If you're starting to blame the recession on Obama, you've better start reading the yesteryear paper. He just started as president, and the bills JUST got passed. Sure, he is still keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it would be reckless to take them all out. Besides, aren't we improving already?
America isn't dead. No states are in mass destruction.. we're doing fine.
I never blamed the recession on Obama, It's from a lot of past presidents. We're certainly not doing fine. Thanks to Obama, my state won't get any money because it spends less on Education, like California and Nebraska I think. Oh, not to mention art is soon to be none existent in the schools.
Chiyu: I thought about arguing about it with you, but then I looked at your profile and the drawings you've done so far and it's obvious that you're just a kid and don't know any better. I will say though, that this isn't about the wars. (although it is kind of interesting that all of a sudden staying there is the responsible thing to do). This is about the systematic dismantling of Liberty and freedom.
The Federal government committed extortion and they’re not being held accountable. What’s next? Listen to this: I recently met with the Chair and CEO of one of the country’s top 10 bank holding companies. His bank is worth in excess of $250 billion, has no bad debt, no credit default swaps, no liquidity problems, and no subprime loans. He told me that he and others were forced by Treasury and FDIC threats to take TARP funds, even though he did not want or need them.
There is simply no authority in the U.S. Constitution for Congress to exercise the level of control it now seeks over private industry.
The FDIC — with Treasury backing — threatened to conduct public audits of his bank unless his board created and issued a class of stock for the Feds to buy. The audit, which he is confident his bank would survive, would cost it millions in employee time, bad press, and consequent lost business.
He pleaded with the Feds to leave his successful bank alone. He begged his board to let him tell the Feds to take a hike. But they gave in. The Feds are now just a tiny shareholder, but want to begin asserting more and more control. This is a classic extortion: Controlling someone’s free will by threatening to perform a lawful act. (Blackmail is the threat is to perform an unlawful act in order to control someone else’s free will.) There are no exceptions in the statutes prohibiting extortion for government persons
This happened in September 2008, but the demands for more control are more recent. It sounds to me like Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke, and Sheila Blair have all read a biography of Benito Mussolini. I guess they skipped the last chapter.
There is simply no authority in the U.S. Constitution for Congress to exercise the level of control it now seeks over private industry. In fact, this level of control will wind up costing the businesses that took TARP (voluntarily or involuntarily) money since they will lose key employees who will go to work elsewhere and because the reporting requirements will take time and time is money. The Constitution basically says that if the government wants to take time or freedom or money from someone or something, it must sue for it. It cannot just give itself the authority to do so via legislation.
Our liberties are slipping away right before our eyes.
It's interesting how the libs got so bent out of shape about the Patriot Act that supposedly took away freedoms away from the terrorists, but they are not concerned now about the freedoms that are actually being taken away from the citizens.
Barack Obama’s revelatory moment may have come in his first week as president. On his first day of work, he signed an executive order prohibiting lobbyists from holding highranking administration jobs, thereby fulfilling a campaign promise to “close the revolving door” between K Street and government via “the most sweeping ethics reform in history.” Two days later, the president granted a “waiver” from the new rules to install Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn as the No. 2 man in the Pentagon.
As offenses go, the move was trivial. But as a signal of a governing pathology, it established a pattern that Obama has repeated serially since being sworn into office: reiterate a high-sounding promise from the campaign, undermine said promise with a concrete act of governance to the contrary, then claim with a straight face that the campaign promise has been and will continue to be fulfilled.
So candidate Obama promised to usher in the “most transparent administration in history,” in part by making sure the American people were allowed to read each proposed non-emergency law for at least five days before the president signs it. Yet in his first month, President Obama signed three laws from the liberal wish list—the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the Lily Ledbetter Fair Play Act, and the $787 billion “stimulus” package—in less than five days. Explained the White House: “We will be implementing this policy in full soon.…Currently we are working through implementation procedures.”
The SCHIP law, which was paid for in part by a cigarette tax hike of 61 cents a pack, also put the lie to a pledge Obama repeated after its passage in his first address before a joint session of Congress. “Let me be perfectly clear,” he said on February 24, with less than perfect clarity. “If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”
But not only is the cigarette tax a “tax” (and worth six dimes at that), it’s among the most regressive kind possible, since poorer people are more likely to smoke and spend a larger share of their incomes on cigarettes than richer smokers do. And it’s hardly the only tax Obama will levy on those not yet in the quarter-million club. In that same speech, and also in the budget proposal he handed to Congress shortly thereafter, the president called for a cap-and-trade system for companies that emit carbon. That would surely translate into a price increase on every gallon of gasoline sold in the United States, a change that would have more impact on the household budgets of working-class heroes than those of modern-day plutocrats.
Spending? Candidate Obama promised “a net spending cut” in which “every dollar that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.” President Obama has proposed the largest net spending increase since World War II, even while holding summits on “fiscal responsibility” and vowing to live by the same “pay as you go” principles he’s already blown to smithereens.
Deficits? A president whose first budget will expand the deficit into uncharted territory (see Veronique de Rugy’s “When Do Deficits Matter?,” page 21) nonetheless promises to cut his shortfall in half within four years. This, he claimed in his speech to Congress, will be achieved partly through $2 trillion in “savings” that will come by “eliminat[ing] wasteful and ineffective programs.” Analysts noted within hours that around half of Obama’s “savings” actually come from letting Bush’s tax cuts expire after 2010. It takes a certain kind of mind-set to characterize Americans’ taking home their own money as a “wasteful and ineffective program,” let alone tax increases as “savings.”
Once you identify the president’s tic of celebrating the very campaign promises that he breaks, you’ll see it everywhere. So there he is, “proud that we passed the recovery plan free of earmarks,” just days after passing a recovery plan stuffed with what the investigative website Pro Publica described as “items that could arguably be called earmarks” (and in the same week that Congress handed him a new budget swollen with brand new chunks of pork). The stimulus package will “save or create 3.5 million jobs,” an elastic, impossible-to-prove projection that neatly gives him credit for either boom or bust. (For more on Obama’s stimulus, please see “Will We Be Stimulated?,” page 32. For more on the state government jobs that will be “saved” by using federal money to cover for bad fiscal management, see “Failed States,” page 24.)
The two faces of Obama reveal more than just a politician hardwired to work both sides of a room. The new president’s political goals and governing goals are in tension. The post-Bush executive needs to solve a mammoth financial and economic crisis affecting the entire country, but the pre-Clintonomics Democrat needs to blame it on fat cats and Republicans.
So in early January, the president-elect lamented that “banks made loans without concern for whether borrowers could repay them, and some borrowers took advantage of cheap credit to take on debt they couldn’t afford.” In February his administration pushed banks to lend still more to risky homebuyers while bailing out underwater borrowers. Technocrat Obama wants to jumpstart the “flow of credit,” which he has described as “the lifeblood of our economy,” but politician Obama wants to somehow surgically remove the “speculators” from the process. “I will not spend a single penny,” he vowed to Congress, unconvincingly, “for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can’t pay its workers or the family that has saved and still can’t get a mortgage.” The following week his administration authorized another $30 billion in the $163-billion-and-counting bailout of the Wall Street insurance giant AIG.
There are both risks and rewards when a politician pronounces gray skies (particularly of his own making) to be blue. For now, Obama is mostly reaping the rewards. A public weary of the president’s tongue-tied predecessor is giving the eloquent new fellow the benefit of the doubt, as evidenced by an MSNBC poll in early March showing his approval rating at an all-time high of 68 percent. But that same poll pointed to Obama’s weakness: A substantially smaller number, 54 percent, thought the president’s policies were on the right track. The country seems to like the guy who talks about fiscal responsibility, less so the one who practices the opposite.
The illusion will eventually give way, and voters will see more of who Obama is than who they wish him to be. In the meantime the president has proposed a budget blueprint that would significantly alter the way Americans spend money on energy, mortgages, charities, and investments, to name just a few areas. Will they recognize the tic in time?
Axil..you rock. You don't spout off uneducated garbage. You back up your convictions with facts. Thank you. I wish more poeple would educate themselves before committing verbal diarreah.
Uh...I know for a fact,that Obama is gay,and bisexual,so let that affect politics.Yes,he is,he's closet,very closet.not honest to not admit it,not fair to gay groups.why not admit we have the first gay president?it's ok.we have plenty of gay congressmen.
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America isn't dead. No states are in mass destruction.. we're doing fine.
The Federal government committed extortion and they’re not being held accountable. What’s next? Listen to this: I recently met with the Chair and CEO of one of the country’s top 10 bank holding companies. His bank is worth in excess of $250 billion, has no bad debt, no credit default swaps, no liquidity problems, and no subprime loans. He told me that he and others were forced by Treasury and FDIC threats to take TARP funds, even though he did not want or need them.
There is simply no authority in the U.S. Constitution for Congress to exercise the level of control it now seeks over private industry.
The FDIC — with Treasury backing — threatened to conduct public audits of his bank unless his board created and issued a class of stock for the Feds to buy. The audit, which he is confident his bank would survive, would cost it millions in employee time, bad press, and consequent lost business.
He pleaded with the Feds to leave his successful bank alone. He begged his board to let him tell the Feds to take a hike. But they gave in. The Feds are now just a tiny shareholder, but want to begin asserting more and more control. This is a classic extortion: Controlling someone’s free will by threatening to perform a lawful act. (Blackmail is the threat is to perform an unlawful act in order to control someone else’s free will.) There are no exceptions in the statutes prohibiting extortion for government persons
This happened in September 2008, but the demands for more control are more recent. It sounds to me like Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke, and Sheila Blair have all read a biography of Benito Mussolini. I guess they skipped the last chapter.
There is simply no authority in the U.S. Constitution for Congress to exercise the level of control it now seeks over private industry. In fact, this level of control will wind up costing the businesses that took TARP (voluntarily or involuntarily) money since they will lose key employees who will go to work elsewhere and because the reporting requirements will take time and time is money. The Constitution basically says that if the government wants to take time or freedom or money from someone or something, it must sue for it. It cannot just give itself the authority to do so via legislation.
Our liberties are slipping away right before our eyes.
As offenses go, the move was trivial. But as a signal of a governing pathology, it established a pattern that Obama has repeated serially since being sworn into office: reiterate a high-sounding promise from the campaign, undermine said promise with a concrete act of governance to the contrary, then claim with a straight face that the campaign promise has been and will continue to be fulfilled.
So candidate Obama promised to usher in the “most transparent administration in history,” in part by making sure the American people were allowed to read each proposed non-emergency law for at least five days before the president signs it. Yet in his first month, President Obama signed three laws from the liberal wish list—the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the Lily Ledbetter Fair Play Act, and the $787 billion “stimulus” package—in less than five days. Explained the White House: “We will be implementing this policy in full soon.…Currently we are working through implementation procedures.”
The SCHIP law, which was paid for in part by a cigarette tax hike of 61 cents a pack, also put the lie to a pledge Obama repeated after its passage in his first address before a joint session of Congress. “Let me be perfectly clear,” he said on February 24, with less than perfect clarity. “If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”
But not only is the cigarette tax a “tax” (and worth six dimes at that), it’s among the most regressive kind possible, since poorer people are more likely to smoke and spend a larger share of their incomes on cigarettes than richer smokers do. And it’s hardly the only tax Obama will levy on those not yet in the quarter-million club. In that same speech, and also in the budget proposal he handed to Congress shortly thereafter, the president called for a cap-and-trade system for companies that emit carbon. That would surely translate into a price increase on every gallon of gasoline sold in the United States, a change that would have more impact on the household budgets of working-class heroes than those of modern-day plutocrats.
Spending? Candidate Obama promised “a net spending cut” in which “every dollar that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.” President Obama has proposed the largest net spending increase since World War II, even while holding summits on “fiscal responsibility” and vowing to live by the same “pay as you go” principles he’s already blown to smithereens.
Deficits? A president whose first budget will expand the deficit into uncharted territory (see Veronique de Rugy’s “When Do Deficits Matter?,” page 21) nonetheless promises to cut his shortfall in half within four years. This, he claimed in his speech to Congress, will be achieved partly through $2 trillion in “savings” that will come by “eliminat[ing] wasteful and ineffective programs.” Analysts noted within hours that around half of Obama’s “savings” actually come from letting Bush’s tax cuts expire after 2010. It takes a certain kind of mind-set to characterize Americans’ taking home their own money as a “wasteful and ineffective program,” let alone tax increases as “savings.”
Once you identify the president’s tic of celebrating the very campaign promises that he breaks, you’ll see it everywhere. So there he is, “proud that we passed the recovery plan free of earmarks,” just days after passing a recovery plan stuffed with what the investigative website Pro Publica described as “items that could arguably be called earmarks” (and in the same week that Congress handed him a new budget swollen with brand new chunks of pork). The stimulus package will “save or create 3.5 million jobs,” an elastic, impossible-to-prove projection that neatly gives him credit for either boom or bust. (For more on Obama’s stimulus, please see “Will We Be Stimulated?,” page 32. For more on the state government jobs that will be “saved” by using federal money to cover for bad fiscal management, see “Failed States,” page 24.)
The two faces of Obama reveal more than just a politician hardwired to work both sides of a room. The new president’s political goals and governing goals are in tension. The post-Bush executive needs to solve a mammoth financial and economic crisis affecting the entire country, but the pre-Clintonomics Democrat needs to blame it on fat cats and Republicans.
So in early January, the president-elect lamented that “banks made loans without concern for whether borrowers could repay them, and some borrowers took advantage of cheap credit to take on debt they couldn’t afford.” In February his administration pushed banks to lend still more to risky homebuyers while bailing out underwater borrowers. Technocrat Obama wants to jumpstart the “flow of credit,” which he has described as “the lifeblood of our economy,” but politician Obama wants to somehow surgically remove the “speculators” from the process. “I will not spend a single penny,” he vowed to Congress, unconvincingly, “for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can’t pay its workers or the family that has saved and still can’t get a mortgage.” The following week his administration authorized another $30 billion in the $163-billion-and-counting bailout of the Wall Street insurance giant AIG.
There are both risks and rewards when a politician pronounces gray skies (particularly of his own making) to be blue. For now, Obama is mostly reaping the rewards. A public weary of the president’s tongue-tied predecessor is giving the eloquent new fellow the benefit of the doubt, as evidenced by an MSNBC poll in early March showing his approval rating at an all-time high of 68 percent. But that same poll pointed to Obama’s weakness: A substantially smaller number, 54 percent, thought the president’s policies were on the right track. The country seems to like the guy who talks about fiscal responsibility, less so the one who practices the opposite.
The illusion will eventually give way, and voters will see more of who Obama is than who they wish him to be. In the meantime the president has proposed a budget blueprint that would significantly alter the way Americans spend money on energy, mortgages, charities, and investments, to name just a few areas. Will they recognize the tic in time?
Matt Welch is editor in chief of reason.