Quote of the Day

More like the lie of the day:

Our “So-Called” Leader

Reason Magazine:

Of the many tall tales spun by President Barack Obama during the State of the Union address this week, there is one—and perhaps only one—that most Americans believe to be true.

The old yarn goes something like this: A long time ago, the United States was an economic powerhouse. We built things with our hands and worked in factories, and we loved it.

Our recent prosperity, on the other hand, was built on a house of cards—intellectual innovation, risk, freewheeling markets, and international trade—and was nothing more than an illusion.

“We can’t afford another so-called economic ‘expansion’ like the one from the last decade—what some call the ‘lost decade,’” Obama explained. The president went on to promise he will do all he can to stop any pesky so-called “expansions” in the future. And I believe him.

A recent poll shows that Obama is not alone in his aversion to the 2000s. According to a Pew Research Center poll, more than 50 percent of Americans hold a negative view of the decade. Yet the 2000s, like previous decades, were, by nearly any measure—be it health, standard of living, the environment, or technology—a success.

The average unemployment rate during this “lost decade”—which included one of those unfortunate man-made disasters, to the country’s financial center—was 5.6 percent. One would think that the president—a man who believes a “jobs” bill that only saw unemployment go from nearly 8 percent to more than 10 percent was a wild success—would be sort of impressed.

No. Obama tells us a real economic expansion will be based on legitimate, tangible economic drivers, such as high-speed rail systems no one wants and government-subsidized “clean energy” nobody uses. (Trains and windmills? Could the ox-yoke-and-millstone sector be far behind?)

[...]

China is headed in the right direction, but our lot in life hasn’t been dreadful, either. Our “so-called” prosperity helped survival rates for cancer patients rise and deaths caused by HIV and AIDS decrease. Life expectancy in the United States—even while we welcomed immigrants from the poorest of nations—increased from 77 to 78.5 last decade, matching the percentage growth of the ’90s.

Meanwhile, teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. have declined dramatically, and higher education enrollment has exploded, with 40 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 24 enrolled in college. Our “so-called” prosperity saw the gross domestic product rise from $9.7 trillion to $14 trillion last decade.

Still, the Pew poll shows that 50 percent of Americans believe the 2000s were a real downer, whereas only 16 percent of them think the same of the ’70s. The ’70s! I suppose that because there is a good chance most of us will be reliving that wondrous decade in the coming years, those poll numbers might change.

None of this is to say we don’t have many genuine problems to deal with. Yet with all our tribulations, during the past 60 or so years (including the past 10) we have seen, in a historical context, unrivaled prosperity. Moreover, it’s prosperity that’s real.

As always, the state of the union will be just fine—if only our so-called leaders in Washington would let it be.

SEIU: The Tea Party Is Over

The unions (Obama’s foot soldiers) are going after the people who believe the Constitution should remain our nation’s law.

This should be interesting.

Rest in Peace, Colonel Archer. Thank you.

via Military Times:

Retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Lee A. Archer, a Tuskegee Airman considered to be the only black ace pilot who also broke racial barriers as an executive at a major U.S. company and founder of a venture capital firm, died Wednesday in New York City. He was 90.

His son, Roy Archer, said his father died at Cornell University Medical Center in Manhattan. A cause of death was not immediately determined.

The Tuskegee Airmen were America’s first black fighter pilot group in World War II.

“It is generally conceded that Lee Archer was the first and only black ace pilot,” credited with shooting down five enemy planes, Dr. Roscoe Brown Jr., a fellow Tuskegee Airman and friend, said in a telephone interview Thursday.

Archer was acknowledged to have shot down four planes, and he and another pilot both claimed victory for shooting down a fifth plane. An investigation revealed Archer had inflicted the damage that destroyed the plane, said Brown, and the Air Force eventually proclaimed him an ace pilot.

Learn more about the heroes of the Red Tail squadron.

I am Ellie Light

And I have a voice. Join me in sending a letter To The Editor in support of our Democrat Leaders!!!

Create Jobs? Yes, we can!!!!

Just Words…

Cato Institute Scholars Analyze the 2010 State of the Union Address

More horsesh*t coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania

President Obama to Push 3-Year Spending Freeze on Non-Security Discretionary Spending

In his budget for Fiscal Year 2011, to be presented on Monday, February 1, President Obama will propose a three-year hard freeze on non-security discretionary spending, to last from 2011 through 2013.

This will save $250 billion over the next decade, senior administration officials told reporters. (The debt during that same period is projected to grow by $9 trillion.) By 2015, non-security discretionary spending will be at its lowest level as a component of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product in 50 years.

Here’s how he felt about spending freezes when he needed your vote:

It’s funny because it is true…

via Top 10 Things I Learned Listening To SOTU Last Night:

10) It’s really, really hard to be President – people expect you to do things and stuff.

9) America needs to be more like China.

8) Five year plans: they’re not just for Stalin anymore.

7) It’s still Bush’s fault.

6) Equity demands that it should be ten times more expensive to go to college in order to do something productive than it should be to go to college in order to become a bureaucrat.

5) Spending more public money on health care will still reduce the deficit. Really. It will.

4) Ending the influence of lobbyists and operating transparent government remains as important a promise to make today as it was during the 2008 campaign.

3) Joe Biden is very, very bored.

2) The problem with Washington is that everyone is eternal campaign mode. Accordingly, everyone should follow the President’s example and limit themselves to no more than 158 interviews and 411 speeches per year.

1) Nancy Pelosi’s face really is frozen.

(Honorable Mention: McCain-Feingold was passed during Teddy Roosevelt’s administration, for in overturning it the Supreme Court “reversed 100 years” of law).

Quote of the Day: Reaction to the State of the Union Address

I have watched many, many State of the Union speeches. This is the most partisan, least presidential of them all. His rhetoric, his glances at the GOP side, and his almost mocking tone at times — not to mention his over-the-top dissembling about the deficit, among other things — will not, I predict, improve his position with the public. Nor should it. – Mark Levin.

via The Corner on National Review Online

Obama’s Bold Faced Lobbyist Lie at State of the Union

via Mayrant&rave:

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama referred to last week’s Supreme Court decision striking down restrictions on corporate political advertisements, saying, “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests.”The comment jibes with Obama’s populist tone, but it clashes with his actual fundraising numbers. Obama, for instance, raised $14.8 million from Wall Street (the “Securities and Investment” industry as the Center for Responsive Politics defines it) — more than any politician in history. Obama’s $995,000 from employees and executives at investment bank giant Goldman Sachs is the most a politician has raised from a single company since the 2001 campaign finance reform law.

Similarly, Obama set the record for raising money from the health insurance industry ($1.4 million) and the pharmaceutical industry ($2.1 million).

Obama also claimed “we’ve excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs.” The claim reflects an executive order Obama issued on his first day in office to restrict recent lobbyists, but it is belied by the dozens of former lobbyists currently serving in his administration, including in policy-making jobs.

Obama: You lie, again, and again, and again….

click for larger

But was Obama’s State of the Union speech historic and unprecedented (like everything else he does) in addition to be full of falsehoods? Via Instapundit comes this from Randy Barnett, Professor, Georgetown University Law Center:

In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds Congressmen? To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment? What can this possibly accomplish besides alienating Justice Kennedy who wrote the opinion being attacked. Contrary to what we heard during the last administration, the Court may certainly be the object of presidential criticism without posing any threat to its independence. But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order. A new tone indeed. [emphasis added]

So what happened exactly?

POLITICO’s Kasie Hunt, who’s in the House chamber, reports that Justice Samuel Alito mouthed the words “not true” when President Barack Obama criticized the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decision.

“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections,” Obama said. “Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’m urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.”

The shot of the black-robed Supreme Court justices, stone-faced, was priceless.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) stood up behind the justices and clapped vigorously while Alito shook his head and quietly mouthed his discontent.

[...]

But one conservative legal expert took sides with Alito — at least on the substance of Obama’s comments.

“The President’s swipe at the Supreme Court was a breach of decorum, and represents the worst of Washington politics — scapegoating ‘special interest’ bogeymen for all that ails Washington in attempt to silence the diverse range of speakers in our democracy,” said Bradley A. Smith, chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics, in The Corner blog on Nationalreview.com.

via Justice Alito mouths ‘not true’

Tonight the president engaged in demogoguery of the worst kind, when he claimed that last week’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, “open[ed] the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”

The president’s statement is false.

The Court held that 2 U.S.C. Section 441a, which prohibits all corporate political spending, is unconstitutional. Foreign nationals, specifically defined to include foreign corporations, are prohibiting from making “a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State or local election” under 2 U.S.C. Section 441e, which was not at issue in the case. Foreign corporations are also prohibited, under 2 U.S.C. 441e, from making any contribution or donation to any committee of any political party, and they prohibited from making any “expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication.”

This is either blithering ignorance of the law, or demogoguery of the worst kind. [emphasis added]

via President Wrong on Citizens United Case

Not only is the President wrong regarding a point of law, but he is also wrong in calling out another branch of the government for something with which he disagrees because he doesn’t know the facts. As Don Surber quotes Glenn Reynolds:

Law professor Glenn Reynolds, on whether Justice Alito should just take President Obama’s words like a man: “No, actually, you don’t, and Alito didn’t. And that will step on Obama’s press tonight and tomorrow, turning his demagoguery into a negative for him. That’s why Presidents usually act Presidential. Not so much because it’s dignified. But because it’s smart. That’s something that Obama, with his limited experience on the national stage, hasn’t figured out yet.” [emphasis added]

Mr. Surber adds, “He failed. He has become an uninspiring speaker who has used up all his magic. Quantity cannot make up for quality.”

The AP also found issue with the veracity of several other things the President said last night. But, we all know by now that Mr. Obama is not an honest man with the integrity expected of our President, so this should not surprise.

Video: No Rules for Radicals

hattip: Mayrant&rave

Obama’s loose grip on reality

click for larger

Via the Washington Times:

President Obama’s response to the catastrophic political failures of his freshman year in office is to fight harder for more of the same. Presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett made the point explicitly on Sunday, asserting that the White House is “not hitting a reset button at all.” That reflects the kind of political savvy that handed the safest Democratic Senate seat in America to a Republican.

Mr. Obama seems unaware that he is part of the problem. The president credited Scott Brown’s historic Senate-race victory in Massachusetts last week to the same voter frustration that swept him into office in 2008. The glitch in that worldview is that Mr. Brown ran explicitly against the Obama agenda.

Mr. Obama’s response to comparisons to 1994, when Democrats lost control of both the House and Senate, is that “the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.” Mr. Obama certainly is making a big difference, but none that should give comfort to his party.

Who is Ellie Light? I am Ellie Light. No, I’m Ellie Light…

Hot Air: “Ellie Light” story turns a little bit freaky and a whole lot deaky

Actually, I take it back. It’s a whole lot freaky, too. The nutshell version: The Cleveland Plain-Dealer spoke to “Ellie Light” on the phone this morning and got her to admit — in a “husky voice” — that her name’s really Barbara Brooks, she’s a nurse, and that she wrote the letters on her own initiative. She gave them some personal information to verify her existence and it checked out. Later today, another woman — not husky-voiced — called the Plain-Dealer and said that she’s Barbara Brooks and that it’s actually her husband, a Kossack named Winston Steward, who’s responsible for the Ellie letters and has now taken to posing as her because he’s afraid the “right-wing crazies” will get him.

Just go read the whole thing.