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When he got to Washington the president sent his kids to a private school, but called a halt to the successful DC voucher program that assisted poor blacks looking for a quality education for their children. The Washington Post had an editorial yesterday about the return of the program, courtesy of John Boehner. That one bit of hypocrisy by Obama is how Pickerhead knew for sure he is a fraud. The balance of today’s Pickings is devoted to the manifest shortcomings of the kid president.
MOST OF THE PARENTS who showed up Saturday to find out more about the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program could not care less about the politics or the polemics behind private school vouchers. What matters to them is arranging a decent education for their children. The excitement they brought to the task of choosing a good school for their sons and daughters should give pause to those who sought to deny them this opportunity.
D.C. parents, including many single mothers, streamed into the Renaissance Hotel for information about the federally funded program that this year will provide vouchers of up to $12,000 to children from low-income families to attend private schools. The scholarship program began in 2004 as part of a three-pronged approach to improve education in the District; additional resources also were funneled to traditional and charter public schools. When Democrats recaptured Congress, they barred the scholarship program from accepting new students, with the Obama administration a disappointing accomplice. The administration even rescinded scholarships that had been promised to 216 families in 2009. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), a strong supporter, used his clout to broker the program’s reauthorization as part of the deal to avert a federal shutdown.
Given the popularity of the program — evident in the hundreds of applicants as well as a recent Post poll showing more than two-thirds of D.C. residents (even higher numbers among African Americans) in support — there’s a strange disconnect in seeing such local leaders as Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) voice their opposition. They should hear Josette Hardy, her voice breaking, talk about wanting a better future — “including college” — for her 5-year-old daughter, Jamia. For Ms. Hardy, having lost out on lotteries for better-performing public schools, winning a scholarship is the only thing that will allow her daughter to escape the failing school in her Southeast neighborhood.
LaKia Smith, hoping to win a voucher for her 10-year-old son, said it best: “We should have as many choices as possible, not just the choices you choose to give us.”
Mark Steyn talks about the fiscal state of the union and how it won’t be cured by speeches.
The Democrats seem to have given up on budgets. Hey, who can blame them? They’ve got a ballpark figure: Let’s raise two trillion dollars in revenue every year, and then spend four trillion. That seems to work pretty well, so why get hung up on a lot of fine print? Harry Reid says the Senate has no plans to produce a budget, but in April the President did give a speech about “a new budget framework” that he said would save $4 trillion over the next 12 years.
That would be 2023, if you’re minded to take him seriously. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, did. Last week he asked Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, if he’d “estimated the budget impact of this framework.”
“No, Mr. Chairman,” replied Director Elmendorf, deadpan. “We don’t estimate speeches. We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech.”
“We don’t estimate speeches”: There’s an epitaph to chisel on the tombstone of the republic. Unfortunately for those of us on the receiving end, giving speeches is what Obama does. …
…The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along. Remember Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Florida? “I never thought this day would ever happen,” she gushed after an Obama rally in 2008. “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.” …
…In Realworld, political speeches would be about closing down unnecessary federal bureaucracies, dramatically downsizing or merging others, and ending make-work projects and mission creep. The culture of excess that distinguishes the hyperpower at twilight would be reviled at every turn. But instead the “highly persuasive” orator declares that there’s nothing to worry about that even more government can’t cure. In Speechworld, “no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.” In Realworld, that’s mainly because we’re going downhill. And the horizon is a cliff edge.
In the Weekly Standard, Yuval Levin discusses the budget battles and the latest CBO report.
…The Democratic Senate has not proposed a budget in either of the last two years. In February, President Obama offered a budget that would actually increase the deficit. Then in a speech in April he essentially retracted it, and offered in its place a vague and incoherent series of policy goals that left Democrats with no particular agenda. On June 23, at a hearing of the Budget Committee, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf was asked what his agency made of the proposals in that presidential address. “We don’t estimate speeches,” he said. “We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech.”
Republicans have no way to force the Democrats to be more specific and to take the crisis seriously. But they are doing their best to use the fight over raising the government’s debt ceiling—a fight the Democrats cannot avoid—to compel some responsible action.
Until last week, that fight had been focused on negotiations led by Vice President Biden. Those talks certainly revealed something about the Democrats’ priorities: In the midst of a spending-driven debt explosion and a weak economy, Democrats in Washington want to raise taxes. But the negotiations also revealed the continuing unwillingness of the president to make specific proposals about how to reduce spending, reform entitlements, and bring the debt under control. On June 23, House majority leader Eric Cantor (who had represented House Republicans at the negotiations) decided he’d had enough, and left the talks in order to force the issue to a higher level and compel the president to get specific. …
In the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Colin McNickle looks at several examples of the administration’s economic ignorance.
…Gasoline prices have been falling. Supplies have been and are expected to be relatively stable. And the Obama administration taps the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves, designed to offset serious supply disruptions. That 30 million barrels — and 30 million more from the reserves of more than two dozen member countries of the International Energy Agency — will be dribbled into the supply chain over the next month.
The net positive economic effect? Pretty negligible. But the net negative effect of what really is a political stunt designed to slap what looks like a rich veneer onto a particle board economic record — could be lasting. The New York Times reports that the move was intended, in part, to send a message to market traders “that governments would react when they believed there was excessive speculation in oil markets.”
That would be those evil speculators whose work, in reality, promotes price stability.
As Fox Business News host John Stossel reminded in a column last month, “When (speculators) foresee a future oil shortage — that is, when prices are lower than anticipated in the future — speculators buy lots of it, store it and then sell it when the shortage hits. They know they can charge more when there’s relatively little oil on the market. But their selling during the shortage brings prices down from what they would have been had speculators not acted.”
And this Mr. Obama wants to stop? …
Bloomberg columnist, William Cohan, writes on the administration’s treatment of Wall Street.
As we head into the 2012 presidential election cycle, the new, official Obama administration policy on Wall Street is crystalline: Hands off the bad guys. …
… The continuing free passes are immensely frustrating, especially when the evidence continues to pile up that lots of people at these firms knew very well as 2007 progressed that they were packaging lousy mortgages and selling them at par to investors. For instance, the SEC’s complaint against JPMorgan included an e-mail sent on Feb. 13, 2007, by a “salesperson” in JPMorgan’s investment bank who was working with Magnetar Capital, the hedge fund looking to short Squared, the synthetic CDO in question. “We all know,” the salesperson wrote, that Magnetar “wants to print as many deals as possible before everything completely falls apart.”
As the market began to crack, JPMorgan pushed potential investors very hard to buy Squared. On March 19, one employee wrote to the European sales force that “we really need your help on this one. This is a top priority from the top of the bank all the way down.” Three days later, another member of the deal team tried again to get the sales team hyped. “We are soooo pregnant with this deal, we need a wheel-barrel to move around,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Let’s schedule the cesarian, please!”
Needless to say, similar e-mails have been found in the files of bankers and traders along Wall Street and at the credit rating services, such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. Are we really expected to believe that such widespread questionable practices flourished without any of the corner-office folk knowing about it?
Make no mistake, Sheila Bair: those “higher up” on Wall Street knew very well what their firms were doing and simply chose to ignore it. After all, there was money to be made. (JPMorgan got paid $18.9 million to slap together Squared, and Goldman got paid $15 million for Abacus.) If that isn’t enough to make you lose your lunch — although not, of course, a $35,800 dinner — then the fact that Wall Street is going to get away with it all surely will.
Michael Barone thinks there’s a better comparison to Obama than Jimmy Carter. Barone points to Chauncey Gardiner, Peter Sellers’ character in the movie “Being There.”
…But there is another comparison I think more appropriate for a president who, according to one of his foreign-policy staffers, prefers to “lead from behind.” The man I have in mind is Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie “Being There.”
As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well in the garden.” “First comes the spring and summer,” he explains, “but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.” The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, “There will be growth in the spring.”
Kind of reminds you of Obama’s approach to the federal budget, doesn’t it?
In preparing his February budget, Obama totally ignored the recommendations of his own fiscal commission headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Others noticed: The Senate rejected the initial budget by a vote of 97-0.
Then, speaking in April at George Washington University, Obama said he was presenting a new budget with $4 trillion in long-term spending cuts. But there were no specifics. …
Michael Ledeen comments on some embarrassing presidential gaffes that would have greatly amused the Liberal Media if they’d been W’s.
Big Media doesn’t pay much attention to them, even though Obama makes an amazing number of errors in his public statements. And I think it’s easy enough to understand why the BM largely ignores them: to report them all would totally undermine the image of the president to which a surprising number of “reporters” and pundits are wedded: that of an unusually intelligent and well educated man.
Yet someone who tells a crowd in Vienna that his “Austrian” isn’t very good, who tells Marines that he’s pleased to speak to the “Marine Corpse,” and who, just today, said he’d given the Medal of Honor to a survivor from the 10th Mountain Division, when in fact the award was given posthumously, doesn’t fit my definition of a brilliant and cultured man.
…And these people think they’re the smart guys, and we’re the dummies, even though we know that German is spoken in Vienna, and many of us would be mortified to make a glaring error about an American hero.
The gaffes are important. They tell us a lot about the nature of our leaders, and it’s not good news. But it is news…even though it’s not reported as often as it should be, or with the sort of concern the gaffes deserve.
Toby Harnden has more thoughts on Obama confusing two Medal of Honor recipients, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.
…The Medal of Honor is the highest United States award for valour. It’s the equivalent of the Victoria Cross. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, just eight have been awarded. Three of them have been awarded by Obama. The names of recipients are seared on the hearts of many, many Americans.
To mix up SSG Giunta and SFC Monti was just awful and it suggests a relaxed attitude towards American heroes that has been evident on previous occasions. Note that rather than referring to SFC Monti by his rank, Obama said just “Jared Monti”. Servicemen and women earn their ranks and deserve to be addressed by them. …
…All this suggests that Obama doesn’t really understand or fully appreciate the military, its culture and its traditions. I don’t think for a moment that he deliberately wants to disrespect Medal of Honor winners or American troops. It doesn’t mean he’s stupid. But sometimes being casual about something solemn and serious does amount to disrespect. A good first step towards putting this right would be to apologise to the family of SFC Monti and to SSG Guinta.
UPDATE: According to ABC: “On his Facebook page this evening, Monti’s father, Paul, posted: “FYI- President Barack Obama telephoned me personally this afternoon to apologise for his error in his speech to the 10th mountain division re: Jared’s medal ceremony. Apology accepted.”
Pundit and Pundette comment on the First Lady’s inappropriate attire at a posthumous Medal of Honor ceremony.
You might think a posthumous Medal of Honor award ceremony would be a somber occasion, but not everyone would agree with you. Either this is an especially skillful photo shop effort or Michelle Obama has no clue whatsoever about the nature of this event. U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Jared C. Monti’s parents received the award for him. I hope they didn’t notice the first lady’s stunningly inappropriate dress, but that’s unlikely.