As I was reviewing the transcript of President Obama’s interview with ABC News’s Robin Roberts, I caught this aspect of the Democrat’s attempt to justify his switch on state recognition of same-sex marriage:

Part of the reason that I thought it was important– to speak to this issue was the fact that– you know, I’ve got an opponent on– on the other side in the upcoming presidential election, who wants to– re-federalize the issue and– institute a constitutional amendment– that would prohibit gay marriage. And, you know, I think it is a mistake to– try to make what has traditionally been a state issue into a national issue.

Interesting how this supposedly post-partisan politician felt it incumbent upon himself to further politicize the issue.  He would have served himself — and the cause of gay marriage — better had he just limited his remarks to the merits of the expanded definition of this ancient institution.

It’s not just gay marriage.  The Democrat is trying to politicize American history:

The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper tweeted that Obama had casually dropped his own name into Ronald Reagan’s official biography onwww.whitehouse.gov, claiming credit for taking up the mantle of Reagan’s tax reform advocacy with his “Buffett Rule” gimmick . . . .  Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford).

Ed Morrissey provides “a comprehensive collection of the ‘Did you know?’ sections added to boost Obama, with links to the specific pages attached to the names of the former Presidents“.

You’d think that the incumbent President of the United States would let the biographies of his predecessors speak for themselves, but this incumbent (or his staffers) felt it incumbent upon himself (or themselves) to insert his name intp their life stories, using their record to promote himself.

Oh dear.  When incompetence rears its ugly head in one area…. it generally is a cancer that spreads to the rest.  So lies the Obama Campaign mired in what seems to be an endless wave of incompetence lately.  And now this….

President Barack Obama was scheduled, albeit briefly, to visit North Carolina on Election Day to make an speech in Asheville about the economy.

The White House sent the notice Wednesday last week but reversed course about five hours later, saying the trip wasn’t taking place, according to a North Carolina congressional office notified about the trip. The false alarm isn’t unprecedented — but the fact the White House even considered visiting the state on primary election day is interesting.

A controversial vote on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and civil unions is on today’s ballot. Obama issued a statement against the amendment earlier this year — but polls show it is likely to win by a solid margin.

The White House did not respond to questions about the scheduling snafu. The alert about the Obama visit came Wednesday last week and was changed by the end of the day. The White House’s official week-ahead schedule released at the end of last week put the president in New York today, not Asheville.

Given the gay marriage conversation that consumed the White House on Monday, a visit to North Carolina on the day of a gay marriage vote would only increase the questions about where the president stands on the issue — questions Gov. Bev Perdue took the brunt of earlier today on an appearance on MSNBC.

Weird this is.  After all, if the Obama Regime TRULY believed that North Carolina was in play… I would think he would be in my neighboring state every chance he gets.

I’m afraid that Obama/Biden are going to find out that having it both ways on the gay marriage issue may cost them the election in November.  Think 2004 in reverse.  I will explain my theory later if no one gets it.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

According to Wikipedia (yes, consider the source)…. here is the definition of Stagflation:

In economics, stagflation is a situation in which the inflation rate is high and the economic growth rate slows down and unemployment remains steadily high.

Well, under Barack Obama’s economic policies passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress from 2009-10…. we at least have two of those three.  And inflation is higher than most of us have been used to since at least the 1990s.

Bob Krumm says the USA is now Stag-Nation.

This is what a stagnant economy looks like.  The gain of 115,000 jobs is less than enough to keep up with population increases, and was below the median economic forecast for April.  The only reason that the unemployment rate “fell” to 8.1% is because the labor force participation rate keeps dropping.  If you stop looking for work, you aren’t unemployed.  But you’re not employed either.  You’re just “missing.”  You don’t count.

Welcome to the country we now live in:  the Stag-Nation.

And this from the bloggers at ZeroHedge:

It is just getting sad now. In April the number of people not in the labor force rose by a whopping 522,000 from 87,897,000 to
88,419,000.  This is the highest on record. The flip side, and the reason why the unemployment dropped to 8.1% is that the labor force participation rate just dipped to a new 30 year low of 64.3%.

GP Ed Note: My post yesterday about the “invisible 86 Million” is now dramatically out of date…

Here are the official FedGov numbers:

Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 115,000 in April, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 8.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in professional and business services, retail trade, and health care, but declined in transportation and warehousing.

Household Survey Data

Both the number of unemployed persons (12.5 million) and the unemployment rate (8.1 percent) changed little in April.

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (7.5 percent), adult women (7.4 percent), teenagers (24.9 percent), whites (7.4 percent), and Hispanics (10.3 percent) showed little or no change in April, while the rate for blacks (13.0 percent) declined over the month. The jobless rate for Asians was 5.2 percent in April (not seasonally adjusted), little changed from a year earlier.

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was little changed at 5.1 million in April. These individuals made up 41.3 percent of the unemployed. Over the year, the number of long-term unemployedhas fallen by 759,000.

The civilian labor force participation rate declined in April to 63.6 percent, while the employment-population ratio, at 58.4 percent, changed little.

Whether Obama & his team studied Martian or Marxist Applied Economics, one thing is clear: They didn’t learn any lessons from the unprecedented US economic expansion that resulted in the 1981-83 economic policies pushed through a Democrat Congress by Ronald Reagan.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

As Glenn Reynolds has said….and I reiterate on Twitter…. UNEXPECTEDLY!!!!!!

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — There are far more jobless people in the United States than you might think.

While it’s true that the unemployment rate is falling, that doesn’t include the millions of nonworking adults who aren’t even looking for a job anymore. And hiring isn’t strong enough to keep up with population growth.

As a result, the labor force is now at its smallest size since the 1980s when compared to the broader working age population.

“We’ve been getting some job growth and it’s been significant, but it hasn’t yet been strong enough that you start to get people re-engaging in the labor market,” said Keith Hall, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A person is counted as part of the labor force if they have a job or have looked for one in the last four weeks. Only about 64% of Americans over the age of 16 currently fall into that category, according to the Labor Department. That’s the lowest labor force participation rate since 1984.

It’s a worrisome sign for the economy and partly explains why the unemployment rate has been falling recently. Only people looking for work are considered officially unemployed.

Yesterday I noted, also on Twitter (so you may want to follow me!), that I’ve come to conclude Obama & his economic team must have studied “Applied Theories in Martian Economics” rather than understand what truly drives human economic activity.  It isn’t rocket science, but The Most Brilliant President Evah somehow has missed the boat.  Class warfare does not employment make.

Kudos to CNN Money for addressing the Elephant In The Room that most of the rest of the MSM has ignored to this point.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

“Can you imagine“, a 101st Airborne Vietnam vet writes to the Weekly Standard‘s Geoffrey Norman . . .

. . . Ike saying, “I pulled the trigger on D-Day but Stevenson never would have had the guts to do that”?  Or Truman saying, “I dropped the bomb, and Dewey wouldn’t have”?  The response from men in that day and age would have been “Shut up and act like a man.”  And there is the irony: What Obama and his campaigners are doing to bolster the public’s perception of him as a strong president is something that would have had the exact opposite effect 50 years ago.

Read the whole thing.  Via Powerline Picks.

Democratic-generated complaints notwithstanding, there was nothing wrong with George W. Bush highlighting his leadership in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks as he campaigned for reelection. He was reminding us of how he had handled his job, uniting the nation at a challenging time. And since he was asking us to keep him on for another term, it was entirely appropriate to provide a record of his accomplishment.

Similarly, there is nothing wrong with Obama reminding us under his watch, Navy SEALs got Osama bin Laden.  We got it done under his watch.  He has every right to take credit for it.

He may be, as Glenn quipped earlier today, overplaying it a bit. And to borrow the metaphor the blogmeister used, the man who scores the touchdown has every right to spike the ball to celebrate his score.  Only he should also acknowledge the man who threw the pass as well as the coach — as well as the other members of the team — who helped him into scoring position.  In other words, Obama may have been in position to score the kill, but he did it as part of a team.

And that team didn’t just include Democrats.  Under Mr. Obama’s Republican predecessor, the team (to stay with the metaphor) moved the ball down the field [See UPDATE below].  The team didn’t score points against Republicans, but against enemies of the United States, enemies shared by both parties.

In other words, it’s one thing to campaign on his own accomplishment, quite another to suggest your opponent wouldn’t have done the same thing.  As 2010 CPAC blogger of the year Ed Morrissey puts it:

Obama would be on firm ground to highlight that victory in the war on terror, as he does in his tedious “Forward” campaign video. Implying that Romney would have let Osama bin Laden go under those circumstances is, as [Arianna] Huffington says, despicable.

Yup, even that liberal blogress condemned the attack ad: (more…)

Earlier today, Jim Hoft linked this telling excerpt from the president’s recent Rolling Stone interview:

Frankly, I know that there are good, decent Republicans on Capitol Hill who, in a different environment, would welcome the capacity to work with me. But right now, in an atmosphere in which folks like Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist are defining what it means to be a true conservative, they are lying low. My hope is that after this next election, they’ll feel a little more liberated to go out and say, “Let’s redirect the Republican Party back to those traditions in which a Dwight Eisenhower can build an interstate highway system.”

Can you recall Mr. Obama’s immediate predecessor ever attacking his liberal critics by name, particularly, say, the folks at Moveon.org when they actively worked to frustrate and eventually succeeded at blocking the then-president’s efforts to reform Social Security?

(To name but one effort when liberal group’s worked to block that Republican’s agenda, even before the election of  a Democratic Congress in 2006.)

* (more…)

On Monday at the Washington Examiner, Charlie Spiering provided a clip from then-Senator Barack Obama’s speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination not quite four years ago:

In 2008, he derided the very strategy he would adopt four years later. proclaiming that

. . . if you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone that people should run from. You make a big election about small things. And you know what it’s worked before — because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn’t work, all its promises seem empty.

Democrats declaring a Republican “war on women” because they disagree with the GOP’s opposition to federal health care mandates sounds like an attempt to paint the opposition as individuals people should run from. That kind of distortion feeds into the cynicism we all have about government.

Now the president is busy scaring voters about the Ryan budget without presenting a one capable of securing a single Democratic vote in the House (indeed without insisting the Democratic Senate pass a budget).  He may be scaring voters about Republican reforms, but still has not put forward a plan to address our growing federal debt or the coming insolvency of Medicare and Social Security.

“As president,” Peter Wehner writes, “Obama has not only discarded” the commitment he made in 2008 to “rediscover our bonds to each other and get out of this constant, petty bickering that’s come to characterize our politics”,

. . . he has turned it on its head. Republicans aren’t simply people with whom he has philosophical disagreements; they are members of the “Flat Earth Society” and have embraced a budget that demonstrates their “Social Darwinism.” (more…)

On Monday, when doing cardio at the gym, I looked up to catch President Obama’s speech at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.  In the eighteen minutes that I watched the speech (until CNN cut away), I heard little but attacks on Republican policies, with frequent references to the middle class.

In a report on the speech (via Instapundit), The Washington Times‘s Dave Boyer reported that

Pausing between $10,000-a-plate fundraisers for his re-election campaign, President Obama called on Congress in a highly partisan speech Tuesday to approve a tax increase on the wealthy to pay for programs for the middle class.

This “highly partisan speech” was an official speech, allowing the president to bill taxpayers for the fundraising trip to the Sunshine State, packing the 30-minute address, as he did, “in the midst of three fundraisers in the battleground state, prompting complaints by Republicans that Mr. Obama was fleecing taxpayers for campaign travel.”

In the speech, billed by the White House, as remarks on the economy, the president offered no new policies to strengthen the anemic recovery, choosing instead to fault Republicans for gutting what he calls “investments” (his terms for government grants):

They proposed a budget that showers the wealthiest Americans with even more tax cuts, and then pays for these tax cuts by gutting investments in education and medical research and clean energy, in health care.

. . . .

Now, thousands of medical research grants for things like Alzheimer’s and cancer and AIDS would be eliminated.  Tens of thousands of researchers and students and teachers could lose their jobs.  Our investments in clean energy that are making us less dependent on imported oil would be cut by nearly a fifth.

Note the conditional of the president’s attacks.  People could lose their jobs.  Investments in “clean” energy?  Has he been paying attention to the number of such companies which have gone belly up (despite receiving federal grants and loan guarantees)? (more…)

Mr. President, I observed the presidency of Bill Clinton. I marveled at his ability to co-opt partisan adversaries’ ideas and spin them as his own. Bill Clinton was a political genius. Mr. President, you are no Bill Clinton.

Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign, was the series of TV ads the Democratic National Committee ran in media markets outside the nation’s three big markets tying then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (who would emerge as his Republican opponent) to then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich who already then had high negatives.  The then-president left it to his ad-makers to attack Republicans while he himself offered a much more upbeat message.

It didn’t hurt that the economy was much stronger during his fourth year in the White House than it is at the same point in the term of the next Democrat to have his old job, the current incumbent.

One wonders why Mr. Obama hasn’t followed the tack of his Democratic predecessor, why the incumbent feels it incumbent upon himself to attack.  Peggy Noonan, a conservative pundit once impressed by the Democrat’s charm and optimistic about his ability to unite us, has, on listening to his speeches, shed any illusions she may once have had.  She found his Tuesday speech to be

. . . an unusual and unleavened assault on the Republican Party. (more…)

Seems that the incumbent President of the United States thinks he can win reelection only by attacking his likely adversary:

When President Barack Obama criticized Mitt Romney by name this week for embracing a controversial Republican budget proposal, he worded his attack carefully and with bite.

“(Romney) said that he’s ‘very supportive’ of this new budget, and he even called it ‘marvelous’ — which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget,” Obama said during a speech on Tuesday. . . .

He may mock the Republican’s word choice, but can he defend an alternative to the budget Mr. Romney praised?  It doesn’t seem any member of his party’s congressional caucus can, given that not one U.S. Representative, not even a single Democrat, voted for his budget blueprint.

And the budget Mr. Obama presented won’t reduce the deficit below the “astounding” figure he, in 2008, equated to “living beyond our means” even ten years after the date of that statement.

As soon as the contest for the Republican nomination is settled, the focus will return to Mr. Obama and the job he’s been doing.  And then attacks on a man who supports a plan that can at least secure a majority of his party’s House caucus (well 94.2% to be exact) will resonate less than will an accounting of his record in office, including the fact that precisely 0% of his party’s caucus in the U.S. House voted for his budget.
——-

*in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Calling the president’s rhetoric smearing the Republican budget as “Social Darwinism,’ “vile and ugly”, Sonicfrog wonders “how the press would react if the previous President” had “said anything like this about his political opponents”:

Think about the term and how it’s been used over the last century and more. It has been justification for all sorts of atrocities and prejudices, from racism to eugenics to Nazism to state sterilization of the mentally challenged and infirm. I generally scoff at the notion that people use “code words”, which is usually an accusation tossed at Conservatives by Liberals to try and portray Conservatives as racists.

Glenn Reynolds offers a slightly different read on the remarks:

SO IF THE REPUBLICAN BUDGET IS, AS OBAMA SAYS, “SOCIAL DARWINISM,” then does that mean that Obama’s approach is some sort of Social Creationism?

Because I’m not seeing any evidence of an Intelligent Design there. . . . (more…)

As I read the president’s speech Tuesday speech to the Associated Press luncheon (an audience which offered him a warmer welcome than it did his likely Republican rival in the presidential contest this fall), I thought I’d heard it all before.  It wasn’t just that his critique of the Ryan budget sounded like another Obama speech — which, to a large extent, it was.

It was that it also sounded like the standard liberal critique of Reagonomics back in 1982 before the Gipper’s policies had been tested. It’s how the anti-Reagan left sounded when Obama was in college. The guy still talks like he’s an undergraduate where the rhetoric mattered more than the facts.  As I wrote yesterday, the President of the United States offered a “cartoon version of Republican economics . . . more like a college activist’s impassioned critique of Reaganomics than an elected leader’s considered response to his rivals.”

Leaders of democratic nations do not deliver speeches so deriding the serious proposals put forward by their political opponents.  This is not to say that he shouldn’t criticize Mr. Ryan’s plan if he objects to it, but that when he does so, he owes the people he serves more than just the same tired bromides that he and other Democrats have been offering for 30 years — even after the Reagan boom — which continued into the Clinton era (when federal spending fell as a percentage of GDP — from 21.4% in FY1993 to 18.2% in 2001).

It is yet another defining moment in the career of this divisive politician where he attacks his political adversaries rather than trying to find common ground with them.  Hugh Hewitt called the speech “risible“ and links what he calls Guy Benson’s epic analysis of the address.  The post-parisan president delivered, what Benson called, “a bitterly partisan speech”; he proceeds to analyze point by point.

The more Americans who hear this speech (and others like it), the more quickly the image of his 2008 campaign will fade and the less likely they will be to trust him with another term as the nation’s chief executive, particularly given the pressing fiscal problems our nation faces.

. . .  he would not have issued that blistering, dishonest attack on the Republican budget which the House passed March 29 with a very strong majority (as he defines such majorities*).  Instead, he would have called on the Democratic Senate to pass a similar fiscal blueprint and then bring representatives of both legislative chambers together and show his leadership qualities by bridging the differences.

But, instead when reporters question administration officials about the failure of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to hold a vote on his budget, the White House, Allapundit quips, “gets awfully fidgety“.  Note the failure of White Hose Press Secretary Jay Carney to even answer Bret Baier’s question about Reid’s failure:

All the president’s spokesman can offer is attacks and bromides.  To get to a balanced approach in a bicameral legislature, each chamber needs first to spell out its position.  The Republican House has done just that.  The Democratic Senate has not.

“The Democrats,” John Hinderaker reminds us, “love to castigate the House Republican budget; fine. But why won’t they propose, and pass, their own?”

Instead of encouraging that the legislature chamber controlled by his party vote on the budget he proposes, he derides the Republican budget as “Social Darwinism.”  By contrast, a pragmatist, that is, “a person who takes a practical approach to problems and is concerned primarily with the success or failure of her actions“, being practical would, facing a divided legislature, attempt to work with each branch to reach a consensus, deriding neither one nor the other, requesting that each act in a timely manner.

As one woman who voted for him because she believed was “independent, moderate, and pragmatic“, lamented, offering advice to the president: (more…)

Earlier today, Glenn linked a great post by the Cato Institute’s Daniel Mitchell which dovetails nicely with (& improves upon) my post on the failure of the president to meet his “moral responsibility” to present a fiscally responsible budget.

Obama said that Paul Ryan’s plan (whichallows spending to grow by an average of 3.1 percent per year over the next decade) is a form of “social Darwinism.”

But the proposal from the House Budget Committee Chairman only reduces the burden of federal spending to 20.25 percent of GDP by the year 2023.

Yet when Bill Clinton left office in 2001, following several years of spending restraint, the federal government was consuming 18.2 percent of economic output.

Read the whole thing!

Remember how Democrats railed against the immediate past president for his spendthrift ways, with one prominent politician telling us that under George W. Bush’s watch, we were “living beyond our means“.  Were it not for TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] (which Obama supported) just before W left office, federal expenditures during his tenure never exceeded 21% of GDP.

So, federal expenditures lower than 21% of GDP mean living beyond our means, but at 20.25% mean “social Darwinism”?

Seems one Democrat is more interested in criticizing Republicans than in offering consistent arguments.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Sonicfrog contends that we’re all

. . . missing the real significance of the “Social Darwinism” comment. Think about the term and how it’s been used over the last century and more. It has been justification for all sorts of atrocities and prejudices, from racism to eugenics to Nazism to state sterilization of the mentally challenged and infirm. I generally scoff at the notion that people use “code words”, which is usually an accusation tossed at Conservatives by Liberals to try and portray Conservatives as racists. Well, in this case, although he apparently isn’t that familiar with the aspects of Marbury v Madison, I think it’s hard pressed not to conclude that this was the “Unifier-In-Chief’s” veiled and half clever way of accusing Conservatives of wanting to off cleans society of the poor and minorities.

Yesterday, there were two big political stories, three if you count the reverberations from the president’s casting aspersions on judicial review, four, if you count the revelation (from the previous day) that once again the Obama campaign has disabled “AVS protections” from its donations pages such that Illegal Contributor could not only make a donation, but also (as of this posting) set up a contributions page on the Democrat’s own web-site.

Those big stories were Mitt Romney’s sweep of the day’s primaries, winning the District of Columbia, Maryland and Wisconsin and possibly all of the delegates at stake yesterday and the president’s luncheon speech to the AP.  From the incumbent’s opening “joke” through the question-and-answer session, the address lacked class.  The long and short of it was that he misrepresented the solutions Republicans were offering and failed to put forward a credible plan of his own, delivering bromides instead:

And yet, for much of the last century, we have been having the same argument with folks who keep peddling some version of trickle-down economics.  They keep telling us that if we’d convert more of our investments in education and research and health care into tax cuts — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger.  They keep telling us that if we’d just strip away more regulations, and let businesses pollute more and treat workers and consumers with impunity, that somehow we’d all be better off.  We’re told that when the wealthy become even wealthier, and corporations are allowed to maximize their profits by whatever means necessary, it’s good for America, and that their success will automatically translate into more jobs and prosperity for everybody else.  That’s the theory.

Now, the problem for advocates of this theory is that we’ve tried their approach — on a massive scale.  The results of their experiment are there for all to see.  At the beginning of the last decade, the wealthiest Americans received a huge tax cut in 2001 and another huge tax cut in 2003.

Well, we did see economic growth and job creation from 2003 until the recession hit a year after the election of a Democratic Congress in 2006.  He otherwise presents a cartoon version of Republican economics — which sounds more like a college activist’s impassioned critique of Reaganomics than an elected leader’s considered response to his rivals.

House Republicans have put forward a budget which slows the growth in federal spending; it passed the House.  The president offered a plan which couldn’t ever garner a single Democratic vote. (more…)

Well, you can’t accuse Barack Obama of originality.  Today, the incumbent President of the United States trotted out that old Democratic talking point that Ronald Reagan “could not get through a Republican primary today.”

The Democrat uses that silly notion as he lambastes his partisan rivals for their supposed unwillingness to compromise:

These are solvable problems if people of good faith came together and were willing to compromise. The challenge we have right now is that we have on one side, a party that will brook no compromise.

. . . .

Think about that. Ronald Reagan, who, as I recall, is not accused of being a tax-and-spend socialist, understood repeatedly that when the deficit started to get out of control, that for him to make a deal he would have to propose both spending cuts and tax increases. Did it multiple times. He could not get through a Republican primary today.

If the newspaper editors (with whom he conducted the interview) did their homework, they would find that the party unwilling to brook any compromise sits in the White House, with the president, for example, having walked away from a a debt agreement last summer where Republicans has agreed to an $800 billion increase in “revenue.”

Oh yea, and Obama might want to remember that Reagan later regretted signing on the 1982 budget deal as the Democrats got their tax cuts, but the spending cuts never materialized.  Seems this guy just can’t get his facts straight about his predecessors.

Not just that, Reagan never ran for president promising to raise taxes.  Quite the contrary, in fact; in the 1984 campaign, he used his Democratic opponent’s support for such hikes against him. (more…)

On Friday night, I had the good fortune to dine with my friends, Powerline blogger John Hinderaker and his lovely lady Loree.  We had similar theories about the presidential election, optimistic about Republican chances this fall and wondering at the president’s apparent insecurity.  He addressed that insecurity in a blog post yesterday:

If Democrats thought President Obama had a defensible record, they would be talking about the economy, not about contraceptives and hoodies. And if their own surveys showed Democrats running strongly, they would be appealing to independent and centrist voters, not trying to motivate their base with feminist and racial controversies that are unpopular with the general public.

And, I would add, trying to motivate them as well with anti-Republican demagoguery.  Later today, the president will be attacking the Ryan budget which passed the House.  Don’t expect him to provide an alternative to the budget he introduced earlier this year — and which failed to garner a single Democratic vote in the House.

The last time he attacked a Ryan budget, he failed to offer an alternative of his own.  (That was last year when not a single Democrat in the Senate could register his support for their fellow partisan’s blueprint.)  Seems Obama is more interested in galvanizing his base to oppose Republican initiatives than to rally centrists to support his proposals. (more…)

When President Obama talks about the economy, it seems he derives his information not from historical facts, but instead from Keynesian theory.  At a campaign fundraiser in Maine, the politician once billed as post-partisan accused his partisan rivals of “madness”:

“We won’t win the race for new jobs and new businesses and middle-class security if we cling to this same old, worn-out, tired ‘You’re on your own’ economics that the other side is peddling,” Obama said.

“It was tried in the decades before the Great Depression. It didn’t work then. It was tried in the last decade. It didn’t work,” he said. “You know, the idea you would keep on doing the same thing over and over again, even though it’s been proven not to work. That’s a sign of madness.”

Well, the economics that the incumbent derides as “You’re on your own” created more jobs in September 1983 than were created in the past five months, among the best months for job creation since Mr. Obama took office.

In the decade** before the Great Depression, under the policies of Republicans Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the United States enjoyed the “Roaring Twenties,” an era of “sustained economic prosperity.“  It was only when Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover, increased federal spending and ramped up government regulation, that the economy began to collapse, leading to the Great Depression.

Under Hoover and his successor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, federal officials tried various forms of state meddling over and over again, yet none of those policies proved to work.  Throughout the 1930s, unemployment remained high.  By this president’s logic, wouldn’t it be a sign of madness to adopt economic policies similar to Mr. Roosevelt’s?  Or Mr. Hoover’s?

(H/t The Gateway Pundit.)

* (more…)

In her post on Friday about President Obama’s speech on energy this past Wednesday, Commentary’s Alana Goodman notes that the Democrat “received some well-deserved mockery for his factually inaccurate swipes at President Rutherford B. Hayes (yes, really) and Christopher Columbus’s contemporaneous critics”, but also finds that his remarks in the speech reveal more about the man than just his historical ignorance:

In Obama’s mind, his critics aren’t just wrong, they’re idiots. Obama, in contrast, is a grand visionary of epic capacity – the type of man who in the past would have ended up on Mt. Rushmore or captaining the voyage that led to the discovery of America.

In that address, the Democrat compared his opponents to flat-earthers and other Luddites throughout history who opposed new technologies.  What Obama failed to mention was that many of his opponents are not opposed per se to the new green technologies he touts, but to using federal subsidies to promote them.

Since he was talking about the telephone, perhaps he should have inquired into Alexander Graham Bell’s sources of funding.  Did that inventor ask for a federal grant so he could continue his research?

Mr. Obama might learn something by reading about a technology pioneer who supported his 2008 campaign.

In his biography of the Apple Founder, Walter Isaacson provides no evidence that that entrepreneur ever sought funding from the federal government (or indeed from any state government).  Fortunately, for that Californian, the federal government hadn’t regulated the computer industry in the 1970s and ’80s as it now regulates the field of energy development.

And there seems to be no evidence that Mr. Obama ever accused Steve Jobs of belonging to the Flat Earth Society.

* (more…)