianism, socialism). Call it whatever you want: it’s an insult to everything America stands for.
CARACAS, June 2 (Reuters) – Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday that he and Cuban ally Fidel Castro risk being more conservative than U.S. President Barack Obama as Washington prepares to take control of General Motors Corp. […]
“Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right,” Chavez joked on a live television broadcast.
Maybe Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro think it’s a joke; I don’t think there’s anything funny about it. I don’t think there’s anything funny about Obama’s using czars answerable only to him to shred the Constitution to set aside firmly established bankruptcy and contract law in order to make a political payoff to his union constituency.
Who did Obama appoint to run his nationalized Government Motors? A 31-year old punk named Brian Deese who has never run anything but liberal political campaign propaganda:
Policy analyst at liberal think tanks like Center for American Progress
Never run a business
Doesn’t have a law degree
Has gone on public record as being scared of his work capabilities already in his appointment in the auto task force.
THIS is the guy who “finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism” (in the exact words of the New York Times)? How do we not deserve to go the way of the Dodo bird when we do crap like this?
Liberals who used to decry Bush for his imperial tactics are an insult unto themselves; Bush’s “abuses of power” are to Obama’s what a pea-shooter is to a hydrogen bomb. Obama is continuing the things that liberals have screamed the most about (including domestic eavesdropping which he once opposed; including the right to use enhanced interrogation methods should he deem it appropriate; including the use of rendition to send terrorist suspects to countries that will employ harsh interrogations; including the use of military commissions he himself condemned; including the right to hold people indefinitely without trial that he previously had demonized. The ONLY difference between Bush and Obama on these issues is that Bush wasn’t a pompous, self-righteous, arrogant liar and demagogue, as Obama has now proven himself to be. Meanwhile, on top of all the “abuses of power” liberals attacked Bush over, Obama has further taken it upon himself to abuse federal power like no one before him had ever even dreamed.
Bush opened the door to this crap; Barrack Hussein has essentially driven a suicide-bomber’s truck right through that door – and is in the process of driving his bomb into the very heart of our economy, our infrastructure, and our entire way of life.
And more and more people are FINALLY starting to become angrier and angrier about it. Not enough to stop it. But enough to give one hope that we’re not as insane as it has previously appeared.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 34% of the nation’s voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-four percent (34%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of 0. That’s the highest level of strong disapproval and the lowest overall rating yet recorded (see trends).
The President’s ratings have slipped since General Motors filed for bankruptcy to initiate a new government bailout and takeover. Just 26% of Americans believe the GM bailout was a good idea and nearly as many support a boycott of GM products. It remains to be seen whether the dip in the President’s numbers is a temporary reaction to recent news or something more substantive.
The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve. It is updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update). Updates also available on Twitter.
Steven Moore, the senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, summarizes what he calls “onslaught of the left” and concludes:
Yikes! That’s a big dosage of economic cyanide the left wants America to swallow. If this whole agenda goes through, in 2009 the federal budget will run the budget deficit to $2.2 trillion — in a single year. That’s more borrowing in twelve months than the federal government did in 200 years!
How do we possibly survive this crushing level of debt? “Economic cyanide,” indeed.
Obama campaigned as this country’s “messiah” or savior. But who will be able to save us from Obama, once his ruinous policies explode?
Start Thinking Right 