Barack Obama

See Here.

Headline on Drudge right now: Obama tells Americans we're out of money.

Gee, thanks for the trillion dollar porkulus bill.

In the words of Mastercard: Priceless.

UPDATE: Apparently, when I originally posted this yesterday in a hurry, I got the President's age when his father left the country confused with the President's age when his father abandoned the family.  My mistake.

From President Obama's speech Yesterday:

I stand here today as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents [the Declaration of Independance and Constitution]. My father came to these shores in search of the promise that they offer.

Mr. President, is that why your father left this country when you were five years old never to return?!?

Franklin Roosevelt famously said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"

Might've made a great pep talk at the depths of the Great Depression, but it's lousy reasoning.  There are always plenty of things to fear.

Of course, being down on fear seems to be what the cool kids in class are into these days. Take this sunday newspaper columm.

Now President Obama has joined the bandwagon.

 our government made decisions based upon fear rather than foresight.....

Perhaps in the relaxed light of today's hindsight, Bush & Cheney made prompt decisions which we are not fully satisfied with now. Then again, when lower Manhattan was covered in ash Professor Obama was nearly a thousand miles away deconstructing the Consitution for his pupils. 

Fear is an acknowledgment of reality.  When we describe someone as "fearless", often it is a synonym for "foolhardy".  Of course, an absence of fear can yield inertia as well as impulsiveness. One who lacks fear may get smug, arrogant or fall into the trap of "paralysis by analysis" since the perceived danger seems far off and the discomfort of an effective response quite immediate.

The Obama team may argue our foreign policy was driven by fear. But in its most controversial aspect--the war in Iraq--it is hard to argue the ultimate decision was one made rashly or impulsively, as the run-up to war was lengthy and deliberate.    

Revisionism by the President today will not change the fact that among those who voted for war were  Joe Biden, Harry Reid and Chris Dodd.  . Does the President suggest these "leaders" are easily frightened?

No. this is a rhetorical flourish designed to appeal to those in the chattering classes who think sleep deprivation of a terrorist is a brilliant strategy grounded in behavioral science when a Democrat uses it, and is a descent into unspeakable barbarity when it is employed by a Republican.

Let's face it. President Obama is eager to trade in the currency of fear when he thinks it will buy him something he wants.

Consider the stimulus bill 

Obama painted a bleak picture if lawmakers do nothing.

 

In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, the president argued that each day without his stimulus package, Americans lose more jobs, savings and homes. His message came as congressional leaders struggle to control the huge stimulus bill that's been growing larger by the day in the Senate. The addition of a new tax break for homebuyers Wednesday evening sent the price tag well past $900 billion.

"This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse," Obama wrote in the newspaper piece

 

 or what his allies say about global warming.

Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can't avoid

Hmm, can we waterboard an oil refinery and get it tell us how to stop greenhouse gas production?

No, it appears some fear is more equal than others.

The sad thing is that if one argues American's foreign policy over the past decade was driven by fear, our economic system was marked by the removal of fear. Which removed accountability and restraint.

I turn to Robert Rodriguez's prescient article in the summer of 2007.

My talk today, Absence of Fear, is a follow up and expansion of the Special Commentary section that appeared in my March 31, 2007 shareholder reports. It will focus on the concept of RISK since there appears to be little concern about risk in the financial markets currently. My goal is not to scare or sensationalize, but to get investors to consider various risks and ask the basic question, "Am I being sufficiently compensated for these apparent risks?" ..

We are concerned that, after many years of an excessively easy monetary Fed policy, a bubble of massive proportions has been created in the housing market. Many experts believe that the housing cycle is at or nearing a trough or at least is at a stable level. We are not of this opinion. We do not believe you inflate prices and demand over at least a decade and then this over stimulation is corrected in barely 18 months. We are of the opinion that this bubble has infected many areas of the financial economy. I will detail more of this in the fixed income portion of my speech.

This article continues to describe the various iterations of the bubble and its bursting. But one thing is apparent. None of the participants were sufficiently fearful of the market. Home buyers assumed prices would increase forever. and that the refi window could never close. Mortgage brokers assumed they could always sell their paper. Rating agencies assumed that A paper circa 2005 was like A paper circa 2000.  Holders of mortgage bonds assumed their losses could always be covered by credit default swaps.  Rodriguez points to one systemic problem built into the process that turned out not to remove risk, but to conceal it.

We are of the opinion that the distancing of the borrower from the lender has contributed to the development of lax underwriting standards. Each participant, in the securitization/origination process, takes their ounce of payment, but no one truly worries about the underlying credit quality since the loan will be sold.....Finally, the securitization market and the multiplicity of products that have been created have never been truly tested in a major credit contraction like that of 1990-94. This is because most of today's securitization products did not exist back then

(Note: Evidently word of this information failed to reach Banking Committee Chairman Dodd at his campaign HQ in Des Moines)

Warren Buffet is credited with the line " be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others were greedy".  Seeing people lose their homes in the midst of the great real estate bubble I fully bought into this myself in the past decade. Alas, the entire financial economy pushed fear to the exits in the headlong pursuit of profit. In trying to create mechanisms to diffuse risk, they encouraged more of it.  

And lest this be thought of as an anti-capitalist rant, the politicians who brought you the Community Reinvestment Act  had no fear at all that our economy could absorb a virtually unlimited amount of subprime lending without adverse results. And the politicians all prided themselves with having a "light touch" as to regulation 

What would have happened if our private sector economy had been as driven by fear in the past decade as our foreign policy?  I would suggest we wouldn't be facing the debacle we stumbled into because we lacked fear.

President Obama wants to correct this situation. He wants to banish both greed and risk from the commercial marketplace.  There is an unpleasant word for this. though.

Socialism. 

When do you know your energy policy is on precarious footing? If you are Barack Obama, it is when your most trusted rubber stamp media voice is also calling your bluff.

New York Times Editorial: Follow the Science on Yucca

The administration’s budget for the Energy Department raises a disturbing question. Is President Obama, who has pledged to restore science to its rightful place in decision making, now prepared to curtail the scientific analyses needed to determine whether a proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada would be safe to build?...

...Before approving this truncated budget, Congress needs to ensure that it contains enough money to sustain a genuine licensing effort. We have no idea whether Yucca Mountain would be a suitable burial ground for nuclear wastes. But after the government has labored for more than two decades and spent almost $10 billion to get the site ready for licensing hearings, it would be foolish not to complete the process with a good-faith evaluation. Are Mr. Obama and Mr. Reid afraid of what the science might tell them?

Read the whole thing.

Crossposted at Conservatives for Science

It will be a few weeks yet before we see the final details, but the broad outlines of the democratic proposals to take over the American health care system are becoming apparent. And from what we can see so far, it looks like bad news for American taxpayers, health-care providers, and, most important, patients. The plan would not initially create a government-run, single-payer system such as those in Canada and Britain. Private insurance would still exist, at least for a time. But it would be reduced to little more than a public utility, operating much like the electric company, with the government regulating every aspect of its operation.

• At a time of rising unemployment, the government would raise the cost of hiring workers by requiring employers to provide health insurance to their workers or pay a fee (tax) to subsidize government coverage.

• Every American would be required to buy an insurance policy that meets certain government requirements. Even individuals who are currently insured — and happy with their insurance — will have to switch to insurance that meets the government's definition of "acceptable insurance."

• A government-run plan similar to Medicare would be set up in competition with private insurance, with people able to choose either private insurance or the taxpayer-subsidized public plan. Subsidies and cost-shifting would encourage Americans to shift to the government plan.

• The government would undertake comparative-effectiveness research and cost-effectiveness research, and use the results of that research to impose practice guidelines on providers.

• Private insurance would face a host of new regulations, including a requirement to insure all applicants and a prohibition on pricing premiums on the basis of risk.

• Subsidies would be available to help middle-income people purchase insurance, while government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid would be expanded.

• Finally, the government would subsidize and manage the development of a national system of electronic medical records.

Taken individually, each of these proposals would be a bad idea. Taken collectively, they would dramatically transform the American health care system in a way that would harm taxpayers, health care providers, and — most importantly — the quality and range of care given to patients.

In the face of this assault on one sixth of the US economy and some of the most important, personal, and private areas of our lives, one would think that the Republican response would be a resounding “No!”  One would be wrong.

Instead, the Republican response has been a plan of their own to increase regulation, mandates, and government control over the health care system. 

Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Richard Burr (R-NC) and Reps. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Devin Nunez (R-CA) have proposed a plan based on the failed Romneycare experiment in Massachusetts.  

It is not all bad. 

In fact, it contains some very good proposals, such as changing the tax treatment of health insurance and expanding HSAs. However, it would also preempt many state insurance regulations, establishing new federal insurance rules, including a requirement that insurers accept all applicants regardless of their health or age.   There would also be a federal “risk adjustment” board that would tax some insurers and subsidize others based on whether the people they insure are healthy or sick. These policies will mean higher insurance premiums for the young and healthy.

The plan falls just short of an individual mandate, setting up automatic enrollment in exchange plans at “places of employment, emergency rooms, the DMV, etc.” — essentially, trying to achieve universal coverage by nagging Americans to death.

Notably, Coburn-Burr-Ryan-Nunez abandons one of the best recent Republican ideas for health reform, Rep. John Shadegg’s proposal to allow Americans to buy insurance across state lines, in favor of a requirement that states establish Massachusetts-style connectors. But the Massachusetts Connector has been one of the worst aspects of that state’s reform, acting as a super-regulatory body, adding new mandated benefits, restricting consumer’s choice of plans, and adding both regulatory and administrative costs to insurance. (In fact, the Connector adds its own administrative costs, estimated at 4 percent of premium costs, for plans that are sold through it.) What the Connector has not done is live up to its promise of breaking the link between employment and insurance, giving workers personal, portable insurance that they could take with them from job to job, and which they would not lose when they lost their jobs. Unfortunately, the Connector has not lived up to its promise in the latter regard. In fact, as of May 2008, only 18,122 people had purchased insurance through the Connector. That’s very little gain for so much pain.

Since there is virtually no chance that the Coburn-Burr-Ryan-Nunez will actually be enacted, perhaps one shouldn’t get too excised about its failings. It is clearly far superior to Obamacare. But one can’t escape the feeling that the best way to show the American voters that Republicans have regained their commitment to limited government—and to defeat Obamacare—is not with Obamacare Lite.

Appropos of today's dueling speeches of President Obama and Former Vice President Cheney, NRO re-released this piece detailing what happened at Abu Ghraib under Saddam.  Reading this should put into perspective the absurdity of drawing any sort of moral equivalence between our enemies and holding some guy's head under water for 40 seconds.

[Warning: It's pretty graphic; consider yourself warned.]

WHAT'S ON THE TAPE [WARNING: THIS IS GRAPHIC]According to Senate sources, this four-minute video, comprised of several clips, came to be after several verbal and written inquires were made to the Defense Department at the start of 2004. It is an edited version of several different tapes, totaling between one and two hours, discovered after the regime's collapse. The translations of the words heard on the tape were provided by the Department of Defense.

"You don't appreciate what happened in that prison until you see it."

The first film clip opens with the camera showing a man standing in a bland, mostly empty room. The camera pans down to show his right hand. Folded rugs are visible in the background. The clip jumps to footage of scrub-clad "surgeons" with rubber surgical gloves severing the man's hand at the wrist. First the skin is peeled away with surgical knives and tweezers; ligaments, tendons, muscle, and bone underneath are exposed. Then the gloved hands wielding the knives begin to slice, shredding through the sinews, slashing muscle, breaking bone, until the hand is ultimately detached and plopped onto a green cloth, as yellow, pulpy tissue spills forth.

"You don't appreciate what happened in that prison until you see it."

The next clip opens amid Saddam Fedayeen — Fedayeen means "those willing to die for Saddam" — chanting loudly: "With blood and spirit we will redeem you Saddam." The Fedayeen stand barking and clapping in a courtyard. A blindfolded prisoner, forced to his knees and held in position has his arm outstretched before him along a low concrete wall. A masked member of the Fedayeen raises high a three-foot-long blade and ferociously slams down on the man's hand, slicing through his fingertips. The victim is wailing, howling, screaming in agony.

The swordsman-torturer, not sufficiently satisfied with his first effort, raises the sword again and drives down once more on the man's immobile hand. This time he severs the fingers closer to the knuckles as blood spurts cartoonishly from his hand spilling over and down the concrete slab. The victim emits a wail I have never heard — could never imagine hearing — from a grown man, this time louder, harder than the first.

The camera then turns to the assembled Fedayeen as they continue rhythmically chanting.

"You don't appreciate what happened in that prison until you see it."

In the third clip, a prisoner sits on the ground, his arm tied with white cloth, strips to a wooden board resting on a gray concrete slab. A man stands before him with a sword, this blade is wider than the last. He, too, strikes down on the man's hand, severing it from his right arm as the prisoner recoils in pain. The camera then quickly darts to the man's hand resting on the dusty ground several feet away as it was launched a considerable distance from the prisoner due to the force of the torturer's chop.

"You don't appreciate what happened in that prison until you see it."

When Mel Gibson's movie The Passion was released, several critics harped on the scenes where Jesus is flogged mercilessly by Roman soldiers. The brutality was so extreme, critics charged, the depiction bordered on parody — it was not a credible rendering of what could have happened to Jesus.

In the fourth clip in the Saddam torture film, it's clear Gibson's cinematic vision of just how depraved men can be was not divorced from reality.

A tall prisoner, stripped to the waist and blindfolded has his arms tied before him to a white pole, his bare back exposed. Black-clad Saddam Fedayeen surround him, jackal-like, as one begins to pound on his back with a black rubber whip. With the man screaming, his scourged back arching backward, shoulders and arms frantically struggling to block the blows, one of the Fedayeen torturers is heard to say "no situation more honorable than truth over falsehood." Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! The prisoner's knees buckle as he crumbles into a hump on the ground from the blows, crying out in pain. Another Fedayeen grabs his hands and pulls him up the pole to receive further lashes.

"You don't appreciate what happened in that prison until you see it."

"In the name of Allah the merciful," intones the beret-topped loyalist to Saddam's "secular" regime in the next segment. He introduces to the viewer and the assembled butcher squad to another prisoner. The loyalist-narrator reads from Koran, Sura 2:179: "And there is a saving of life for you in the Law of Equality in punishment. O men of understanding, that you may become the pious."

"The Fedayeen, Saddin Ezzedin al-Arousi," he goes on, "was charged with a special mission in which he betrayed his duty in the mission. The head of the Fedayeen has ordered the following: He is expelled from Fedayeen work and his arms are to be broken in front of his unit. Tarik Juman will personally undertake the breaking of his arms. Thank you."

The camera jumps to al-Arousi sitting with one arm tied behind him as his right arm is extended out to his side. His right elbow rests on a cinderblock and his right fist is supported by another cinderblock. Nothing supports his forearm in between. While a Fedayeen holds the prisoner's elbow in place, Tarik Juman crashes a three-inch-thick pipe down on his old compatriot's forearm, bending the forearm in a 'V' shape and shattering the bones within. This procedure is repeated for his left arm as well.

"You don't appreciate what happened in that prison until you see it."

In another clip a hooded and blindfolded prisoner is led to a room where he is forced to kneel, hands tied behind his back. Another man sits before the prisoner with thick metal tweezers and a scalpel. With his left hand he grabs the tip of the prisoner's tongue with the tweezers and pulls it forward from his head. With the scalpel in his other hand he slices through the prisoner's tongue, cutting it out of his mouth and then dropping it on the floor.

This ritual is repeated for more prisoners who are lined up, squatting in a row like parts on an assembly line waiting for processing, sitting ducks surrounded by dozens of men bearing witness to a Baathist tongue lashing.

"You don't appreciate what happened in that prison until you see it."

In the final clip we see a blindfolded prisoner being led to his fate as the assembled men around him sing "Happy Birthday, long live the leader, eternal gift to the people." Again with arms tied behind his back he is shoved to the ground, bent over stuffed burlap sacks. A black-clad Fedayeen loosens the prisoner's shirt exposing his back and neck, while another stands two feet from him holding a long silver blade at its curved handle. He raises his arms and strikes, hacking the prisoner's head from his body, tumbling it to the ground. He picks up the severed head by the hair and places it ceremoniously on the dead man's back as the camera pans in closer and closer and you can make out the victim's now lifeless and bloodied face.

Also, check out John McCain's account of when he was a POW.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Persons who whine about alleged U.S. torture have no idea what real torture is.  Such persons will whine about anything the U.S. Miltary does to give meaning to their insignificant lives.  They are best ignored.

That is all.

Cahnman out.

Podcast Show Notes

Obama's car tax.

We now own a car company and are forgiving a $15 billion loan. (Hat Tip: Hot Air.)

The Obama budget deficit in perspective.  (Hat Tip: Willisms.)

The specter of cowardice. (Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin.)

Texas as the promised land and economic powerhouse.

Teachers who can't learn math.

Georgia GOP takes a stand.

Oklahoma places ten commandments monument.

Click here to listen, click here to download.

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, has a piece entitled "Hail to the intellectual president" in the May edition of New Scientist.The piece includes the usual mantra of the scientific Left: namely that George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, and so forth, embody the tradition of American anti-intellectualism. By contrast, Barack Obama, who embraces intellectualism, has the potential to usher in a new spirit of intellectual rigor in policy making.

With the coming of Barack Obama to the presidency, the phrase "sea change" is not too strong. Here is a former academic who is deeply familiar with the world of thought. In his inaugural address, Obama pledged to restore science to its "rightful place" in our government; heck, he even extolled the virtue of "curiosity". And for the first time in history, he has appointed a Nobel laureate to the presidential cabinet. The worm has turned in American life - but for how long?

Mooney was a dogged critic of the Bush administration’s energy policy and the former President’s attitudes towards climate change. However his enthusiasm for the promise of President Obama’s approach to both climate and energy can barely be contained.

If Obama pulls off governing as an intellectual president, the dividends could be enormous. Already, he has been more than true to his word when it comes to the support of science. It is too soon to tell, but his soaring language about building a new energy future could be his Apollo programme, and could dramatically improve America's long-term competitiveness.

Strangely missing from the piece is any mention of one of the President Obama’s boldest initial actions on energy policy, the elimination of funds for the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility.

As has been documented on this blog, the President, in close coordination with Majority Leader Harry Reid, gutted the Yucca project without giving the slightest consideration to the ramifications for America’s nuclear industry. This action arbitrarily undid decades of planning at the cost of tens of billions of dollars in nuclear rate payer funded studies.

With no definitive solution to the waste issue, America’s nuclear power industry may be unwilling to make the enormous investments necessary to build new nuclear power generating facilities.

Given that nuclear power is responsible for 20% of our power supply and 70% of our CO2 free energy, Mooney and others who profess grave concern about global warming should be deeply disturbed by this development.

What should be even more disconcerting to Mooney personally is the Obama administration’s disregard for complying with the scientific protocol proscribed for the Yucca facility. As was reported in the New York Times:

The site’s suitability is supposed to be established in hearings by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must decide whether to license the repository. Now, the Obama administration is proposing to provide only enough money that project officials can answer questions from the hearings.

While this blatant politicization of energy science has failed to register on Mooney’s radar screen, it has not escaped the attention of others in the media.

Toledo Blade Editorial: NIMBY Rules

Yucca Mountain has been the sole site under consideration since 1987 and the time and treasure spent on it have been immense. America is left with a government that encourages nuclear power with one hand, takes away its waste options with the other, avoids its legal obligations with eyes wide open, talks up the importance of global warming, but can't put its policies where its mouth is.

The Free Lance Star Editorial: Captain Atom he ain't

A bipartisan group in Congress, consulting with nuclear scientists, geologists, and others, pegged Nevada's Yucca Mountain to receive the nation's nuclear waste. Department of Energy studies confirmed that Yucca was one of the safest possible repositories. But after 22 years and $13.5 billion of preparation--and no scientific evidence to refute its selection--Mr. Obama has defunded Yucca Mountain……Preening about "restoring scientific integrity" on stem cells while ignoring research on Yucca Mountain and nuclear energy is disingenuous hypocritical pick your word. In the pursuit of alternative energy sources, nuclear must be in the mix. And Yucca Mountain should be back on the map.

USA Today Editorial: Obama’s budget puts politics above science, leaves waste issue unsolved

When Obama lifted the ban on stem cell research last week, his press secretary said the president made it clear that "politics should not drive science." Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened here.

Given Mooney’s past vilification of Republicans for supposedly letting politics instead of science drive their policy decisions, it would be expected that he and others similarly opinioned would express deep dissatisfaction with the President’s actions.To date, that criticism has yet to appear.It could be that the scientific Left is still basking in the return of "intellectualism" to the White House. Their exuberance must be blinding them to the fact that the era of "post-political science" has yet to be ushered in.

Crossposted at Conservatives for Science

I was discussing the recent financial crisis with a friend tonight.  He said: "The Problem with the GOP is that they deregulated until the banks became too big to fail." BULLSHIT!!! Had our political leaders had a pair of brass balls last year, they would have realized letting the banks fail would benefit America.  We could have re-built a solid banking system instead of the politicized BS we have now.

Unfortunately, the Republican President and Treasury Secretary didn't have the courage of their alleged free market convictions.  Thus, we're stuck with a politicized banking system for the next decade.

And some people are trying to say the GOP has moved too far to the right...ha!