Thursday, February 12, 2009
Pants on fire
I received an e-mail from some joker named "Jessup" who didn't cotton to my calling President B. Hussein Obama a "liar." I curtly reminded Mr./Ms. Jessup 'bout this:
Earlier this week, Mr. Obama gave a speech at a Caterpillar plant in which he stated that the company's CEO, Jim Owens, had made a personal promise to re-hire laid-off workers if the president's stimulus bill passed. After the president left the plant, Owens said, " The truth is we're going to have more layoffs before we start hiring again. ... It is going to take some time before that stimulus bill means [re-hiring workers]."
As Homer Simpson might say, "D'oh!" As Joltin' Django might say, "The President of the USA is full of, er, beans."
Some more facts for your consideration (from John R. Lott, Jr.):
At the very end of the presidential campaign Obama "proposed a $175 billion plan with tax-rebate checks for consumers as well as spending on school repairs, roads and bridges, aid to states, and tax credits for job creation."
The current bill is not only spending 4.7 times what he promised in November, but gone are the tax-rebate checks and tax credits for job creation. The new additional programs have nothing to do with roads and bridges. Yet, a package that Obama never hinted at a couple of months ago is now considered sacrosanct. The Associated Press described Obama’s position on the stimulus plan this way: "Stopping just short of a take-it-or-leave-it stand, Obama has mocked the notion that a stimulus bill shouldn’t include huge spending."
Take an emphatic promise that Obama made just a month ago, well after the heat of the presidential campaign had passed: "We are going to ban all earmarks — the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review." That wasn’t a new promise. During the third presidential debate on October 15, 2008 Obama bluntly promised: "they need to be eliminated."
But now take Obama’s testy defense of those same earmarks last Friday. Obama reportedly "also defended earmarks as inevitable in such a package."
During the third presidential debate Obama promised to rein in the budget deficit. When moderator Bob Schieffer asked Obama what he was going to do about the deficit Obama promised to cut the it: "But there is no doubt that we’ve been living beyond our means and we’re going to have to make some adjustments. Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut."
Or take the second presidential debate on October 7, 2008. Obama noted that eliminating earmarks was "important," but even more important "I want to go line by line through every item in the federal budget and eliminate programs that don’t work and make sure that those that do work, work better and cheaper." This was his constant theme during the presidential debates to cut government.
So how do you go from campaigning to cut government spending and ban earmarks before the election on November 4 to start talking about a $500 to $700 billion stimulus plan in mid-November. What changed?
What exactly did he learn immediately after the election about the economy that caused him to go from a budget cutter to proposing the biggest increase in spending ever? Prior to the election, Obama was already regularly claiming that the economy was in the worst financial crisis since the depression. Do you cut spending when you are in the worst financial crisis since the depression, but massively increase it if you can claim that things have gotten a little worse?
Read the rest here.
# posted by Joltin' Django @ Thursday, February 12, 2009 
