IS OBAMA RELUCTANT TO COME DOWN ON BANKS, A Huff
The battle lines over how to deal with the banking crisis have been drawn. On the one side are those who know what needs to be done. On the other are those who know what needs to be done -- but won't admit it. Because it is against their self-interest. Unlike the conflict over the stimulus package, this is not an ideological fight. This is a battle between the status quo and the future, between the interests of the financial/lobbying establishment and the public interest. The plan laid out -- or, more accurately, sketched out -- this week by Tim Geithner makes it very clear that he is on the wrong side of the issue, more worried about the banking industry than the American people.
DIRTY TRICKSTER IS NEW RNC CHAIR
When Michael Steele ran for Maryland's open US Senate in 2006, his backers hired 300 mostly poor African Americans from Philadelphia -- most if not all of them unemployed, many of them homeless -- fed them donuts and then packed the crew onto Trailways buses for an Election Day trip that would make a bit of political history.
The buses, which were draped in banners for Steele and then-Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, headed across the state line into Maryland, where the day laborers were dispatched to predominantly African-American neighborhoods of the city of Baltimore and populous Prince George's County.
They spent Election Day handing out glossy fliers headlined "Democratic Sample Ballot" or "Official Voter Guide." The fliers employed the phrase "Ehrlich-Steele Democrats." And they featured images of prominent African Americans, such as former Democratic congressman and NAACP leader Kweisi Mfume, above the words: "These are our choices."
The implication that Mfume and other popular Democrats in the state were backing Steele, and Ehrlich, was hard to miss. But Mfume wasn't backing the "Ehrlich-Steele Democrats" ticket. Steele and Ehrlich weren't running as Democrats.
T BOONE PICKENS ON ENERGY STIMULUS
President Obama's team is settling into their new offices and the new Congress is getting used to those new people talking about new approaches to America's problems. A major issue they should all pay close attention to is the national security threat posed by Russia.
In the deepest part of this winter, Russia held most of Europe hostage to a natural gas fight it was having with Ukraine. This wasn't the first time. In fact, this was the eighth time since the mid-90s that Russia has used natural gas supplies as a weapon to impose its will on its customers.
What is the U.S. national interest in this? Our interest is about $500 billion per year. We import more than two-thirds of the oil we use every day. Look at where we are now. The recession is getting deeper and oil prices have dropped $100 per barrel since last summer. Even with all that, in December, 2008 we imported two-thirds of the oil we used; a total of 379.6 million barrels of oil which cost us of $19.3 billion. One month.
REPUBLICANS BEHAVING BADLY, Mitchell Bard
Say you belonged to a charitable organization, and you and your friends were appointed to the steering committee for a big fundraiser, so you chose to have a combination bake sale and casino night. And let's say that you scheduled it on the same night as the town's homecoming football game, so nearly nobody showed up, and the peanut butter cookies in the bake sale gave the few guests that did visit salmonella. Oh, and let's say that in setting up the casino equipment, you accidentally cut off the electricity for the entire block. When the time rolled around the next year for the annual fundraiser, would you stand up and advocate a salmonella bake sale held on the same night as the big game? Of course not. You'd sit down, shut up, and wait for someone else to come up with a new idea. Even if you thought a bake sale/casino night could work under the right circumstances, you would probably be able to figure out that having overseen a colossal failure, the timing might not be right for you to pitch the same idea again.
OBAMA VS. THE REPUBLICANS, Bob Cesca
There's a killer web graphic that was created back in the post-Republican Convention days while everyone was writing spasmodic, breathless "Obama should [fill in the blank]" blog entries and "Oh crap! We're gonna lose!" newspaper columns. Not that there's anything wrong with that, really. The Obama campaign slipped in the polls during Sarah Palin's very brief golden age -- an era of roughly two weeks following the Alaska governor's successful recitation of a convention speech without, you know, choking on her own vomit.
GLOBAL WARMING, Al Gore
We are here today to talk about how we as Americans and how the United States of America as part of the global community should address the dangerous and growing threat of the climate crisis.
We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home - Earth - is in grave danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.
Moreover, we must face up to this urgent and unprecedented threat to the existence of our civilization at a time when our country must simultaneously solve two other worsening crises. Our economy is in its deepest recession since the 1930s. And our national security is endangered by a vicious terrorist network and the complex challenge of ending the war in Iraq honorably while winning the military and political struggle in Afghanistan. More.....
A HOLE WORTH DIGGING
After the 2006 midterm election, the Republican Party showed such a dramatic inability to engage in self-reflection - and self-correction - that in 2008, they ushered in a beating without precedent at all levels of government. Now, as the GOP prepares to oppose President Obama's economic stimulus plan, to oppose a president with overwhelming approval ratings and a mandate for change, to oppose a piece of legislation with broad support from a desperate public, it is becoming ever more clear that, from the perspective of the Republican leadership, a hole worth digging is a hole worth digging deep.
Since Election Day, the post-mortem analysis of the Republican Party, by the Republican Party, has been exceptionally superficial. Most GOP officials and conservative opinion makers argued that the party was led astray because of an abandonment of conservative principles. Republicans failed and a liberal Democrat was elected, Republicans concluded, because Republicans weren't Republican enough. It's with that brand of logic that they've begun moving forward. More.....
JET SETTERS AND WALL STREET, Maureen Dowd
As President Obama spreads his New Testament balm over the capital, I’m longing for a bit of Old Testament wrath.
Couldn’t he throw down his BlackBerry tablet and smash it in anger over the feckless financiers, the gods of gold and their idols — in this case not a gilt calf but an $87,000 area rug, a cache of diamond Tiffany and Cartier watches and a French-made luxury corporate jet?
Now that we’re nationalizing, couldn’t we fire any obtuse bankers and auto executives who cling to perks and bonuses even as the economy is following John Thain down his antique commode?
How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?
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THE FIERCE URGENCY OF PORK, Charles Krauthammer
Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.
The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.
ONE BIG PACKAGE IS INSANE, David Brooks
In a fateful decision, Democratic leaders merged the temporary stimulus measure with their permanent domestic agenda — including big increases for Pell Grants, alternative energy subsidies and health and entitlement spending. The resulting package is part temporary and part permanent, part timely and part untimely, part targeted and part untargeted.
This recession is scary and complicated. It’s insane to try to tackle it and dozens of other complicated problems, all in one piece of legislation. Leadership involves prioritizing. Those who try to do everything at once will end up with a sprawling, lobbyist-driven mess that does nothing well.
LARRY KUDLOW ON THE STIMULS PACKAGE
Last night’s House vote on the Democratic stimulus package, where not a single Republican voted in favor, was another shot across the bow for this incredibly unmanageable $900 billion behemoth of a program that truly will not stimulate the economy. Team Obama is now regrouping in the face of mounting criticism of this package. GOP economist Martin Feldstein revoked his prior support of a stimulus plan in this morning’s Washington Post. “In its current form,” Feldstein wrote, “[the plan] does too little to raise national spending and employment. It would be better for the Senate to delay legislation for a month, or even two, if that’s what it takes to produce a much better bill. We cannot afford an $800 billion mistake.” Clinton economic adviser Alice Rivlin made the same point yesterday in testimony for the House Budget Committee. Her message: Divide up the package and slow down the process. Former Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush econo
IS THE STIMULUS PACKAGE A TROJAN HORSE, Tevi Troy
The House of Representatives has already approved, and the Senate is pontificating on -- er â taking up, â -- the first major legislative package of the Obama administration. When considering the $900 billion monster, leave aside for the moment the two obvious questions of whether we can afford this bill and whether it can stimulate economic growth. There is, in fact, another salient line of questions going unpondered -- the question of what policies the package promotes, and what their long-term impact will be.
MORE BOOS THAN BALLS, Ann Couter
It will not be easy for President B. Hussein Obama. More than half the country voted for him, and yet our newspapers are brimming with snippy remarks at every little aspect of his inauguration.
Here's a small sampling of the churlishness in just The New York Times:
-- The American public is bemused by the tasteless show-biz extravaganza surrounding Barack Obama's inauguration today.
-- There is something to be said for some showiness in an inauguration. But one felt discomfited all the same.
-- This is an inauguration, not a coronation.
-- Is there a parallel between Mrs. Obama's jewel-toned outfit and somebody else's glass slippers? Why limousines and not shank's mare?
It is still unclear whether we are supposed to shout "Whoopee!" or "Shame!" about the new elegance the Obamas are bringing to Washington.
Wake Up Taxpayers!, Michelle Malkin
"The time has come," President Barack Obama told us in his inaugural address, "to set aside childish things." He borrowed the line from Corinthians. With the Beltway bread-and-circus show over, President Obama will now get to work on borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from you, your children and your grandchildren for a doomed fiscal stimulus.
As President Obama basked in the inaugural glow, a dark cloud of reality moved in over the Democrats' $825 billion plan to rescue the economy. The Congressional Budget Office crunched the numbers and concluded that a huge bulk of the federal spending orgy wouldn't actually kick in until the recession is waning -- if not already over.
The CBO analysis showed that "less than half of the $30 billion in highway construction funds detailed by House Democrats would be released into the economy over the next four years" and "less than $4 billion in highway construction money would reach the economy by September 2010," according to the Associated Press. And those are generous time estimates given the reality of molasses-slow bidding and contracting processes -- bogged down by the usual weight of political wrangling, racial bean-counting and assorted union grievance-mongering.
Wake up, taxpayers: This nearly $1 trillion plan is nothing but future-mortgaging ornaments and tinsel boxed in self-delusion. It is time, as President Obama lectured us, to put away childish things -- starting with this epic fail.
Fred Barnes - The Only Fear I have is ...... Obama, weekly standard
Barack Obama is the apostle of hope. But he also arouses the flipside of hope--fear. And while the fear he stirs may turn out to be unfounded, it's not irrational. People don't know who Obama really is or where his ideological center of gravity rests, to the extent it rests anywhere. He was a liberal in the Senate and the campaign, a centrist in the transition, and who knows what he'll be as president. He's elusive.
I count four separate fears. Whether he's a crypto-Marxist is not one of them. Neither is the absurd fear that he's secretly a Muslim, even a closet jihadist. Nor is the groundless claim Obama was actually born outside the United States and isn't really an American citizen. Forget all those. They're nonstarters.
He doesn't know what he's talking about. This is a legitimate fear. Obama throws around numbers like confetti. In the campaign, he said he would create 1 million jobs. After the election, he put out a plan he said would produce up to 3 million jobs. Then in a radio address on January 10, he said the number could reach 4.1 million and said 500,000 would be jobs in the alternative energy field, 200,000 in health care. Does he really believe he can achieve this? The fear is that he might.
The President of War, William Kristol
In synagogue on Saturday, before saying the customary prayer for our country, the rabbi asked us to reflect on the fact that a new president would be inaugurated on Tuesday, and urged us to focus a little more intently than usual on the prayer. The congregants did so, it seemed to me, as we read, “Our God and God of our ancestors: We ask your blessings for our country — for its government, for its leaders and advisers, and for all who exercise just and rightful authority ...” |
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