…I suppose in a nation that twice elected this schiester as president, the question answers itself to a degree.

But consider this: All winter, government spokespersons wondered, in puzzled bewilderment given the complexity and enormity of the entire enterprise of doing something that hundreds of private corporations do thousands of times daily with the ease of a bodily function, just how many people had actually so far at any point in time signed up for insurance under the ACA’s myriad state health insurance exchanges. For months on end, Secretary Sebelius and her minions, White House spokes-individual Jay Carney, even the president himself were left in befuddled speechless deer-in-the-headlights slack-jawedness over a simple question: How many people have signed up?

Nary a straight answer because…well, that sort of information is just so darned hard to come up with.

Lo! And Behold! The very day THE VERY DAY! the ball drops and all who are to receive insurance (and who haven’t fallen into about 15,832 ‘exemptions’ magically bestowed upon the populace by the benevolent dictator and his czars) must have signed up, suddenly the Administration appears from behind a magic curtain to announce that 7,100,000 subjects citizens have indeed signed up for insurance. (Precisely ‘point-one’ more than their goal!)

Suddenly those impossibe-to-know numbers are well…right there at the fingertips of the president himself. Amazing, isn’t it, how reliable and precise are the Administrative Class?

Naturally we have an adversarial press, who after six months of having been given the Heisman Stiff Arm on their queries about numbers, will raise the flag on this fascinating turnaround. Right?

(crickets)

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from Dallas tonight, seriously, for some reason…)

So, Jonathan Karl of ABC News asked a completely logical, reality-based question of Mr. President Obama yesterday.

In China, in Syria, in Egypt, and now in Russia we’ve seen you make strong statements, issue warnings that have been ignored. Are you concerned that America’s influence in the world — that your influence in the world — is on the decline? And in light of recent developments, do you think Mitt Romney had a point when he said that Russia is America’s greatest geopolitical foe, if not Russia, who?

The president’s response is at the link, but it doesn’t matter because it’s a word salad. At no point in the president’s rambling, incoherent response does he come close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. In it, he taunts Vladimir Putin by dismissing Russia as an insignificant “regional power.” And he goes on to say he is more concerned about someone detonating a nuclear bomb in New York City. But if Russia is not a threat, and if Al Qaeda, as the president has bragged many, many times, has been defeated. Who is going to detonate this nuke? Probably the Koch Brothers, Pro-Lifers, or the Tea Party, if I understand the Democrats’ view of America’s enemies properly.

Do we all agree that, notwithstanding his penchant for distant murder-by-disembodied-aerial-vehicle, not-as-surgical-as-you’d-wish-it-were, drone strikes (what I like to call a “passive-aggressive” military policy), the president’s favored foreign policy is a preference for ‘soft power’? Which is to say, don’t you think the Obama Administration’s approach to the world is to rely more on influence than on coercion? I think he (and Secretary of State John Kerry too) would say so himself. He’d much prefer (well, either of them would, I suppose) to rely on what he considers (ahem) his extraordinarily outsized powers of charm and persuasion to win over other heads of state, rather than the inelegant and clumsy use of force to dictate his way when it comes to what other countries do.

Contrast that with his approach to the issues with America’s healthcare system.

Although I disagree with the premise (a topic for another post altogether), President Obama and the Leftist technocrats with whom he finds common cause believe in the scheme of health “insurance” and feel the third-party payment system is good because healthcare (which for some reason they feel is synonymous with health insurance) is “different” and thus not to be entrusted to market forces…then again, the things in life that should be influenced by market forces is pretty limited anyway.

Anyway. From their perspective, the answer has always been that not enough of the ‘young invincibles’ were bought into the cockamamie scheme and thus not participating, pushing the cost up due to what’s called ‘adverse selection’. Not enough people willing to pay more into a system and voluntarily get less out means that the whole thing collapses under the weight of those who are taking more than they’re putting in. It’s not even economics…it’s basic physics.

Their answer to this was (and is) that more people need to abandon their own better judgment and personal motivations and jump right in. But how to achieve that?

Well, with a super-majority in the Senate and an overwhelming majority in the House in 2009 those who know better than you pushed through the ACA without a single Republican vote in either chamber. For your own good, they forced an unpopular (at the time, and downright detested now) gigantic overhaul of an enormous chunk of our economy. Let’s call that “hard power”.

Of course, we see what hath the ACA wrought: With higher premiums than before for young and healthy individuals, those needed to save the sinking ship are now even less inclined to climb aboard. So now the very solution to the problem (as the health-insurance-scheme supporters see it) is even farther out of grasp.

This struck me as ironic because now the president and his lickspittle sycophants in the press/Leftist Hollywood/sports/entertainment/etc. are reduced to begging, pleading, brow-beating, heavy-handedly imploring every 20-something to please, please, please sign up for health “insurance” through the exchange, lest the signature program of your benighted leader fall to pieces and all we’ve worked for (WE!, not me, this is about YOU and how important all that work YOU! did on the campaign for…well, yes, me, but anyway…YOU! did to get…well, yes, me, but anyway…elected so I could serve YOU, because after all, YOU are the ones YOU’VE been waiting for, and thank goodness I came along to make YOU feel special about needing ME…oh, I mean ‘me’, but anyway….) tragically succumb to the machinations of the awful powers of cynicism and the Koch brothers and Rush Limbaugh and the War on Women, and…okay, where was I going with this? Oh, right. Please sign up for health insurance and talk about it in your pajamas with your friends at your kegger parties…

The president is in an all-out campaign to get the least-likely people to sign up for health “insurance” to…sign up for health “insurance”. But if he’d done that when he was popular (and his ACA handn’t ironically increased the price of it), couldn’t he have avoided all this?

Consider: when he was elected, Barack Obama had an incredible amount of popularity and political capital (before his inauguration, his approval rating was 79%). With that, he had the power to influence and persuade. Let’s call that “soft power”. What’s ironic is that, had he chosen to use his soft power (and been successful), he may have been able to convince a ton of the 20-something sheep who voted for CHANGE! and HOPE! to actually do things (even things against their own better interest) through the influence of this “soft power”. Who knows? It may have actually kept the system afloat.

*(No, The system still would have eventually collapsed, of course, because the problem wasn’t ever that young people weren’t buying “insurance”, rather the dis-incentive for consumers to shop for, and for providers to offer prices commensurate with their actual value…well, you know how that story goes…)

This suave and persuasive dude who had just sailed into the Oval Office because he was too cool for the room and was able to exercise the lost art of subtlety was loved by damned-near everybody in the Country. He believed in The System. He realized (believed) that the problem with it was that not enough people were active participants in it. His solution? Heavy-handedly and by force, to coerce everybody into doing what he wanted them to do.

Way to go, Cowboy!

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from The Ranch)

On Wednesday, V noted how President Obama set aside his own Obamacare law and decreed a delay to the “individual mandate”. (The mandate that he previously told the Supreme Court was an absolutely essential part of Obamacare.)

Thursday’s example was Obama’s plan to decree overtime pay for some 10 million who had willingly been working without it, because they are salaried employees.

It’s not a good thing. First of all, anytime the government mandates pay increases, it costs real people their jobs. While some people might get more pay, others’ pay goes to part-time, or to zero. When Obama proposed his minimum wage hike last month, even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agreed that it would cost 500,000 jobs.

But the deeper problem is that, in Barack H. Obama, we have a President who increasingly abandons constitutional, legislative and democratic processes. Throughout his administration, in issue after issue, he has declared that the rules are now different because he says so. Whether it’s ripping off honest GM bondholders, Fast and Furious, hiding information about corrupt federal prosecutors, Obamacare or countless other issues, you never can tell when this President will suddenly decide on different rules.

With this overtime change, there is serious debate about whether the President has the legal authority to do it. Some say he doesn’t; some say he does. But that means his move is dubious. And however that might be – and I say, even worse – Obama’s move makes the government interfere, once again, in arrangements that freely consenting adults had agreed on. (Liberals may want government out of the bedroom, but boy, do they want government in everything, everyone and everywhere else.)

This is one more, little thread in the tapestry of America’s decline: we have become a nation ruled by “men, not laws.” And if you think that arbitrary government doesn’t make for an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that stifles the economy, think again.

UPDATE: Allahpundit has video, as he puts it, of Obama “in 2008 promising to roll back Bush’s executive overreach because he was a law professor and knew the Constitution ‘n stuff.”.

Rep. Trey Gowdy gives an appropriate response.

Some of us are old enough to remember the ABC Afterschool Specials, which were usually (but not always) some sort of teenaged melodrama wrapped around a pedantic message about kindness and understanding, or somesuch. I was reminded of them when I saw US Secretary of State John Kerry lecture former KGB Chief Vladimir Putin that “nice people don’t invade other countries.”

Invasion is not the act of someone who is strong. It is the act of someone who is weak. @FaceTheNation

— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) March 2, 2014

This is not the way modern nations resolve problems. There is still a right set of options. Not invasion. @FaceTheNation

— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) March 2, 2014

There is a naive belief in the Obama Administration that countries can be persuaded out of acting in their strategic interests if you tell their leaders they aren’t cool and the rest of the cool kids won’t like them. What works on the Republican Leadership is much less effective against the former head of the KGB.

Mrs. Bill Clinton, by the way, has gone full Godwin’s Law on Putin. I bet the former KGB Chief is shaking in his Bruno Magli jackboots.

And apparently America’s adversaries find the whole spectacle of President Obama stomping his feet and Secretary of State John Kerry wagging his finger effing hilarious.

“The low-IQ US president and his country’s Secretary of State John Kerry speak of the effectiveness of ‘the US options on the table’ on Iran while this phrase is mocked at and has become a joke among the Iranian nation, specially the children,” said General Jazzayeri, according to Fars News Agency.

General Jazzayeri pointed to Obama’s recent statements about the number of the US troops in the region, and said, “Obama’s statements about the number of the US troops in the region and the extent of their influence are completely inexpert remarks far from the reality, and these statements can be used as the joke of the year.”

I can’t imagine that word of the first drag show to take place on an American military base has done much to frighten the Iranian military either.

Meanwhile, the president is out today campaigning for Democrats under the slogan, “If you like your minimum wage job, you can keep your minimum wage job.”

(more…)

Earlier this afternoon, President Obama gave a very stern warning to Russia not to intervene in the Ukraine.

Oops, wrong link. Meh, whatever.

President Obama said he was “deeply concerned” on Friday over reports that Russian troops are meddling in Ukraine as armed men took up positions in Ukraine’s Crimean region. “Any violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity would be deeply destabilizing, which is not in the interest of Ukraine, Russia or Europe,” he said.

Q. Does any intelligent believe that President Obama would really intervene militarily in Ukraine? A. No.

Q. Does Vladimir Putin give two hoots about President Stompy Foot’s threats?
A. See above.

BTW, here’s a link to an actual video of the president, in which he manages to embarrass and humiliate the United States only slightly less than his foreign policy does.(“Oh yeah, *that* guy makes me think twice about engaging in bad behavior,” said no foreign tyrant ever.)

Update: MSDNC keeps its viewers informed of the most important breaking news and developments.

Update: Putin sends Russian troops into Ukraine; Obama attends Democrat fundraiser. #Priorities.

(more…)

Leftist Progressives are overjoyed that Mr. President Obama is going to request massive new spending increases that will bring to an end this horrible age of austerity and limited Government spending under which the country has suffered lo these past five years.

The Federalist has a a retrospective on the hardships and scarcity Mr. Obama has put himself through to spare the country needless expenses in accordance with the modesty and reserve for which his administration has been renowned.  A sample below the break:

(more…)

L’etat, c’est moi.

“That’s the good thing as a president. I can do whatever I want.” Mr. Barack Obama, 10 February 2014

Unironically, Mr. Obama made the remark the same day he decided he would not faithfully execute the Obamacare law passed by his own party, but instead waved his pen and granted another politically expedient extension.

(more…)

The administration—whose latest foray into unobstructed, unlegislated, we’ve-got-this, go-it-aloneism was the fabulously ‘effed up roll-out of HealthCare.gov—is going to make 2014 the year of the Executive Branch takes on the world without the messiness of involving the People’s Branch of the federal government?

This’ll be something to see…

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from The Ranch)

The President, currently enjoying a 17-day, $4 Million, taxpayer-funded vacation in Hawaii… attacks Republicans for going home to their families instead of staying in Washington to spend taxpayer money and expand that welfare state.

Just a few days after Christmas, more than one million of our fellow Americans lost a vital economic lifeline – the temporary insurance that helps folks make ends meet while they look for a job. Republicans in Congress went home for the holidays and let that lifeline expire…

…We make this promise to one another because it makes a difference to a mother who needs help feeding her kids while she’s looking for work; to a father who needs help paying the rent while learning the skills to get a new and better job. And denying families that security is just plain cruel. We’re a better country than that. We don’t abandon our fellow Americans when times get tough – we keep the faith with them until they start that new job.

BTW, when he returns from Hawaii, the top items on this man’s agenda are to enact punitve, job-killing EPA regulations and pass an Amnesty bill to replace American workers with cheap, imported foreign workers.

How anyone can have anything but contempt for this contemptible man is beyond me.

That’s the gist of his speech.

There is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes–especially for the wealthy–our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.

Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.

It’s the usual Obama campaign speech (the only kind he gives, the man doesn’t do thoughtful), unnamed enemies (“a certain crowd”), strawman arguments (“the market will take care of everything”), mixed in with blatant falsehoods, (“we tried cutting taxes and reducing regulation, and it didn’t work”). It’s a candyfloss of lies, class warfare, and demagoguery but this is what Obamacrats actually believe.  In fact, his crowd of mindless drones lapped it up like an MSDNC panel of Melissa Harris-Perry clones.

And all of it has no more truth or substance than their rumor that Mitt Romney would outlaw tampons. But the low-information voters that have turned the USA into a statist Idiocracy lap it up.

Obama really believes this inanity too, and it drives his policies of massively increased regulation, tax increases, and welfare expansion.

Imagine if you will, George W. Bush, attending a state funeral for a much respected world leader. And, during the funeral procession, he flirts with an attractive blond and takes grinning selfies in full view of the cameras.

And before any of Obama’s Army of Sycophants shrieks “faux outrage,” I’m not actually outraged by him acting like a complete boob at a state funeral. I am somewhat outraged by his eager and ready handshake for a Communist dictator with the blood of thousands on his hands, who keeps millions of his people oppressed and impoverished. Or, maybe that’s not a big deal to the Food Stamp, IRS-Abusing, “I’m really good at killing people” President.

So, over the weekend, the Obama Regime came to an agreement with the gay-killing, terrorist-supporting Iranian regime. The agreement is that sanctions will be lifted, and Iran will be allowed to continue to enrich uranium. And in return, the Obama Regime gets a distraction from the Obamacare debacle and the predictable adulation of their sycophants in the press.

The agreement is strikingly similar to the deal Jimmy Carter negotiated with the Norks in 1994. And we all know what a brilliant success that was.

Obama is happily willing not only to negotiate with the gay-killing, terrrorist supporting regime in Iran, but eagerly grants them major concessions. But he will not negotiate with Congressional Republicans.

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

– Barack Obama, June 3, 2008

Via The Other McCain.

And it’s happening in the middle of our own society, now.

I didn’t say nearly enough about this morning’s incredibly wrong quote from Jonathan Gruber, who is billed as the ‘architect’ of Obamacare:

We currently have a highly discriminatory system where if you’re sick, if you’ve been sick or [if] you’re going to get sick, you cannot get health insurance.

The only way to end that discriminatory system is to bring everyone into the system and pay one fair price. That means that the genetic winners, the lottery winners who’ve been paying an artificially low price because of this discrimination now will have to pay more in return.

First, Gruber doesn’t understand free markets: If we had them (and we have NOT had them in medical care for decades), then health insurance would always be available to people with pre-existing conditions, at some price. And they could choose to take it, or not – as they have the means and perceive being to their own advantage (or not).

One of the ways the Left wins is by warping language. In this case, the Left has warped the concept of “health insurance” to mean “subsidized health care”, health care paid largely by Other People’s Money.

And it’s true: the free market won’t supply that – beyond voluntary charity. Because it is by definition a win-lose transaction. Someone must be forced to pay the subsidy, and that person loses. The free market is about win-win transactions. If your basic desire is to win at someone else’s expense, forcing them to pay for you, then you naturally hate free markets; the Left is your political home. Congratulations.

Next, Gruber thinks it’s “discriminatory” that people with conditions would pay more for health care. But here’s the thing: They take more health care.

Just like young men get into more car accidents, consume more repair services and thus have to pay higher rates for car insurance, so unhealthy people properly should have larger bills for health care – or health insurance.

Finally, Gruber’s quote wrongly chalks up everything about one’s health to genetics, ignoring the role of lifestyle choices in determining health – and thus ignoring the role of personal responsibility. And that may be where he’s most wrong. We know that socializing health care will lead a society to greater disease, as people make worse lifestyle choices.

But we also know that the Left has a ready ‘solution’ for it: namely, greater government control of people’s lifestyle choices. We’ve seen the beginnings of it in the U.S., with Nanny Michelle-Bloomberg’s efforts. It’s a road that ends with everyone doing mandatory calisthenics in front of the telescreen, _1984_-style. Because, at some point, no one’s life is their own anymore; each person is an investment (property) of the State.

Which brings me to my point. There are, so to speak, “two paths you can go by”.

• If you believe in freedom – that is, in self-ownership, responsibility and choice under the Rule of Law – the logic of your position drives you toward limited government. Not to anarchy, but to *min*archy: the idea that government is there to protect people’s rights against attack and crime and, beyond that, to do little; allowing people to reap what they sow.
• If, instead, you believe in community ownership of people’s lives and efforts – the central tendency of communism – the logic of your position drives you toward ever-larger government. You will always need more government, to solve the social problems that you caused by your last round of increases to government. Concluding in totalitarianism.

People support Obamacare and President Obama depending on whether – deep in their souls – they truly prefer freedom or dictatorship.

Gruber’s idea is essentially communist. The idea that capable and healthy people must be forced to pay for incapable or unhealthy people, lest society be “discriminatory” or whatever, means that people’s lives are not their own. Whatever people become, whatever they produce, is ultimately the State’s property to distribute as it sees the need.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” – it can’t really ever be implemented, but if it could be, then only by total government diktat over everyone and everything. That is Gruber’s road – the underlying logic of his position – whether he admits it or not. It is also Karl Marx’s.

Glenn Reynolds explains:

A government that can’t build a health care website isn’t likely to be very good at running health care for 330 million people. But the technocrats aren’t so concerned with being good as with being in charge.

Emphasis added.   (Read the whole thing as the blogmeister excerpts Daniel Greenfield’s wonderful reflections on the magic powers of government.)

RELATED:  Michael Barone asks us to

. . . check out this story from Britain’s Independent. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service is going to abandon a $17 billion information technology system that was being rolled in over a 10-year period.

The Independent account suggests that big universal governent IT systems just can’t be made to work.

UPDATE (from Jeff): Is cronyism involved? Meet Anthony Welters. He and his wife have been top Obama donors/”bundlers”, and White House visitors. His company owns QSSI who got a lot of money for the broken Obamacare website…including millions more right now, to fix it.

Each of us is born with certain gifts. What determines our success in life oftentimes is how we develop those gifts to serve the needs of the world in which we live.

Barack Obama has a mellifluous speaking voice. And he can, on occasion, deliver an inspiring speech. His keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention catapulted the charismatic Chicago politician to national fame. Had he not delivered that speech he would not have been in a position to run for — and win — the White House four years later.

And now, as president, he seems think that he can address the nation’s problems through such speeches. During the month of September, as a government shutdown loomed, instead of reaching out to — and meeting with — congressional leaders, he delivered a number of campaign-style speeches.  And now as his health care overhaul faces myriad glitches, he’s doing it again, as Reason’s Peter Suderman reports:

Three weeks after the deeply troubled launch of Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges, President Obama gave a speech responding to some of the problems that have plagued the government-run online enrollment system. The most revealing thing about it was what he didn’t say.

Obama was somewhat more blunt than he has been about the system’s failures. “There’s no sugarcoating it. The website has been too slow. People have getting stuck during the application process. And I think it’s fair to say that nobody’s more frustrated by that than I am,” he said. “There’s no excuse for the problems.”

No excuse—and no explanation either. Obama acknowledged some problems with the site. But he didn’t say why they happened, when they would be resolved, or what the administration’s specific plan was to get things working.

Read the whole thing.  H/t:  Powerline picks.  So convinced is the president with his rhetorical prowess that he doesn’t need explain, he just needs to talk.

No wonder, Allahpundit sees the speech as a means to buy ”time for website repairs and trying to combat ominous polls like this, which show the public’s perceptions of Healthcare.gov bleeding over into their perceptions of the ObamaCare program generally.”

A speech may buy the president time, but it won’t fix the program’s flaws  – nor will it contain its costs.

These past few weeks, President Obama has (metaphorically or morally) held a gun to America’s head, demanding that his profligate borrow-and-spending be fully funded or else he’ll default on America’s debt payments.

Now it looks like the crisis is receding, with the hostage-taker mostly getting his way. It isn’t clear if the GOP achieved anything, except yet another committee to look into the nation’s fiscal turpitude.

Knowing that the Tea Party doesn’t have the votes it needs (yet) to break through that turpitude, I didn’t really expect a different outcome. So, I’m not too upset. But was the time & drama worth it?

I say yes: at least it shed light on these issues. Even if you can’t stop lying would-be dictators from succeeding, it’s still worthwhile to rip their masks off. Seeing Obama lie outright about the debt (as I always suspected he would, when cornered) was priceless.

Perhaps Pascal Emmanuel Gobry at Forbes would feel as I do? He writes about the crisis showing Tea Party mettle, and about the hope he feels from seeing the House GOP at least demand (even if they didn’t win) Congress being put on Obamacare like the rest of us. But he also notes that the crisis may have distracted much-deserved attention from Obama’s other troubles, like Obamacare’s launch failure.

Your thoughts?

No discussion is grownup, if the participants don’t know/acknowledge certain facts which President Obama, the Democrats and their media try to have people forget:

1. The government is supposed to spend by a budget.
2. Between April 29, 2009 and March 23, 2013, Harry Reid’s Democrats didn’t even bother to pass a budget. Nearly four years!
3. Under the U.S. Constitution, the budget is supposed to originate in Congress and particularly the House of Representatives. Which means,
4. The House IS supposed to be able to impose its budgetary will on the President, including by shutting down the government, as Democrat Houses have shut down the government many times before to successfully impose their will on GOP Senates and presidents.
5. On a district-by-district basis (as required by the Constitution), the American people elected a GOP House in 2012. To coin a phrase, “they won”.
6. The current so-called “shutdown” only affects 17% of the government. (83% is still open.)
7. The current House has passed many bills to keep most of the remaining 17% open – bills which the Democrats have rejected.
8. Obama has given us more debt than any president in U.S. history.
9. Contra Obama, raising the debt ceiling does indeed mean raising our debt further. And it does cost taxpayers a lot of money.
10. Contra Obama, there is no reason for the government to default on its debt, even if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. You default only if you fail to make your minimum debt payment. Our ongoing tax revenue exceeds our minimum payment by many times over, leaving lots of money for the rest of government spending after debt service. (Just not as much as Democrats want.)
11. Which is probably why Obama and the Democrats are the only side talking about having a default happen. (They want to at least dangle the threat – and they might carry out the threat – even if it’s unnecessary.)
12. Contra Obama, our future spending isn’t “paying a bill”. Spending that Congress has budgeted or authorized (but not yet actually spent) can be stopped or cut any time Congress says so, or under-spent if the money simply doesn’t exist for it.

The people who run GayPatriot welcome intelligent disagreement with our views. If your disagreement ignores the above facts, sorry but it’s not intelligent.

As the adage goes, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.”

NB: Originally, point 2 stated incorrectly that the Senate hadn’t passed a budget since 2009. Error fixed. (thanks Kurt!)

ADDENDUM: 13. Contra Obama, borrowing money “to pay our bills” is NOT paying our bills. When you buy something on credit, have you paid you bill? No, of course not. You’ve merely changed to whom you owe the payment (and perhaps when).

By way of Michelle Malkin’s excellent website Twitchy, I’ve learned of two great hashtag nicknames for Obama and his administration in the past few days: #PresidentStompyFoot and #SpiteHouse.  As appropriate and amusing as those are, in thinking about his behavior, I’ve come up with another one lately which I like to imagine is just as good: President Cha-Cha Heels.

The reference, for those who don’t recognize it, is to Dawn Davenport, the spoiled teenager in John Waters’ 1974 film Female Trouble.  Although the film is one of Waters’ earlier efforts and is therefore full of the sort of rude, crude, and just plain gross humor and incidents which assured it an NC-17 rating, in some respects it is a useful parable about the evils of modern liberalism.

Here’s a brief synopsis: Dawn Davenport wants nothing more than a pair of “cha-cha heels” for Christmas, but when her parents refuse to get her any on the grounds that “nice girls don’t wear cha-cha heels,” she throws her mother into the Christmas tree, runs away from home, gets pregnant, and eventually becomes a criminal before being discovered by Donald and Donna Dasher, a couple who loves to photograph women committing crimes.  They make her famous, and she becomes even more notorious as a result.  The Dashers are the sort of liberals who embrace transgression as art and dysfunction as beauty, until Dawn goes berserk and then they try to pretend that they had nothing to do with it.

So what does this have to do with Obama?  Well, our petulant President seems rather like Dawn Davenport throwing a tantrum because he didn’t get any cha-cha heels to wear with his Mom jeans.

As Thomas Sowell wrote in an excellent article that appeared last Friday: “You cannot blame other people for not giving you everything you want. And it is a fraud to blame them when you refuse to use the money they did vote, even when it is ample to pay for everything else in the government.”

In any case, Obama doesn’t care.  He didn’t get his cha-cha heels, and so he’s determined to “walk all over you,” in the words of this catchy tune inspired by the story of Dawn Davenport and performed by Eartha Kitt and Bronski Beat:

Unfortunately, like the Dashers, his enablers in the press and the liberals who voted for him are rallying around him as though there’s nothing offensive, disturbing, or troubling about his dishonest and spiteful behavior.