I'm trying to work on a post regarding Obama's disastrous first 100 days. It's filled with broken promises and a socialist agenda.
"Stimulus" - over a $1 trillion of deficit spending.
Proposed Budget - $2 trillion deficit.
National Healthcare - because it's worked so well in Britain and Canada . Anyone really looking to institute any plan or project looks for similar scenarios that have been tried. Even a cursory view of Britian's healthcare will show long wait lines, poor coverage, high levels of staph infections, etc. Proponents of national healthcare make arguments "the children." Children already have access to healthcare via "CHIP" Medicare programs. Statistics of "48 million" without health insurance include illegal immigrants.
Carbon Tax - Oh yeah, it's called a "cap and trade" system. Bottom line, it will artificially raise the price of electricity and gasoline across the board. That will tax a non existent problem (anthrophrogenic global warming) and obviously hurt the poor the most.
Federalization of Education - More government control of education. As if the
Appointees that haven't paid their taxes. How many? Tim Geitner, Kathleen Sebelius, Hilda Solis, Tom Daschle, Nancy Killefe to name a few. This is from the party that always wants higher taxes.
Amateur appeals to Iran and Russia. Obama tried to barter the missile defense shield in Poland for help preventing Iran for getting nukes. Russians publicly said "no way." He made a YouTube appeal to Iran saying how we want to restart relations. Iran rebuffed Obama in no uncertain terms.
Hillary went to Mexico and told them we were responsible for their drug violence. Then she said that we have a lot to learn from them on the environment. Yeah, in the country you can't drink the water.
Ignoring North Korea
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Are smaller quieter Mexican cartels okay?
Obama’s wording when discussing the Mexican drug cartels gives me pause. To say that the Mexican cartels have “gotten out of hand”, implies that prior to the frequent shootings near the border, they were okay.
“We are coordinating very effectively with the Mexican government and President Calderon, who has taken on an extraordinarily difficult task of dealing with these drug cartels that have gotten completely out of hand”. -Obama
“We are coordinating very effectively with the Mexican government and President Calderon, who has taken on an extraordinarily difficult task of dealing with these drug cartels that have gotten completely out of hand”. -Obama
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Media Abulation of Obama Slipping
Another fact check on Obama by the AP:
FACT CHECK: Obama having it both ways on economy?
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's plea for patience in the economic turmoil Tuesday fits with the view of most economists that a turnaround will take some time. It doesn't fit quite so neatly with his bullish budget. The president's spending plans and deficit projections rest on the assumption that the economy will post solid growth next year after a mild, further decline this year. Many economists think that's too rosy.
Obama was more cautious than that in his prime-time news conference — possibly to the point of having it both ways.
A look at some of his statements and how they square with the facts:
THE CLAIM: "We will recover from this recession. But it will take time, it will take patience, and it will take an understanding that when we all work together, when each of us looks beyond our own short-term interests to the wider set of obligations we have to each other, that's when we succeed."
THE FACTS: No one really knows when the recession will end. But Obama's own budget forecasts the recession will continue through this year but with a relatively shallow 1.2 percent decline in the gross domestic product.
Then, the budget predicts solid 3.2 percent growth for 2010, followed by three years of more than 4 percent growth each year.
Christina Romer, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said this week she was "incredibly confident" the U.S. economy will recover within a year.
Congressional Republicans and some Democratic budget hawks have suggested the Obama budget projections are unduly optimistic to make the math to pay for the president's programs work. The higher the GDP growth, the more tax revenues come in.
Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office last week predicted that the Obama budget would produce deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.
___
OBAMA: "In this budget, we have made the tough choices necessary to cut our deficit in half by the end of my first term even under the most pessimistic estimates."
THE FACTS: Not all credible estimates foresee a deficit halved in that time.
Obama's budget forecast a deficit of $530 billion by the end of 2013. That would cut by half the deficit he inherited at the start of his term. To succeed, Obama is counting on a recovered economy, a tax boost for the rich and success in easing foreign entanglements. But his assertion that he can accomplish that "even under the most pessimistic estimates" flies in the face of an answer he gave moments later.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecasts that Obama's spending plan would leave a deficit of $672 billion by the end of 2013. Explaining the differences between his projections and CBO's, Obama said: "They're assuming a growth rate of 2.2 (percent), we're assuming a growth rate of 2.6."
___
THE CLAIM: Obama repeated his assertion that his housing bailout will help "stabilize the housing market and help responsible homeowners stay in their homes."
THE FACTS: Even officials in his administration, many supporters of the plan in Congress and the Federal Reserve chairman have said some of the bailout money is bound to go to those who acted irresponsibly.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has said it's important for the nation to go ahead with the plan even though it means assistance will go to some who should have known better than to get in over their heads.
Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., made a similar point when she said it's "simply impractical" to examine every delinquent loan and weed out those taken by people who overstated their income or assets to get a mortgage they couldn't afford.
FACT CHECK: Obama having it both ways on economy?
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's plea for patience in the economic turmoil Tuesday fits with the view of most economists that a turnaround will take some time. It doesn't fit quite so neatly with his bullish budget. The president's spending plans and deficit projections rest on the assumption that the economy will post solid growth next year after a mild, further decline this year. Many economists think that's too rosy.
Obama was more cautious than that in his prime-time news conference — possibly to the point of having it both ways.
A look at some of his statements and how they square with the facts:
THE CLAIM: "We will recover from this recession. But it will take time, it will take patience, and it will take an understanding that when we all work together, when each of us looks beyond our own short-term interests to the wider set of obligations we have to each other, that's when we succeed."
THE FACTS: No one really knows when the recession will end. But Obama's own budget forecasts the recession will continue through this year but with a relatively shallow 1.2 percent decline in the gross domestic product.
Then, the budget predicts solid 3.2 percent growth for 2010, followed by three years of more than 4 percent growth each year.
Christina Romer, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said this week she was "incredibly confident" the U.S. economy will recover within a year.
Congressional Republicans and some Democratic budget hawks have suggested the Obama budget projections are unduly optimistic to make the math to pay for the president's programs work. The higher the GDP growth, the more tax revenues come in.
Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office last week predicted that the Obama budget would produce deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.
___
OBAMA: "In this budget, we have made the tough choices necessary to cut our deficit in half by the end of my first term even under the most pessimistic estimates."
THE FACTS: Not all credible estimates foresee a deficit halved in that time.
Obama's budget forecast a deficit of $530 billion by the end of 2013. That would cut by half the deficit he inherited at the start of his term. To succeed, Obama is counting on a recovered economy, a tax boost for the rich and success in easing foreign entanglements. But his assertion that he can accomplish that "even under the most pessimistic estimates" flies in the face of an answer he gave moments later.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecasts that Obama's spending plan would leave a deficit of $672 billion by the end of 2013. Explaining the differences between his projections and CBO's, Obama said: "They're assuming a growth rate of 2.2 (percent), we're assuming a growth rate of 2.6."
___
THE CLAIM: Obama repeated his assertion that his housing bailout will help "stabilize the housing market and help responsible homeowners stay in their homes."
THE FACTS: Even officials in his administration, many supporters of the plan in Congress and the Federal Reserve chairman have said some of the bailout money is bound to go to those who acted irresponsibly.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has said it's important for the nation to go ahead with the plan even though it means assistance will go to some who should have known better than to get in over their heads.
Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., made a similar point when she said it's "simply impractical" to examine every delinquent loan and weed out those taken by people who overstated their income or assets to get a mortgage they couldn't afford.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
The Coming Evangelical Collapse
So says an evangelical:
The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.
2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.
3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.
....
•Expect evangelicalism to look more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented megachurches that have defined success. Emphasis will shift from doctrine to relevance, motivation, and personal success – resulting in churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith.
•Two of the beneficiaries will be the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions. Evangelicals have been entering these churches in recent decades and that trend will continue, with more efforts aimed at the "conversion" of Evangelicals to the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.
....
•Charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity will become the majority report in evangelicalism. Can this community withstand heresy, relativism, and confusion? To do so, it must make a priority of biblical authority, responsible leadership, and a reemergence of orthodoxy.
The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.
2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.
3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.
....
•Expect evangelicalism to look more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented megachurches that have defined success. Emphasis will shift from doctrine to relevance, motivation, and personal success – resulting in churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith.
•Two of the beneficiaries will be the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions. Evangelicals have been entering these churches in recent decades and that trend will continue, with more efforts aimed at the "conversion" of Evangelicals to the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.
....
•Charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity will become the majority report in evangelicalism. Can this community withstand heresy, relativism, and confusion? To do so, it must make a priority of biblical authority, responsible leadership, and a reemergence of orthodoxy.
Monday, March 09, 2009
NARAL's Abortion Rights Activist of the Year
Despite it only being March, Naral has locked up the decision to give it's Abortion Rights Activist of the Year Award to Barack Obama. In the 6 short weeks since Obama's been inaugurated he's:
— proposed to rescind Health & Human Services’s regulation aimed at protecting the conscience rights of physicians and others, especially in the context of abortion. This means that Catholic doctors would be forced to perform abortions above their moral objections.
— permitted U.S. government funding of organizations sponsoring abortion provision around the world (i.e., rescission of the so-called “Mexico City Policy”). How is this Constitutional?
— nominated Kathleen Seblieus, an aggressively pro-choice Catholic to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This is the same lady who has protected George "The Baby Killer" Tiller, a notorious late term abortionist. Any efforts by the Kansas legislation to curtail his viable baby killing efforts were vetoed by Ms. Seblieus.
— reversed the ban on federal funding of embryo-destroying stem-cell research. The media liked to portray it as a ban on research. However, it was just a ban on funding the research with taxpayer money. It was always legal to destroy embroys in the name of stem cell research with private money, which was bad enough. Now, to twist the knife, you will be forced to finance it through your taxes.
— proposed to rescind Health & Human Services’s regulation aimed at protecting the conscience rights of physicians and others, especially in the context of abortion. This means that Catholic doctors would be forced to perform abortions above their moral objections.
— permitted U.S. government funding of organizations sponsoring abortion provision around the world (i.e., rescission of the so-called “Mexico City Policy”). How is this Constitutional?
— nominated Kathleen Seblieus, an aggressively pro-choice Catholic to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This is the same lady who has protected George "The Baby Killer" Tiller, a notorious late term abortionist. Any efforts by the Kansas legislation to curtail his viable baby killing efforts were vetoed by Ms. Seblieus.
— reversed the ban on federal funding of embryo-destroying stem-cell research. The media liked to portray it as a ban on research. However, it was just a ban on funding the research with taxpayer money. It was always legal to destroy embroys in the name of stem cell research with private money, which was bad enough. Now, to twist the knife, you will be forced to finance it through your taxes.
Friday, March 06, 2009
A Great Summary
Deception at Core of Obama Plans
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.
Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.
All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.
The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:
"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.
The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.
Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.
At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.
The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.
And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.
Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.
Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.
All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.
The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:
"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.
The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.
Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.
At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.
The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.
And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.
Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Obama Loses Cramer
Cramer became critical of Obama’s budgets and bailouts, so Obama (via his press secretary) took to criticizing him as well. Cramer had always been a Democrat, so there’s some cracking in Obama’s support.
Part of me is glad that supporters are bailing on Obama.
The other part of me is annoyed that these people didn’t see it coming. Cramer thought Obama would be a middle-of-the-road Democrat. I think people hoped he would be, but it was just wishful thinking as there was no voting pattern to support that.
Part of me is glad that supporters are bailing on Obama.
The other part of me is annoyed that these people didn’t see it coming. Cramer thought Obama would be a middle-of-the-road Democrat. I think people hoped he would be, but it was just wishful thinking as there was no voting pattern to support that.
Monday, March 02, 2009
The Obama Market crash
In the stock market, for companies, when you release an earnings report, whether you stock jumps, dives, or remains the same has nothing to do with how you did. It is how you did compared to what everyone (via analysts) were thinking that you would do.
That's you might see a headline that reads "Company A loses $2 billion", yet the stock jumps 25%. That's because everyone expected it to lose $4 billion.
All the known good and bad news is accounted for already in a stock price. Therefore, by the time Obama took office on January 20th, all the bad news from the mortgage mess and the impending recession had already been factored into stocks.
The Dow has declined 18% since Obama has taken office. This subsequent decline is all based on Obama's policies.
That's you might see a headline that reads "Company A loses $2 billion", yet the stock jumps 25%. That's because everyone expected it to lose $4 billion.
All the known good and bad news is accounted for already in a stock price. Therefore, by the time Obama took office on January 20th, all the bad news from the mortgage mess and the impending recession had already been factored into stocks.
The Dow has declined 18% since Obama has taken office. This subsequent decline is all based on Obama's policies.
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