Thread: Can Obama Sink Any Lower?

Can Obama Sink Any Lower?

January 31, 2014 by Chip Wood

Did you listen to Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night? It was amazing to hear him tell Congress that he was going to do whatever was necessary to circumvent them — and to see them leap to their feet and applaud him for saying so.

That’s right. The Democrats in Congress actually cheered the President when he said he wasn’t going to wait for them to pass legislation. He’s ready to proceed without them. Here is how our imperial leader put it: “But America does not stand still – and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Watch for yourself. He makes that comment at the 0:07:32 mark.



The threat of unilateral action didn’t take anyone by surprise. White House officials had been promising for days that this would be an important part of El Presidente’s remarks.

Obama didn’t waste any time putting his threat into action. He’s been badgering Congress for months to raise the minimum wage. He wants it increased from $7.25 an hour to $10.10. He doesn’t seem to know — or care — that ordering businesses to give low-wage earners a 39 percent increase in pay might cause some of them to fire some workers. After all, the more something costs, the less of it you get. And that definitely includes jobs.

In most cases, the President can’t just order a business to pay its employees more. But there is one area where he can: those with federal contracts. In his speech, he said he was going to order all such firms to increase the minimum wage for their employees to $10.10. And he urged other businesses to do the same thing voluntarily, before they are required to do so by law.

All of this was too much even for some Democrats. Alaska Senator Mark Begich told CNN: “You have to be very careful of how far you extend those executive powers. … I would encourage the President to work with us, not just have a slew of executive orders, because I think that’s going to upset the balance and also create a lot of controversy not just from Republicans, but some of us that are much more moderate and view this careful balance that we have a role here. … If they go too far, you’ll clearly hear push back from me. There’s no question about it.”

Begich joined a growing list of Democrats who said he had no interest in having Obama campaign for him in the coming elections. And no wonder. Back in 2008, when Begich first won his Senate seat, Obama lost Alaska by 22 points. Clearly, the President is not the most popular guy in the State.

As you’d expect, the harshest criticism of Obama’s arrogant posturing came from Republicans. Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) said on CNN’s “New Day”: “This threat that the president is going to run the government with an ink pen and executive orders, we’ve never had a president with that level of audacity and that level of contempt for his own oath of office.”

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was even more blunt. In an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal the day after Obama’s State of the Union speech, the Tea Party favorite declared: “Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat.”

No surprise that the No. 1 example of Obama’s cavalier attitude toward the law is Obamacare. Cruz wrote: “There is no example of lawlessness more egregious than the enforcement–or nonenforcement–of the president’s signature policy, the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Obama has repeatedly declared that ‘it’s the law of the land.’ Yet he has repeatedly violated ObamaCare’s statutory text.”

Cruz listed several other examples of Obama’s abuse power: “When Mr. Obama disagreed with federal immigration laws, he instructed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the laws. He did the same thing with federal welfare law, drug laws and the federal Defense of Marriage Act.”

Cruz pointed out that “11 state attorneys general recently wrote a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying that the continuing changes to ObamaCare are ’flatly illegal under federal constitutional and statutory law.’”

In their letter, the attorneys general wrote that “the only way to fix this problem-ridden law is to enact changes lawfully: through Congressional action.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for anyone in the White House to agree with that.

So how can we put the brakes on this imperial President?

Clearly, so long as the Democrats hold a majority in the U.S. Senate, there isn’t a chance of getting remedial legislation passed. Heck, as long as the petty and vindictive Harry Reid (D-Nev.) serves as Majority Leader, such legislation won’t even be allowed to be brought up for a vote.

Hopefully, this unhappy situation can change this November, when Republicans have a chance to win control of the Senate.

That will depend on getting decent candidates, getting them adequately funded and then making sure that they focus on the right issues.

According to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, there is no question what the key issues are … and aren’t. When asked what should be an “absolute priority” for the President and Congress this year, the top two issues, by a wide margin, were creating jobs and reducing the deficit.

And what topics were down at the bottom of the public’s wish list? Again, I don’t think you’ll be surprised. In descending order, they included reducing income inequality, passing new immigration legislation, and addressing climate change.

Needless to say, Barack Obama gave a shout-out to all three in his State of the Union address.

No wonder the same poll said that 51 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s job performance, while only 43 percent approve. An even larger number, 63 percent, say that the U.S. is “off on the wrong track.” And almost as many say they are uncertain, worried or pessimistic about the chances that Obama will do a good job in the remainder of his Presidency.

For once, I find myself agreeing with the majority — although “uncertain, worried or pessimistic” isn’t nearly strong enough. During the remainder of his Presidency, I am absolutely certain that Obama will do everything he can to expand government, increase spending and push this country even further to the left.

The rest of the President’s address was pretty much a tired rehashing of prior failed policies. If you didn’t listen to it, you didn’t miss much. He even put closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, back on his to-do list.

Obama did toss in a few lines that would appeal to conservatives, such as cutting the bureaucracy and reducing the deficit. They not only sounded like something a Republican would say, but a former speech writer for George W. Bush says they were. Marc Thiessen, who was the lead writer on Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, told Fox News’s Megyn Kelly that parts of Obama’s speech were eerily similar to what he wrote seven years ago.

“So Barack Obama has gone from blaming George W. Bush to plagiarizing George W. Bush,” he said.

So an increasingly unpopular President continues to push increasingly unpopular policies. Is anyone surprised?

Until next time, keep some powder dry.

–Chip Wood

Filed Under: Conservative Politics, Personal Liberty Digest™

http://personalliberty.com/2014/01/3...ink-any-lower/

The real question is not whether Obama can sink any lower.

The real questions is can Americans sink any lower by allowing him carte blanche reign over our Constitution.

Friday, 01/31/2014 - 06:03 am EST
Now THAT's A State Of The Union Rebuttal.

Written by Mockarena

Majordawg forwarded the most excellent link to us yesterday, which included text from a 1948 rebuttal by Henry Hazlitt to Harry Truman's State of the Union address. The parallels between what Truman said years ago and what Obama said this past Tuesday are remarkable.

And yet, here we are. We're still having to explain BASIC COMMON SENSE to Democrats who cannot seem to get it through their thick skulls that everything they suggest, every policy change and every tax and every "investment" - means destruction of the very thing that makes America great - productivity.

Here's the text from Hazlitt's rebuttal which was printed Newsweek (emphasis mine, because LOVE):

“President Truman’s annual message to Congress was primarily a campaign document. It seems to have been written chiefly in fear of losing extreme leftist votes to Henry Wallace. The basic philosophy it embodies is unmistakable. It is the philosophy of the welfare state, the doctrine of salvation through bureaucracy. Free enterprise, free markets, and free prices are no longer to be trusted to stimulate and guide production and consumption. Everything is to be in charge of omniscient and omnipotent bureaucrats.

Everyone is promised economic security, regardless of what he contributes to production. We are to have bigger job insurance, bigger old-age benefits, bigger survivors’ benefits, bigger education. The government is to subsidize our medical care and our housing. It is also to reclaim land, replant forests, build more TVA’s. On top of this, it is to spend in fifteen months on European aid alone as much as it used to spend in the same period before the war for all its purposes combined.

Mr. Truman, by some miracle, is at the same time for “economy.”

“Government expenditures have been and must continue to be held to the lowest safe levels.” But the proposals he makes would immeasurably increase even present expenditures. And the Federal government is already spending in one year as much as it took it five years to spend just before the war. Of course all this money is to be taken in taxes only from “the rich.”

What Mr. Truman forgets is that the entire wealth and welfare of the country depends upon production.

The total amount of the national product is far more important to the average family than any possible redistribution of it. Yet Mr. Truman’s schemes and taxes would undermine, discourage, and disrupt production. It would destroy incentives. The producers would not be permitted to enjoy the fruits of their production, and others would be handed the fruits whether they produced anything or not.

Mr. Truman’s speech is a tissue of self-contradictions. He is for “free enterprise” and “free competition,” but demands price fixing. He wants to “continue price supports for major farm commodities.” But he declares that the price of food is too high and that it must be reduced by government edict. While prices are to be held down, costs of production are to be forced up.

The minimum wage is to be increased from 40 to 75 cents an hour. This would be a wage boost of 871⁄2 percent. All workers above the minimum would of course insist on the maintenance of their existing differentials. Production costs and prices would be forced up enormously, and this might cause heavy unemployment even in spite of monetary inflation. If we can raise wages just by passing a law, and do it without such harmful consequences, why not $1 an hour or $2 an hour? Why stop anywhere?

We must enlarge our industrial capacity, continues Mr. Truman: “At least $50,000,000,000 should be invested by industry to improve and expand our productive facilities over the next few years.”

But such funds could only be provided out of past profits and would only be invested if there were an inviting prospect of future profits.

Yet Mr. Truman is shocked by existing profits, even though, as a percentage of the national income (especially when proper allowance is made for depreciation and inventory replacement) corporate profits today are not at all abnormally high. Mr. Truman wishes to increase taxes precisely where the increase would do most damage to production—on the corporations that are the very means of the workers’ livelihood. He would do this in order to free some 10,000,000 voters in an election year from all income taxes, and to create the short-lived illusion that present enormous government expenditures can be paid for only by a minority, by “the rich,” by “somebody else.”

Candidate Truman’s program is demagogy run riot. It is a blueprint for disruption. He asks this country to imitate slavishly all the disastrous economic policies that have brought Europe to its present critical state, and he wants us to call this process American ‘leadership.’”

http://chicksontheright.com/posts/it...union-rebuttal