the rightwing czar

Obama wants Congress to complete one of the most radical overhauls of our health care system in a matter of weeks, so is anyone surprised that after House Democrats rushed a bill through committee that even Democrats have “basic questions about whether some of their proposals might do more harm than good”?

And while senior Democrats vowed to press ahead to meet Mr. Obama’s deadline of having both chambers pass bills before the summer recess, some in their ranks, nervous about the prospect of raising taxes or proceeding without any Republican support, were pleading to slow down.

Now why would they be nervous? Is it because the Congressional Budget Office said that the budget numbers in ObamaCare are a load of crap?

Obama and Pelosi seem intent on ramming government-run health care that nobody wants down our throats, and if the President isn’t careful, he’s going to destroy his presidency in the process. His approval rating is already dropping and he’s losing his political capital fast.

Given that, I fully support all attempts at making this bill law. There’s nothing thatwill sink Obama’s ship faster.

“There’s nothing that we would have done differently.”

You gotta love the Democrats’ persistence here. Imagine if the surge hadn’t worked and had costs thousands of American lives and Bush announced he was open to a second surge. What do you think Steny Hoyer would think about that?

NewsBusters has the story up about Rick Santelli (you remember him) calling out the Obama administration for it’s recent lies about not knowing how deep the recession was. Obama and Biden want to let us know that when they first took office they hadn’t exactly calculated how bad the economy was, but we all know that isn’t true:

After all, as Santelli marvelously asked: “How many hundreds of times has the current administration talked about the worst recession in history? The worst time since the Depression?

If you don’t believe Senatlli, watch the first 30 seconds of this video, made by Team Barry 10 days before he was sworn in.

Behold, “objective” journalism at its finest. Apparently the news that 4/10 Americans think the economy is not in recovery is good news for the Obama administration:

A national poll indicates that nearly half of all Americans think the economy has stabilized, but only one in eight believes that a recovery has started.

Four in 10 questioned in the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday morning think the country’s still in an economic downturn. …

The poll suggests that when it comes to an economic recovery, Americans agree with President Obama.

Huh? Only 1 out of 8 people believe that our economy has started to recover, 4 out of 10 believe we’re still in a downturn, and the takeaway about how the Obama administration is doing should be that Americans agree with him?

How about – only 1 in 8 Americans think that Obama’s economic plans have helped start economic recovery. Or, 4 out of 10 Americans think we’re still in an economic downturn. But no, CNN thinks that the important thing to note here is that Americans agree with Obama because Obama also doesn’t think our economy is recovering.

Even worse, why is CNN giving Obama a pass for thinking our economy isn’t recovering? Didn’t he promise us some time ago that unemployment wouldn’t get higher than 8% if we passed his really important stimulus bill? Today we’re hearing that unemployment rose again in June, even though we passed the life-saving stimulus bill months ago:

The jobs report was a heavy weight on the broader market. Payrolls fell more than forecast in June, and the unemployment rate rose slightly, according to the Labor Department. Employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, compared to a decline of 345,000 in May. The unemployment rate hit 9.5%, up from 9.4% in May. Analysts had forecast payroll declines of 365,000 jobs and an unemployment rate of 9.6%.

So CNN is faced with two pieces of news today: First, only 1 in 8 Americans think our economy is recovering and second, unemployment continued to rise even after we had already passed what Obama said would be the highest it would be. Given those pieces of news, CNN thinks the important point to takeaway here is that Americans agree with Obama about what the current state of the economy is.

I bet Americans agree with Obama about what color the grass is outside of the White House. Think we should write a story about that?

Leave it to Friedman to explain how the Iranian troubles would have never happened if only we didn’t spend so much money on oil.

Mr. Obama has already started some excellent energy-saving initiatives. But we need more. Imposing an immediate “Freedom Tax” of $1 a gallon on gasoline — with rebates to the poor and elderly — would be a triple positive: It would stimulate more investment in renewable energy now; it would stimulate more consumer demand for the energy-efficient vehicles that the reborn General Motors and Chrysler are supposed to make; and, it would reduce our oil imports in a way that would surely affect the global price and weaken every petro-dictator.

Okay, so if we make gasoline more expensive it will lower prices? Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t liberals screaming about high gasoline prices a year ago? So what is it, high prices are better or worse?

Actually, let me step back and examine his logic further: Higher gasoline prices strengthen the Islamic fascists so we should raise oil prices through a tax, because the higher prices… will turn into lower prices? What? This is bizarre.

Maybe he clarifies it further down for us:

Exhibit A: the Soviet Union. High oil prices in the 1970s suckered the Kremlin into propping up inefficient industries, overextending subsidies, postponing real economic reforms and invading Afghanistan. When oil prices collapsed to $15 a barrel in the late 1980s, the overextended, petrified Soviet Empire went bust.

Ah! So it is lower oil prices that will cause the downfall of Iran like it did the Soviet Union. But still, the mystery is how we get to those lower prices. Did we lower prices in the 1980’s by increasing taxes? Hold on – were taxes lower in the 80’s or the 70’s? Something is fishy here.

Look - we all know we need to ween ourselves off of oil and we all know that our oil “addiction” is financing terrorism. But come on, Friednman can’t honestly believe that taxing gasoline and “investing” it into research for alternative energy is going to lower prices?

And even if he does believe that, does he really believe it’s a good time for our economy to add a $1 in tax to every gasoline people buy?

Remember all that talk last fall about how those evil Republicans and their free market ideas caused lenders like Fannie and Freddie to go under? And do you remember how we were accused of wanting to let lenders run wild, free of regulation? Not very many people believed us when we pointed out that it was Democrats who were obsessed with de-regulating lenders, not Republicans.

Well, Barney Frank is ready for round 2 of destabilizing our market – even before we’ve recovered. Word on the street is he has come up with this great idea of pushing Fannie and Freddie toward riskier loans, again:

Back when the housing mania was taking off, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank famously said he wanted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to “roll the dice” in the name of affordable housing. That didn’t turn out so well, but Mr. Frank has since only accumulated more power. And now he is returning to the scene of the calamity — with your money. He and New York Representative Anthony Weiner have sent a letter to the heads of Fannie and Freddie exhorting them to lower lending standards for condo buyers.

You read that right. After two years of telling us how lax lending standards drove up the market and led to loans that should never have been made, Mr. Frank wants Fannie and Freddie to take more risk in condo developments with high percentages of unsold units, high delinquency rates or high concentrations of ownership within the development.

Is it just me, or was I under the impression that risky loans are a big reason this economic meltdown happened in the first place?

Frank is either of his mind or – actually, out of his mind might be the only plausible explanation here. News like this should absolutely be on the front page of every newspaper covering DC politics. You can bet that if Bush was still in charge and was behind an initiative like this, the NYT would be declaring to the world on its front page that he was purposefully fueling the destruction of our economy.

I can’t imagine, though, that Frank will have much success here. Surely there are enough people involved that they won’t start repeating the same mistakes before we’ve even payed off the cost of fixing them the first time.

When I go to read an article, whether in print or online, my usual expectation is that the pictures and captions will somehow illustrate a piece of the story. That seems pretty typical, right? Well, not when you’re MSNBC and you’ve (probably reluctantly) published a story about your dearest president losing support for his stimulus bill.

Here’s a picture I took of the MSNBC website when I went to read the story. You need to see how the page displayed on my browser to get the full effect.

Click to enlarge

Notice a couple things right off the bat. First, the caption of the picture:

Ryan Stewart, 17, signed up for a summer job with the Mile High Youth Corps after failing to find part-time work at fast-food restaurants. He’s one of thousands of young people working government jobs this summer paid for by the federal economic stimulus package.

How does this picture/caption fit with MSNBC’s story? The report is about how public support for the stimulus bill is decreasing, and MSNBC chooses a picture about a guy who got summer work because of the stimulus funds.

Even worse (and the reason you need to enlarge the picture to really see it) is how the picture is placed. I have to scroll down to read the story, but the picture about the guy who loves the stimulus bill is right at the top. This means that before you see even a word of the actual story, MSNBC wants to let you know how awesome the stimulus bill is because this high school student got a summer job.

This is nonsense but typical MSNBC garbage. I guess we should give them kudos but reporting the facts about public support dropping off for Obama’s gazillion dollar pork project, but come on – this is ridiculous.

With unemployment skyrocketing way past Obama’s worthless projections First Lady Michelle has a great idea for those of us who suddenly find ourselves without anything to do: volunteer.

Hey, I’m not trying to knock volunteering here. It’s a great way to give back to your community and help those in need. I just wish that when I helped out at the local food bank I could do it in as much style as the First Lady.

Courtesy of Fox News’ “right now” segment that focuses on new leaders in the GOP, we have a video of Wisconsin Rep. Ryan Paul in an interview with Chris Wallace.

Ryan is great in this interview. He is a fluid and confident speaker who a firm grasp on the issues. When Wallace tries to insist that the Democrats’ health care plan only wants to add government as a competitive player in the industry, Ryan says that would be like setting up a McDonald’s next to his daughter’s lemonade stand and say it’s “competitive.”

This interview has two pretty intriguing undertones about the future direction of the GOP. First, as Wallace points out, Ryan has a bit of a reputation right now for not being very concerned about “social” issues (ie. abortion, gay marriage) and more concerned with fiscal conservatism and fighting against Obama and the Dems attempts to socialize, well, just about everything. As someone who considers myself a social conservative like Ryan does, I can relate to being very unconcerned about hot-button issues like abortion right now. Focusing on the economy and preserving the integrity of a free and fair market should be our number one priority right now, because these are the issues that will re-stabalize the nation and reaffirm the people’s faith in small, unobtrusive government.

How the GOP rebrands itself is going to be critical if right-wingers don’t want to spend decades in the wilderness. Obama and the Democrats swept into Washington as anti-war, anti-corruption, and populist politicians. They didn’t give up their commitments to Big Labor or Planned Parenthood, but it certainly wasn’t the image they broadcast as part of their national brand.

Getting government out of our lives is something the American people still believe in very passionately, and it is that distinctly Republican message that will contrast well against the big government, Big Brother version of America we’re seeing thrown at us now.

As a final thought, Wallace asks Ryan about his vote for the bailout, which Ryan defends. What do you think? Will the bailout vote be for Republicans in 2012 what the Iraq War vote was for Democrats in 2008?