From Music Man, to Messiah, to Mr Cool, to Candy Man!

Last night I had dinner with some friends so missed Obama's speech. When I returned to my hotel I caught a re-broadcast and after about 20 minutes I turned it off because he continues to turn me off.

Obama still pits everyone against each other. No healing there. Obama even made a new enemy - The Supreme Court and then misspoke about their recent decision, suggesting The Court allowed foreign corporations to advertise in our elections. The Court specifically avoided the issue.

Obama's comment about the Supreme Court was undignified, petty and unnecessary because the Justices were guests and cannot respond - though Justice Alito may have done so under his breath. Poor taste but typical of a person who is so insecure he has to lead by demeaning. (See 1 below.)

The 'no party' was dissed from the git go and again last night. They did submit ideas but White House arrogance was more than Republicans could penetrate. That dog won't hunt no matter how hard Obama tries to off load his own failed leadership. Then he seeks their co-operation.

When someone offers a different view Obama becomes insulted and blames Republicans as stiffing the nation and being obstructionists What garbage.

Obama entered office with a super majority in both Houses and was unable to get his own legislation passed because he/they failed. Last night Obamaforgot about that thing called "buck."

This leopard has not changed his spots. Obama persists in his disturbed need to set up enemies and remains incapable of leading. He is still a polarizing pathetic figure in my eyes and getting more so with the passing of each day and each failure.

As for the structure of the speech the White House writers were obviously thrown by the Brown election and the speech was very disjointed and lacking in substance. Lot of patronizing and pandering as The White House gropes to recover from three election defeats in a row.

Obama has gone from 'Music Man, to ' Messiah,' to 'Mr. Cool' to a 'Candy Man' continuing to dispense goodies!

Obama is getting slicker than 'old Bll.' Obama screws up, blames someone else by dumping on them and then proceeds to literally lie. At least 'old Bill' was Arkansas funny. Obama remains snide, sarcastic, angry and anything but presidential.

Obviously Massachusetts got to him but nothing has really changed just more vapid words, delivered in his usual sing song cadence

No doubt Obama would give himself a B plus. In my book he still has yet to make a passing grade. (See 1a,1b,1c,1d,1e,1f,1g and 1h below.)

Our legislators haven't learned much in over 2000 years. (See 2 below.)

Erdogan is accomplishing his goal - destroying Israel's relationship with Turkey. (See 3 below.)

Dick

1)Justice Alito’s Reaction
By LINDA GREENHOUSE


There was the president, and there were six members of the Supreme Court. The few words from the one to the others went by quickly. The president’s tone was mild compared to the animation in some other parts of the speech, and I thought he looked momentarily awkward. But maybe I was just projecting.

Mr. Obama’s words were sharp, echoing his earlier criticism of the court’s decision last week in the Citizens United case to strike down the limits that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law placed on independent political expenditures by corporations and unions. The decision would “open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign companies — to spend without limit in our elections,” Mr. Obama said, adding that “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests.” He urged Congress to “pass a bill that helps correct some of these problems.”

Nearly every president finds something to criticize about the Supreme Court, but not every one gets to do it to the justices’ faces, on national television, in the State of the Union speech. Of the six justices in the audience, three were in the majority in the 5-4 decision: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the opinion; Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.; and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. Three were among the four dissenters: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

Supreme Court justices usually make for an awkward sight at the State of the Union speech, because they sit stony-faced and never clap or cheer.


Some members of the court dislike the exercise so much that they never attend. Justice Sotomayor’s predecessor, David H. Souter, never did. For several years, Justice Breyer attended alone.

This time, Justice Alito shook his head as if to rebut the president’s characterization of the Citizens United decision, and seemed to mouth the words “not true.” Indeed, Mr. Obama’s description of the holding of the case was imprecise. He said the court had “reversed a century of law.”

The law that Congress enacted in the populist days of the early 20th century prohibited direct corporate contributions to political campaigns. That law was not at issue in the Citizens United case, and is still on the books. Rather, the court struck down a more complicated statute that barred corporations and unions from spending money directly from their treasuries — as opposed to their political action committees — on television advertising to urge a vote for or against a federal candidate in the period immediately before the election. It is true, though, that the majority wrote so broadly about corporate free speech rights as to call into question other limitations as well — although not necessarily the existing ban on direct contributions.

But this was a populist night and the target was irresistible. There are a variety of specific proposals floating around to address the Citizens United decision. The president offered no specifics and did not endorse any of them. Just as the decision doesn’t lend itself to a sound bite, neither do the fixes.




1a)A Self-Reverential State of the Union Address
By Peter Wehner

President Obama's State of the Union address should unnerve Democrats in Congress and throughout the country. It was one of the worst State of the Union addresses in modern times – a stunning thing for a man who won the presidency in large measure based on the power and uplift of his rhetoric.

For those who hoped the president would use this speech as a pivot to the center, a la Bill Clinton in the aftermath of the 1994 mid-term elections, the speech was a major letdown. Much of what he offered up last night was symbolic. His budget freeze on a subset of domestic discretionary spending – which might amount to $15 billion – will hardly put a dent into our $1.35 trillion deficit. His budget commission, which will have no real power or authority, is worthless. His proposal to cut the capital gains tax for small business investment is a step in the right direction – but it will fall far short of what is needed to generate jobs and economic growth. One sensed there was no urgency or passion behind his effort to help small businesses and the private sector.
Get the new
PD toolbar!

At the same time, Obama did not back away from his commitment to pass health care legislation that is incoherent, wildly expensive, unpopular, and which would do enormous damage to our economy. Obama also stuck to his guns on cap-and-trade legislation, which would be a job killer.

And even as he castigated Washington for being "unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems," he continued to champion an agenda that would concentrate unprecedented power there.

If substance was the main take-away of this address, it would have been merely mediocre. But what made it downright harmful for Obama and Democrats was its tone. The speech was defensive and petulant, backward-looking and condescending, petty and graceless. He didn't persuade people; he lectured them. What was on display last night was a man of unsurpassed self-righteousness engaged in constant self-justification. His first year in office has been, by almost every measure, a failure – and it is perceived as a failure by much of the public. Mr. Obama cannot stand this fact; it is clearly eating away at him. So he decided to use his first State of the Union to press his case. What he did was to set back his cause.

What made the speech a bit bizarre, and somewhat alarming, is how detached from reality the president is. After having spent much of his time blaming his predecessor for his own failures, he said he was "not interested in re-litigating the past." Barack Obama lamented waging a "perpetual campaign" – even though that is what the president, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs and others in his employ do on a daily basis. He said, "Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game" – yet his White House has played that very game with zest and delight.

Having gone on a spending spree that is unprecedented in American history, the president castigated the political class for "leaving a mountain of debt" to future generations. Having helped to create the worst fiscal situation in our lifetime, he says he will "refuse to pass the problems on to another generation of Americans." He says, "If we do not take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could damage our markets, increase the cost of borrowing, and jeopardize our recovery" – despite the fact that future generations will have to work to undo the deficit and debt he had done so much to increase.

It was as if we were being lectured on marital fidelity by John Edwards or Mark Sanford.

The president criticized the "outsized influence of lobbyists in Washington" – as though he had no memory of the squalid backroom deals that were cut in order to try to secure passage of health care legislation but that helped lead to its demise. He spoke of the need to "do our work openly," even though Obama broke his promise to allow health care negotiations to appear on C-SPAN and who worked with the House and Senate leadership behind closed doors. He called on Congress to "continue down the path of earmark reform" – even though he eagerly signed legislation that contained around 8,500 earmarks. He claimed he is ending American involvement in the Iraq war – even though the Status of Forces Agreement that will end American involvement in the Iraq war was signed by President Bush. He said the United States must "always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity" – even as he and his secretary of state have consciously downplayed our commitment to both, whether in our dealings with Iran or China or any of a number of other nations.

On and on this game went, late into the night.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of last night's speech, though, was that Obama spoke as if the last year hadn't happened; as if he had not been president; and as if Congress had not been controlled by Democrats. He sought to portray himself as an outsider and a reformer, an antidote to cynicism, and a post-partisan, unifying force. He wanted to cast himself as an idealist, an inspirational figure, Mr. Hope & Change.

Barack Obama was, in short, trying to recapture the magic from his presidential campaign.

But that moment is gone with the wind. The charm and aesthetic appeal have all but disappeared. And so his words came across as not only stale but surreal. It is as if Obama was speaking in a parallel universe.

What we are seeing play out on a very large stage, it seems, is a man of extraordinary self-regard having to deal with punishing political set-backs, with the fact that his high hopes have come crashing down around him. The nation has turned against his agenda. They are turning against his party. And they are tiring of him as well. This is something he cannot seem to process. So the president marches ahead, pretending up is down and east is west, embracing an agenda the country has rejected and that is doing terrible damage to his own party.

It was quite a thing to witness.

1b)The Lesson of an Affirmative Action President
By James Lewis

You don't pick brain surgeons by the color of their skin. You pick them by competence only. Same thing with airplane pilots. But we have allowed the profoundly irrational liberal media to persuade the American public that we are supposed to pick a U.S. president by affirmative action. Obama was elected to universal Hosannas because he is black. It wasn't a secret. That's why the Left around the world went into ecstasies when Obama ran and got elected.


We've been using affirmative action to hire and promote teachers and cops and to popularize movie stars and media heroes. We've had a generation of affirmative action agitprop, 24/7/365. Hillary Clinton was going to dictate racial and gender preferences for medical school admissions under HillaryCare. You can bet that reverse-racism is all over the 2,200 pages of ObamaCare. It's reverse-racism forever!


In America today, competence is suspect, and incompetence gets all the attention. Yet competence is what keeps us alive.


Affirmative action was allowed by the Supreme Court as a temporary exception to the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution until blacks had the same opportunities others did. It has now been about forty years, and the goal posts have just moved farther and farther Left. Today it's not just blacks -- it's women, homosexuals, and illegal aliens. And it's no longer equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome, which was the goal of Communism for seventy years in the Soviet Union, until the whole Soviet Empire crumbled as a result.


In the Soviet Union, everything was politicized. Incompetent people ran agriculture along Stalinist lines. Everything turned into a lie, and lies accelerated as they propagated through the system, in exactly the way the Climategate lies get worse and worse as they get passed along by politically correct bureaucrats and scientists. When political loyalty controls the outcomes, honesty and competence are driven out at every level of society. Nobody can point to Obama's anti-terrorist policies and say that's wildly incompetent -- without fearing they will be accused of racism.


From a temporary policy to give black people a better chance in life, we have now arrived at a Marxist goal of universal equality for everyone -- except for white, male, heterosexual, and excessively normal people. We have reversed racism, but guess what? Reverse-racism is still racism. As a direct result, corruption now pervades the big cities and Washington, D.C. That's because race, gender, and victim status have taken over as the criteria for all the benefits society has to offer.


Obama's election to the nation's most powerful office is the direct outcome of racial reasoning. It was race that put him over the top against Hillary, in a thousand media endorsements, and finally, against John McCain, who was old, male and white. Three strikes against McCain, who for all his faults is vastly more experienced and knowledgeable than the Obamessiah.


Meanwhile, blacks are still suffering from the pervasive social pathology of the inner city -- almost all self-inflicted, with the help of the welfare state. Europe shows exactly the same results, except that the victims of welfarism aren't black, but mostly white and Muslim immigrants. American blacks today are more bitter and more racially enraged than ever before, after forty years of affirmative action. Affirmative action hasn't helped women, who now have to work two jobs, one at home and one for income, especially because so many men have walked away from their families under liberal cultural values. Reverse-racism has actively hurt generations of children, who have grown up in broken homes as a direct result of pernicious social policies which Obama has actually tried to make worse. One of the first things he did was to reverse Clinton's welfare reform so that social pathology in the black community can spread its poison even wider and deeper. Obama isn't good for black people -- but then, blacks consistently vote for those who do them the most harm.


Reverse-racism has hurt Asian-Americans, who don't usually count as disadvantaged non-whites, but who by dint of talent and hard work are now among the largest ethnic groups in many colleges and universities and a majority at Berkeley and UCLA, where race engineering is banned by a California law passed by voters over the objection of the political establishment.


Any time a Muslim tries to explode a bomb on an airplane, Obama sticks his nose in the air and pretends he doesn't know what's up. But he knows, he knows. The next time an airplane blows up in flight, Obama will be history, but he will never blame himself for his own truly stupid and perverse policies. On the contrary, Obama will be around for the next forty years blaming White America for his own folly.


We've now been taught by the media to hire and elect people by the color of their skin, or by gender, or by sexual preferences -- including, in the case of Kevin Jenkins, their ability to peddle gay sexuality to kids and teachers for the Queering of the Elementary Schools.


Is it any surprise that a president who ran as the historic first black -- that is, on affirmative action grounds -- is not just incompetent, but perverse, so that we deliberately don't check the passenger lists for young Muslim males who were brought up in radicalized cultures, even if they are already in the terror database, even if they buy a one-way ticket with untraceable cash and don't check any luggage at all on their one-way flights from Nigeria to Detroit?


Obama's anti-terror policies are not just incompetent. They are suicidal.


They are exactly like all the other social policies that are supposed to help the poor, the disadvantaged, the black, females, homosexuals -- all of which invariably end up punishing and degrading the very people they are supposed to help. Who do you suppose is in the teachers' unions that are keeping black kids from escaping the inner city ghettos? Yes, it's black and liberal teachers. Who do you suppose is actively importing Muslim radicals into Europe and the United States? Who do you suppose has done more to spread HIV? Yes, it is the very Leftists who are always telling us how much compassion they feel for those very people.


The vote in 2008 was even crazier than picking your brain surgeon by the color of his skin. If the knife slips in the surgeon's hand, you might die, but the nation as a whole doesn't. But if the president has a nervous breakdown in the Oval Office, the whole world is at risk. It's a mad, mad, mad idea to elect people on the basis of race or gender.


We have been so PC-whipped as a nation that Obama's election as a black man -- not as a competent black man, not as an experienced and well-qualified black man -- was celebrated by liberals and Leftists around the world. It is the victory of brain-dead ideology over common sense. The guy in the White House today is potentially the most dangerous, mentally fixated, and irresponsible demagogue we have ever known. Those wacky ideas are once again on the rise, not just in the schools and colleges, but even at the very centers of power. The election of Obama was by far the screwiest thing American voters have ever done. It throws doubt on the whole American experiment, because we have inflicted this disaster on ourselves.


The lesson of the Obama presidency is exactly the opposite of what our stuck-on-stupid media are telling us. It is that we must never, ever hire, promote, or elect somebody to a position of power and responsibility merely because of his race. Abraham Lincoln would not have been surprised. Neither would Martin Luther King, Jr. Even the editors of the New York Times choose schools for their kids not by race, but by educational competence. Somehow the American people have forgotten their common sense while Obama was rifling their wallets.


The captain is drunk in the deckhouse, and the ship of state is heading for the rocks. Our enemies are trying to take advantage of our failure to elect even sensible leadership. If you don't think al-Qaeda, Ahmadinejad, and the Russians will try to screw us royally under this perverse and incompetent leadership, just wait a month or two. The Chinese have taken the measure of this guy. So have the other jackals prowling around the small campfire of civilization. They know he's a pushover, and they will act accordingly. The only question is how badly we'll get burned.


The Left have advocated suicidal policies, and now they have found their way to power. But ultimately this is a failure of the American people, of our pathetic excuse for a media, and of the anti-American hatred that pervades the Left.


Yes, God protects orphans, widows, and the United States. But you can rely on pure dumb luck for only a little while before the ship of state comes to grief on that unforgiving iceberg.

1c)Did Obama's SOTU Pass the Women's Intuition Test?
By Janice Shaw Crouse

One Fortune 500 CEO commented that he always brings his wife to dinner with potential top executives because he trusts his wife's intuition as a reliable barometer of a candidate's character and trustworthiness -- important characteristics that aren't measured by other aspects of the job interview process. With the president's State of the Union address (SOTU), it didn't take women's intuition to see through the rhetoric and understand the tone and defensiveness of the speech.


The president promised the moon, but he said nothing for which he could be held accountable. He did a brilliant job of giving the impression that he was addressing issues, but in case after case, one could only wonder about the particulars. Most women listen carefully when a man dishes out flowery promises. Most have learned from bitter experience not to fall for vague promises. Instead, they look for the particulars, and most importantly, they look at a man's actions.


The president's rhetoric, as usual, was phrased in a way that any listener could shape the message according to her particular point of view. As the president wrote in his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, he believes that one of his strengths is that he is a "blank screen" on which different people can "project" different views. Clearly, he believes that he can say anything and people will believe it in a way that has personal meaning and significance, even when these people have different perspectives and ideologies. He doesn't seem to understand that words have to be associated with reality -- not to mention truth and accuracy. There was an almost total disconnect between what he said in his SOTU and what he did -- the actions he took -- last year in regard to Iran, earmarks, transparency, bipartisanship, and I could go on and on.


Ultimately, the president's SOTU was deceptive. This goes to the issue of character, which leads directly to the question of whether he can be trusted.


Mr. Obama talked about the need for a government that "matche[s] the people's decency." He praised the people's resiliency as a prime reason for the nation to be hopeful. Women will welcome his promises about creating jobs, tax credits to small business that create new jobs, improving education. Health care, too, is a bread-and-butter issue for women. Women will notice that while he talked passionately about the vital "preexisting condition" issue, Mr. Obama did not touch on the issue of federal funding for abortion. He challenged Congress to "continue down the road toward earmark reform" -- a smokescreen that ignores the fact that they have been porking up every bill they write.


The president talked about "relieving the burden on middle class" and "helping working families." He talked about improving schools by emphasizing achievement and excellence. He expressed a goal of "world class education" for America's children. He didn't want anyone to go "broke because they [choose] to go to college." The Congress applauded when he talked about "not accepting second place for the United States of America." He expressed strong feelings about bipartisanship and stopping politics as usual. He wanted to end distrust and division, and he promised not to give up on trying to change government (supposedly in regard to trust and unity, but again, one can give Obama's words one's own meaning). He told the assembly that "people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills." He said that Congress was "sent here to serve citizens, not our ambitions." He promised to help military families. He spoke often, in fact, about "families." He talked about the difficulties people are facing; he echoed former President Clinton's mantra about "feeling people's pain." He embraced the vision of JFK and Reagan. Get it? He is bipartisan -- he cares, he is compassionate, he is working and providing leadership to "advance the prosperity for all people." He applauded his more popular wife and chided her for being "shy." He kept saying that he "wouldn't walk away from" the job he was elected to do, but he gave no road map and presented no plan.


One of the basic principles of communication is that when there are discrepancies in a person's words, listeners believe what they sense from the non-verbal communication. In that regard, President Obama has major problems. His total reliance on the teleprompters is a hindrance to his believability. Obama lifts his head to read the teleprompter screens in a way that makes him appear arrogant and condescending. He almost never looks at real people during his speeches; his head swings from side to side as he reads first one screen and then the other. Even during applause interruptions, he looks above the heads of the audience or at the screens rather than at those in his audience. The president spoke very reassuringly about feeling great hope for America. But his tone of voice was strained. He talked about regretting that "people are still hurting," but as Congress applauded him before he began his speech, his chin in the air and rigid stance communicated that he was not backing down from his leftist policies or taking blame for their failure.


People, especially women, don't like whiners or those who blame others instead of accepting responsibility for their own actions. Mr. Obama kept blaming Washington as though he were an outsider -- as though he was not the president and his party in the majority. He continued to whine about the nation's condition when he took office; he said that he took office "during awful times" and that he "acted immediately and aggressively." He lamented the deficit that the nation was in "before he walked in the door." He claimed that "anxieties aren't new" -- that we've "struggled for years." The problem, he said, is what we did "for eight years" before he came into office -- "that is what helped us to this crisis." He lamented the "partisanship and pettiness," and he talked about "deep corrosive doubts" and "credibility gaps" as though they had nothing to do with his leadership or his party's failures. He had many bogeymen -- the banks, the lobbyists, Wall Street, the health insurance companies. The president talked about a "deficit of trust" as though it had nothing to do with him or his leadership. In short, he praised people's "resilience in the face of adversity," and blamed everything else. Then he reiterated that he came into office to "change" all those "bad things."


Women don't like bullies, and they don't like finger-pointing. The president apparently has no clue that he is out of touch with reality. He was expected to "pivot" away from his failed policies; instead, he almost belligerently insisted that "[o]nce temperatures cool," Congress must "take another look at our bill" and demanding that Congress not "walk away from health care reform." He seemed genuinely to think that the failure of the deeply-flawed health care reform bill was because he "didn't explain" it well enough. In spite of everyone's expectation that he would learn from his failures this year and try a different approach, he refused to bend to reality. As one focus group participant said, "Obama is turning out to be a great conservationist; he is just recycling all of his old campaign rhetoric."

1d)Faux Contrition: Obama Blames the Public
By George Will

Barack Obama tiptoed Wednesday night along the seam that bifurcates the Democratic Party's brain. The seam separates that brain's John Quincy Adams lobe from its Sigmund Freud lobe.

The dominant liberal lobe favors Adams' dictum that politicians should not be "palsied by the will of our constituents." It exhorts Democrats to smack Americans with what is good for them -- health care reform, carbon rationing, etc. --even if the dimwits do not desire it.

The other lobe whispers Freud's reality principle: Restrain your id -- the pleasure principle and the impulse toward immediate gratification. Settle for deferred and diminished but achievable results.

Obama was mostly in Adams' mode Wednesday. His nods to reality were, however, notable.

Such speeches must be listened to with a third ear that hears what is not said. Unmentioned was organized labor's "card check" legislation to abolish workers' rights to secret ballots in unionization elections. Obama's perfunctory request for a "climate bill" -- the term "cap-and-trade" was as absent as the noun "Guantanamo" -- was not commensurate with his certitude that life on Earth may drown in rising seas.

Last Feb. 24, when unemployment was 8.2 percent, Obama said in the second sentence of his speech to Congress that the economy "is a concern that rises above all others" and later that his agenda "begins with jobs." After 11 months of health care monomania, he said Wednesday that "jobs must be our No. 1 focus." Unemployment is 10 percent.

He called Wednesday for a third stimulus (the first was his predecessor's, in February 2008) although the S-word has been banished in favor of "jobs bill." It will inject into the economy money that government siphons from the economy, thereby somehow creating jobs. And you thought alchemy was strange.

Not until the 33rd minute of Wednesday's 70-minute address did Obama mention health care. The weirdness of what he said made it worth the wait.

Acknowledging that the longer the public has looked at the legislation the less the public has liked it, he blamed himself for not "explaining it more clearly." But his faux contrition actually blames the public: The problem is not the legislation's substance but the presentation of it to slow learners. He urged them to take "another look at the plan we've proposed." The plan? The differences between the House and Senate plans are not trivial; they concern how to pay for the enormous new entitlement.

Last Feb. 24, with a grandiosity with which the nation has become wearily familiar, he said, "Already, we have done more to advance the cause of health care reform in the last 30 days than we have in the last decade." He was referring to the expansion of eligibility to an existing entitlement -- the State Children's Health Insurance Program. But that expansion was minor compared to the enormous new Medicare entitlement for prescription drugs created under Obama's predecessor. Before the Massachusetts nuisance, this year's speech was to be a self-coronation of the "last" president to deal with health care.

Last Feb. 24, he said he had an activist agenda because of the recession, "not because I believe in bigger government -- I don't." Ninety-seven days later, he bought General Motors.

Wednesday night's debut of Obama as avenging angel of populism featured one of those opaque phrases -- the "weight of our politics" -- that third-rate speechwriters slip past drowsy editors. Obama seems to regret the existence in Washington of ... everyone else. He seems to feel entitled to have his way without tiresome interventions in the political process by the many interests affected by his agenda for radical expansion of the regulatory state. Speaking of slow learners, liberals do not notice the connection between expansion of government and expansion of (often defensive) activities referred to under the rubric of "lobbying."

Lamenting Washington's "deficit of trust," Obama gave an example of the reason for it when he brassily declared: "We are prepared to freeze government spending for three years." This flagrant falsehood enlarges Washington's deficit of truth: He proposes freezing some discretionary spending -- about one-eighth of government spending.

Obama's leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily Washington is toxic -- yet Washington should conscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc. Talk about a divided brain.

1e)State of the Union: The Slam, the Scowl and the Separation of Powers
Obama, Alito and the Political Theater of a Constitutional Lesson
By Terry Moran


It was an impromptu moment of political theater with a constitutional lesson at the heart of it.

Justice Alito shakes his head when Obama hits campaign finance decision.President Barack Obama took the extraordinary step of bashing a decision of the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address last night -- while six of the justices sat there stonily.

Well -- five sat there stonily. Justice Samuel Alito Jr. couldn't contain himself. He scowled, shook his head vigorously, and mouthed what seemed to be the words, "Not true."

It wasn't exactly "YOU LIE!" -- Rep. Joe Wilson's (in-)famous outburst at the president last year. But it was exceptional, and for those of us who are fascinated by our constitutional traditions and norms, it was a riveting moment and, perhaps, a sign of these times.

But President Obama shares some of the blame for this contretemps -- and he knows it.

It is an extraordinary thing for a president in a State of the Union address to trash a decision of the Supreme Court.

Tony Mauro, over at The Blog of Legal Times, has done some legwork and finds that presidents have mentioned the Supreme Court by name only nine times in the past century or so, most of those times innocuously.

Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Reagan were the only three who really took aim at the Court specifically -- Harding to advocate the repeal of court decisions outlawing child labor in America (really); FDR to pressure the court to get out of the way of the New Deal; and Reagan to urge the passage of a constitutional amendment allowing school prayer.


So presidents are careful to respect the decisions of the court. Sure, Andrew Jackson was supposed to have brushed off a Supreme Court decision that would have stopped the government from forcibly removing Cherokee, Creek and other American Indian peoples from their homelands in the Southeast out to Oklahoma with the frank declaration, "John Marshall has his opinion; now let him enforce it." (Jackson may not have said this of the Chief Justice, but he acted in the spirit of the statement, ignoring the Court and putting the tribes on the genocidal Trail of Tears.)

It was an impromptu moment of political theater with a constitutional lesson at the heart of it....
It was an impromptu moment of political theater with a constitutional lesson at the heart of it. President Barack Obama took the extraordinary step of bashing a decision of the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address last night--while six of the justices sat there stonily. Well--five sat there stonily. Justice Samuel Alito Jr couldn't contain himself. He scowled,, shook his head vigorously, and mouthed what seemed to be the words, "Not true."
(Reuters)And FDR got so frustrated with the Court's rulings on the New Deal he tried to expand its membership and pack it with his legal toadies. But both moves are seen today as low points in the history of the presidency. Even Richard Nixon bowed to the will of the court, releasing the Watergate tapes he knew would end his presidency.

There's a good reason for this tradition of deference. The Supreme Court has no direct authority to enforce its rulings. Think about it: There is no Supreme Court police force, or tax collection department, or other agency to see that its decisions are adhered to throughout the land. The court is, in that sense, powerless. Its only power, its only duty, in Marshall's words, is "to say what the law is." It depends on the political branches to give effect to its rulings and maintain the rule of law in our country. It depends on that tradition of respect.

1f)If Obama Fails, It Won't Be GOP's Fault
By Debra Saunders

It all looked so easy in August 2008, when Sen. Barack Obama spoke before the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The Democrats were going to win in November, storm Washington with their reforming ways, and because they were so much smarter than everyone else, they'd know how to get the American economy cooking. There was no doubt as the enthusiastic Invesco Field throng cheered and chanted, "Yes, we can."

Well, never mind.

After the Democrats squeezed floor votes for unpopular health care legislation through the House and Senate, independent voters are turning on Obama, conservatives never warmed to him and the far-left base feels betrayed. It turns out that governing is a lot harder than lobbing mud and vitriol at the Bushies.

Perhaps that is why, after having won office, Obama can't stop.

The Democrats own the White House, the Senate and the House. If they want to, they can pass their own bill. But they can't. Obama can't make centrists in his own party vote for the final passage of a bill that their constituents vehemently oppose. That leaves him two choices: Pass a doable and more fiscally responsible bill - yes, it will anger the base, but isn't that what Democrats used to argue George W. Bush should do? Or try to fob his own failure off on Republicans, while saying out of the other side of his mouth that he won't give up "on trying to change the tone of our politics."

Of course, Obama's big problem is that he cannot deliver more private sector jobs with a health care agenda that will discourage hiring, a global-warming plan that threatens to hobble industry and - despite his too-modest spending "freeze" proposal - huge deficits that have spooked the public.

His too-into-the-future spending "freeze" sounds nice. But do I believe? The president noted that Washington's annual deficit had exceeded $1 trillion before he entered office, because of "two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program." So his remedy is continued runaway spending while fighting two wars, passing his own extra tax cuts and peddling an underfunded and overweening health care package? Where's the change?

Donning the mantle of reformer, Obama said he wanted to require that lobbyists disclose their contacts with his administration or Congress to erase the public's "deficit of trust." Why bother? Voters are angry about all the grease that changed hands out in the open.

The White House very publicly cut a deal with union leaders to exempt union and government workers from the Senate bill's 40-percent excise tax on employer-paid "Cadillac" health care plans. Then there were the very open giveaways handed to Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Mary Landrieu, D-La. to win their support. Nebraska voters were so outraged that Nelson has since distanced himself from his own big-dollar bargain.

"I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people," Obama said. "I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, the process left most Americans wondering, 'What's in it for me?' "

What's in it for me? Actually it's Landrieu, Nelson and Big Labor who asked that question. Perhaps while they had their hands out, they also wondered if they dare be so brazen. And a little voice answered: "Yes, we can."

1f)Obama's Dull, Cheap, Successful Speech
Jonathan Chait


President Obama’s speeches have always been notable for both their exquisite prose and their unusually high intellectual level. Tonight’s speech, while probably as effective as such speeches can be, was neither.

The dropoff between rhetoric penned by Obama and that by his staff, always noticeable, was especially so tonight. When he declared, “health care experts who know our system best consider this approach a vast improvement over the status quo,” I wondered if his budget freeze had already claimed the entire White House speechwriting staff.

Obama suggested that we should embrace alternative energy sources even if you doubt climate science. (I’m pretty sure that, if carbon dioxide were harmless, we’d be better off sticking with the cheap energy.) He embraced some hoary populist tropes, in which “Washington” and “us” are homogenous, mutually exclusive categories, and he belongs to the second. (“Washington has been telling us to wait for decades.”) And his rationale for a budget freeze made no sense whatsoever. “I am absolutely convinced that [the stimulus] was the right thing to do,” he said, “But families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.” Um, why?

And when Obama announced “I do not accept second place for the United States of America,” I thought I was listening to Otter:

Still, the substance seemed to work quite well. Obama has taken the liberal advice to hold firm on financial reform, either getting a victory or an issue, rather than taking the best deal he can get from the Senate. He insisted that large banks pay back their bailout and, unbelievably, Republicans took the bait and sat on their hands. I guess it’s principled of them. But crazy.

Obama effectively projected his personality, often to the detriment of the opposition. He gently laughed at the GOP’s refusal to applaud his tax cuts. He had a winning moment when he explained his motivation for embracing health care reform: “By now it should be clear I didn’t take on health care because it was good politics.”

Obama’s closing flourish served a double purpose. Putatively, he was urging America to remember its greatness and press on in the face of adversity. The message seemed also to be aimed at his fellow Democrats, who have succumbed to utter panic in the last week:

We have finished a difficult year. We have come through a difficult decade. But a new year has come. A new decade stretches before us. We don’t quit. I don’t quit. Let’s seize this moment – to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our union once more.

For most of the last year, liberals have been berating the administration for things that weren’t its fault. Rhetoric and “leadership” can only go so far in the face of structural realities – Obama can’t turn Ben Nelson into a liberal. But we’ve finally reached a moment where these intangible qualities do matter. The Democratic Party has been verging on total breakdown, and the administration has wilted in the face of the challenge. Stemming the Democratic panic was the primary task of this speech. We’ll soon see if it succeeded. I’d bet that it did

1g)The State of the Union Is No 'Reset' Button: Presidential ratings usually drop after the speech
By KARL ROVE


It was a tense moment in the West Wing. Less than a year into a new president's term, a Senate seat was slipping to the opposition and taking with it the balance of power in the upper chamber. The president's agenda was suddenly at risk.

If this sounds like Republican Scott Brown's upset victory in Massachusetts last week, it was actually Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords's defection in 2001. Mr. Jeffords's decision to bolt the party cost the GOP not the 60th vote, but a razor-thin majority. Yet following the defection, George W. Bush passed his signature tax-cut package, No Child Left Behind education reform, and a budget that cut in half the growth of discretionary domestic spending from the sizzling 16% rate of President Bill Clinton's last budget.

As congressional Democrats back away—for now—from Mr. Obama's health-care agenda, it is worth asking if this president's agenda is really aligned with what Americans want. This was supposed to be a historic presidency. But if it's undone by the loss of the 60th Senate Democrat, was Mr. Obama actually prepared for the challenges of governing?

Massachusetts defeat, Mr. Obama said on Sunday on ABC's "This Week," caused him "to try to reset the tone" in his State of the Union address because "we had lost some of that sense of common cause that existed a year ago."

But that "sense of common cause" wasn't lost. It was abandoned when Mr. Obama attempted to do things he hadn't prepared Americans for, such as a government takeover of health care, and when he failed to revive the flagging economy.

Now Mr. Obama wants to hit the reset button with his State of the Union address. But since World War II, presidential job approval ratings have dropped an average of 1.8 points after a president's first State of the Union speech. Over the past 25 years, presidents have experienced virtually no change—an average drop of 0.1 points in Gallup's job approval ratings—after giving a State of the Union address. That indicates that last night's teleprompter special is unlikely to stop Mr. Obama's decline.

Mr. Obama entered 2010 with 49% job approval, according to Gallup. That's down from 67% last January. Those who strongly disapprove of his performance outnumber those who strongly approve by 41% to 26%, according to Rasmussen's latest poll.

Mr. Obama's slide over the past year has been led by independents (whose support is down 17 points since last January), seniors (down 19 points), those making $60,000 to $90,000 a year (down 19 points), Republicans (down 23 points) and conservatives (down 24 points).

On the generic ballot, a measure of party strength, Republicans lead Democrats by five points in National Public Radio's latest poll and by eight points in Rasmussen's latest survey.

These numbers are worse than Democrats faced at this point in 1994. If Democrats fare better this year than they did 16 years ago, it will likely only be because they have fewer open seats to defend and because they are taking their challengers more seriously than they did in 1994.

One of Mr. Obama's first reactions to last week's Massachusetts debacle was to install his 2008 campaign manager as an über-election czar for Democrats. But the White House tried to boost Democrats running for governor in New Jersey and Virginia last year. They lost anyway.


It probably didn't help Democratic morale when the White House complained it was blindsided by Mr. Brown's victory. Politico reports the White House had the Democratic Party spend $2.2 million on surveys and focus groups in just a 10-month span last year. That money was supposed to let Team Obama see these things coming.

Mr. Obama's problems are not political management, but policy. They won't be solved by faux fiscal restraint, mini-ball proposals for the middle class, and angry pretensions to populism.

By his own Office of Management and Budget numbers, Mr. Obama has raised the baseline of discretionary domestic spending by a total of $115 billion since his inauguration, bumping it up midway through the 2009 fiscal year budget and then increasing it again for the 2010 fiscal year.

Mr. Obama is now calling for a spending freeze to save $15 billion for fiscal year 2011. That's nice, but it freezes in place a 24% increase in discretionary, nonsecurity domestic spending. The president would also exempt from a freeze the $512 billion that has yet to be spent from last year's stimulus package. To present such a proposal as a serious attempt at restraining spending is to reveal a low opinion of the intelligence of ordinary Americans.

Mr. Obama has squandered the "sense of common cause" he talked about on Sunday that many felt at his inauguration. In the week leading up to his State of the Union, he did little to rekindle that spirit or reverse his sinking fortunes.

Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).

1h)Haven't We Heard This Before? Obama's shopworn State of the Union speech.
BY Fred Barnes


Haven’t we heard that speech before, practically every word of it? Maybe it was a year ago when President Obama first addressed Congress. Maybe it was during the campaign. Maybe it was at one of those town halls? Maybe Obama can’t help himself. His speeches just insist on sounding the same.

In any case, Obama delivered the least fresh State of the Union address I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard more than 30 of them. It was filled with old ideas, campaign cliches, and frequent use of personal pronoun, “I.” That’s the Obama pattern.

The chief takeaway from 70 minutes of presidential oratory was that Obama doesn’t intend to move to the center. Should we have been surprised? Not at all. Obama is no Bill Clinton. He’s an ideologically committed liberal.

Sure, the public has expressed strong opposition -- in the elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts -- to the liberal agenda of the president and congressional Democrats. And poll after poll has found the similar opposition all over America. But Obama is unimpressed and undeterred.

He’s sticking with his liberal policies -- on health care, global warming, gays in the military, the high speed rail boondoggle, taxing the overseas profits of American companies, the whole batch. Obama said those in Congress who might have grown skeptical of force feeding an unwilling nation a massive dose of liberalism should “not run for the hills.’’ I suspect they will anyway.

Here are several further thoughts about Obama’s first official State of the Union address:

1) In a speech as long as last night’s, it was shocking the president spent so little time on national security and foreign policy. Okay, he’s more interested in domestic policy. We knew that. But he kissed off Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran in a few words, though he took time to boast that more al Qaeda leaders have been captured or killed in his first year in office than in George W. Bush’s last.

2) Obama voiced concern about the lack of trust by Americans in their government. But he didn’t help matters by repeating discredited (or at least less than believable) claims about his policies. He said that 2 million more people would be jobless today were it not for his economic stimulus bill. Not much empirical evidence for that claim. And he said his health care legislation would actually reduce the deficit. Please! Everyone knows this is the result of transparent accounting tricks and, in truth, ObamaCare would increase the deficit by hundreds of billions.

3) The president isn’t so anxious about the deficit that he’d pass up the chance to pass another stimulus bill. Only this time it’s a “jobs bill” and Obama wants it “on my desk without delay.” From Obama’s description, it should be a lot like the first stimulus -- that is, not very stimulative. It would have small, temporary tax cuts of the sort that have never in human history provided substantial, permanent economic growth. To pay for it, he’d use bank bailout money that’s been paid back, money that otherwise could be applied to deficit reduction.

4) It was nice to hear the president praise innovation. He said his administration had spent a record amount on basic research, which is good. Then he outlined a series of steps to promote innovation. Guess what? They were all things that government would do, which is bad. Unleash the private sector? He didn’t mention that.

5) One more thing that ought to irritate folks. Obama blames the economic crisis of 2008 entirely on banks. True, they bear some blame. But there were other culprits, government ones. The trouble that started with a housing stampede prompted by the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates was compounded by the federal government’s pressure to provide loans for unworthy investors, and worsened by the packaging of these bad loans into securities marketed around the world. Banks erred, but so did government. But Obama chose to demonize banks. How can that help the economy?



2)"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled,

public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be

tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should

be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to

work, instead of living on public assistance."

- Cicero - 55 BC



What have we learned in 2,064 years? Evidently nothing....


3)Turkey's ruling Muslim party: Israeli intelligence ran eavesdropping station from Ankara


Turkish prime minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan has engineered a fresh assault on the already crisis-laden relationship between Turkey and Israel by putting up members of his ruling AK Islamic party to reveal that Israel ran a secret signals intelligence station from Turkish military headquarters in Ankara for covert surveillance on Iran and Syria.
Erdogan is determined to stamp out the last remnants of the once-warm ties between Turkey and Israeli.