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Tony Blankley comments on the administration so far.
I am trying to capture the spirit of bipartisanship as practiced by the Democratic Party over the past eight years. Thus, I have chosen as my lead this proposition: Obama lied; the economy died. Obviously, I am borrowing this from the Democratic theme of 2003-08: “Bush lied, people died.” There are, of course, two differences between the slogans.
Most importantly, I chose to separate the two clauses with a semicolon rather than a comma because the rule of grammar is that a semicolon (rather than a comma) should be used between closely related independent clauses not conjoined with a coordinating conjunction. In the age of Obama, there is little more important than maintaining the integrity of our language against the onslaught of Orwellian language abuse that is already a babbling brook and soon will be a cataract of verbal deception.
The other difference is that Bush didn’t lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He merely was mistaken. Whereas Obama told a whopper when he claimed that he is not for bigger government. As he said last week: “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by Presidents Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets, not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t.”
This he asserted despite the fact that the budget he proposed the next day asks for federal spending as 28 percent of gross domestic product, higher by at least 6 percent than any time since World War II. …
Would you believe Bush was more popular than Obama at this point in their terms? Of course you wouldn’t, because the media wants you to think the Kid walks on water. Peter Wehner Corner post with details.
VDH says he knew he’d be the Great Divider.
I confess I did not believe Barack Obama entirely during the campaign when he bragged on working across the aisle and championing bipartisanship.
You see, as in the case of any other politician, one must look to what he does—and has done—not what he says for election advantage.
And in the case of Sen. Obama, in his nascent career in the Senate, he had already compiled the most partisan record of any Democratic Senator. He had attended religiously one of the most racially divisive and extremist churches in the country. His Chicago friends were not moderates. His campaigns for state legislature, the House and the Senate were hard-ball, no-prisoner affairs of personal destruction, even by Chicago standards. Campaign references to reparations, gun- and bible-clingers, and Rev. Wright’s wisdom were not words of healing. …
Power Line posts on the voice of the market.
… Yesterday Obama was asked about the stock market. He advised his audience not to “spend all your time worrying about that.” Bill Kristol sums up Obama’s response under the heading “Don’t worry, be happy.” Obama explained:
What I’m looking at is not the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market, but the long-term ability for the United States and the entire world economy to regain its footing. And, you know, the stock market is sort of like a tracking poll in politics. You know, it bobs up and down day to day. And if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you’re probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong.
With its likening of the stock market to daily tracking polls, this is certainly a rich text. Most notably, as Bill Kristol observes, “the stock market isn’t gyrating, or bobbing up and down. It’s dropping.”
The sobering voice of Mr. Market is saying that the Obama administration and its allies in Congress have done nothing to brighten the prospects of companies struggling to make a go of it in the private sector. On the contrary, they have dimmed the prospects of these companies. The dimming can be measured in the vast destruction of wealth in the stock market. …
And on whether he will sell out the African-American children who get DC vouchers.
David Warren writes on what he has learned.
… “The people” have discovered that they can vote themselves money, by the simple device of putting into office politicians like Barack Obama, who promise them cash, services, tax breaks, bailouts, and to “make the rich pay.” Democracy has been degenerating into a vicious system in which wealth is transferred by the power of law from “them” to “us.” That this must have a crippling effect on the creation of wealth should be perfectly obvious.
The Nanny State is hardly something new, but it seems that in this year of 2009 we have entered a new phase of it, which might be characterized as the “death spiral.” The U.S. government is suddenly vomiting out trillions — literally, trillions — to the people who voted for it. Partly at the expense of the people who didn’t; but mostly conjured from thin air.
The laws of supply and demand are laws of nature. They do not apply only to free markets, but with a special vengeance to those who try to subvert market disciplines. The effect of summoning huge quantities of dollars out of nothing is extremely well known. It leads to inflation, and when not then very painfully corrected, to hyperinflation.
Inflation, too, has been with us for some time, but seldom on the scale the U.S. is now risking. …
David Harsanyi likes Limbaugh’s ideas of failure.
… Republicans, conversely, are fighting over their future, a future that grassroots figures like Limbaugh will certainly be a part of. In the meantime, Democrats are hoping Republicans fail to come to a consensus and regroup — even though two vibrant parties are always healthier for the nation than one.
And many of us are hoping that all those in power fail. Because those in power have a grating habit of being annoyingly self-righteous, hopelessly corrupt, resolutely incompetent and completely apathetic about the freedoms that they have sworn to protect.
Embrace the failure. It’s patriotic.
Pseudonymous film writer explains why Hollywood hates America.
… Many explanations have been offered to account for our ludicrously parodistic version of liberalism. There is no cause too ridiculous for us to support, as long as it is described as a civil-rights issue and is couched in the language of “fairness,” preferably tinged with self-loathing and anti-Americanism. Among the clichés cited for our conformism are (a) the arts are a natural home for sensitive and suffering souls, (b) like journalism, the movie business has long attracted crusaders for “social justice,” and (c) the immense wealth generated for its creators by a hit movie — or, even better, a long-running television series — provokes an internal backlash of guilt over undeserved good fortune, which is then partially expiated by “good works,” especially when those works involve spending taxpayers’ money. (Taxes? Us? We have accountants for that.)
Forget about it. The origin of our reflexive liberalism lies not in the kinds of people who go into movie-making but in something far deeper: the nature of the movie business itself, which drives us insane. …
Here’s some good news. Remember the bees that were disappearing? They might be coming back. The Economist has the story.
AT THE end of February, the orchards of California’s Central Valley are dusted with pink and white blossom, as millions of almond trees make their annual bid for reproduction. The delicate flowers attract pollinators, mostly honeybees, to visit and collect nectar and pollen. By offering fly-through hospitality, the trees win the prize of a brush with a pollen-covered bee and the chance of cross-pollination with another tree. In recent years, however, there has been alarm over possible shortages of honeybees and scary stories of beekeepers finding that 30-50% of their charges have vanished over the winter. It is called colony collapse disorder (CCD), and its cause remains a mystery.
Add to this worries about long-term falls in the populations of other pollinators, such as butterflies and bats, and the result is a growing impression of a threat to nature’s ability to supply enough nectar-loving animals to service mankind’s crops. This year, however, the story has developed a twist. In California the shortage of bees has been replaced by a glut. …
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