Justice Roberts: State of the Union a ‘Political Pep Rally’
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts ruffled feathers Tuesday when he criticized Obama for scolding the Supreme Court during his State of the Union address in January. Speaking to law students at the University of Alabama, Roberts called the speech a “political pep rally”:
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Senate Democrats will miss their self-imposed deadline for bringing a jobs bill to the floor Monday, and they’re hoping that the weekend’s epic snowstorm will give them some cover.
Senate votes scheduled for Monday evening have been pushed back to Tuesday on account of the storm, but it seems unlikely that Democrats would have been ready to proceed Monday, anyway.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said last week that he believed “very emphatically” that the Senate would hold a vote on the first of a series of jobs bills Monday.
But there was no agreement on a bill late Sunday afternoon, and aides to senators involved in the discussions cautioned against expecting much progress by Monday.
Read more at Politico
Much like the stock market, Obama’s approval numbers also dropped. In the aftermath of the State of Union address President Obama’s approval jumped to -4, now five days later it drops back to – 15. According to Rasmussen, 26% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve while Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove. That brings Obama to the same levels pre-SOTU.
Read More at rasmussenreports.com
by Assemblyman Chuck DeVore
The President’s first State of the Union Address was an appropriate reflection of his first year in office: rhetorically ambitious, pragmatically muddled, ideologically dangerous, and surprisingly naïve for a product of the Chicago political machine. But as with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine, for whom “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being,” so too did Barack Obama focus more upon ascending to high office than on using it well. The President is now stuck upon his pinnacle. To borrow a metaphor from the Owens Valley where I spent my high school years, he’s a turtle on a post: you aren’t sure how he got there, and he’s not sure what he’ll do about it.
Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, is currently running for the United States Senate against Barbara Boxer
Read More at Flash Report
Calvin Woodward the chief AP debunker has gone over Obama’s claims during last night’s State of The Union address.
By CALVIN WOODWARD
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama told Americans the bipartisan deficit commission he will appoint won’t just be “one of those Washington gimmicks.” Left unspoken in that assurance was the fact that the commission won’t have any teeth.
Obama confronted some tough realities in his State of the Union speech Wednesday night, chief among them that Americans are continuing to lose their health insurance as Congress struggles to pass an overhaul.
Yet some of his ideas for moving ahead skirted the complex political circumstances standing in his way.
A look at some of Obama’s claims and how they compare with the facts:
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OBAMA: “Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t.”
THE FACTS: The anticipated savings from this proposal would amount to less than 1 percent of the deficit – and that’s if the president can persuade Congress to go along.
Obama is a convert to the cause of broad spending freezes. In the presidential campaign, he criticized Republican opponent John McCain for suggesting one. “The problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel,” he said a month before the election. Now, Obama wants domestic spending held steady in most areas where the government can control year-to-year costs. The proposal is similar to McCain’s.
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OBAMA: “I’ve called for a bipartisan fiscal commission, modeled on a proposal by Republican Judd Gregg and Democrat Kent Conrad. This can’t be one of those Washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem. The commission will have to provide a specific set of solutions by a certain deadline. Yesterday, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission. So I will issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward, because I refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of Americans.”
THE FACTS: Any commission that Obama creates would be a weak substitute for what he really wanted – a commission created by Congress that could force lawmakers to consider unpopular remedies to reduce the debt, including curbing politically sensitive entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. That idea crashed in the Senate this week, defeated by equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. Any commission set up by Obama alone would lack authority to force its recommendations before Congress, and would stand almost no chance of success.
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OBAMA: Discussing his health care initiative, he said, “Our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan.”
THE FACTS: The Democratic legislation now hanging in limbo on Capitol Hill aims to keep people with employer-sponsored coverage – the majority of Americans under age 65 – in the plans they already have. But Obama can’t guarantee people won’t see higher rates or fewer benefits in their existing plans. Because of elements such as new taxes on insurance companies, insurers could change what they offer or how much it costs. Moreover, Democrats have proposed a series of changes to the Medicare program for people 65 and older that would certainly pinch benefits enjoyed by some seniors. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted cuts for those enrolled in private Medicare Advantage plans.
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OBAMA: The president issued a populist broadside against lobbyists, saying they have “outsized influence” over the government. He said his administration has “excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.” He also said it’s time to “require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my administration or Congress” and “to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office.”
THE FACTS: Obama has limited the hiring of lobbyists for administration jobs, but the ban isn’t absolute; seven waivers from the ban have been granted to White House officials alone. Getting lobbyists to report every contact they make with the federal government would be difficult at best; Congress would have to change the law, and that’s unlikely to happen. And lobbyists already are subject to strict limits on political giving. Just like every other American, they’re limited to giving $2,400 per election to federal candidates, with an overall ceiling of $115,500 every two years.
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OBAMA: “Because of the steps we took, there are about 2 million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed. … And we are on track to add another one and a half million jobs to this total by the end of the year.”
THE FACTS: The success of the Obama-pushed economic stimulus that Congress approved early last year has been an ongoing point of contention. In December, the administration reported that recipients of direct assistance from the government created or saved about 650,000 jobs. The number was based on self-reporting by recipients and some of the calculations were shown to be in error.
The Congressional Budget Office has been much more guarded than Obama in characterizing the success of the stimulus plan. In November, it reported that the stimulus increased the number of people employed by between 600,000 and 1.6 million “compared with what those values would have been otherwise.” It said the ranges “reflect the uncertainty of such estimates.” And it added, “It is impossible to determine how many of the reported jobs would have existed in the absence of the stimulus package.”
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OBAMA: He called for action by the White House and Congress “to do our work openly, and to give our people the government they deserve.”
THE FACTS: Obama skipped past a broken promise from his campaign – to have the negotiations for health care legislation broadcast on C-SPAN “so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.” Instead, Democrats in the White House and Congress have conducted the usual private negotiations, making multibillion-dollar deals with hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and other stakeholders behind closed doors. Nor has Obama lived up consistently to his pledge to ensure that legislation is posted online for five days before it’s acted upon.
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OBAMA: “The United States and Russia are completing negotiations on the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades.”
THE FACTS: Despite insisting early last year that they would complete the negotiations in time to avoid expiration of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in early December, the U.S. and Russia failed to do so. And while officials say they think a deal on a new treaty is within reach, there has been no breakthrough. A new round of talks is set to start Monday. One important sticking point: disagreement over including missile defense issues in a new accord. If completed, the new deal may arguably be the farthest-reaching arms control treaty since the original 1991 agreement. An interim deal reached in 2002 did not include its own rules on verifying nuclear reductions.
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OBAMA: Drawing on classified information, he claimed more success than his predecessor at killing terrorists: “And in the last year, hundreds of al-Qaida’s fighters and affiliates, including many senior leaders, have been captured or killed – far more than in 2008.”
THE FACTS: It is an impossible claim to verify. Neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has published enemy body counts, particularly those targeted by armed drones in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. The pace of drone attacks has increased dramatically in the last 18 months, according to congressional officials briefed on the secret program.
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Associated Press writers Jim Kuhnhenn, Jim Drinkard, Erica Werner, Robert Burns and Pamela Hess contributed to this report.
Read Article at My Way
By: The Editors
Everything changes except President Obama. His agenda doesn’t change. He has had no second thoughts about the wisdom of his health-care policies, or any of his policies; resistance is always and only a reason for redoubling. Also unchanging is the condescension with which he articulates his agenda: He faulted himself for not explaining health care well enough to the easily confused American public.
The same familiar strawmen dot the landscape of his rhetoric. (Republicans want to “maintain the status quo” on health care. This president is willing to listen to Republican ideas, just so long as he can then forget that he has ever done so.)
Narcissism, too, is a constant companion. The opening of the speech, and the end, invited us to regard Obama as the embodiment of the nation. But it is not the country’s future that has suddenly come under doubt. It is his administration’s. It is not the country’s spirit that is in danger of breaking. It is contemporary liberalism’s.
“Let’s try common sense,” said the president. For Obama, that means that expanding Medicaid is the way to reduce the deficit. That increasing the price of energy is the way to create jobs. That further socializing medicine is the way to stay ahead of India.
Nothing in his speech suggested that the government’s most important economic task might be to create the context of stability in which growth can occur. (Perhaps that thought would have interfered with the theme of “change.”) Beyond a pro forma sentence, nothing in the speech suggested that any positive economic trend could ever take hold without a direct assist from the federal government. Without its help, firms wouldn’t export or get credit. The proposal to forgive student-loan debt on special terms for people who go into “public service” typifies this administration’s attitude toward the economy: Producing wealth is less noble than rearranging it.
On one of the country’s true economic challenges, runaway entitlement spending, Obama punted to a commission.
The president’s foreign-policy remarks were both perfunctory and otherworldly. Bringing our resources and our ideals into balance is always the difficulty in American foreign policy. Obama resolved the tension by pretending that he had consistently favored democrats and freedom-fighters the world over. In Iran, in Cuba, in China, his actual policy has been the reverse.
Anyone could find something to agree with in an endless speech, and we will dutifully applaud the president’s professed desire for new nuclear plants. All in all, though, our impression was of an administration that has no real understanding of the political straits in which it finds itself and thus no way to escape them.
Read More at NRO
At roughly 9:48pm EST, in the midst of President Obama’s first State of the Union address he begged us to “let him know!”
The president was defending his push for his vision of universal health care when he threw down the challenge in a speech that seemed strangely and wholly disconnected from the experience of the average American family.
As far as expectations for the State of the Union the president’s speech was a sizable failure.
By my count President Obama made several significant policy pivots — for the first time he advocated the use of nuclear power, domestic drilling, clean coal, capital gains tax cuts, spending freezes, and called on Congress to “tighten their belts” just as American families are being forced to do.
Acting on previously published advice from Democratic strategist James Carville, President Obama took the opportunity, by my count at least eight times, to mention Bush administration. He did this not to give President Bush and his team credit for the low unemployment we enjoyed during his eight years in office, or the national security they provided. Instead, he brought up the Bush administration to place blame for the problems that have only grown since President Obama entered the White House.
He gave lip service to the need to create new jobs. Yet, in almost the same breath, he claimed he had rescued the economy in 2009. He claimed to have saved 2 million jobs with the stimulus bill (though the Congressional Budget office does not endorse his numbers or view his on the matter the way he implied it does in his speech.) But the number of jobs lost on his watch exceeds 3 million.
Most shocking of all, perhaps, was his insistence on ramming health care reform and cap-and-trade legislation down the throats of American voters even though they have roundly rejected his proposals on these issues.
He referred to himself in the speech more than 100 times. And made absolutely absurd demands that appeared to be almost dishonest. But noticeably absent in his speech was any mention of how he handled the mirandizing of a terrorist captured after a failed terror attack on Christmas Day. — The fourth such attack on our nation in just his first year in office.
He also made several statements that were painfully obvious, from noting that, “jobs must be our number one focus in 2010″ to “the true engine of jobs creation is our nation’s businesses.”
He also drew laughter at himself with one liners, “For those who have yet to believe the overwhelming scientific evidence that exists on climate change” to the line “all of this before I walked in the door.”
President Obama’s State of the Union address was poorly thought out, not terribly well executed, and, in the end, tremendously ineffective.
It was also terribly inappropriate when he openly encouraged belligerent reaction against the Supreme Court with the Justices sitting in the chamber. It was a cheap shot, and multiple constitutionalists and scholars believe it may have violated the spirit embodied in our government’s commitment to the separation of powers.
Add to this stemwinder of a speech that he will work towards an unhealthy and unsafe environment for homosexuals in our nation’s military ranks.
He closed the sale by announcing yet another deadline for terrorists in Iraq to bide their time for, specifically August of 2010.
It was messy, incoherent, disorganized, and most regrettably defiant.
Which I guess when you think of it, defines the state of our union pretty well.
Kevin McCullough is the nationally syndicated host of “‘Baldwin/McCullough Radio” now heard on 207 stations and columnist based in New York. He blogs at www.muscleheadrevolution.com. His second book “The Kind Of MAN Every Man SHOULD Be” is in stores now. And host of “The Kevin McCullough Show” weekdays 7a-9am EST on Sirius 161.
Read Original at Fox News
By: Randy Barnett
Professor, Georgetown University Law Center
In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds Congressmen?
To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment? What can this possibly accomplish besides alienating Justice Kennedy who wrote the opinion being attacked.
Contrary to what we heard during the last administration, the Court may certainly be the object of presidential criticism without posing any threat to its independence. But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order.
A new tone indeed.
Read More at Politico
CSPAN on You Tube: Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) Responds to State of the Union
In the parlance of Broadway critics from a by gone era, when a new show flopped, the expression was that the producer and the director “laid an egg.”
From what little I have seen of the SOTU address, in my view, this was an omelet.
Much has been written and spoken by the chattering class and the “ink-stained wretches” about Bill Clinton’s famous rightward migration after he and the Dems of his day got hammered in the ’94 Republican election sweep. Many pundits have recently speculated about whether or not Obama would rip out a page from the Clinton playbook and morph into a “New Democrat” and co-opt traditionally Republican policies like tax cuts, fiscal responsibility and a strong response to the threat we face from the Jihadists.
After viewing some of the address, it is apparent that Obama is either a committed hard left idealogue or a slow learner. After lopsided Republican victories in New Jersey, Virginia and the historic win in Massachusetts, Obama still has not gotten the message. The voters are tired of the profligate spending, the endless “stimulus” bills, the attempted hijacking of the health care industry, the dangerous handling of the terrorist trials and finally….the empty promises.
I said from the jump that I would not watch the address in it’s entirety. It’s just too painful. But that’s the thing when it comes to Obama, after you get the “formula” down, you can pretty much predict what he’s going to say. No need to waste an hour of my time listening to the same stump speech. I don’t need a teleprompter to follow along with his speeches, I pretty much have them memorized by now.
~~John Cronin~~
A few thoughts after a very long and I though flatly delivered speech by President Barack Obama:
1. He’s not going to pivot towards the centre a la Bill Clinton 1995 – yet.
2. Obama realises many people find him too cool and detatched so he laid on the “I feel your pain” stuff with a trowel. But this sat uneasily with the passages in which he tried to be optimistic. It was a difficult thing to pull off and I don’t think he succeeded.
3. The speech was uninspiring. Perhaps deliberately slow. Soaring rhetoric would not have worked. Perhaps the greatest talent Obama has – speechifying – is now not much use to him.
4. He paid lip service to getting health care through Congress but he knows it’s dead.
5. A consistent theme from now until November will be that Republicans are rejectionists and it’s all their fault that Obama’s agenda has been frustrated. But ultimately the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress so they’ll be blamed for inaction.
6. Obama has stopped blaming Bush all the time by name. But he did it several times in thinly-veiled references.
7. It’s remarkable how much of a back seat nationals security issues are taking given that the US is engaged in two wars.
8. Obama berating Republicans for being oh-so political simply won’t wash. The President is giving all his speeches in swing states and has given his 2008 campaign manager an enhanced role.
9. It was pretty classless to berate the Supreme Court while Democrats all around them leapt to their feet cheering and guffawing. Obama will suffer for this more than Justice Samuel Alito will for mouthing the words: “Not true.”
10. This speech won’t change the current political dynamic – Obama has much, much more to do.
Toby Harnden
READ MORE AT telegraph.co.uk
