I had not intended to watch it, but switched on FoxNews at about 5:40 and was surprised that he was still in the middle of it.  And he’s still going.  He seems quite angry, shouting the speech rather than giving it.  (And it seems others agree with me as a blogging friend observed as his Facebook status, “Why is the President yelling at us?”

“If you misrepresent what is in this plan, I will call you out.”  Um, so does that mean he will be calling himself out?

UPDATE:  Stephen Green drunkblogs to similar effect: “The president is LECTURING people he needs to win over. How’s that gonna go over, you think?” His summary:

Obama will see a brief spike in the polls, but not enough. He delivered a divisive speech to a divided nation — and that’s no way to spur a divided Congress into action.

I agree.  Read the whole thing.

UP-UPDATE:  Please note I include this post in the “Dishonest Democrats” category because of the way he misrepresented his plan and his critics.  Hope to address this in a subsequent post.

UP-UP-UPDATE:  Jim Geraghy also thought he “shouted” the speech:

Tonight, we saw a surprising amount of “shouting” delivery, and a lot of promises. A lot. A big reason the public skeptical is that they doubt any plan passed by Congress will meet the litany of pledges Obama offered this evening.

When most Presidents speak to a joint session of Congress, it is in response to a personal tragedy (as was Reagan’s speech in 1981 after he recovered from being shot), a national crisis (as was George W. Bush’s September 20, 2001 speech to the attacks of 9/11),  or to deliver the State of the Union address.

It seems today the only tragedy for Obama is personal, the precipitous drop in his poll numbers, the only crisis the loss of popular support for his legislative initiatives.  The current state of the union (while not calling for a constitutionally mandated address) is economic unease and increased political polarization with Americans growing increasingly upset about the Democrats’ statist solutions to pressing social, economic and political problems.

In part, the President is making this speech to address these issues, and Byron York doubts Obama will succeed:

. . . when a president makes such a rare request, he’s sending a clear message that there is an emergency, or at least an urgent issue, that must be addressed in the most solemn national forum. . . .   Is Obamacare such an issue? Hardly. So it will be the president’s job to convince the public that the need to pass a national health care bill is so urgent that it ranks alongside war and other national emergencies.

It can’t be done. No matter what Obama says on Wednesday, the audience will see the speech for what it is: A president speaking not as the nation’s leader in time of crisis but rather as a salesman pushing a troubled product.

Sales jobs are the least successful joint addresses. Clinton’s didn’t work. And it hasn’t been pointed out very often, but the president in the last half-century who used the joint session format the most was the one who got the least done: Jimmy Carter.

Read the whole thing.  Simply put, no matter how polished is the President’s performance tonight, it’s the ideas he espouses which have caused the current crisis (his crumbling public image).  Perhaps, if he announced tonight that he was shifting his strategy to focus on the economy or launching a health care reform do-over, he might find himself standing on more solid political ground. (more…)

So, Perez Hilton cuts a video for Obamacare, but won’t criticize the President for having the same view on gay marriage as does beauty queen Carrie Prejean who earned multiple tongue-lashings from this left-wing celebrity blogger?

There he goes again.

It seems that whenever someone criticizes Barack Obama’s policies, he offers the same response, contending that his opponents just raise objections, but don’t offer solutions.  In remarks to the AFL-CIO in Cincinnati on Sunday, he repreated his standard misrepresentation:

“What’s your solution?” Obama asked of his critics . . . . “You know what? They don’t have one. Their answer is to do nothing.”

Guess neither the President nor his people have been paying much attention to the right-of-center blogs, the editorial pages of major newspapers, websites of libertarian and conservative think tanks or legislation pending before Congress.  Conservatives (and libertarians) have come up with a plethora of ideas for reforming health care.

Not just that, in conversations with blog readers in Denver, even exchanges with my Democratic Aunt in Colorado Springs, all of whom are at odds with Obama’s statist approach, I have heard a number of friends, relatives and acquaintances offer some interesting alternatives to Obamacare, from a requirement that any able-bodied person receiving government benefits for health care be required to “volunteer” at a health care facility (in exchange for the services) to limits on malpractice claims to portability (across state lines) of health care benefits.  I’m sure you all have had similar experiences in conversations with your various circles.

And yet instead of hearing our suggestions, Obama dismisses us as wanting to “do nothing.”  I wonder why that it is.

How pathetic that the President of the United States would so misrepresent the ideas of his adversaries.

UPDATE:  Maybe this will get his attention:  “Plus, Republicans will unveil their bill — in Obama’s presence. Tired of being ignored, I guess.”

As the President prepares to make another pitch for his health care overhaul as the American people turn against his statist approach, Jim Geraghty wonders if Obama has ever persuaded Americans to change their minds and support his liberal policies:

There’s a rather glaring problem with public expressions that “this is the moment for Obama to change people’s minds.” Other than persuading people to vote for him, has Obama ever done this? Ever? Can anyone point to a circumstance where he encountered a group that wanted X, and he persuaded them to embrace “not X”?

Indeed.

His strength has never been his power to persuade but rather to inspire.  It always struck me how many of his most zealous supporters could never identify the particular changes Obama would institute once elected (save to replace George W. Bush and be different from him).  They were just impressed by the Democrat as a man, the sound of his voice and the figure he cut.

So, my sense is that while Obama may get a momentary bounce (in the polls) from tonight’s speech, the numbers will not hold and we will not see a significant increase in support for a radical overhaul of our healthcare system.

Do you think a petition generating only 150 signatures in a year’s time to protest the naming of a center in honor of a former Democratic Vice President in his home state would have generated an AP article and led Yahoo! news?

In reporting on the University of Wyoming’s naming “a new center for international students” for the former Vice President who represented the state in Congress for a decade before serving as the nation’s Defense Secretary, AP Reporter Mead Gruyer breathlessly focuses on the protest:

The university’s decision to name the center after Cheney, a former Wyoming congressman, prompted a petition that collected more than 150 signatures. The petition said polices of the Bush administration were “very controversial” and the name will affect how people perceive the center.

Cheney’s support for harsh interrogations — torture, some say — is one reason to oppose naming the center after him, said Suzanne Pelican, who began circulating the petition a year ago.

Emphasis added.  150 signatures in a year?  Wow, we got thrice that in an afternoon at a Tea Party in Santa Monica, one of the most left-wing bastions in the Golden State.  And we didn’t have a an AP report from that grassroots protest leading Yahoo!’s news.

UPDATE:  Linked on Newsbusters where a smart young blogger offers:  “Ill will against former Vice President Dick Cheney still runs high in some circles.“  Read the whole thing.

The farther away I get from the 2008 presidential election, the more amazed I am at how well John McCain did in the November balloting. Our anxieties about the economy were stoked by a media eager to portray the then-President as a failure and McCain the candidate of that man’s party couldn’t articulate a coherent economic message.

McCain’s campaign slogan had little to do with Americans’ (then-) current concerns.  He did nothing to calm our fears, did not clearly articulate a plan to improve things.

And in came Barack Obama, calm, cool, collected.  He tapped into our anxieties and promised change.

People trusted him to fix the economy and yet, while there are still signs of recovery, unemployment continues to climb with only one in eight American employers expected “to add to their workforce” in the fourth quarter this year.  While hiring expectations “are improving around the world,” 14% of domestic employers “expect a decline” in their workforce.

My advice thus to the President, use his speech tonight to recall how he owed his electoral success to economic anxiety, choosing to put health care overhaul on the back burner and focus on the economy.  I mean, just imagine the speech,

Many of you have rallied this past month against radical reform of health care; I’ve heard your concerns.  I agree.  We need to slow this down, take some time to craft a solid program for reform.  Meanwhile, many Americans are losing their jobs, while others fear they could be the next to be laid off.   Let’s first fix the economy before we proceed to other necessary projects.  You elected me to fix the economy.  And that’s what I’m going to do.

Should he speak those words or something similar, he’d reverse his slide in the polls, would probably pick up a point or two (or half-dozen) and leave Republicans confused, confounded and sputtering.

My fellow partisans may declare victory in stalling Obamacare, but the President would have regained the initiative.

On few issues have those who have taken issue with the points we have made stood on as solid ground as have these critics on the issue of the President’s speech to schoolchildren yesterday.  Indeed, despite the outcry on the right, many of our philosophical confrères shared our critics sentiments and thought the speech was “no big deal.”

Under normal circumstances, we should welcome the head of state of the United States of America encouraging children to work hard in school and to aspire to great things.  (And many on the right found much to praise in the President’s address.)

Alas, that too many of those critics refused to understand our genuine concerns about the potential politicization of the address, especially given the study guides prepared by the Department of Education.  It seems they reacted in a bitter and hateful kneejerk manner to our criticisms, as if everything we say must be discounted and every criticism we level against the President must be rooted in animus.

So, I wonder if those who reacted in such an unthinking manner to our criticism under stood some conservatives were doing exactly what Democrats did when then-President George H.W. Bush delivered a similar address to schoolchildren in 1991.   Not only did Democrats denounced the Republican Chief Executive they even held hearings: (more…)

Great piece today on Investor’s Business Daily‘s editorials site about how even enemies of liberty like Hugo Chavez are finding it inevitable that (to steal a phrase) “democratic, constitutional governance” will probably prevail despite the Obama Administration’s ongoing efforts to thwart the rule of law in Honduras with their bully tactics toward the interrim (and, by the way, completely constitutional) government there.

From the piece:

[A]s Honduras remains firm, the rest of the world, sees this and has started to restore normal ties. If this continues, the U.S. will be left holding the bag as the world’s bad cop bully….

Meanwhile, the European Union announced it wouldn’t initiate trade sanctions on Honduras as it had threatened earlier. It knew the deal and knew its interests.

Thursday, the International Monetary Fund announced it would extend a $150 million loan to Honduras, a sharp shift from the lending cutoff announced by the World Bank after the June 28 ouster of Zelaya. Again, game over, back to business.

Now we see where all the cowboys have gone, no? I recall eight years of consistent hand-wringing over how America was not cow-towing to the will of the greater world in foreign policy. Along comes The One and his Gal at State, and suddenly it’s fashionable to be left the only ones standing as long as the end result is supporting a would-be dictator with zero respect for the rule of law or voice of his people.

Funny how things change.

Oh, and by the way, I (as many Hondurans were probably doing for a while before they gave up on us) am still waiting for a cogent explanation from the Administration (or even State) that addresses all the facts of the situation there and shows the absolute steel-jaw logic that led to the US position on the issue. Can someone in the press posit such an inquiry, please?

I’ll be over here waiting.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

Go get ‘em, Glenn.  The wolves are in the henhouse!

The American people stood up and demanded answers. Instead of providing them, the Administration had Jones resign under cover of darkness. I continue to be amazed by the power of everyday Americans to initiate change in our government through honest questioning, and judging by the other radicals in the administration, I expect that questioning to continue for the foreseeable future.

We must keep fighting against the statist aims of those in Washington — Republican and Democrat alike.

Remember folks, it is WE, THE PEOPLE who are our government.  That is the essence and the difference of the idea of America.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

The Instapundit does a nice job summarizing stories that we all may have missed over the weekend.

Among the highlights:  Tens of thousands of TeaParty protests from coast-to-coast.  Pizza on a stick!  And two Charlie Rangel ethics stories.

READ THE WHOLE THING!

Of course, if you read/watch the mainstream media you also wouldn’t know who Van Jones is.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I thought today was a good time to remind you all of our fun and patriotic merchandise!

Here’s the bumper sticker.

And a new item!

The time is right to show those Obama voters in your neighborhood that you are as patriotic as they were during the Bush Administration!

Buy them now!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Michelle says it’s “not the speech, it’s the subtext.”

And I wonder if I would have seen the uproar in the rightosphere as nothing more than a tempest in a teapot were it not for the preparatory materials the Department of Education provided exhorting teachers to have students, “Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.”  Ed Morrissey offers a similar view:

In fact, had the White House skipped the study guide and simply released the speech from the beginning, it seems unlikely that this would have created much controversy at all. Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush both gave similar speeches in similar circumstances to students without creating a lot of hard feelings. That isn’t to say that their political opponents all yawned.

In the end, the remarks seem remarkably banal, but I wonder if they would have been more pointed (and more partisan) had the right not raised suck a ruckus.

Morrissey finds the speech quite self-referential with the President referencing “himself more than school, education, responsibility, country/nation, parents, and teachers combined.”  (Read the whole thing.)

Similarly finding the speech “unobjectionable” as it “exhorts students to study hard and aim to achieve big things. It is devoid of any controversial content,” Paul Mirengoff also laments the speech’s self-referential aspect:

One might have hoped for less discussion of Obama himself, particularly the things he’s tried to accomplish in the area of education. But that hope would have been unrealistic with this president.

Were I not enjoying the last few days of an unusual vacation, I might blog more on two issues receiving scant attention from the mainstream media, but which show a level of corruption and radicalism among Washington Democrats that would raise the hackles of tens of millions of Americans, including many who pulled the lever last fall for Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates, if they knew.

The first, of course, is the radical background of the President’s former green jobs czar Van Jones who resigned within the past twenty-four hours. Both Glenn and Michelle (the latter also in her Buzzworthy column) have a plethora of links to thoughtful commentary on the right.

In this post, Glenn links a couple of bloggers who, like Ed Driscoll, observe that it really wasn’t until the Obama Administration official’s resignation that those who rely on the MSM for news learned of his radical past:

Scott Johnson: “Jones was also a perfect symbol of the dereliction of the mainstream media in the Age of Obama. Those who rely on the New York Times for their news, for example, will learn of Jones’s departure some time soon, but it will come as a great surprise to them, and well after the shouting is over. Whatever Jones said is already heard indistinctly, like a distant echo, in the Times’s lame overnight report.”

The other story is the various scandals swirling around the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Charlie Rangel on whom House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “loath to drop the hammer.”

Can you imagine the heat generated in the MSM if, during the days of Republican control of Congress, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee had a similarly checkered career?  Or if W had tapped a radical Clinton-hater to his White House staff?

Charles Krauthammer explains:

In a center-right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.

Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.

Emphasis added. Read the whole thing.

We all knew it was coming, the only question was when.  

It seemed the Obama Administration decided to let  Van Jones go in the middle of a holiday weekend when few people were paying attention.  The White House announced his resignation in the wee hours of Sunday* on Labor Day weekend:

Jones, an administration official specializing in environmentally friendly “green jobs” with the White House Council on Environmental Quality was linked to efforts suggesting a government role in the 2001terror attacks and to derogatory comments about Republicans.

And true to form, this man who much maligned the Bush Administration left swinging, saying in his resignation statement:

On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. . . . They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.

Sounds like he’s describing the tactics of some of his former White House colleagues and their special interest allies working to help pass the President’s various big-spending initiatives.

Kudos to the numerous conservative bloggers, notably Jim Hoft, who investigated the issue while the MSM ignored it.  Independent bloggers did their research for them.  Finally, their posts generated enough chatter that the MSM finally picked it up.

This story shows how much new media have changed the world.  In the past, a Democratic White House may have been able to get away with hiring a former Communist with radical views and an undiplomatic vocabulary. (more…)

I regret having not blogged more extensively on the topic of Honduras, although I and some commenters have brought it up a few times. The long story short can be read in several places to which I’ve already linked (specifically, here and here), but in sum, the legal and democratic institutions of the tiny Central American country upheld the rule of law earlier this summer by ousting their president when he was in direct and incontrovertible violation of their constitution.

Then the Obama Administration and its State Department, naturally, ‘effed it up by supporting the ousted Zelaya and demanding his return to power without even the slightest hint of irony (having only a week or two earlier claimed the moral high ground for not “meddling” in Iran). Obama went so far as to even suspend military activities with Honduras and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revoked visas for some Honduran officials.

What’s left to do? Why how about a complete termination of all non-emergency aid to the mouse that had the temerity to roar in order to keep its democracy?

Check out this nonsensical passage from the State Department’s statement:

Restoration of the terminated assistance will be predicated upon a return to democratic, constitutional governance in Honduras.

Huh? An exercise of “democratic, constitutional governance” is exactly what the Congress and Supreme Court of Honduras was doing, you morons! How about if Honduras has an election in November (You know, the one that’s scheduled for then, and has been all along…the one Zelaya was trying to hijack?) and we can all move on and wash our hands of all this. No need to do something stupid and amateurish that might diplomatically paint the US into a corner, right?

Oh, wait. From the same press release:

[November's upcoming elections in Honduras] must be undertaken in a free, fair and transparent manner. It must also be free of taint and open to all Hondurans to exercise their democratic franchise. At this moment, we would not be able to support the outcome of the scheduled elections.

WTF? So the story goes that in order for Honduras to demonstrate to Hillary Clinton and that international wizard Barack Obama that they are committed to “democratic, constitutional governance”, Hondurans will have to restore a criminal to their presidency and allow him to run the nation’s upcoming presidential election.

Would be kinda nice if someone asked the Secretary what the hell she (and her boss) is thinking.

Or at least what are Bill’s thoughts?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

When a friend on Facebook offered that the anti-[Obamacare] side “short circuited the [healthcare] debate with craziness,” I responded with a rhetorical question:

Did the anti-side short circuit the debate or did the media coverage of their opposition short circuit [it], given the media focus on [its] most extreme elements?

It does seem many in the media wish to define conservatives (& libertarians) by those “zaniest” of Obama critics.  

By reporting more on the process than the substance of the debate, the media have made it easier to focus on the zany protesters instead of the actual ideas many protesters, building on and echoing proposals put forward by intelligent editorialists, libertarian think tanks and reform-minded legislators,  have presented.  According to Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander:

In my examination of roughly 80 A-section stories on health-care reform since July 1, all but about a dozen focused on political maneuvering or protests. The Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism had a similar finding. Its recent month-long review of Post front pages found 72 percent of health-care stories were about politics, process or protests.

This skewed coverage, however, has done nothing to dampen the opposition to Obamacare and indeed has made independent voters “more sympathetic to the protesters’ views“.  Given the growing opposition of independents to statist proposals to reform health care, Republicans would do themselves well to promote free-market reforms more forcefully, more publicly .

This will accomplish two things, frist show that Republicans are not just the party of “no,” that we do have actual solutions to the problems of the day.  And second, show their renewed (restored?) commitment to smaller government and free-market principles.

The MSM may not cover these ideas, but with the various forms of new media, these ideas will out.  We are already seeing how many Americans have succeeded in bypassing traditional news media to learn the details of Democratic proposals for healthcare reform–and free market alternatives.

Graphic courtesy of Gateway Pundit.

So what the hell was the Stimulus Package for anyway, besides wasting taxpayer money?

Where are the jobs, Mr. President?

UPDATE: From The Heritage Foundation:

The unemployment rate is already one-fifth higher than the Administration predicted. It is now expected that the peak of unemployment rate will be one-fourth higher than their predictions. Even worse, the promised job creation that was expected to lower the unemployment rate in the upcoming months has not materialized.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Great Steve Crowder stuff!  It is a classic.

He’s hilarious.  Not much I can add. 

-Bruce (GayPatriot)