Obama retreats on public option for health insurance

Obama unmasked

Paglia: Obama "simplistic" and "condescending"

"But the gravest omission was that Obama failed to fully articulate the most basic Western concepts of legal process and civil liberties, which have inspired reformers around the world. The president of the U.S. should be an eloquent ambassador of those ideals wherever he goes.

It was also puzzling how a major statement about religion could seem so detached from religion. Obama projected himself as a floating spectator of other people's beliefs (as in his memory of hearing the call to prayer in Indonesia). Though he identified himself as a Christian, there was no sign that it goes very deep. Christianity seemed like a badge or school scarf, a testament of affiliation without spiritual convictions or constraints. This was one reason, perhaps, for the odd failure of the speech to acknowledge the common Middle Eastern roots of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, for both of whom the holy city of Jerusalem remains a hotly contested symbol.

Obama's lack of fervor may be one reason he rejects and perhaps cannot comprehend the religious passions that perennially erupt around the globe and that will never be waved away by mere words. By approaching religion with the cool, neutral voice of the American professional elite, Obama was sometimes simplistic and even inadvertently condescending, as in his gift bag of educational perks like "scholarships," "internships," and "online learning" -- as if any of these could checkmate the seething, hallucinatory obsessions of jihadism."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009/06/10/waterloo/

Now they tell us; economics is all about feelings

"...Mr Obama needed the nation to be worried enough about the economy to pass his nearly $800bn stimulus plan. And too much good cheer in the first days of his administration could have wasted one of his most powerful trump cards – the country’s belief that this recession is owned by president number 43, not number 44.

But once the stimulus bill was passed, the White House calculated that, as Mr Obama told the Financial Times, lawmakers and US voters had reached their limits. No new money to rev up the economy or revive the banks would be forthcoming until the president and his team could demonstrate concrete results from the first instalment.

Since then Americans have been hearing a decidedly more optimistic vibe from Washington. It has seemed to work. A Google search for the term “economic recovery” turned up 6,991 references to the term in January and 7,831 in February. In the first week of May the phrase occurred 24,443 times."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/69bc7894-3b34-11de-ba91-00144feabdc0.html

Krauthammer: Obama is using "brazen deception"

WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/03/a_dishonest_gimmicky_budget.html

New Obama bill riddled with 9,000 earmarks

WASHINGTON — During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain fought vigorously over who would be toughest on congressional earmarks.

"We need earmark reform," Obama said in September during a presidential debate in Oxford, Miss. "And when I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely."

President Barack Obama should prepare to carve out a lot of free time and keep the coffee hot this week as Congress prepares to unveil a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that's riddled with thousands of earmarks, despite his calls for restraint and efforts on Capitol Hill to curtail the practice.

The bill will contain about 9,000 earmarks totaling $5 billion, congressional officials say. Many of the earmarks — loosely defined as local projects inserted by members of Congress — were inserted last year as the spending bills worked their way through various committees.

http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/stimulus_bill_earmarks/2009/02/23/184512.html?s=al&promo_code=7ACC-1

Five states did most to burst the housing bubble

"When President Obama discusses his $275 billion mortgage bailout, he talks as if it was a national problem, caused by a national decline in home prices. "We must stem the spread of foreclosures and falling home values for all Americans," he says. But there is no national market for homes and no national price for homes. Instead, most of the United States will pay for the folly of few.

The beneficiaries of taxpayer charity will be highly concentrated in just five states - California, Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Michigan."

http://www.nypost.com/seven/02212009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/the_foreclosure_five_156287.htm

Did the wordsmith Obama misspeak? Or slip up?

"With the Dow Jones Industrial Average making new lows, President Obama may have it exactly right. When he signed the so-called “stimulus” legislation on Tuesday, he said, “today does mark the beginning of the end.”

OK, he meant “the end of our economic problems.” But it was a peculiar choice of words for a man who is supposed to be so eloquent. It’s easily misunderstood — especially since every single effort he, his administration, and Congress have put forth to stabilize the economy has done nothing but drive the stock market lower and lower.

I wrote here several weeks ago that the “stimulus” bill would be an expensive dud — nothing but a big-government power-grab. And I wrote last week about what a disaster the unveiling of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's half-baked bank rescue plan was. It's now gotten even worse, now that we can see a deadly surprises hidden in the "stimulus" bill, and now that we've heard the administration's plans for mortgage foreclosure relief."

http://www.smartmoney.com/Investing/Economy/The-Beginning-of-the-End-for-Investing/