Archive for the ‘Obama’ Category

You’ve heard of lies, damned lies, and statistics? Well, here’s Exhibit A: a column at MarketWatch by Rex Nutting.

Nutting’s column, titled “Obama spending binge never happened,” has caused a lot of excitement among people who would like to believe it’s true. And the bottom-line numbers — which are as far as Nutting goes in his column — do show that total spending has risen more slowly between fiscal 2009 and fiscal 2013 than you might have otherwise believed. Annual federal spending growth during President Obama’s first term, Nutting’s numbers show, has been 1.4 percent. That would be slower than in any of the seven previous terms, dating to the beginning of the Reagan years. Going out of his way to be even-handed, Nutting even graciously attributes Obama’s “stimulus” spending in FY09 to Obama rather than to George W. Bush, under whom that fiscal year began.

What a guy!

But what Nutting’s surface-level “analysis” fails to acknowledge — aside from the fact that he’s giving …

Continue reading About the idea that Obama’s spending has been tame »

In Chicago yesterday, President Obama described the essence of his campaign against Mitt Romney. Asked during a press conference about his campaign ads criticizing Romney’s record at Bain Capital in the 1980s and ’90s, Obama disagreed with fellow Democrats’ advice to focus on other issues:

[T]his is not a distraction. This is what this campaign is going to be about — is what is a strategy for us to move this country forward in a way where everybody can succeed?

Well, now. That’s just completely different from every other presidential campaign in history…

Some commentary has focused on what Obama said just before that: his description of the job of president vs. the job of a private equity CEO. And with good reason. There is plenty to address: from his assertion that the president should be involved in helping individual communities plan their economic development, to the obvious conclusion that the job, as he’s described it, is not one he’s done particularly well given the …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: Obama wants the election to be about a topic he doesn’t understand »

If you thought the Catholic Church and universities affiliated with it would quietly accept the Obama administration’s “compromise” for the contraception mandate, well, think again. From Fox News:

Some of the most influential Catholic institutions in the country filed suit in federal district court Monday against the so-called contraception mandate, in one of the biggest coordinated legal challenges to the rule to date.

Claiming their “fundamental rights hang in the balance,” a total of 43 plaintiffs filed a dozen separate lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the requirement. Among the organizations filing were the University of Notre Dame, the Archdiocese of New York and The Catholic University of America.

The groups are objecting to the requirement from the federal health care overhaul that employers provide access to contraceptive care. The Obama administration several months back softened its position on the mandate, but some religious organizations complained the …

Continue reading Catholic groups sue to overturn Obama’s contraception mandate »

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman. But what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they’re not discriminated against on the job.

OK, confession time: I didn’t create those opening sentences. Then-U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama did, in 2004.

Obama offered a different, “evolved” belief Wednesday, saying he thinks same-sex couples should be able to marry. He had it right the first time.

Well, not the first first time. Before tackling the issue, let’s review Obama’s “evolution.” In 1996, while running for the Illinois Senate, Obama noted on a questionnaire that he “favor[ed] legalizing same-sex marriages.” By 2004, he’d flipped on that position.

Last week — after an endorsement of gay marriage by Vice President Joe Biden and a report that …

Continue reading Obama got it right about gay marriage . . . in 2004 »

A day after President Obama endorsed the concept of same-sex marriage (but, notably, no policies to legalize it), the Washington Post reported that, as a teenager in boarding school, Mitt Romney once forcibly cut the longish hair of a fellow classmate who was “presumed” to be gay. The story has since been found to have a number of problems: Two sisters of the alleged victim (who died several years ago) claim the depiction of him is “factually incorrect,” and one says she had never heard of the incident (which, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t happen); one of the Romney classmates quoted about the incident now says he didn’t actually witness it.

As if to confirm that juvenile behavior by juveniles is not a partisan issue, a blogger soon posted an excerpt from Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” in which he describes behaving rudely toward an unpopular female classmate. (The posted excerpts don’t refer to his age at the time, but the reference by Obama to her being in …

Continue reading Poll Position: How much of a candidate’s life is fair game? »

On a day when the political sob stories ought to focus on Dick Lugar, whom Indiana Republicans voted out after 36 years in the U.S. Senate, the bulk of the bad news from yesterday’s primaries instead concerns President Obama:

1. North Carolina is a swing state. Four years ago, Obama won the state by 14,177 votes out of more than 4.2 million cast. Last night, almost 200,000 voters in the state’s Democratic primary voted against him, even though no one else was even on the ballot. A constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, publicly opposed by Obama despite the mixed signals from his administration on the issue, passed easily, 61 percent to 39 percent.

2. Wisconsin is generally not considered a swing state — it’s typically been safe territory for Democrats. But 2010 saw the election of Republicans to a majority of the state’s legislative seats and the governor’s mansion. That GOP governor, Scott Walker, currently faces a recall election fueled by labor unions still steamed …

Continue reading Obama steals Lugar’s bad-news thunder »

I’ve written many times about the budgeting/accounting/scoring gimmicks that allowed Democrats to claim Obamacare would reduce federal deficits when the opposite is true. The latest piece of evidence came from Charles Blahous, an economist and trustee of the Social Security and Medicare programs who recently reported Obamacare’s “double counting” of spending cuts and tax increases means the law will actually increase deficits by $340 billion over 10 years (or about seven Buffett Rules).

Blahous, writing with former federal budget official James Capretta in today’s Wall Street Journal, explains double counting by making an analogy to Social Security:

If we generate $1 in savings within that program, then that’s $1 that Social Security can spend later. If we also claimed this same $1 to finance a new spending program, we would clearly be adding to the total federal deficit. There has long been bipartisan understanding of this aspect of Social Security, which is why Congress’s …

Continue reading Obamacare costs more than advertised, double-counting edition »

On Monday, the Obama-Biden 2012 campaign unveiled its slogan: “Forward.”

Yep, that’s it. As Washington Post humor-blogger Alexandra Petri observed, “If your slogan is just one or two notches above BCC, it might not be a great slogan.”

But never mind the lack of zip to the latest and greatest in Democratic bumper-sticker philosophy, or the fact that it won’t help the arguments that President Obama isn’t a Marxist. The most disqualifying thing about “Forward” as a slogan is that this is a president who keeps looking backward. Heck, even the video unveiling “Forward” as a slogan began with a retrospective on the 2008 financial crisis; the very first words of the video titled “Forward” are “January 2008.” I’m not sure that word means what the Obama team thinks it does.

In other forward-looking news, Democrats are using today’s anniversary of the Navy SEALs’ killing of Osama bin Laden last year to revisit some comments Mitt Romney made five years ago. (Forward! Forward!)

According …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: Team Obama moves ‘Forward’ by dredging up, distorting Romney’s words from 2007 »

Good grief. Or, as a certain presidential candidate might say, “For Pete’s sake!”

It seems the long-running inanity about the time — 29 years ago — Mitt Romney transported the family dog in a cage strapped to the top of his car has finally gotten to the Romney campaign. It has responded by dredging up from “Dreams from My Father” a snippet of an anecdote about Barack Obama, as a child, eating dog meat while living in Indonesia.

Seriously. This is what stands to dominate the news cycle today. It’s already being branded “the dog wars.”

Memo to the Romney campaign: Democrats are not bringing up the Seamus-in-a-cage story because they are confident Americans approve of Obama’s presidency. It’s not a roundabout way to steer the conversation back to taxes and spending, deficits and debt, jobs and the economy, high gas prices and low employment — you know, the stuff voters repeatedly say they care about.

It is the opposite of that. So why do y’all keep falling for it?

Mitt Romney is …

Continue reading Romney: Don’t let this election go to the dogs »

A lot of commentary about Barack Obama’s re-election campaign focuses on what’s different from 2008. But there’s one clear way in which it’s exactly the same.

In 2008, when ABC’s Charles Gibson asked Obama during a debate why he favored raising the capital-gains tax rate when the evidence suggests doing so would only reduce government revenues, Obama answered, “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” (Amazingly, except to those who have noticed Obama’s tendency to try to have things both ways, he went on to talk about the need to spend more money on health care and education — without disputing Gibson’s premise that raising capital-gains tax rates would instead lower revenues.)

Now, in discussing the so-called Buffett Rule, which would require Americans making at least $1 million in a year to pay at least 30 percent of their income in federal taxes, we’re back to the argument of fairness, economic and …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: With Buffett Rule, Obama ignores economics and leans on ‘fairness’ »