The U.S. has never before had a President who thinks so little of the American people that he imagines he can win re-election running on the opposite of reality. But that is the reality of President Obama today.
Waving a planted press commentary, Obama recently claimed on the campaign stump, “federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any President in almost 60 years.” […]
He knows very well that he is not a careful spender. His whole mission is to transform the U.S. not into a Big Government country, but a Huge Government country, because only a country run by a Huge Government can be satisfactorily controlled by superior, all wise and beneficent individuals like himself. That is why he is at minimum a Swedish socialist, if not worse. Notice, though, how far behind the times he and his weak minded supporters are, as even the Swedes have abandoned Swedish socialism as a failure. […]
Recall […] that in 2008 Congress was controlled by Democrat majorities, with Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, and the restless Senator Obama already running for President, just four years removed from his glorious career as a state Senator in the Illinois legislature. As Hans Bader reported on May 26 for the Washington Examiner, the budget approved and implemented by Pelosi, Obama and the rest of the Congressional Democrat majorities provided for a 17.9 percent increase in spending for fiscal 2009!
Actually, President Obama and the Democrats were even more deeply involved in the fiscal 2009 spending explosion than that. As Bader also reports, “The Democrat Congress [in 2008], confident Obama was going to win in 2008, passed only three of fiscal 2009’s 12 appropriations bills (Defense, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security). The Democrat Congress passed the rest of them [in 2009], and [President] Obama signed them.” So Obama played a very direct role in the runaway fiscal 2009 spending explosion.
But but … BOOOSH! … but … raaaaaacist!
Forward!
And he’s got half the country perfectly willing to play along. These are perilous times.
Duuuuude, reality is a social construct consisting of a consensus reached by everyone denying some of their perception and accepting some of everyone else’s.
And it’s a crutch for people who can’t handle drugs.
<giggle> I need me some munchies, maaaaan.
The Obama electorate of 2008? The dumbest electorate in World History.
Obama told us we had a big hole to dig our way out of.
Juan Williams:
“[…] That blowup-the-system button, not pushed since FDR’s attempt to stack the court with Democrats during the New Deal, is for Obama to use the bully pulpit of the White House, and the national stage of a presidential campaign, to launch a bitter attack on the current court as a corrupt tool of the Republican right wing. […]
But the heart of any attack on the Supreme Court for derailing healthcare reform will come from Obama. […]
The hardball political fact is that attacking the court will help the president’s campaign and it will damage the court for years to come. […]
The relevant point is that the court may do irreparable harm to its reputation [My emphasis. The Court may do! Ha! — sdf] with another highly political split between justices appointed by Democrats and justices appointed by Republicans. A 5-4 defeat of the healthcare law will erode trust in the justice system. […]”
Ol’ neighbor brother Juan often signals what’s coming down prior to the event’s appearance on the scene: he knows people in the White House, you see, and is more than willing to do their bidding or echo their talking points. In this sense, he may be a better marker than that White House Insider guy, who could easily be nothing but a fiction. Juan, dumb as he may often be, is a for reals flesh and blood striver and ideological true believer.
This is not the number one I was hoping for!
OT: last night the local news’s weekend anchorette read the understatement of the year in reporting the death of Rodney King. It seems all the unpleasantness associated with his name began when poor Mr. King was “stopped for speeding.”
And exceeding the Weight Watcher point allowance led to the downfall of Jeffrey Dahmer.
sdh: Interesting. It seems Juan has missed how the great orator has gone downhill and his speeches aren’t playing to the crowds like they once did.
(cue Sunset Boulevard references)
I think Juan may need an intervention when Obama fails to be re-elected. sdferr, you know him. You may be able to talk him off the ledge.
Here’s a commentary by Jonathan Tobin at Contentions on Williams’ column.
A couple of things: first, I don’t think Willams is “proposing” as Tobin puts it (Juan, I think, is merely echoing what he hears). And second, I don’t believe the political left has the same understanding of FDR’s court packing (1937), i.e. as a loss. In their view, it was ultimately a success, though the “success” took a few years to take shape. See: Wickard v Filburn (1942), a unanimous decision, to say nothing of the jurisprudence of the years following. That, however, does not mean that the FDR court packing model is the correct model to follow today. Far from it. The world has changed, where the leftists have not. They’re an intellectually rigid lot, that bunch.
I once had an argument with a congressional aide (R) who insisted FDR actually did pack the court.
They most surely are sdferr.
I heard a lawyerette talking to Megyn Kelly today about how overturning the ACA would revisit the SCOTUS’ reading of Wickard, fundamentally changing their interpretation of the Commerce Clause. I wish I could remember her name, she used to clerk for Clarence Thomas so she isn’t a hired gun for either party.
Pat Cadell was also talking about how Obama is done and it’s starting to sink in at White house HQ.
I don’t believe the plaintiff’s arguments against ACA even touched Wickard with a ten foot pole, not so much as to even graze it. In fact, I think I’ve heard most of them explicitly concede they wanted nothing to do with questioning the rightness of the Wickard decision, and explained how they went out of their way to stay away from it altogether.
“Pat Cadell was also talking about how Obama is done and it’s starting to sink in at White house HQ.”
– In November they can make Bummblefucks last act in office removing all the “R”‘s off the WH keyboards.
– Fathers day leftovers…..
“Father’s Day might always be a tricky holiday for Woody Allen but this year was particularly awkward. Ronan Farrow, the 24-year-old son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, let loose yesterday tweeting, “Happy father’s day — or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law’s day.”
Mia Farrow even got in on the act, re-tweeting his message and adding her own comment: “BOOM.”
– Hey, its not like she married her adoptive father, so she has a right to…..Wait…..erm….nevermind.
I don’t believe the plaintiff’s arguments against ACA even touched Wickard with a ten foot pole, not so much as to even graze it.
No, they didn’t. She was speaking for herself as a legal beagle in anticipation of the howling, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments on the Left when the decision is read. Frankly, I don’t know enough about legal issues to discuss it intelligently so I’ll leave it up to those of you who do.
Breaking: Roger Clemens: Not Guilty on all counts!!
Reading Wickard in law school was one of my first WTF moments in law, where the decision was so far off the constitutional rails that even I could recognize it.
ConLaw was my second-least-favorite subject, with Criminal taking the cake. Years later, ConLaw is my favorite. And don’t call me in the middle of the night with a DWI problem.
So, I’m back from my week in the wilderness. Did I miss anything good?
Also, Wickard should go the way of Dred Scott, and for much the same reasons.
Welcome back, Squid! How was your vacation?
A significant portion of western and central Pennsylvania Democrats declined to vote for Barack Obama in the April primary, an analysis by PoliticsPA has found. The results there resemble those of Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia, where the President lost around 40 percent of the primary vote to no-name opponents or “undecided”. … Over 30 percent of voters left the presidential ballot blank rather than select Obama’s name in 27 counties.”
link
And yet it was unanimous. Crazy, ain’t it?
I almost get the sense that the newsmedia was happy to have Romney in Wisco today just so they could write headlines that read one variation or another of “Romney spends day BADGERING Obama!”
Obama has found them an awfully cheap date, willing to put out for him before he’s even bought them a first popcorn.
The thing is, Obama will be making them buy the popcorn, and they’ll still put out again.
One of my first jobs in politics–decades ago–was to analyze the “undervote” in uncontested primaries. An undervote happens when a voter fails to register a vote in a particular primary contest when there is only one candidate on the ballot. In essence, the voter simply skips over the race. It happens either because the voter hasn’t heard of that candidate or they have some basic opposition to that candidate. Our general rule of thumb was that a candidate who had more than 10% undervote was in serious trouble. In many counties in the recent Pennsylvania primary, Obama’s undervote was 30% or higher.
link
Ha! You’re right cranky-d, the media pays the freight themselves, turning themselves inside-out to lose their integrity, no charge to Obama at all.
His vote to strike it down seems a foregone conclusion. What’s more tantalizing, per the passage in his book about Wickard, is the possibility that he might call for the Court to more broadly revisit its Commerce Clause jurisprudence starting with the Roosevelt-era cases that established the precedent that Congress’s commerce power is more or less limitless. Which brings us to the atomic bomb scenario: How many justices would join him on that? It’s no stretch to think Thomas might. What about Alito and Roberts?
link
Now that’s funny. And not in a good way either.
Nr, what is the title of Scalia’s book? It’s not in the article or the hotlinked article within the article.
soon to be a pw best seller
Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts
Thanks!
If the court would strike down Wickard v Filburn that would be a great day for the USA. I don’t think it will happen, but dreaming is still free.
If we’re going to dream, cranky, I say dream big!
Yeah, Pablo. I have to imagine that J. Edgar Hoover must have paid a visit to all nine of the Wickard court.