Obamanation
“Chicago Does Socialism,” that’s what Victor Davis Hanson calls the aggregate effect of the Obama administration’s year in office: The president promises a state fix for health care; then student loans; and next energy. There are to be subsidies, credits, and always new entitlements for every problem, all requiring hordes of fresh technocrats and Civil…
Charles Blow informed New York Times readers, Friday, that President Obama may be “unbreakable”: First, let’s take his job approval rating. Yes, it slid during the summer, but it stabilized around 50 percent in November and has hovered there ever since. The empty-headed chattering class began another round of speculation and inane analysis this week…
An unsigned op-ed in the Newport Daily News, yesterday, went to bat for the Obama administration on government transparency: … it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise that on his first full day in office, the president issued a memorandum to the heads of all executive departments restoring the original presumption of disclosure…
Almost since the recession began, I’ve been wondering out loud what was going to pull us out of it — what unexplored industry, what as-yet-stagnant market, what boom. In the intervening months, it’s been clear that the Obama administration’s strategy has been to prop up the public sector (i.e., insulate government from the downturn), flood…
Chatter about the comparison of circumstances between President Obama and President Reagan has been everywhere, and it all falls apart on one basic question. Here’s an example from Henry Olsen (subscription required): Where does this leave us? Republicans should first remember that politics is like tennis, and the Democrats are serving. It’s very hard to…
In 1993 the Strategic Defense Initiative (founded in 1983) became the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which was in turn renamed the Missile Defense Agency in 2002, complete with a brand new logo: It was noticed last November that the MDA has decided to update its “branding” with yet another new logo (h/t). See for yourself…
I caught about 25 minutes or so of President Obama’s State of the Union address on 630AM/99.7FM WPRO on my way home last night, which served to make me even more relieved to pull into the driveway. Put aside all the cortex-numbing spin, the take away message from what I heard, and what I’ve read…
Has anybody else been writing “What is he thinking?” in the margins of stories like this? President Obama’s latest broadside against big banks may have more bark than bite. Obama’s plan to limit banks’ size and risky trading has spooked investors, but analysts say it would have only marginal effect on institutions like JPMorgan Chase,…
Here’s the ruse (emphasis added): President Obama expressed confidence Saturday that lawmakers would approve his proposed tax on banks to recover bailout money, despite opposition from Republicans and the financial industry. And here’s the reality (emphasis added): The proposed 0.15 percent tax would last at least 10 years and generate about $90 billion over the…
Anybody who watches politics must be prepared for spin to the border of falsehood, but in Brian Riedl’s telling, it’s difficult not to conclude that the Obama administration has stepped well into the range of what would more accurately be called scams and con jobs: Last spring, President Obama proposed $11.3 billion worth of discretionary…