The news is full of discussion about the”anniversary” of the Osama bin Laden killing. President Obama is getting very bad advice, and it makes him appear completely classless. When the raid on bin Laden’s hideout comfortable residence in Pakistan was announced, the mainstream media said in unison “gutsy call”. I don’t know who comes up with the talking points, undoubtedly the Center for American Progress, the Soros-funded policy generator; but when the mainstream media all says the same thing in the same words at the same time— it’s fairly obvious that they are just pre-determined talking points.
In the first place, it was not a “gutsy call.” It is the kind of decision that presidents are expected to make. That’s his primary job— commander in chief.. Bill Clinton, who avoided two chances to get Bin Laden, was excoriated for not making the decision to get him. And it was Bill Clinton who narrated the unfortunate campaign video celebrating Obama’s “gutsy call” to kill bin Laden. Any president would have made the call.
Celebrating the anniversary of a killing is tacky. If anyone brings it up, it should be the media, but all this hoo-haw is classless. The president’s decision was the smallest part of the operation. A lot of people put their lives at risk to make it happen — and they deserve our gratitude.
The trip to Afghanistan and the campaign speech from Afghanistan are just another campaign event, trying to emphasize that Obama once made a “gutsy call.” Sad. It really was a dreadful speech. He needs new speechwriters.
Obama wanted out of Afghanistan, which he believes his supporters demand. The generals and Ambassador Ryan Crocker have said that victory is within reach and the withdrawal is ill-advised.
George W. Bush saw victory in Iraq, and Obama threw that away. Now he is throwing away our efforts in Afghanistan, as a result of dreadful diplomacy. The Afghans are poorly prepared to take over, and any idea that “the Taliban have expressed interest in reconciliation” is laughable. Or if they have “expressed interest” reconciliation is not on the menu. Obama has regularly announced our intentions, what we are doing and when we will do it — not exactly how you run a military campaign.
This is an effort to shore up Obama’s hawkish credentials. There was no news in the speech. He’s trying to claim credit for winning a war that is not won. He’s bringing the troops home in about 2 ½ years. There is no news, and no real reason for the speech, and no reason for his appearance in Afghanistan.
John Podhoretz noticed that Obama was celebrating winning the war against al Qaeda, but our troops in Afghanistan have been fighting a war against the Taliban. Bad day for Obama, bad speech, bad trip.
Over at Investors,Andrew Malcolm asks “Who is this guy pretending to be president?” He argues that the optimistic hopeful fellow with the charming smile is gone and has been replaced by the “2012 Obama who is strident and mean, even deceitful, divisive, telling half-truths after half-truths.”
This Obama is in full-time campaign mode, though his accomplishments are pretty wispy. The Republican primary is essentially over, and he now has someone to run against. They tried out their prepared “war on women” theme, but that isn’t going too well, though they still have hopes. Turns out that women are a lot more concerned about the economy in general than about the cost of a month’s supply of birth control pills.
More women have been laid off from their jobs than men—177,000 women compared to 55,000 men. Mitt Romney said that his wife told him that’s what women were worried about, which prompted a new line of attack by the Obama campaign.
What did Ann Romney know about what women cared about, they asked: she’d never worked a day in her life,” That was to be a new, but connected theme — the Romneys were elite, rich, and out of touch with ordinary people. Because they were so rich, Ann Romney just got to loll around their many houses while authentic women went out to work. That pathetic claim is something left over from the 60s. Raising five boys to be outstanding young men is not “not working.” And Mitt is supposed to be really out of touch. Square, still living back in the 50s. Above all, not cool.
Very interesting. Obama’s initial campaign was largely based on”cool.” Not just that he would be the first African-American president, but the logo everywhere, on the soon-to-be-presidential airplane, on every sign, on the podium, soon, you didn’t need words—just the ubiquitous logo. In the years since, photoshoppers have had great fun with the logo, and it has perhaps lost its cool in the process.
The new president would prove just how cool he was with his myriad accomplishments, making the hated Bush appear small and well-rid-of as the new guy in charge showed how things should be done. Hope springs eternal.
But all the dreadful things Bush did turned out to be the inevitable and correct thing to do. The terrorists in Guantanamo weren’t innocent boys imprisoned by the warmongering Bush people; they actually were the worst of the worst; and Guantanamo never did get closed. The fundamentalist rule against embryonic stem cells would be waived but the halt didn’t walk again. Whatever happened to the twenty volunteers who were waiting for the real kind of stem-cell transplant?
Major government investment in 21st Century technologies like new, towering wind turbines and cutting edge solar shingles would make dependence on foreign oil a thing of the past, except they simply did not produce the electricity that was promised by the promoters, and the countries that Obama pointed to as examples to be copied, like Spain, have gotten out of the solar business altogether. Germany is slowly shutting theirs down, and it turns out that they weren’t the 21st century new, new thing but only old-fashioned ideas that have never worked very well. The Volt goes about the same distance on a charge as the 1896 Roberts electric car. There’s more, of course.
Seems to me the case that Mitt and Ann Romney are out-of-touch and not cool may be a little iffy. Americans mostly don’t envy the rich — they hope to get rich themselves someday. They expect their president to honor the Constitution and separation of powers and respect the traditions of the office, and to understand enough about free enterprise and how the American economy works, to avoid spending all the money on big ideas of the wonders of big government. Surely that’s not asking too much.
Obama delivered a luncheon speech today to the Associated Press. It was so absolutely dreadful that you just have to laugh.
Obviously the White House is in full panic mode after the president’s perfectly awful week last week. It hadn’t occurred to them that it was possible that ObamaCare could possibly be struck down. Nobody expected Obama to be selling out the country in a whispered conversation caught by a hot mic. And the president’s budget request was shot down without even a single Democrat vote.
Obama has railed against the Supreme Court, reminding them that they must observe precedent and not go ruling against him. Now he’s taking on Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity. The nasty Republicans are threatening to “spend $4.6 trillion on lower tax rates.” This reveals the president’s mindset. Allowing people to keep more of their own hard-earned money is “spending.” Government taking more of the peoples’ hard-earned money to spend on current government enthusiasms is “investing.”
“Investments in clean energy technologies that are helping us reduce our dependence on foreign oil would be cut by nearly a fifth. ” Be still my beating heart! A fifth is not nearly enough. All our clean energy technologies are not reducing dependence on foreign oil one whit. Our “clean energy” technologies are wind and solar which make small amounts of electricity, Foreign oil gets refined into gasoline for transportation. There is no reason for us to be dependent on foreign oil. We have plenty of our own. Perennial lie.
Medicare and Social Security are both on a path to destruction. Both programs were devised in the expectation that rising birthrates would always supply the country with a larger crop of young workers to support the old folks when they reached the age for Social Security and Medicare. And the great increase in the number of babies following World War II made that seem like a good bet.
But the Baby Boom was followed by the baby bust. Now the 76 million Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age, and Medicare is already running in the red. The very first Boomers began retiring last year, and their numbers will increase dramatically every year until 2025. Boomers represent 26% of the American population.
Democrats’ approach is to pretend all is well and accuse the Republicans of “trying to end Social Security and Medicare as we know them.” It’s not easy to totally ignore 26% of the population, but Democrats are working on it. If we address the problems now, we can save the programs. As Paul Ryan says:
For four years the President has refused to honestly confront the most predictable economic crisis in our history. Instead, he has accelerated the nation toward this looming debt-fueled crisis with reckless budgets, always accompanied by partisan speeches that seek to divide the nation in order to distract from his legacy of broken promises. If he thinks there is no political price to pay for this total abdication of leadership, he is due for a rude awakening.
The president says early in his speech “So I believe deeply that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history.” which he immediately modifies by saying that “through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.”He falls back on what seems to be his campaign theme: “Or are we better off when everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.”
Consider that last statement. How does that work? How do you give everyone ‘a fair shot?’ Much as Obama wants to imply that government can guarantee that everyone be treated equally — it can’t be done. The Soviets claimed they were going to do that and ended up killing 25 million of their own people. How do you insure that everyone does their fair share, make all those slackards work harder? And everyone play by the same rules? You cannot say that on the one hand and then demand that the rich who pay most of the taxes pay even more. It’s a contradiction in terms. We have the most progressive tax system in the OECD. Pretty, persuasive propaganda, but complete nonsense.
Obama even hauls out the old canard about “trickle-down” economics — the name Democrats gave to Supply-Side economics, the successful program that gave the country nearly 30 years of prosperity. Or don’t you remember 20% interest rates? Obama said “In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few.” I wonder if he ever had any class in economics.
When free people are able to keep more of their own money the result is prosperity. Government has never made anyone prosperous —except for those favored few who are rewarded by government “investment” in their programs, like the millions that have just happened to flow to Obama’s bundlers who have an interest in those renewable clean energy companies that Obama is “investing” taxpayer money in. I would urge you to buy John Steele Gordon’s An Empire of Wealth, a book that should be in everyone’s library. It is an economic history of American prosperity, and an exciting, rewarding read.
Here’s the transcript of the President’s worst speech ever. You really should read it to understand the depth of his demagoguery, and what we can expect in the upcoming campaign. Guy Benson takes on the speech and inserts a few uncomfortable facts that Mr. Obama would prefer to ignore.
I think we reached a sort of tipping point this week. Politically, this was an unbelievably bad week for the President and his administration. And the defining event was not even the constitutional lessons being exposed in Supreme Court consideration of the Patient Protection and Affordable Car Act. The defining event was a whispered exchange with the Soviet president Dmitry Medvedev captured by a microphone still on.
President Obama: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.”
President Medvedev: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…”
President Obama: “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”
President Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you.”
The next day the president tried to explain away his comment, and made it worse. He insisted his comments to Medvedev were “not a matter of hiding the ball—I’m on record” about wanting to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles. His private comments to Medvedev were not about nuclear stockpiles, but about missile defense, and he was promising more accommodation to Vladimir Putin’s Russia next year.
Most presidents have come to office hoping to do good and serious things for the country and for the American people. They often bring with them ideas about just what those good and serious things will be. In most cases, they have discussed them thoroughly with the American people during the campaign, and made promises to the people. Yet as they settle in to the White House and learn about the office, they will inevitably find that the problems on the presidential plate may order different priorities than exactly what they originally had in mind. The world and events inexorably move on.
Barack Obama came to office and was shocked! shocked! as were his economic advisers at the awful mess left to him by George W. Bush — at least as described in his new campaign video “The Road We Traveled.” Why were they shocked? Were they not paying attention? Did they think that the ascension of “the One” to the highest office wiped the slate of events clean so that he could start reinventing America?
He was offered all sorts of help in the transition, because Bush did not want to leave the kind of mess, even for the opposing party, that was left to him by the Clinton administration. Yet Barack Obama was so reluctant to accept the burden of the presidency that he could not stop whining and complaining for three whole years. All those things he was forced to deal with —those were Bush’s fault — the good and popular things like clean green energy— those were Obama’s doing.
From the very first, Obama has been singularly uninterested in what the American people wanted. He wants to install his own personal agenda for his own selfish reasons. We’ve never had a president like this. All presidents make mistakes, do things they probably should not, at least in retrospect, have done. The president of the United States doesn’t occupy office to do as he pleases. He is president of all the people, including Republicans, and it is his job to do what is right for the country to the best of his ability. In the Washington Times, Charles Hurt said:
The past seven brutal days will go down as one of the worst weeks in history for a sitting president. … Somehow, Mr. Obama managed to embarrass himself abroad, humiliate himself here at home, see his credentials for being elected so severely undermined that it raises startling questions about whether he should have been elected in the first place — let alone be re-elected later this year.
It’s true this has been Obama’s worst week ever. But it’s also more than that. There are all sorts of ways to have a bad political week, and most don’t involve secretly colluding with the Kremlin and watching your signature policy initiative deliquesce at the Supreme Court.
For Obama detractors, this week was the mother of all “told-ya-so’s”: the disaster predictions of his presidency made manifest; all the contents of 2008’s dire prophecies conjured into the real world. The brazen courting of international bad actors, the constitutionally unfeasible leftism, and the political illiteracy have been summoned at last in the space of a few days.
Worst of all is the clear, bright line connecting the health-care showdown and the Putin pander: Barack Obama’s casual indifference to democratic principle. That the healthcare overhaul was a federally enforced protection racket is no more relevant to him than Vladimir Putin’s aggressive anti-freedom agenda. Expedience means the state compels the people to do what’s in their best interest. No one said change is easy.
In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan writes about a president who “increasingly comes across as devious and dishonest.”
In terms of the broad electorate, I’m not sure he really has a relationship. A president only gets a year or two to forge real bonds with the American people. In that time a crucial thing he must establish is that what is on his mind is what is on their mind. This is especially true during a crisis.
From the day Mr. Obama was sworn in, what was on the mind of the American people was financial calamity—unemployment, declining home values, foreclosures. These issues came within a context of some overarching questions: Can America survive its spending, its taxing, its regulating, is America over, can we turn it around?
That’s what the American people were thinking about.
But the new president wasn’t thinking about that. All the books written about the creation of economic policy within his administration make clear the president and his aides didn’t know it was so bad, didn’t understand the depth of the crisis, didn’t have a sense of how long it would last. They didn’t have their mind on what the American people had their mind on.
But really the message, the important one, concerns us, here in America. It is that the American people can’t be trusted if the president is honest with them about what he proposes. More bluntly, that the American people are not trusted by their own president. Otherwise the president would tell us the truth about his intentions. And here he is, admitting his distrust of his own people to a leader of a nasty foreign government that seeks to thwart our purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere. President Obama is in cahoots with the Russian regime against America’s very body politic.
Mr. Obama’s revealing comment, and the question of missile defense, and the question of Mr. Obama’s bizarre desire for coziness with Vladimir Putin, is a matter about which our European allies have great concerns.
The President of the United States takes a solemn oath at his inauguration,. to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. The American people place a fundamental trust in a President that he will do all within his powers to defend the country from foreign military threats. That trust applies as well to the threats posed by ballistic missiles.
This is not the first time this President has been caught off guard, by a microphone still ‘hot’, making comments not intended to be heard by the American people. The President met today, March 26, with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Seoul, South Korea.
Baker Spring of the Heritage Foundation sketches the background:
President Obama has been willing to subordinate the missile defense program to his policies for arms control and nuclear disarmament for a long time. One need go no further than to read a portion of the preamble to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which is the new strategic nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, on the subject of missile defense. It states that U.S. missile defense capabilities must come down as the numbers of strategic nuclear weapons come down under the treaty.
The Obama Administration spared no effort to defeat an amendment in Senate to strike this language in the New START preamble. The President’s comments in Seoul are completely in keeping with this past behavior. What is now evident is the scope of the manipulation he is pursuing to fool the American people about something essential to their security. It is now undeniable that President Obama is breaking the most basic trust the American people put in any President.
The exchange caught by the ‘hot’ microphone was as follows:
President Obama: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.”
President Medvedev: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you.…”
President Obama: “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”
President Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir [Putin].”
Russia’s definition of missile defense cooperation is problematic to say the least. Regardless of the level of knowledge Russia has of the U.S. missile defense program—a result of hours of unilateral U.S. briefings—Moscow insists on having veto power over Washington’s decision to shoot down a missile on its way toward its victims. On other occasions, Russia demanded binding limitations on speed or geographical coverage of U.S. interceptors.
Due to the pressure of concerned Senators, the President certified that “it is the policy of the United States to continue development and deployment of United States missile defense systems to defend against missile threats from nations such as North Korea and Iran, including qualitative and quantitative improvements to such systems” in New START’s resolution of ratification. It appears the President is ready to walk away from his own commitment.
After all, it would not be the first time that he failed to honor his promises made pursuant to New START ratification. He already failed to provide funding for U.S. nuclear weapons infrastructure, deemed essential at the time of ratification. If left unchecked, the Administration’s policies will lead to America’s becoming increasingly vulnerable. This is the wrong posture for the United States. North Korea is preparing to launch its long-range missile, and ballistic missile proliferation is growing worse. Heritage researchshows that a “protect and defend” strategy—which would combine offensive, defensive, conventional, and nuclear weapons—is the best response for this uncertain environment.
Obama has already betrayed our allies Poland and the Czech Republic, abandoning plans for ground-based interceptors and missile defense radars needed to defend against Iranian missile launches. He has also demonstrated that he has no problem with lying to the American public. He has his own goals for the nation, and he prefers to keep those hidden — until he is reelected and there are no more restraints on his actions. This is an appalling betrayal of the American people — and not even the first one. We’ll just have to see that there is no second term.
(This clip comes from Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR’s Detektor. The host is Thomas Buch-Anderson.)
UK Prime Minister David Cameron told a state dinner given by the President of the United States in his honor this week, that Barack Obama has “pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world”
Neutered American power abroad and extended the reach of the state at home
Appeased Iran while dumping on its designated target of annihilation, Israel
Appeased the Palestinians while dumping on the state they vow to destroy, Israel
Given Iran time to bring its genocide nuclear bomb to fruition
Helped consolidate in power the repressive and murderous Iranian regime by ignoring the plight of its political dissidents, women, gays and other victims of Iranian state terror
Allowed Iran to become the regional hegemon, thus in turn pushing moderate Arab states into its arms
Empowered the fanatical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Arab world
Helped bring to power a regime in Egypt which is oppressive to its own people and hostile to Israel and the west
Helped bring to power a regime in Libya which is oppressive to its own people and hostile to Israel and the west
Stood by and done nothing while President Assad butchers untold thousands of Syrian citizens
Surrendered in Afghanistan
Abandoned Iraq to the enemies of the west
Downplayed Islamist aggression at home, eg by declaring the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, where an Islamist terrorist killed 13 American soldiers and wounded 29 more, ‘work place violence’ not a terrorist attack
Taken the side of Argentinian aggression against Britain over the Falkland Islands (at least until this week when he agreed to return to a neutral position)
Sought to deny freedom of religious conscience at home by forcing Catholics to sign up to abortion and contraception services (and his backtracking compromise was scarcely any better)
Attacked free enterprise, as in his blockage of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, while ruinously increasing American debt through public spending designed to increase state power over people’s lives.
Economist Veronique du Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center explains, by using the example of neighboring Maryland, why Obama’s stimulus program could not have worked, why the ideas were flawed, and what happened when he put it into practice.
Doomed from the beginning, it’s another lesson in how “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Barack Obama is the most puzzling of presidents. He has, as Richard Epstein remarked, the most perfect human disposition — complete self-control. He reveals almost nothing of himself. We are confronted with his words, soothing, flowery, in a pleasing baritone voice, and his actions which have nothing whatsoever to do with the words. We are left with questions, millions of questions. Why is he doing this? But I thought he said —? What does this mean? Doesn’t he understand—?
I have a folder of OPP (Other People’s Posts) and the headlines indicate the puzzle: “How Smart is Obama?” “Obama’s Nixonian Enemies List On Steroids,”"Obama, Explained,” “The Most Polarizing President Ever,” “The Chosen One,” “Barack Obama’s Faux Populism,” “This White House Thinks That It’s Above the Rules,” “Obama is An Awful Economic Historian,” “Obama’s Godfather Speech,” “Obama vs. Capitalism.” Well, at least I’m not alone in wondering. I am, perhaps, a little more partisan than usual since we went to our Washington State caucus yesterday — big turnout. And I’m still pondering the loss of Andrew Breitbart, and wondering if his brave combat will spur usually non-combative Republicans into action.
Here are two posts that are especially thoughtful and carefully reasoned. The first is “How Obama Makes Decisions” by Ed Lasky, from American Thinker, which ought to scare the pants off you, and strikes me as probably completely accurate.( I knew there had to be some logical reason for all those Czars). The second is “Presence of Malice: Against the Conservative Portrait of the President,” by Gerard Vanderleun at American Digest. Read them both, they are real food for thought, and they don’t necessarily agree with each other. Vanderleun takes on the president’s foray into Libya, which he now cites as a great accomplishment. Which suggests that perhaps you should also read John Hinderaker’s “Springtime for Hitler” and watch the videos posted there.
A couple of days ago I said that we are in a make-or-break moment when it comes to America’s middle class. We either have a country where everybody fends for themselves, or we create a country where everybody does their fair share, everybody has got a fair chance, and we ensure that there’s fair play out there.
Now, to ensure fair play, one of the things that I talked about was the importance of making sure we implement financial reform, Wall Street reform that was passed last year. And a key component of that was making sure that we have a consumer watchdog in place who can police what mortgage brokers and payday lenders and other non-bank financial entities are able to do when it comes to consumers.
This is a big deal. About one-in-five people use these kinds of mechanisms to finance everything from buying a house to cashing their checks. And we passed a law last year that said we need this consumer watchdog in place to make sure that people aren’t taken advantage of.
Obama is complaining about his nomination of Richard Cordray, former attorney general and treasurer of the State of Ohio to be the director of Obama’s new Consumer Finance Protection Board. The problem is that the office inserts a board to oversee all consumer finance issues with no limits whatsoever on what the board may do. There are no legal controls, the board may do anything. Congress, particularly the Republicans, balk at that. No one seems to object to Mr. Cordray. We do have way too extensive a grasp for power and control by this administration. See how Mr. Obama twists the situation to fit his “fair play” theme.
The administration cut the “payroll tax” last year. It is not a tax on payrolls, it is the contribution (not a tax) to Social Security and Medicare. It may act like a tax, but it has since the beginning been defined as a contribution to your “old age insurance.” (But then it’s not an insurance policy either). Foregoing the standard contributions to Social Security have meant that Social Security cannot meet the payments to the old folks in their “Golden Years” out of revenue and the program is operating at a deficit. The “tax-cut” amounts to about $1,000 a year.
Could we survive as a nation if people spoke clearly and honestly about what the government is doing? Harry Reid said this morning “millionaire job creators are like unicorns: they’re impossible to find and don’t exist.” which has to rank high among the sillier things he’s said. Debbie Wasserman Schulz, (Democrat National Committee Chairman)also this morning, absolutely denies that the unemployment rate has gone up under Obama.
Jobless rate in January 2009: 7.8%. Jobless rate in November 2011: 8.6%.
Number of employed in January 2009, in thousands: 133,563. In November 2011: 131,708
Civilian participation rate in January 2009: 65.7%. In November 2011: 64.0%
Unemployment level in January 2009, in thousands: 11,984. In November 2011: 13,303
Number of people not in labor force, January 2009, in thousands: 80,554. In November 2011: 86,558
Aside from that there have been 3 million-plus people working-age adults who have joined the population during Obama’s term in office. Last month, 315,000 workers left the workforce — quit looking for work — which is the only reason the unemployment rate declined last month.
Word seeping out of the White House speaks of the president as increasingly isolated, withdrawn, and speaking only to Valerie Jarrett and David Axlerod. In a long article in the Washington Post, Scott Wilson describes the president’s “cerebral isolation.” I keep going back to Richard Epstein’s description of Obama as someone “who does not change his mind,” whose ideas are “set in concrete.”
If you visit the White House website, and read Obama’s remarks to supporters at fund-raising events, you will hear exactly the same litany from the campaign, from his first months in the White House: infrastructure, high-speed rail, depending on clean energy, crumbling schools and bridges, green jobs — nothing has changed in the slightest.
Analysis of the stimulus has proved over and over that it was a failure, and accomplished nothing — yet the “American Jobs Act” is simply stimulus jr. Some say that the Jobs Act is simply a ploy to blame the failure to create jobs on Republicans for their refusal to pass the jobs bill — which is probably true.
Also in the news is the Wikileaks revelation that Obama wanted to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki on his World Apology Tour and apologize to the Japanese for the bomb. The Japanese notified our government that such a visit would not be appropriate. Did Obama really think it was appropriate?
There seems to be a mindset among Democrats or Progressives, a storyline about Republicans that they all agree on, yet no Republican would recognize any part of it. You have heard it, over and over. Obama is a clear example. He believes that Republicans are anti-science, don’t understand the necessity for action on global warming and reducing our “greenhouse gases.” Republicans are the party of the rich, and have favored the rich with unwarranted tax cuts that damage the middle class. (Anybody look at who attends these big fundraising events)?
Republicans are warmongers, and our intransigence has prevented a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. We don’t need to spend money on missile defense — and that budget is on the chopping block. Whatever the Bush administration did is to be undone. When Iran is developing an intercontinental-range ballistic missile and North Korea already has the capacity to attack Alaska and Hawaii. Iran attempts a political assassination on American soil, and Secretary of State Clinton says that the United States would work with its allies to “send a very strong message that this kind of action, which violates international norms, must be ended.”
Republicans are racist, and you can prove that by their opposition to Obama’s policies. The Tea Party is radical and racist, but the earnest protestors in the OccupyWallStreet demonstrations represent the plaintive cries of those who have been abused by the rich who took all their money— a real grassroots movement that probably reminds the left of their glory days in the 60s. This is the Democrats’ answer to the Tea Party?
Brett Stephens wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the president’s contempt for Americans in general and Republicans in particular. The “mess we have inherited” line “became the administration’s ring tone for its first two years”
For presidential candidates to rail against incumbents from an opposing party is normal; for a president to rail for years against a predecessor of any party is crass—and something to which neither Reagan nor Lincoln, each of them inheritors of much bigger messes, stooped.
Then again, the contempt Mr. Obama felt for the Bush administration was merely of a piece with the broader ambit of his disdain. Examples? Here’s a quick list:
The gratuitous return of the Churchill bust to Britain. The slam of the Boston police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates. The high-profile rebuke of the members of the Supreme Court at his 2010 State of the Union speech. The diplomatic snubs, petty as well as serious, of Gordon Brown, Benjamin Netanyahu and Nicolas Sarkozy. The verbal assaults on Wall Street “fat cats” who “caused the problem” of “10% unemployment.” The never-ending baiting of millionaires and billionaires and jet owners and everyone else who, as Black Entertainment Television’s Robert Johnson memorably put it on Sunday, “tried rich and tried poor and like rich better.”
Richard Epstein said that Obama never participated in the lunchtime discussions at the University of Chicago, and because he would not put his ideas out there to be shot down, he never had to defend them, and thus did not learn and grow from the process. What do you do when confronted with new information?
This interview with the brilliant Richard Epstein was made in October, last year, and remains stunningly pertinent.
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Few legal scholars have blown as many minds and had the tangible impact that Richard Epstein has managed. His 1985 volume, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain is a case in point. Epstein made the hugely controversial argument that regulations and other government actions such as environmental regulations that substantially limit the use of or decrease the value of property should be thought of as a form of eminent domain and thus strictly limited by the Constitution. The immediate result was a firestorm of outrage followed by an acknowledgment that the guy was onto something.
As Epstein told Reason in a 1995 interview, “I took some pride in the fact that [Sen.] Joe Biden (D-Del.) held a copy of Takings up to a hapless Clarence Thomas back in 1991 and said that anyone who believes what’s in this book is certifiably unqualified to sit in on the Supreme Court. That’s a compliment of sorts…. But I took even more pride in the fact that, during the Breyer hearings [in 199X], there were no such theatrics, even as the nominee was constantly questioned on whether he agreed with the Epstein position on deregulation as if that position could not be held by responsible people.”
Born in New York in 1943, Epstein splits faculty appointments at the University of Chicago and New York University; he’s also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a contributor to Reason. In books such as Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (1992) to Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), and Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (2003), Epstein pushes his ideas and preconceptions to their limits and takes his readers along for the ride. A die-hard libertarian who believes the state should be limited and individual freedom expanded, he is nonetheless the consummate intellectual who first and foremost demands he offer up ironclad proofs for his characteristically counterintuitive insights into law and social theory.
Indeed, Epstein’s enduring value may not be any particular legal or policy prescription he’s offered over the years but rather his methodology. He believes in robust and unfettered argument and debate as a way of gaining knowledge. If you don’t put your ideas out in the arena, you can’t be doing your best work, he argues. “The problem when you keep to yourself is you don’t get to hear strong ideas articulated by people who disagree with you,” he says.
Dr Scott Gottlieb has a post at National Review this morning, saying:
Fresh off its successes in the green-energy patch, the Obama team is turning its investment skills to the life sciences. Last Friday, President Obama announced his intention to increase the federal government’s involvement in the business of biotechnology.
His plan is for a new federal center inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that would be focused on the development and commercialization of new drugs. The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) would engage in early drug-development work, eventually handing off programs to private companies for completion. In return the government would take a guaranteed royalty stream on drugs that eventually made it to market. The center would get its seed money by tapping other NIH programs. Longer term, the administration’s plan is to provide billions in dedicated federal funding to the new drug center.
Um, Oh oh!
The NCATS idea reflects the belief of the president and NIH director Francis Collins that the for-profit drug industry has ignored promising areas of science because these opportunities appeared financially dubious. Collins has said that government can plow scientific fields that profit-driven companies ignore. He suggested during an interview on CNBC earlier this year that NIH drug developers would also get a break from regulators at the Food and Drug Administration. His reasoning seems to be that government regulators could place more trust in government drug developers.
Do read the whole article. This proposal is one of those things that can sound appealing at first glance, yet requires some careful examination. It is coming right at the time when federal regulatory agencies have been squeezing the life-sciences sector. Regulators have been forcing longer development programs, and this, in turn, has made the cost of creating new drugs dramatically higher. Fewer new drugs are reaching the market, and fewer programs are being funded. Not interesting unless it happens to be the drug that might have saved your life.
The NIH has great achievements, Gottlieb says, but they are to do with basic science. The NIH is not very good at drugs. The government spends more than a combined $50 billion a year, but has helped to discover only 84 drugs in the past 60 years. The agency has also been reluctant to submit to FDA oversight of the same kind required of private drug companies.
This proposal demonstrates nothing so much as Obama’s misplaced faith in Big Government as the proper agent to determine what, in their wisdom, they think the people should or should not have. There are other names for this kind of government, and they are not included in a Constitution that begins “We the People…”
Back a while, Ted Kennedy and Rahm Emanuel introduced a bill removing the “reimportation ban” to make companies subject to FTC action if they refuse to sell to foreign companies that undersell them. The “Patent Reform Act” would degrade the patent system and patent rights. It endorses a congressional finding that says “Congress believes access to drugs is more important than protecting corporate rights to produce those drugs.”
The idea was that the poor are going to Canada for drugs and rich pharmaceutical companies care only about profits. This is typical liberal thinking. The actual consequences would deprive pharmaceutical companies of the financial incentive to develop and market new drugs. Liberals described it as a way to promote innovation and efficiency in patents. Uh huh. In actuality it would do just the opposite.
In 2007, Senator Bernie Sanders (S – VT) came up with the Medical Innovation Prize Act, which would deprive inventors of medicines and drug treatments of all patent rights, and instead create a bureaucracy to dole out compensation from a “prize fund.” The theory was that prizes would act as incentive to create new drugs for HIV/AIDS or 3rd world malaria. It just strips all patent rights from all medicine.
I assume that neither of these acts ever saw the light of day, but it demonstrates liberal thinking. They don’t understand the free market. They hate corporations and don’t understand the profit motive, and essentially think corporations should do nice things for free. Haven’t noticed Sen. Sanders offering to serve in the Senate for free, nor the other two either. Their thinking always has to do with the presumed wisdom of the elites who serve in the federal government.
The world is in turmoil with financial crises created by government. Our current recession was caused by government action, and is being prolonged by government action. It was not caused by greedy corporations or bankers or even Wall Street. It was caused by government. The Crisis in Europe was caused by government action. The Conservative Euro-skeptics were right, and have been proven right. Free markets work.
The independent actions of millions of people acting in their own self-interest have a collective wisdom that governments cannot even begin to imitate. When will they ever learn?
