Obama sides with would-be dictator in Honduras

"Dictators and demagogues can rest easy on President Obama's watch. When thousands of Iranians flooded the streets of Tehran protesting a rigged election and were beaten and shot down by pro-regime thugs, the president bided his time before making a series of noncommittal statements. He seemed to hope it would all just go away. However, when a socialist demagogue was ejected unceremoniously from Honduras on Sunday by his own government for trying to establish a presidency for life, Mr. Obama instantly sprang to his defense.

What happened in Honduras was not a military coup. Honduras has a civilian president, Roberto Micheletti, a member of former President Manuel Zelaya's own Liberal Party, who was elevated to the post after Mr. Zelaya was removed. The army did not seize power, but acted as the elected government's instrument in ousting Mr. Zelaya, who was well on his way to subverting the Honduran constitution and erecting a dictatorship. "

(snip)

"In throwing its unqualified support to Mr. Zelaya, the Obama administration is enabling America's strategic foes. This shortsightedness is truly breathtaking and underscores the incoherence of the administration's foreign policy. Smart power? We think not."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/02/obama-stands-with-tyrants/

John Bolton: the Bush official conservatives miss

"Conservative foreign and national-security policies do not need remaking, rebranding or remessaging. They need not be escorted by prefixes or adjectives, nor do they need "moderating."

Conservative foreign policy is unabashedly pro-American, unashamed of American exceptionalism, unwilling to bend its knee to international organizations, and unapologetic about the need for the fullest range of dominant military capabilities. Its diplomacy is neither unilateralist nor multilateralist, but chooses its strategies, tactics, means and methods based on a hard-headed assessment of U.S. national interests, not on theologies about process. Most especially, conservatives understand that allies are different from adversaries, and that each should be treated accordingly.

These sentiments bear repeating because the fundamental principles underlying conservative foreign and national-security policy have never been stronger, and the consequences of deviating from them have rarely been so clear. The Obama administration's first few months already provide compelling evidence of the enormous costs of embracing the alternative worldview of the European and American left."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/10/
obama-administration-continuation-of-second-bush-t/

Obama said jobless line would go down; it went up

While lobbying for its "stimulus" plan the Obama administration used charts that showed a significant decline in unemployment if it were enacted. It was. But the unemplymnet line went in the opposite direction.

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/
06/us-loses-most-jobs-at-fastest-rate-in.html

Is Obama "shockingly ignorant?" Yes

"We have a rock star president who for the first time in American history fired the President of a private corporation, General Motors, then immediately flew to Europe with an entourage of 500 courtiers and a worshipful media, bowed waist-deep to the King of Saudi Arabia, and proceeded to accuse his own country of arrogance.

In France, of all places.

Does anybody else think this guy is shockingly ignorant? I wonder if he has ever really talked to a concentration camp survivor, or a Cuban refugee, or a boat person from Vietnam? Or a Soviet dissident. Or a survivor or Mao's purges.

Not to mention families with fallen American soldiers in the graveyards. Yes, he's going to Normandie, but will he apologize for our arrogance there, too? Does he really understand anything beyond the PC history of the world? Or will he just lie in his photo op at the American Cemetery at Normandy?"

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/04/those_arrogant_americans.html

My take: That Obama's glittering resume bears little resemblance to the man became obvious to me when he ordered the White House bust of Winston Churchill be returned to England, a decision that could have been made only by someone ignorant of the fact that Churchill had lived in the White House while England was under siege by the German Luftwaffe during World War II. The White House was England's War Room. Obama obviously didn't know.

Senate smacks down Obama scheme

April 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate rejected a proposal by President Barack Obama to finance an overhaul of the nation’s health-care system by limiting the ability of the well-to-do to take tax deductions for charitable contributions.

The chamber unanimously approved an amendment to a pending budget plan that rejects the proposal to limit the size of itemized deductions that can be taken by those earning more than $250,000.

Obama proposed using the estimated $318 billion such a change would generate to help finance a health-care overhaul, which he says will cost at least $630 billion. Lawmakers said they feared the effect of such a tax change on charities.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aAKl4RpzgwpY&refer=worldwide

Obama's toxic asset transfer plan is itself toxic

"In his review of the Geithner-Summers Plan to remove toxic assets from the banks, NY Times columnist Joe Nocera writes (March 28, p. B8), "As for the complaint that it will make rich guys richer, well, you can't win 'em all." If Nocera had looked at alternatives that many of us have been suggesting and if he still concluded that helping rich guys get richer was the only conceivable strategy, his attitude might be acceptable. But he does no such thing. He did not explore alternatives. Nor did he explain to his readers that the taxpayer transfers to make "rich guys richer" could amount to tens, or hundreds, of billions of dollars of the public's money, massive transfers that are avoidable.

Geithner and Summers are proposing to use government loans to finance investors to buy toxic assets. This is fine. The question is the terms. If the loans were going to large and well-capitalized investment funds, whose overall capital base would back the repayment of the government loans, the plan would have merit of providing liquidity to the market for toxic assets. Instead, the government loans by design will go to poorly capitalized special investment funds set up specially to buy toxic assets. The approach is tailor-made to leave the FDIC and Fed with massive losses. Since the taxpayer losses will be hidden on the balance sheets of the FDIC and Fed, the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer losses will not be recognized until the program is long forgotten by the public."

Zogby poll has Obama's approval rating at 50 %

"The honeymoon is over, a national poll will signal today as President Obama’s job approval stumbles to about 50 percent over the lack of improvement with the crippled economy.

The sobering numbers come as the president backpedals from two prime-time gaffes - one comparing his bowling score to a Special Olympian and another awkwardly laughing about the economy, which prompted Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” to ask “are you punch-drunk?”

Pollster John Zogby said his poll out today will show Americans split on the president’s performance. He said the score factors out to “about 50-50.”

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view/2009_03_23_Poll_of_change:_Obama_s_job_approval_slipping_to_%E2%80%9850-50_/srvc=home&position=recent

If Obama is a failed president, so was George Bush

"... where was Krauthammer’s ire when President Bush sought American security by guarding the borders and sovereignties of foreign countries at a cost of thousands of American soldiers’ lives lost or maimed and trillions of dollars we didn’t have wasted—while leaving America’s own borders and its own sovereignty unprotected?

Bush’s great non sequitur has cost $864 billion so far [Congressional Research Service, October 15, 2008 PDF]. It will likely cost another $865 in the next ten years. According to some estimates, e.g. those of Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, it’s The Three Trillion Dollar War.

Even apart from the terrorists trickling and vicious gangbangers streaming into the country steadily through its joke of a border, just the number of Americans killed every year by illegal alien drivers far exceeds those killed on foreign fronts.

As far as the costs are concerned, Robert Rector’s research points to the average life-time costs to the American taxpayer of $1.3 million for each low-skill household. There are at least 15 million such households between the legal and illegal low-skill immigrants in both Bush’s and Obama’s America.

My calculator cannot handle the number of zeros required to compute the total cost, but this fiscal and social capital disaster is as much among Mr. Bush’s greatest failings as it will be among Mr. Obama’s.

http://www.vdare.com/seiyo/090307_krauthammer.htm

Mark Steyn on Obama's out-of-the-gate stumbles

"Few pieces of political “wisdom” are more tediously recycled than a well-retailed bon mot of British prime minister Harold Macmillan. Asked what he feared most in the months ahead, he gave an amused Edwardian response: “Events, dear boy, events.” In other words, you can plan all you want but next month, next year, some guy off the radar screen will launch a war, or there’ll be an earthquake, or something. Governments get thrown off course by “events.”

It suggests a perverse kind of genius that the 44th president did not wait for a single “event” to throw him off course. Instead he threw himself off: “Is Obama tanking already?” (Congressional Quarterly); “Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?” (the Financial Times).

Whether or not it’s “already” failed or tanked, the monthly magazines still gazing out from their newsstands with their glossy inaugural covers of a smiling Barack and Michelle waltzing on the audacity of hope seem like musty historical artifacts from a lost age.

The ship didn’t need to hit an iceberg; it stalled halfway down the slipway. This is still the phase before “events” come into play, when an incoming president has nothing to get in the way of his judgment and executive competence. President Obama chose to nominate Tim “Indispensable” Geithner and Tom “Home, James!” Daschle, men whose enthusiasm for the size of the federal budget is in inverse proportion to their urge to contribute to it. He chose to nominate as commerce secretary first the scandal-afflicted Bill Richardson and then the freakishly scandal-free Judd Gregg, and wound up losing both."

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTdjMzQ0MTg3MDZkMWM0YWE1MGNiOTZhZTVkN2JhZmY=