Archive for January, 2010

Herman Cain

Last week I wrote an assessment of the real State of the Union. It was based on compelling and irrefutable facts. As expected, my assessment did not match what the president said last Wednesday in his State of the Union address. The president’s address was filled with new rhetoric and old policy, more promises that had already been broken, and more Bush-bashing.

Forever in our debt.

As a result, listeners did not get a sense of direction, a reassurance that we are safe, positive prospects for renewed prosperity, nor did we get a sense that we are more united as a nation. Obama supporters will say that he needs more time.

Sorry, that dog will not hunt!

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Mark Watson

“I am not an ideologue,” President Obama told Republican lawmakers Friday afternoon. Obama engaged in some lively banter with members of the opposition party as Republicans gathered in Baltimore for a retreat.

No doubt many in the audience were reminded of the last time a sitting president felt compelled to tell the nation what he was not. Shortly after Richard Nixon uttered “I am not a crook,” he was resigning his presidency.

An ideologue? Who, me?

While Obama has no reason to resign for proclaiming what he’s not, his protest demonstrates that he is either being disingenuous or delusional.  While the president doesn’t like anyone using the dictionary as a weapon against his words, Merriam Webster defines ideologue as “an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology.”

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Gregory D. Lee

President Obama’s State of the Union address this week was more than a speech. It was a stern lecture for the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The president made it clear he was not pleased with the Court’s five to four decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission allowing corporations to make campaign contributions without restriction. He used the opportunity to chastise the Justices who were a captive audience in the Capitol building during the speech.

Not true.

On live television, the president said, “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections. Well, I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”

As the president spoke, the camera was trained on the Justices’ stoic faces, and Justice Alito could be seen mouthing, “Not true!”

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Bob Maistros

I’m sorry. Honest I am.

You see, it appears all these satirical jabs I’ve been aiming at our president over the last year have drawn some blood.

Last week, Mr. Obama lamented to a church congregation, with voice quavering, eyes glistening and countenance drooping, that “(t)here are times when the words that are spoken about me hurt. There are times when the barbs sting.”

Everyone stop being so mean to me!

I never realized.

Then our prez picked up on the “sticks-and-stones” theme in his State of the Union address, although in less personalized fashion. To wit: “Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, no matter how malicious, is just part of the game … So, no, I will not give up on trying to change the tone of our politics.”

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Bob Franken

Now I get it. Now I understand why so many of the Supreme Court Justices are bitterly opposed to television cameras. They are worried people will see them make fools of themselves.

Samuel Alito probably learned an important life lesson on Wednesday night. The man definitely needs to stay out of sight. Because he just can’t control himself.

Loosen up, Supremes

He made that obvious by mouthing off after President Obama raised cain about the corporate spending decision. While it wasn’t Joe Wilson shouting “You Lie!”, visibly mumbling “Not true” is almost as bush league, which is probably apt since Alito was a Bush appointee.

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Dan Calabrese

You’ve heard, here and elsewhere, that President Obama wants targeted tax credits to encourage businesses to hire people. His administration is trying to figure out a way to craft the policy so that the businesses will actually do what they want them to do.

89-minute shuffle, my ass.

Helping businesses hire people – what a good thing for government to do, right? But it can never work, for many reasons, chief among them the fact that it is government proposing to do it.

Let me tell you a story about government and business, and why, however much it proposes to do so, the former can never help the latter.

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Bruce Fisher

Politics matters for the economy because politics drives policy—and “policy” is shorthand for the many hundreds of billions of public dollars, annually, that move around. Just this past week, two events utterly changed the predictable course of who our elected officials are going to be, and thus the course of policy and where all that money might go.

Not good.

First, there was the Massachusetts race for the late Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat. The Democrat lost because of bad White House messaging, but mainly because of specific local conditions including widespread misogyny, her own stone-deafness to local culture (i.e., she didn’t know much about the World Series champion Red Sox), and because the Republican sounded tougher on terrorism in a state that is still embarrassed that the September 11 hijackers all took off from Logan Airport in Boston.

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Jamie Weinstein

Like all State of the Union addresses, President Obama’s Wednesday night was a snooze fest, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano demonstrated. The smartest person in political life was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who someone secured a get-out-of-class pass from the president.

Blah blah blah . . .

For those who stayed up to watch what seemed like a never-ending speech, you probably had some trouble understanding the president. That was because he was speaking politicalese. Fortunately, I am a world-class translator, a veritable Rosetta stone between English and politicalese.

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Mark Watson

Last night’s State of the Union address was less about the State of the Union than it was about President Obama’s disdain for the country’s Constitution.

Obama went out of his way to disrespect the co-equal judicial branch of this country when he essentially accused the Supreme Court of dismantling 100 years of law in last week’s decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. Obama complained that the decision opens the flood gate for foreign contributions to affect U.S. elections.

Narcissists.

“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections,” Obama claimed.

Since the Citizens United decision had absolutely nothing to do with foreign contributions, but rather dealt exclusively with the First Amendment’s proscription against congressional abrogation of free speech. Barack Obama again demonstrates his disdain for truthful utterances and for the Constitution. His words also show that he has either not read the Citizens United decision or has purposely distorted its ruling.

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