Monthly Archives: January 2012
January 25, 2012 — John Hinderaker
President Obama’s State of the Union address was a sorry performance in many ways, but let’s note just one Big Lie that he tried to get away with. In the course of defending his administration’s disastrous record on energy, Obama said: Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration…. But with only two percent of the world’s oil reserves, oil isn’t enough.
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January 25, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Earlier this week we drew attention to AFSCME’s Newtron bomb — AFSCME’s megabucks Florida advertising campaign attacking Mitt Romney in order to give Newt Gingrich a boost in the Florida primary. Hugh Hewitt now draws attention the the Orlando Sentinel story drawing the larger picture: Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has an unlikely ally this week in his Florida primary battle against Mitt Romney: the Democratic National Committee. The Democrats
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January 25, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Once again our friends at the Institute for Energy Research have issued the best smack down of Obama’s amazing energy claims. Read the link for the whole text, which isn’t long, but their three charts reprinted below tell the story: oil and gas production are indeed increasing, but on private land, and falling on federal land. Obama has nothing to do with the increase in oil and gas exploration. And
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January 25, 2012 — Steven Hayward
People old enough to recall the fall of 1981 might remember the huge fuss that occurred when the Atlantic published William Greider’s article “The Education of David Stockman,” in which Reagan’s budget director went overnight from whiz kid to Deep Throat. For readers too young, or anyone wanting their memory refreshed, here’s part of my account of the debacle in The Age of Reagan: “I’ve never believed that just cutting
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January 25, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Obamacare constitutes a fundamental assault on limited constitutional government. The question isn’t exactly whether it’s unconstitutional, but whether the Supreme Court can get it right given the state of the doctrines it has fashioned to accommodate liberalism in the modern era. Liberalism has done its best to abrogate the limits on limited government, and its best is probably good enough. Obamacare calls us to return to first principles. Thank you,
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January 25, 2012 — Steven Hayward
When Bill Clinton used his 1996 State of the Union address to kick off his ultimately successful re-election campaign, he uttered one of the few SOTU lines that people still remember: “The era of big government is over.” It did not matter narrowly that this was another Clinton lie; he went on in that speech to outline something like 97 small ways government could get bigger, from school uniforms to
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January 24, 2012 — John Hinderaker
One reason why presidents feel free to bloviate without restraint in SOTU speeches is that they know hardly anyone will ever go back, months or years down the road, and recall what they said. It is a feel-good exercise of the moment, intended to be free of consequences, other than the immediate political ones. Still, some might wonder: what was President Obama touting in his SOTU two years ago? The
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January 24, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Mitch Daniels will deliver the GOP’s response to Obama’s State of the Union speech. You can read excerpts here. I have not been a particular Daniels fan–he’s Tim Pawlenty without the charisma and the consistent conservatism–but this is good stuff: As Republicans our first concern is for those waiting tonight to begin or resume the climb up life’s ladder. We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation
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January 24, 2012 — John Hinderaker
News reports say that the theme of President Obama’s State of the Union speech tonight will be fairness. I take this as an admission of failure. If his economic policies were working, he would be talking about growth. By focusing on fairness, he is implicitly admitting that things aren’t going to get any better. Not while he is in charge, anyway. Of course, by “fairness” Obama means raising taxes on
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January 24, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Lots of difficult and important things, as this excellent video from the Heritage Foundation points out. One thing you can’t do, however–at least, not if you are the Democratic Senate–is fulfill your legal obligation to pass a budget. Today is the 1,000th day since the Senate last fulfilled its legal duty by adopting a budget. The fault lies 100% with Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats, who have been in
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January 24, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The Washington Post Science section today carries an interesting story about how astronomers estimate that the black hole at the center of our galaxy has a mass equivalent of 4 million suns, and moreover that they are hoping to take a photo of it. “The thing we will actually see is light just barely escaping from the black hole,” the Post quotes one hopeful astronomer. By why look so far
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January 24, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Further to John’s post below on the shame of the Democratic Senate for failing to pass a budget for 1,000 days, Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, notes that the last time the Senate passed a budget, “you had never heard of the iPad, Tiger Woods was only known for his golfing abilities, General Motors had never declared bankruptcy, you had never heard of Swine flu.
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January 23, 2012 — John Hinderaker
We have written many times over the years about liberal newspapers, in particular the New York Times, which have published classified information in violation of the Espionage Act. They did thus to undermine the foreign policies of the United States, and in particular to attack the Bush administration. Today the curtain was raised on one of those episodes, as a former CIA official who was more recently a Democratic staffer
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January 23, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Hugh Hewitt draws attention to the astounding news that the AFSCME arm of the AFL-CIO has bought $800,000 worth of television time to run this ad attacking Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain. (Hugh credits Conn Carroll for the inside dope.) AFSCME’s ad gives voice to some of the same sort of high-minded concerns about Romney’s work at Bain that Newt has voiced. The ad will run throughout the state of
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January 23, 2012 — John Hinderaker
In the Islamic world, that is. At Middle East Forum, Raymond Ibrahim details the persecution of Christians during the Christmas season, which Islam considers an abomination. If you go to his post, all items have links: Around the Muslim world, Christmas time for Christians is a time of threats, harassment, and fear. One can point to any number of Muslim attacks on Christians to prove this—whether churches attacked, burned, or
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January 23, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Tomorrow will be the 1,000th day since Senate Democrats last passed a budget. The Democrats’ fecklessness is not only irresponsible, it violates federal law. But the Democrats don’t care: they simply can’t allow the American people to see, in black and white, their plans for spending and taxes. Since the Democrats last passed a budget, just three months into the Obama administration, the federal government has spent $9.4 trillion and
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January 23, 2012 — Steven Hayward
A couple weeks back I skipped over the big story of the newly released minutes of Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings from back in 2006, which showed a complete lack of interest in and complacency about early warnings that the housing bubble might burst with disastrous consequences. Today Robert Samuelson brings the story back up again in his Newsweek/WaPo column. And though Samuelson doesn’t say so, his account
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