Cruising the Web

The Obamanians are so nostalgic for 2008 that they wish they could run against McCain again forgetting all the vitriol they launched against him in that election.

Think of what Obama's avoidance of Wisconsin as the vote comes down to the final moments says of both Obama and the results of Scott Walker's reforms.

The unions and Democrats are using a particularly smarmy tactic in Wisconsin.

Michael Goodwin is rightfully appalled at the national security leaks coming out of this White House.

Panic is never pretty. When it involves a politician scrambling desperately to stay afloat, it is ugly. When it involves a president of the United States trading national-security secrets for political gain, it is obscene.

Twice last week, The New York Times published insider accounts of Obama-administration decisions. One involved “kill lists” of terrorists targeted by drones. The other described cyberwarfare attacks against Iran.

The articles revealed details of top-level meetings and quoted the president’s comments. They were so gushingly favorable to him that it’s clear they were based on authorized leaks by the White House designed to make Obama look tough against terror. Flattery was part of the bargain.

So we learned the president insists on giving final approval to each target, a “grim debating society” that tests his “principles.” We learned he “is a student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas” and follows the “just war theories of Christian philosophers.” Adviser John Brennan, described as a “grizzled” son of Irish immigrants, is compared “to a priest whose blessing has become indispensable” to Obama.

Naturally, campaign guru David Axelrod attends these “Terror Tuesday” meetings. Not that politics is involved, of course.

This is more than an unseemly spiking of the football. This is reckless politicking that reflects an his “anything goes” approach to November: Nothing is sacred except four more years.

The Times also outed Israel as our partner in launching the Stuxnet virus against Iran’s nuclear computers. While the United States and Israel were long suspected, the article shredded any deniability.

The Allies broke German military codes in World War II, but it remained secret until the 1970s. Now our president leaks secrets in real time.

This leaking is part of a trend from this White House. They're willing to see huge cuts in security spending and they're also willing to give away advantages we may have in security in order to make their guy look more macho.

John Ellis highlights the importance of the margin of the vote in Wisconsin tomorrow.

One liberal asks "exactly who died and made Bill Clinton king?" You guys did.
Hey, maybe there are lessons to be learned from our stalled economy. If only the liberals would learn those lessons.

Mr. Obama has had the freest run of policy of any President since LBJ. So maybe the problem is the policies.

Maybe Milton Friedman was right that "temporary, targeted" tax cuts don't change the incentives to invest or hire because people aren't stupid. Maybe each $1 of new federal spending doesn't produce a "multiplier" of 1.5 times that in added output. Maybe the historic burst of regulation of the last three years has harmed business confidence and job creation. And maybe the uncertainty that comes from helter-skelter fiscal and monetary policy has dampened the animal spirits needed for a durable expansion.

Instead they just cry for more, more, more of the same. Isn't that Einstein's definition of insanity?

Obama's snub of Lech Walesa says much about him.

The Washington Post asks if Romney's religion is fair game. The Romney campaign has a simple test to answer that question - would the media have written the same thing about a Jewish candidate? I'd add in - a Muslim candidate. Enough said.


Victor Davis Hanson notes the differences between cultures that are still the foundations for differences in governments.

The fault lies not in the Senate but in Harry Reid's leadership

You may have seen charts that the number of cloture votes has skyrocketed since the Republicans fell to the minority in the Senate. This is usually taken as evidence of Republican obstructionism and an argument for ending the filibuster. What is not understood is that the real reason the majority has filed so many cloture motions is because Harry Reid has been using the rules to bypass normal committee procedures to examine bills and to avoid any amendments proposed for bills because he wants to protect Democratic senators from having to vote on tough amendments.

So Republicans are to blame for all those cloture petitions to end filibusters, right? Wrong. The fact that the majority has filed so many cloture petitions is as much a symptom of its own efforts to block the Senate from working its will as anything the minority has done. Consider this example.

On March 19, Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) introduced legislation (S. 2204) to promote renewable energy with the cost offset by a tax hike on large oil producers. The normal process would have been for this legislation to be referred to committee for action.

Majority Leader Harry Reid bypassed the committee process, however, and using something called Rule 14 had the bill placed directly on the Senate calendar. Two days later, he started the process to call up the bill by moving to "proceed to it" and immediately filed a cloture petition to end debate on that motion.

The following Monday, the Senate then voted 92-4 to curtail debate on the motion to proceed to the bill. The next day, as soon as the bill was before the Senate, Mr. Reid offered five consecutive amendments and one motion in order to effectively block the consideration of any competing amendments or motions.

He then filed a cloture motion to close out debate on the bill. Two days later, the Senate rejected cloture on a party-line vote and moved on to other business, leaving the Menendez bill adrift.

Now go back to the Politico story and ask yourself how exactly Republicans filibustered this bill? They didn't have time to filibuster anything, it was over so quickly. Moreover, their ability to take meaningful action was effectively nullified by four specific parliamentary maneuvers taken by Mr. Reid.

Why does the majority go to all this trouble? The simple answer is to protect its members from tough votes.

The Senate is a wide open forum where almost any issue can be raised and voted on at almost any time. This environment is a function of the Senate's tradition of unlimited debate, but it does leave members vulnerable to having to vote on difficult issues at inconvenient times, like when they are up for re-election.

In response, Majority Leader Reid has adopted the practice of blocking amendments from being offered. No amendments, no surprises, and no tough votes.

And continuing his efforts to make sure that his members don't have to make tough votes, note that Reid still hasn't allowed normal procedures to be followed on the budget and on any other number of bills that have been passed out of the House and sent over to the Senate. The Senate is truly the graveyard of proposed laws, but the fault lies not in the filibuster, but in how Harry Reid is trying to lead by not governing and blocking other attempts to do anything.

Is there nothing that the Obama administration won't leak?

There is a story today in the New York Times that clearly comes from leaks in the Obama administration. The story reveals that Obama bravely decided to continue the program set in place by Bush to use cyberwarfare against the Iranian nuclear program. This program led to Stuxnet and now the new program, Flame, that we learned about this week. It's obvious from the story that it mostly came from members of the Obama administration since there are quotes and references to what Obama said in classified briefings on the program.

There have been lots of guesses that either or both the U.S. and Israel were behind Stuxnet and Flame. The better part of valor would have been to have left this question out there instead of leaking the story and validating the role of the United States. And when parts of the computer virus program went wrong, the leakers are quite happy to place the blame on the Israelis.

An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users.

“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”

Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”

Classy, aren't they? Nice of them to leak details of their blaming Israel.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's stupendous that we were working on this secret program. But there are reasons that such programs are done in the shadows without governments acknowledging their roles. But that's not the Obama way. They were happy to leak details of the raid on Osama bin Laden in order to make Obama look good. They were happy to leak details about Obama making choices of whom to kill abroad. And now they happily leak details about the most secret of our plans for cyberwarfare. This is truly shameful. As Elliot Abrams writes,

If the effort is highly classified, and if parts of it continue to this day, revealing the information contained in the article is a criminal act. What was the justification for these revelations to a reporter? Self-aggrandizement? The political interests of the president? The story contains details about events at the White House that European and Israeli officials would not have had–nor would officials at middle levels at CIA. Such information came from high-ranking officials at the White House, leading again to the suspicion about political motives. Just days ago it was revealed that meetings on counter-terrorism policy, at which the next names for the drone kill list were selected, were attended by the president’s political adviser David Axelrod.

All of this would have been viewed as a scandal had it occurred in the Bush Administration. Ask yourself what the New York Times would have said about Karl Rove attending any such meetings–which by the way he never did. You need not ask yourself what the Times and other liberal outlets would have said about leaks, for they mounted a gigantic campaign against one minor leak–that of the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA official. Where are the calls for a special prosecutor to investigate the leak after leak coming from this White House on the most sensitive intelligence operations, leaks whose only thread is that they make the president look tough? Until a serious investigation is launched, these leaks will continue and the damage they do to American intelligence operations will continue to mount.

Anything to help the election effort. That's what they're clearly more concerned about. Keeping a top secret program developed with one of our best allies secret - not of so much interest if they can make Obama look like a gutsy and tough leader.

Obama wants to fight on Romney's turf

If Obama wants to run a campaign comparing Bain Capital and the administration's record on investment, bring it on. David Horwich writes,

The problems for The One’s are threefold. First, he has made near-universally bad bets. Second, public entity investing possesses fundamental flaws. And third, the opportunity to make investments with politically connected business ventures has led to charges of corruption and cronyism.

A campaign fought on this issue is fighting on Romney's turf.

Moreover, the folly associated with public entities investing in established businesses (like, say, General Motors…oops!), let alone technologies best evaluated by trained professionals, is manifest for all to see. A private equity (or even venture) investor is a highly experienced individual who has seen, invested in (and/or rejected investment in) many companies in his or her career. His existence is Darwinistic: if he doesn’t know what he’s doing and makes too many bad bets, he doesn’t get to raise the next round of fund capital and is out seeking a new career by the day after that failure.

On the other hand, a public functionary deciding to risk hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars can’t have been through the fire of investment success-or-failure, and, most importantly, doesn’t have the same interests at heart.

By definition, his or her goals are policy-driven, not return-driven, so he feels indifferent to success: he’ll keep his job regardless of failure – unless political pressure forces him out.

Which of these two would you rather see as stewards of your money? After all, it is your money.

With the government, you get bad decisions often driven by corruption and cronyism. The losses are the taxpayers. And the unseen consequences are the private investments that don't get made because of the higher taxes needed to pay for all that crony capitalism.

Fighting on Romney's turf might be a sign of an aggressive Obama campaign, but it's a fight that Romney can win. And it's heartening to see that he is willing and able to make that argument.

Cruising the Web

Eric Holder incites racial divisions. That's hope and change for you.

The deceptions that are the Obama campaign's claims about their own record.

He should embrace those budgets in all their Keynesian majesty. They are one of his most consequential contributions to our national life, and a true expression of his philosophical core and that of his party. In his tawdry denials, the president almost acts as if $5.5 trillion in new debt were something to be ashamed of.

Peggy Noonan gives some examples to demonstrate that Obama is bad at politics. That certainly counters the mythology.

Why do we have a system where monks who make handcrafted caskets have to go to the courts to maintain their rights to make such caskets?

The Romney team hits back and hits hard. Politico gets their panties in a knot and calls this "2012's nastiest day." Definition of nasty: a Republican campaign hitting back against a Democratic campaign. When the Democrats do that, it barely rates a mention. However, Republicans are encouraged to see the Romney campaign hit back. As John Hinderaker writes, "These aren't your father's Republicans." Romney's speech at Solyndra laid out how Obama looks at the government's role in the economy.

“It’s also a symbol of how the president thinks about free enterprise,” said Romney. “Free enterprise to the president means taking money from the taxpayers and giving it freely to his friends.”

This is why Glenn Reynolds wrote, "You know, I think I like the cut of this Romney fellow's jib."

Hmmm. Here's a tell from the Obama's card-playing. Notice how he's staying far away from the Wisconsin recall effort.

Does anyone listen to Obama anymore?

Charles Krauthammer ponders the irony of "Barack Obama: Drone Warrior."

This administration came out opposing military tribunals, wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights, and trying mightily (and unsuccessfully, there being — surprise! — no plausible alternative) to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them in their beds.

You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no prisoners. The morality is perverse. Which is why the results are so mixed. We do kill terror operatives, an important part of the War on Terror, but we gratuitously forfeit potentially life-saving intelligence.

But that will cost us later. For now, we are to bask in the moral seriousness and cool purpose of our drone-warrior president.

This is Obama's approach to diplomacy: insult Lech Walesa and make a gaffe on "Polish death camps," yet give a Medal of Freedom to the chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. Maybe Obama just doesn't like being seen with someone who actually earned his Nobel Peace Prize or a union leader whose union didn't do anything to get Obama elected. And it's part of a trend of Obama's insults to Poland.

Jonah Goldberg has some good advice for Romney -don't defend the Bush-era spending.

Elizabeth Warren demonstrates once again that it's not the crime, but the cover-up.

Unlike Obama, Scott Walker delivered on his promises. Maybe that's why Obama is staying away. The contrast is stark.

Yet another reason why Obama didn't fulfill his promise of having the details of the negotiations over health care reform play out on C-Span. It turns out that the administration was wheeling and dealing with Big Pharma in order to buy their support.

Cruising the Web

Karl Rove, who should know, explores the differences between 2004 and 2012.

Jay Cost explains why the Democratic Party was never Bill Clinton's party.

Byron York reports that the Romney campaign is just not going to get involved in the game of repudiating fools like Donald Trump who support him but say abysmally stupid things. They're exactly right. This is a one-team game. The Democrats don't repudiate their fools like Bill Maher and Jon Corzine who are supporting and raising money for Obama. And the media only demands such repudiations from the Republicans.

Romney aides believe that cooperating with Democrats and media figures who are demanding a Trump disavowal would most certainly lead to more calls for more disavowals of other figures in the future -- leaving Romney spending as much time apologizing for his supporters as campaigning for president. Team Romney views it as a silly and one-sided game designed to distract voters from the central issue of the race, which they remain convinced will be President Obama's handling of the economy.

By one-sided, they mean not only that Obama has not disavowed SuperPAC contributor Bill Maher for a number of Maher's statements that were particularly insulting to Republican women. They also mean the press, with, as Team Romney sees it, questionable associations of its own. Has David Gregory, moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," repudiated his colleague Al Sharpton, the MSNBC host with a decades-long record of incendiary statements and actions? And has, say, the New York Times columnist Gail Collins repudiated her colleague Charles Blow, who once wrote to Romney, "Stick that in your magic underwear"? Romney, his team believes, understands that the calls for him to repudiate Trump over the issue of birtherism -- and future calls to repudiate this or that supporter next week or next month over some other issue -- are at the core all about politics.

The campaign is going to keep their eyes on the ball regardless of what distractions the media will dig up to change the subject. Good for them.

No surprise - Obama and his supporters are just making up statistics about how many jobs have been created by his green energy programs.

May 30, 2012 4:02pm 1 Comment
Obama's bogus clean energy job claims
byConn Carroll Senior Editorial Writer
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The Department of Energy's Loan Program Office website claims that a $400 million loan guarantee recipient has created 1,200 permanent jobs. But a company Chief Financial Officer confirmed that the company actually employs just 125.

Earlier today on MSNBC, President Obama spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter claimed that Obama's "strategic investments" in companies like the now-bankrupt Solyndra solar panel manufacturer had created "almost a quarter of a million jobs." "There are plenty of other examples that were successful," Cutter said.

But the DOE website that tracks loan guarantees only identifies 60,000 jobs created. And even that number is highly suspect.

Take the 1,200 permanent jobs that Obama claims were created by his $400 million loan to Abound Solar. Contacted by phone today, Abound Solar's CFO said the company currently only employs 125 people total. They did employ as many as 400 people at the beginning of the year, but they were forced to fire 280 of them in late February. A new factory in Indiana was also delayed.

That is not even the biggest discrepancy on the DOE site. The Ford Motor Company currently employs around 60,000 employees in the United States, but the DOE claims their one $5.9 billion loan saved 33,000 of them. Obama's DOE also claims 2,000 jobs were created by a $529 million loan to Fisker automotive. But as of April 18th, Fisker's only U.S. factory was completely empty.

Even teacher union officials have trouble demonstrating that Scott Walker's reforms hurt their school districts. The evidence is clear that the school districts that implemented those reforms were able to preserve teacher jobs; those that haven't yet implemented them are the ones cutting teacher positions.

James Pethokoukis uses CBO data to demonstrate that the stimulus cost between $540,000 and $4.1 million per job created.

Larry Sabato reviews the low predicative ability of June polls for November presidential contests.

Martin Feldstein reviews the history of European economic unification and how it was a goal pushed by the French with little attention to warnings on the effects of expanding the Euro to such widely different economies.

Kevin Williams explodes the silly arguments that the New York Times made to refute the study about how many people are leaving New York and the possible connection to tax rates. Apparently, the NYT figures that if Michael Bloomberg wouldn't leave New York for a lower tax state, no one else would. After all, doesn't everyone behave like billionaires?

More signs of the lunacy of the United Nations - now it's giving an honor to Robert Mugabe as a leader for tourism.

The Hubris Administration

Is there any superlative that this president and his supporters won't claim for him? I guess not. When you start out claiming that your nomination is the moment when the seas stop rising and the planet starts to heal, it's clear that your self-love knows few limits. And that was just the start for a man who seems to think that he ranks right up there with our nation's greatest presidents. Remember this revealing comment:

“The issue here is not going be a list of accomplishments. 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.”

Obama doesn't seem to realize that passing big, expensive bills is not the same thing as an accomplishment. His bills would have had to actually accomplish their goals. His stimulus didn't jump start the economy as promised and his health care bill doesn't reduce health care costs as advertised. In fact, both did the exact opposite. Just compare the statistics for the recovery under Obama to the recovery under Reagan and it's clear that he's graded himself on a very self-deceiving curve.

He seems to be surrounded by sycophants who are only to eager to feed his self-love. Remember Rahm Emanuel's ahistorical love song to President Obama as Emanuel left the White House.

“I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest times any president has ever faced.”

I guess Emanuel never heard of either the Civil War or the Great Depression and World War II.

But this lack of historical perspective seems to permeate this administration when it comes to talking about the wonder that seems to be Barack Obama. There was Joe Biden's bloviating about how spectacular President Obama was when it came to making the call on the Bin Laden mission. It wasn't enough to be proud of what he'd done, but Biden had to reach for the prize in hyperbole by calling it "the most audacious plan in 500 years." He also went on to with the whole meme of Obama facing more problems than FDR.

“I think I can say … no president, and I would argue in the 20th century and including now the 21st century, has had as many serious problems which are cases of first-instance laid on his table,” Biden said. “Franklin Roosevelt faced more dire consequences, but in a bizarre way it was more straightforward.”

The vice president claimed that the complexity of the 2008 financial crisis presented challenges in a way the Great Depression of 80 years ago did not.

Why not just say that he faced a tough situation or decision instead of reaching for these absurd comparisons.

And now Obama has reached again for a hubristic claim telling a group of conservative Jewish rabbis that he knows more about Judaism than any other president.

Obama also stressed he probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it - and wondered how come no one asks Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner or Senate minority leader Mitch McConnel about their support to Israel.

And it's not only that he's read about it, but some of his best friends are Jewish. Truly.

"Rather than describe how deeply I care about Israel, I want to be blunt about how we got here," Obama said, reminding his guests that he had so many Jewish friends in Chicago at the beginning of his political career that he was accused of being a puppet of the Israel lobby.

Bill Kristol responds,

1. The reason no one asks John Boehner or Mitch McConnell about their support for Israel is ... because they really do support Israel. The reason people ask Barack Obama about his support for Israel is because his support for Israel has been equivocal.

2. It's truly pathetic that Obama has to reach for the tired (to say the least) trope that some of his best friends were Jewish. Actually, one wishes more of his best friends were pro-Israel Christians. They might have had more luck convincing him, a fellow Christian, that he should be pro-Israel.

3. And the claim that Obama knows more about Judaism than any president? His vanity boggles the mind. One could begin by citing Adams and Madison, who knew Hebrew, or Harry Truman, who knew Jewish history ... but it's silly to dignify this claim with a rebuttal. In thinking about the presidents since Truman, though, I'd guess the president who knew the most about Judaism was Jimmy Carter, who taught Sunday school and had a deep interest in religion. So let's stipulate that of the modern presidents, Carter and Obama "know" the most about Judaism. But what is it they know? In Obama's case, one could ask whether what he “knows” is what he learned from Rashid Khalidi and Jeremiah Wright.

Alana Goodman reminds us who some of those friends from Chicago are.

The one person I can recall who has actually accused Obama of being an AIPAC puppet is Rev. Wright — though his theory was that Obama didn’t turn into a lapdog for the Jews until he started running for president. I don’t doubt the president hung out with plenty of Jews in Chicago, but considering that some of the most vile Israel bashers out there are Jewish, that says absolutely nothing about his own views on Israel. Plus, if we’re now supposed to judge Obama’s support for Israel based on his Chicago friendships, that’s not exactly comforting. Two of his close friends in the city were an anti-Semitic pastor and a famed anti-Israel academic — oh, and there was also his domestic terrorist buddy who participates in anti-Israel activism on the side. What are we supposed to glean from that?

Despite his very public disdain for Natanyahu, Obama likes to claim that he's done more for Israel than any other president. Biden at least acknowledges Truman's contributions, but thinks that Obama is Israel's greatest friend next to Truman.

His own wife speaks about him in Biblical terms.

This president has brought us out of the dark and into the light.

His supporters seem to see Obama in messianic terms. Maybe that is why they inserted President Obama into the presidential biographies on the White House site. Because nothing that any other president has done stands on its own without a little touch of Obama.

I guess when your guy got a Nobel Peace Prize just a few weeks after taking the oath of office and before he'd actually done anything to spread peace then you figure he really he on another plane than mere mortals. And poor Barack - it's all gone to his head and he believes all the blather that there has been surrounding him since he first appeared on the national scene.

And now hubris is what defines his vision of himself. Well, perhaps he should remember what the gods thought of hubristic mortals.