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…)

In a blog post this morning, Jim Geraghty repeated an observation he has made before that the president’s “furious schedule of fundraisers is driven less by a need for campaign cash than by his ego’s need for constant praise and adoration.”

Sometimes, it seems that even the president’s official speeches serve a similar function.  He speaks not so much to defend his policies, but to demonize his political adversaries and, in so doing, elevate himself in the eyes of audiences who really, really hate Republican leaders and conservative ideas.  In a speech today “at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Md., a smug President Barack Obama,” reports Tina Korbe, Obama did just that, smearing “opponents of his energy policies as backward and unscientific in their approach”:

“Now, here’s the sad thing. Lately, we have heard a lot of professional politicians, a lot of the folks who were running for a certain office, who shall go unnamed, they’ve been talking down new sources of energy. They dismiss wind power. They dismiss solar power. They make jokes about biofuels. They were against raising fuel standards. I guess they like gas guzzlers. They think that’s good for our future. We’re trying to move towards the future. They want to be stuck in the past!” Obama exclaimed to cheers from the crowd. “If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they probably must have been founding members of the flat earth society. They would not believe that the world was round!”

Can you imagine George W. Bush leveling those accusations against Democrats?

Korbe points out how the president misrepresents the Republican stance on energy: (more…)

Wonder how Matt Lauer and his colleagues in the legacy media would have reacted had George W. Bush expressed a similar frustration:

I think this is the nature of being President. What’s frustrated people is that I have not been able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008.

Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change that I would like sometimes. But what I have been able to do is move in the right direction. And what I’m going to keep on doing is plot away, very persistent. You know what? One of the things about being President is you get better as time goes on.

Emphasis.  What arrogance.  Assuming people are frustrated because he can’t force Congress to implement his promises?   (Maybe they’d have been frustrated if he tried (and failed) to “force” Congress to act on something he’d been proposing throughout the campaign, you know that “net spending cut“.)

In reality, his party controlled Congress for the first two years of his term.  He was able to “force” the legislature to implement a good chunk of his agenda.  And people were frustrated, frustrated that the Democratic Congress implemented many of his proposals.

Doesn’t he understand that the people elected a Republican Congress in response to such implementation?

Many of us like the system our Founders designed — and they designed it deliberately to make it difficult to bring about the types of changes men like Obama would propose, changes which usurp the liberties of the people and centralize power in a in a far-distant capital. (more…)

US-Egypt standoff worsens (H/t Powerline)

Repeat after me:  “Hope and Change.”

<audience chant>

Now this: “Mmm, mmm, mmm… Barack Hussein Obama.”

<audience chant>

Now read this:

Exactly three years after Aretha Franklin’s hat launched the Obama administration, the Democrat’s annual job approval rating has sunk to his lowest level.

That’s not normally a good sign after 1,095 days in office. But who’s counting? Heading into reelection years, pols want to be at least at the 50% level. A new Gallup Poll just out reveals that the ex-state senator’s job approval for his third full year is 44%.

That’s down from 47% in his second year.

That’s down from 57% in his first year.

It’s also down from the 69% approval he enjoyed on Inauguration Day.

So, the better Americans have come to know the guy and to watch his record, the less they seem to think of him. Of course, what really matters is what they think of him starting with early voting this October and ending the night of Nov. 6.

Gallup’s 2012 results are based on about 175,000 adult interviews during the year, showing a brief high for Obama of 53% in May (can you say Navy SEALs’ success?) and a low two times of 38% in both August and October.

In terms of historical patterns, Obama’s third-year average is the lowest of any modern president except the doomed Democrat Jimmy Carter, who had 37.4%. The highest approval at this stage of a first term was Dwight Eisenhower with 72.1% and George H.W. Bush with just under 70%.

According to Gallup’s analysis:

“Comparing Obama’s third-year numbers with all presidential years in Gallup records, Obama’s 44% average job approval rating is well below average, ranking 53rd of the 68 presidential years measured.”

But this conflicts with what They all tell me: Barack Obama is The Smartest President EVAH!” 

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Via BuzzFeed:

The uncontested primary of an unchallenged incumbent doesn’t mean much, but it can perhaps be taken as some kind of measure of intensity, partisan loyalty, or simple willingness to show up to and be counted.

And by those measures, George W. Bush handily defeated Barack Obama in New Hampshire last night.

Bush’s uncontested 2004 re-election bid received 53,962 votes in the state.

Obama has, with 94% in, received just under 47,000, and is on pace to pick up 49,983 in last night’s uncontested primary, if the pattern holds.

Republican turnout last night, meanwhile, broke records.

Hmmmm.

Hope & change, baby!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

During his “60 MInutes” interview last week, the most humble new kind of politician to occupy the White House since George W. Bush compared his accomplishments to some of his predecessors:

As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.

More work to do on the economy? Why, Mr. President, have you waited so long to address the sluggish economy?  In his insightful piece on the Democrat’s reelection prospects, Jay Cost observes how unlike FDR, the incumbent spent so little time in his first two years in office on the economy:

Obama turned his attention away from the economy far too quickly. This points to another difference between Obama and Roosevelt. FDR essentially threw everything at the Depression, including the kitchen sink; the legislating of 1933 and 1934 was relentlessly focused on the economy, and voters had no choice but to conclude that Roosevelt was, at the very least, doing everything he could think of. Not so with Obama. Having passed their stimulus, this president and his allies in Congress turned their attention to grander social welfare ambitions, something FDR did not begin to do until 1935, when the economy had already started growing at a robust rate.

Via Instapundit.  Emphasis added.  Interesting how quickly Obama, who won election largely because voters trusted him more to face the financial crisis and fix the economy, turned away after his “stimulus” (er, Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed).  It’s as if he believed that his economic team’s forecasts.

Seems Obama is just not interested in matters economic.  His “Jobs Bill” of 2011 shows little imagination, being basically a scaled-back version of the stimulus of 2009.

Yesterday, when writing about candidate Barack Obama’s pledge, if elected to meet, the then-leader of North Korea, Jim Geraghty quipped that many

. . . of us are pleased that this promise reached its expiration date . . . but one would like to think that any future presidents would not need to be disabused of the notion that their personal charisma and reasonableness could win over unhinged hostile dictators.

Geraghty’s quip reminds us yet again that part of the Democrat’s appeal was that his supposedly superior temperament would provide the cornerstone for the change his election would herald.  Only problem is, save for the reactions of those to the charismatic candidate’s speeches, no one could provide much, if any, evidence that this man had ever used the power of his personality to reconcile opposing parties or effect real reform.

And his charm and reasonableness certainly haven’t helped transform hostile dictators threatening the United States and oppressing their citizens into benign despots making peace with the U.S. and relinquishing their control over their societies.

Shortly after posting this piece, I wondered that the president cast Republican opposition to his policies in strictly personal terms.  In his 60 Minutes interview, the Democrat contended the Republican strategy was to oppose anything he’s for:

“Anything Obama’s for, we’re against, because that’s our best chance of winning an election,”

As if it’s all about him and his ambitions.  You’d think a man billed as so bright could appreciate that Republicans may well oppose his programs on philosophical grounds.  Or on financial ones.  As McCain put it, “WE DON’T HAVE THE MONEY TO PAY FOR THIS CRAP!”

Well, at least he’s not emulating a rising mafia boss:

Caught this first on Powerline, then on Gateway Pundit. The man who defeated the man heralded by Joe Biden as an economic advisor to the Obama administration at the ballot box in a state Obama won by 15 points lays it out:

Note how all the #OWS folks just repeat their leader.  (Wonder what that says about them).  Christie just laughs at these folks, mocking their anger.

Kudos, Governor!

Yesterday, the president told us that conservative economic policies have never worked. Someone should ask him the same questions about the Keynesian theories that drive his big-spending policies. He — and many of his supporters — really do believe that we need economic stimuli in order to jump-start the economy.

Only problem is that such solutions rarely (if ever) lead to sustained economic growth. The New Deal delayed economic recovery in the 1930s. Japan suffered a “Lost Decade” in the 1990s when its government adopted policies similar to those Democrats would follow in 2009.

Instead of trusting to theories which sound good on paper, we need to turn to policies which have succeeded in practice.  In his book on the housing crisis, Thomas Sowell makes the case for a pragmatism that has eluded the incumbent president:

In housing markets, there have been an abundance of theories and of fervently believed doctrines, but not nearly such an abundance of willingness to subject these theories to the test of evidence.   Politicians would be gambling their entire careers on a roll of the dice, if they were to publicly subject the policies and programs that they have been advocating for years to empirical test of their consequences.

The economy grew after the economic policies similar to those Obama derided yesterday took effect in 1983.  And despite Obama’s success in enacting his policies in 2009, the recovery which followed the Bush-Pelosi-Reid downturn (the one that he “inherited”) has been the most anemic in generations.

Would be nice if the president acknowledged that empirical test of his policies rather than stick to the rhetorical appeal which served him so well in 2008.

Today, the president traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, in Michael Know Beran’s words “to unveil his latest persona: Teddy Roosevelt, who delivered his “New Nationalism” manifesto in the town’s John Brown Cemetery in August 1910.”

And yea, the Democrat did invoke the Republican who also favored a more muscular state than had that energetic early twentieth century leader’s predecessors. Only problem is, as Beran reminds us:

The difference is that in 1910 government spending amounted to about 8 percent percent of GDP. A century later it comes to around 40 percent. The country today has too much state, not too little.

At this point, I’d settle for government spending (at all levels) three times what it was a century ago.

UPDATE:  Writing about the speech, Tina Korbe observes:

Today in Osawatomie, Kan., Barack Obama laid bare his progressive agenda, calling for more federal involvement in education, increased spending on infrastructure, an extension of the payroll tax cut and increased taxes on the rich. . . .

. . . on the whole, the president was pretty transparent about his belief that big government makes everything better.

Seems that every time the incumbent gives one of his ballyhooed big speeches, he calls for more federal spending and greater government intervention.  Doesn’t this guy remember that he won the Oval Office by promising a “net spending cut”?

UP-UPDATE: About the incumbent’s attempt to compare himself to the Republican progressive, Victor Davis Hanson writes, “What we have here is an adolescent president in desperate search of an adult identity of his own, without which he borrows liberally from others, often oddly from Republicans or conservatives.” Read the whole thing.

Let’s imagine that George W. Bush’s Department of Justice had a program going that funneled weapons to the drug cartels of Mexico and then that directly to the murder of a US Border Patrol Agent. I have no doubt that the network news would be on full-scale nuke alert and heads would be rolling, including the President’s.

Now let’s imagine the truth:

In the growing Fast and Furious scandal, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s death in Peck Canyon, Arizona was previously described as a chance meeting that led to a firefight: an illegal alien “rip crew” working for the Sinaloa cartel was hoping to find other illegal aliens and to rob them at gunpoint. Instead, they stumbled across a Border Patrol unit and murdered Agent Terry.

Last week, the Washington Times offered a new version of the encounter: they reported that the rip crew was not hunting illegals, but Border Patrol teams — with the intention of engaging them in combat.

Sources now tell PJ Media that neither version of events is accurate: the rip crew was not waiting for a chance encounter with other illegals, nor did the members intend to engage American law enforcement agents.

The rip crew was in Peck Canyon that evening with the intention of stealing money and drugs from a specific shipment of which they had prior knowledge.

Sources claim the Department of Justice has been trying for almost a year to hide the key information — how the rip crew knew the shipment was coming through that night.

Criminal informants (CIs) are a common tool of law enforcement agencies. When agencies apprehend criminals, agencies often reduce or drop charges in exchange for information leading to the arrests of higher-ranking criminals. Earlier this year, reports claimed that Operation Fast and Furious weapons smuggled over the border were actually chosen by an FBI informant, and paid for with money provided by the federal government.

The rip crew knew to be in Peck Canyon that December evening because a CI working for the FBI found out about a smuggling run — from the FBI.

It is not clear if the information was provided intentionally, but a possible motivation for the FBI to provide the information is known to exist: the CI had previously lost a shipment of drugs, and wanted to regain the trust of the cartel with an offering of drugs or money. The other possibility is that the FBI mistakenly allowed the CI to discover the information.

The CI used this information to organize an ambush of the drug convoy. A source tells PJM that the FBI knew from wiretaps that the CI was using their information to set up an ambush.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) — through its own CIs and communications intercepts — was also aware of the planned assault.

Neither the DEA nor FBI warned Border Patrol about the expected criminal activity.

This is completely outrageous. But the American news media is laying on their backs like supine sheep. Please call your Member of Congress & US Senator TOMORROW and demand that Attorney General Eric Holder resign and that President Obama be held to account for these crimes.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

YAY Arab Spring!!!!

Judges overseeing the vote count in Egypt’s parliamentary elections say Islamist parties have won a majority of the contested seats in the first round. The judges spoke on condition of anonymity because official results are expected to be released later Thursday.

They say the Muslim Brotherhood could take 45 percent of the seats up for grabs. The liberal Egyptian bloc coalition and the ultra-fundamentalist Nour party are competing for second place.

Together, Islamist parties are expected to control a majority of parliamentary seats by March. This week’s vote was the first of six stages of parliamentary elections that will last until then.

Obama = FAIL.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Even the Huffington Post is taking note of the failures of Obama’s foreign policy:

Russia threatened on Wednesday to deploy missiles to target the U.S. missile shield in Europe if Washington fails to assuage Moscow’s concerns about its plans, a harsh warning that reflected deep cracks in U.S.-Russian ties despite President Barack Obama’s efforts to “reset” relations with the Kremlin.

Seems the more we watch this president and his team stumble, the greater appreciation we have for his predecessor and his team.  It looks like the challenges we faced abroad were not so much due to that man’s alleged incompetence, but instead to the particular nature of those very challenges, the complex situations and the particular players.

We face, as one blogger noted, a world of trouble out there, problems that a purportedly tongued-tied Republican did not create, problems that a supposedly smart silver-tongued Democrat cannot fix.

The president and his team often whine about the bad set of circumstances the Democrat has had to deal with, you know all those problems they “inherited” (as if their was the first administration to face problems left unresolved by the previous president.)  The Democrat’s chief of staff put it recently, “Considering the debacle that he came in with, the tough choices he’s made and how there have been few, if any breaks, he says it himself all the time. . . .”

President Obama, as Jim Geraghty (who linked the quote above) reminds us:

. . . has been using the “run of bad luck” line on the stump, too. He cites the Arab Spring as an economic headwind, but let’s face it, Egypt or Libya or Syria or one of the Gulf states could have completely collapsed from internal uprisings. He mentions the tsunami in Japan, which as we all recall was so traumatic to the president he could only cope by going over his March Madness picks with ESPN. Yet obviously that could have been much worse, spreading much more serious radioactivity over more-densely populated areas of Japan. He cites the European debt crises, and again, it’s not hard to imagine that circumstance turning out much worse – such as a collapse of the Euro or serious social unrest in Greece and elsewhere.

Nothing is ever the fault of Obama and the team around him. It’s just that the universe seems to enjoy disappointing him, I guess.

Emphasis added.  Maybe the president wouldn’t be as upset with the universe if he took the advice of that politician who told Jay Leno that “one of the things” he was “trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“

When our President is beholden to union special interests and a failed Keynesian economic dogma, most of us could have  did predict his “recovery” plans would have been a complete FAIL.

From Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com:

When running for President, Barack Obama decried the decline of American household income, which certainly dropped during the 2007-2009 Great Recession.  Since the recovery began in June 2009 — a recovery for which Obama has repeatedly claimed credit — that trend has gotten worse, not better.  A new report shows that the percentage of decline in household income during the so-called recovery actually doubled that of the recession:

During the recession, which economists say lasted from Dec. 2007 to June 2009, the median annual household income fell by 3.2 percent, from $55,309 to $53,518, according to a report authored by two former U.S. Census Bureau officials. But in the post-recession period from June 2009 to June 2011, the figure fell by 6.7 percent, from $53,518 in June 2009 to $49,909 in June 2011. …

The study found that during the post-recessionary period, families with just a male or female head with no spouse present saw a 7.3 percent decline in income compared to the 4.5 percent drop for married-couple households. Income for households with a head under the age of 25 fell by 9.5 percent, significantly more than the 5.5 percent decline for households with a head who is 45 to 54 years old.

Again, I repeat: Our President Spent $787 Billion Dollars Of Our Money And We Got Was This Lousy 9.1% Unemployment Rate (Forever…)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

“Remember,” Ed Morissey wrote yesterday with some nostalgia, those “heady days of ‘hope and change’?”

That was Obama’s argument that only he could change the way Washington worked as an outsider with few obligations to the Establishment.  How voters bought that notion from a Chicago Machine politician is a matter for future psychiatrists and comedians, but Obama’s jerk to the Left and the embrace of old class-warfare arguments and policies appear to have derailed any serious attempt to curtail deficits, at least for the short term.

And the longer Obama governs, the more we see that the image he and his campaign created is at odds with his record.  Ed’s right; that people bought into it is indeed a matter for psychiatrists and comedians.

That our journalists did not delve into his record to see if it matched his rhetoric causes one to question their competency.  Sarah Palin’s daughter’s ex-boyfriend becomes a source of information on the accomplished Alaska reformer, but Barack Obama’s minister of twenty years (about as long as that ex- had been alive, much longer than he knew the Palins) is off limits.

Today, two of my favorite sources of libertarian/conservative opinion, Glenn Reynolds and the WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription) linked and/or excerpted Peter Wehner’s must-read piece on Obama’s Disquieting Heroic Fantasies.  Wehner notes how Obama created this image of this new kind of politician out of whole cloth,about which Morrissey recently reminisced, offering an image of himself opposite to the actual politician Obama has been:

I have written before about Obama’s deep, almost desperate, need to portray himself as the opposite of what he is, to conceive of himself in a way that is at odds with reality. We have seen it in all sorts of areas, including claiming himself to be a voice of civility, portraying himself as a champion of bi-partisanship, lecturing others about profligate spending, and saying he is the only responsible “adult” in Washington. (more…)

Wow.  This from Gallup today:

• 49% of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. In 2003, less than a third (30%) believed this.
• A record-high 81% of Americans are dissatisfied with the way the country is being governed, adding to negativity that has been building over the past 10 years.

Oh, there’s so much more…. read the whole thing.

Hey, someone should write more about this “Low Grade Civil War” thing!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)