Bitch About Obama

By BOB HERBERT, NYT

 It’s all about Jobs

The Obama administration and Democrats in general are in trouble because they are not urgently and effectively addressing the issue that most Americans want them to: the frightening economic insecurity that has put a chokehold on millions of American families.

The economy shed 36,000 jobs last month, and that was trumpeted in the press as good news. Well, after your house has burned down I suppose it’s good news that the flames may finally be flickering out. But once you realize that it will take 11 million or more new jobs to get us back to where we were when the recession began, you begin to understand that we’re not really making any headway at all.

It’s also widely known by now that the official employment statistics drastically understate the problem. Once we take off the statistical rose-colored glasses, we’re left with the awful reality of millions upon millions of Americans who have lost — or are losing — their jobs, their homes, their small businesses, and their hopes for a brighter future.

Instead of focusing with unwavering intensity on this increasingly tragic situation, making it their top domestic priority, President Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill have spent astonishing amounts of time and energy, and most of their political capital, on an obsessive quest to pass a health care bill.

Health care reform is important. But what the public has wanted and still badly needs above all else from Mr. Obama and the Democrats are bold efforts to put people back to work. A major employment rebound is the only real way to alleviate the deep economic anxiety that has gripped so many Americans. Unaddressed, that anxiety inevitably evolves into dread and then anger.

But while the nation is desperate for jobs, jobs, jobs, the Democrats have spent most of the Obama era chanting health care, health care, health care.

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By Robert T. Smith, American Thinker

 Obama shows up late to the spending party

Somewhere deep down inside, The One We Have Been Waiting For must be disappointed to have arrived at the spending party so late. It’s just about over; the ice has melted, the keg of taxpayer-supplied funding is floating, and the public coffers are tapped out.

Each year since 1969, Congress has spent more money than its "income." The Treasury Department has to borrow money to meet Congress’s appropriations. The national debt currently increases by $3.89 billion per day and stands at over $12.4 trillion. Each American citizen’s share of the debt is over $40,000, and this debt is growing.   

It seems almost impossible for The One to believe that America’s revulsion over more spending isn’t about him. How could we not recognize how sophisticated, intelligent, or just plain cool he is and end the spending party at the very moment he and his enabler friends arrived with so many ideas for more spending party activities?   

By their statements in the media, it appears clear that The One and his enablers believe that America’s rejection of continuing the spending party must be about racism, or anti-government radicalism, or perhaps just astroturf orchestrated by the evil Republican establishment who wants to control the spending party itself. The One and his enablers seem stupefied as to why so many Americans are attempting to thwart all the spending partying they wish to inflict on them; it is incomprehensible to them why Americans want to end the spending party now.

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FOXNews

 Obama plays loose with the facts in healthcare campaign stop

President Obama, making his final push for health care reform, pitched his proposal Monday to a crowd in Pennsylvania with a deficit-reduction figure that the White House later admitted missed the mark.

"Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill, which reduces most people’s premiums and brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion dollars over the next decade because we’re spending our health care dollars more wisely," Obama told an audience at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., a suburb north of Philadelphia.

Obama was so proud of these cost-saving numbers in the latest version of health care reform, he delved into a bit of Washington-speak to back them up.

"Those aren’t my numbers," Obama said to the rising applause of the estimated 1,300 in attendance. "They are the savings determined by the Congressional Budget Office, which is the nonpartisan, independent referee of Congress for what things cost."

But the budget office did not say the Senate health care bill would save $1 trillion over the next decade — or even close to that figure.

It estimated the bill would save $132 billion from 2010 to 2019, leaving Obama’s "next decade" estimate $868 billion short.

When contacted about this disparity, a White House official said Obama meant to say the Senate bill would save $1 trillion in its second decade.

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By Richard Cohen

Googling to my heart’s content on a recent eve, I decided to match “health care” with “ram” to see what would happen. What I got was about 9.8 million hits, some of them right on the nose and reflecting the current conservative meme that after more than a year, several votes, countless presidential speeches and having to look upon the face of Harry Reid some 10,000 times, the health care bill is being “rammed” through Congress — an absurdity that now has currency through sheer repetition. It is not exactly the renowned vaunted Big Lie, just a miserable little one.

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By Mike Colapietro

Not since porn star Cicciolina was elected to the Italian parliament has there been a sexier political candidate. The first thing you notice is her bust. Round, full, in the Dolly Parton/Jayne Mansfield sense, they are just too “perfect.” Then you notice her eyes: blue, piercing, determined.

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By Roger Hedgecock, WND

Obama’s energy plan is collapsing 

The president promised to "transform America."

As part of that transformation, Obama proposed to reduce the use of cheap oil, natural gas and coal by raising the price of these energy sources through regulation and taxation until consumers used less. Simultaneously, the federal government would subsidize wind, solar and geothermal to create "green" jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

The primary push behind these policies was Obama’s belief in the radical environmentalists’ notion that use of traditional fuels was changing the climate. During the 2008 campaign, Obama admitted that electricity rates for every consumer would "necessarily skyrocket" under his plan.

(Earth to Obama: Methane gas is 30 times more a greenhouse gas than CO2. More methane is naturally leaking from the Arctic Ocean floor today than CO2 from human sources.)

The political wheels are coming off this goofy energy plan.

Last week, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., submitted legislation that would stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions for two years. This would stop the EPA from imposing a "cap-and-trade" tax on energy while legislation authorizing "cap and trade" is stalled in Congress because of overwhelming public opposition.

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AP

 Obama is on a mission to pass healthcare no matter what

In private pitches to Democrats, President Barack Obama says he will persuade Congress to pass his health care overhaul even if it kills him and even if he has to ask deeply distrustful lawmakers to trust him on a promise the White House doesn’t have the power to keep.

That, in a sometimes darkly joking way, is what the president is telling Democratic House members as he begins an all-out push to coax Congress into passing his proposals despite voters’ misgivings and Republicans’ dire warnings.

"He made the case, ‘Listen, we put in a very hard year working on health care reform and the time for action is now,’" said Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., one of several Democrats who met with Obama at the White House on Thursday.

Obama joked that the political battle has contributed to the recent rise in his cholesterol, Kind said, and the president noted how ironic it would be if health care drove him to his grave.

But Obama is anything but sickly these days, making health care pitches Monday in Philadelphia and Wednesday in St. Louis, and instructing aides to address every question or concern Democratic lawmakers possibly can raise.

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By Rich Lowry, Real Clear Politics

 Obama’s Infomercial for weather stripping created no new jobs

A year ago, President Barack Obama peered into our economic future and saw foam sealant and weatherstripping.

In the midst of a punishing recession, Obama would wield that incomparable jobs-creating tool, the caulk gun. What the Works Progress Administration was to Franklin Roosevelt, the government-funded weatherization of homes would be to Obama.

"If you allocate money to weatherize homes," Obama effused to an audience in Elkhart, Ind., "the homeowner gets the benefit of lower energy bills. You right away put people back to work, many of whom in the construction industry and in the housing industry are out of work right now." And it’s a step to "a new energy future."

Obama was hawking another one of his cost-free, best-of-all-worlds scenarios, one that has been exposed in all its self-deluding inanity in the space of a year. As a writer parodying such magical thinking long ago observed, "Sun-beams may be extracted from cucumbers, but the process is tedious." A sun-beam extraction program might have been just as effective, and nearly as timely.

Obama poured $5 billion into weatherization as part of last year’s stimulus and wanted to spend billions more in a second stimulus. The Department of Energy managed to get the money to the states, where it has swelled the coffers for weatherization and done little else.

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By Tony Romm, The Hill

 Michael Moore and the left is blasting Obama

Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore on Sunday railed on Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, predicting, "Democrats on Election Day 2010 are going to get an ass-whoopin’ of biblical proportions if things don’t change right now."

In an open letter to the White House, Moore placed the blame for Democrats’ dismal electoral prospects in 2010 squarely on the shoulders of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, recently a popular target for liberals dissatisfied with the White House’s handling of healthcare.

While Moore praised the sitting chief of staff for long being a "no apologies, take-no-prisoners fighting machine," he ultimately said Emanuel had "turned into a fighter — not of Republicans, but of the left."

"Well, you and the Democrats have been in charge now for over a year and not one banking regulation has been reinstated. We don’t have universal health care. The war in Afghanistan has escalated. And tens of thousands of Americans continue to lose their jobs and be thrown out of their homes," Moore wrote.

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By Ken Blackwell, American Thinker

 The evils of Obamacare Home Visits Exposed

It’s all supposed to be voluntary, those "home visits" that are tucked into the mammoth Obamacare bill. If you have a strong stomach, and a stronger bottom, you can find home visitation on pages 568-595. That’s Section 2951 of H.R. 3590, the Senate bill that Harry Reid brought down the chimney on Christmas Eve.

All voluntary, they say, but once you "volunteer" to have the oh-so-helpful folks from Social Services come in to help with your newborns, or with a number of other specified issues, will you ever be able to get rid of them?

The bill provides for federal funding and supervision for this vast expansion of government intrusion into family life. This is the Nanny State on steroids.

Is your family being "targeted" for such home visitations? Let’s see if you fit into one of these very broad categories:

Families where Mom is not yet 21. (No mention here whether she is married or not.)

Families where someone is a tobacco user. (Does this include the White House? Watch out, Sasha and Malia! Does Grandpa, whom you love and have taken in, enjoy his after-dinner pipe?)

Families where children have low student achievement, developmental delays, or disabilities.

As if that list were not wide-ranging enough, here’s the net that can encompass tens of millions:

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