The contents of these articles are based on Fact and Truth. Challenges are invited.
The day’s top political news:
Justice Dept.: Obama administration may take action on BCS
The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday to a senator who had asked for an antitrust review.
In the letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch, obtained by The Associated Press, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote that the Justice Department is reviewing Hatch's request and other materials to determine whether to open an investigation into whether the BCS violates antitrust laws.
Several lawmakers and many critics want the BCS to switch to a playoff system, rather than the ratings system it uses to determine the teams that play in the championship game.
Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen
The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.
The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions. The admissions are further evidence Al Gore’s climate scam is just that – a scam.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7009081.ece
Reid raises $2M, spends it all
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) raised an impressive $2 million in the fourth fundraising quarter, but spent $2.1 million -- even more money than he brought in -- much of it on campaign advertisements designed to improve his profile.
With all that spending, Reid begins the new year with $8.7 million in his campaign account -- a formidable sum, but less money than he banked last September. And the ads have not improved his low popularity back home, with a new Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll showing his approval rating down to 36 percent.
Reid still holds a substantial financial edge over his leading Republican opponents. Former state party chairwoman Sue Lowden raised the most money ($800,000) on the Republican side last quarter.
Banker John Chachas, who loaned his campaign $1.3 million, has the most cash-on-hand of all the Republican candidates, with $1.7 million in the bank.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/scorecard/0110/Reid_raises_2M_spends_it_all.html
Opinion:
Obama among the Republicans – a Nixonian moment.
Under extreme political pressures, President Richard Nixon famously proclaimed “I am not a crook”. Under pressures of his own and facing House Republicans face to face, Obama proclaimed “I am not an ideologue”.
Obama made the claim as he faced off with Republican House members at their annual retreat yesterday in Baltimore. (However, these days, its Democrats who are in actual political “retreat”.
The similarity cannot neither be missed nor denied.
Nixon escaped being declared a crook by resigning the presidency and getting a pardon from his replacement – Gerald Ford.
Obama has no such escape mechanism at hand. He is clearly an ideologue and has governed in that manner from the moment he stepped from the inaugural stage and took command of the Oval Office.
That he would deny the obvious, and do so in the midst of his most vehement opponents, demonstrates he is as much in “clinical denial” as Charles Krauthammer diagnosed the other night. Krauthammer, of course, is not only a TV pundit, but also a distinguished psychiatrist. He recognizes real mental dysfunction when he sees it on display.
Denial consumes the Obama White House – either that, or they simply don’t care, have lowered their heads, and intend to stubbornly push through in a “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” manner.
Obama has been obsessed with attempting to govern from the far left. His administration is consumed with consuming American tax dollars in manners ranging from phony “stimulus” schemes, through bailing out failing industries – then taking them over. Who would have guessed General Motors would become must another government program?
Of course, there was the Democrat Cap and Trade scam – which would impose a huge tax increase and send groceries, gasoline, and other necessities (in Obama’s own words) “skyrocketing”.
As more and more Americans become aware of what Obama and Democrats are trying to do, their polling numbers plummet.
Incumbent Democrats are openly unhappy with Obama’s performance. A report on the State of the Union address noted:
“The slow-motion collapse of health care talks. A government bailout of Wall Street while unemployment sits in double-digits. 'It just stinks to the high heaven what happened here,' Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., railed earlier in the day at Obama's treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner. He was talking about the bailout, but the statement could well describe the Democrats' attitude about Obama's performance and the toll it's taken on their political standing. And Wednesday night, they were expected to put on a smile and applaud a president and an agenda many have questioned."
Democrats tried to smile. Speaker Nancy Pelosi gleefully clapped her hands and jumped up and down like a giddy junior high cheer leader. Vice President Joe Biden listened to Obama’s speech and did his imitation of a bobble headed doll.
Normal America yawned as much as Democrat Senate Leader, Harry Reid through the speech – among the longest such address on record,
From another news analysis:
“Left-wing bloggers, liberal columnists and the stray Nobel-Prize-winner-turned-polemicist are all urging Democrats in Congress to pass, somehow, some way, a health care bill, and many of them are calling for a second and even larger stimulus bill.
But Democrats in Congress are replying, as politicians are wont to do when challenged by party wingers, that their name is on the ballot. New York Times editorialists can opine that the Massachusetts result had nothing to do with opposition to health care, but their life's work is not in peril.
Democratic officeholders know theirs is. Some are heading for the hills. Four well-regarded veteran congressman announced their surprise retirements in December; two longtime Democratic senators folded in January. Family concerns have suddenly become very pressing.
Others are holding out against the bloggers. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that "unease would be the gentlest word" to describe House Democrats' refusal to pass the Senate health care bill. Her elegant ears must have burned in that caucus meeting"
The face-off between Obama and the Republicans was polite, but no one would deny there was tension. It was a clash of ideas, approaches, and philosophies. Trying to find an honest path toward mutual regard and cooperation – achieving any realistic shot at compromise – would require a massive shift in expressed attitudes and approaches.
Democrats claim Republicans are simple nay-sayers and offer only “No” to proposals. Frankly, given the extremism of Democrat schemes to date, “No” is the best response, the correct response, and – for the future of the country and its people, the crucially necessary response.
But, I cannot allow the Democrat claims to survive. They are bald faced lies. Republicans have offered alternatives and approaches. Democrats have steadfastly denied them any voice in much of anything.
The health care scheme was crafted entirely in secret behind office doors slammed shut to all views by Republicans or by the American people. We DO know, what transpired behind Harry Reid’s office doors, was blatant, massive, and unabashed bribery of those Senators that resisted demands they come on board with the extremist legislation.
The first real evaluation of how Americans actually reacted to the Obama Address Wednesday night, will begin becoming available about Monday morning. Maybe he pulled it off.
Democrats went into that joint session of Congress with their backs to the wall. They have no way to go at this point but up.
Buddy
The day’s top blogs:
1.
GOP To Obama: Pelosi’s the Problem
BALTIMORE, Md. -- President Obama and House Republicans had a rather candid, at times combative, but overall a fascinating and rare public exchange on the successes and failures of the administration's first year in office here today. Republicans came in determined to show that they in fact have been more than the "party of no" that Democrats portray them as, while Obama called on the opposition to tone down what he deemed as hyperbolic attacks.
In the end, what emerged from the session was a clear sense of how Republicans could potentially frame this year's midterm elections. Multiple Congressman rose to hail the president's promises and intentions but argued that he has been ill-served by an obstinate House Democratic leadership, and specifically Speaker Pelosi.
That point was driven home most effectively, perhaps, by Rep. Pete Roskam (R-Ill.), a former colleague of Obama's in the Illinois state Senate. He said he had enjoyed collaborating on tough issues with Obama in Springfield, but wondered what had changed.
"You've gotten the subtext of House Republicans that sincerely want to come and be a part of this national conversation toward solutions, but they've really been stiff-armed by Speaker Pelosi," Roskam said. "The obstacle is, frankly, the politics within the Democratic caucus."
Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), the GOP conference chairman, was more blunt, waving a compilation of his party's ideas, and saying to the president that the summary "is backed up by precisely the kind of detailed legislation that Speaker Pelosi and your administration have been busy ignoring for 12 months."
That tactic might be especially appropriate if the president's numbers, while not as high as the early days of his administration, remain in positive territory as November approaches. They did, though, manage to extract some more concessions from Obama that he has failed to live up to some of his promises. For instance, he again conceded that he broke a pledge to hold all health care negotiations on C-SPAN, while hedging somewhat to say doing so might have been logistically impossible.
For his part, Obama said he appreciated Republicans' show of ideas today, but that the party made any real compromise impossible by inflaming the debate with heated rhetoric, particularly on health care.
"Frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot," Obama said. "We've got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you've been telling your constituents is, 'This guy's doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America.'"
The president also castigated Republicans for consistently criticizing a stimulus bill they voted unanimously against, and yet appearing to take credit for potentially popular projects it make possible in their home districts. And as some of the Republicans' statements wandered on, Obama showed some uncharacteristic fire.
"I've just got to take this last question as an example of how it's very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we're going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign," he told Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas).
In the end, both sides felt the session worked to their advantage. For Obama, it played as a genuine effort to follow through on this State of the Union pledge to work harder at changing the tone of Washington. For Republicans, they got a televised airing of their ideas in a largely respectful confrontation with the president.
"We've been trying to convince the public that we have alternatives, we have ideas, we have solutions, and the White House hasn't wanted to acknowledge that. The president was forced to acknowledge that today," Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) told RCP after the session. "For the president to say I've read your proposal, it's a substantive proposal, that's huge for us."
The fact that the session was televised was a last-minute change. The Republican leadership that organized the event said it had always been their hope to allow reporters and cameras to show the full session, but they worked with the assumption that the White House would not allow it. Similar opportunities in the past were not open, nor was a Q&A the president had with members of his own party at their recent getaway. That changed with a late night call from the administration on Thursday.
A White House spokesman said that version of events was not entirely accurate, and said simply that they were gratified that the session was broadcast for the public's consumption.
2.
Divided Democrats shift strategy
Ben Pershing
President Obama's State of the Union address seems to have done little to clarify the way forward for his agenda, as congressional Democrats are prepared to shift their focus to the economy but remain unsure how to complete health care or lift themselves out of the electoral doldrums.
"The White House on Thursday signaled the outlines of its strategy for breaking the partisan logjam holding up President Obama's agenda," the New York Times reports, "saying Democrats would move quickly to underline their commitment to fixing the broken economy and to build an election-year case against Republicans if they do not cooperate." Rahm Emanuel tells the paper the White House hopes the Senate takes up a jobs bill next week, then Obama's proposal for a new fee on banks and then the financial regulatory reform bill before returning to health care. Politico observes "it's clear health care is already falling to the back of the legislative line, behind the Democrats' feverish new focus on jobs and the economy. Health care reform didn't even make the cut when ... Chuck Schumer ticked off the party's priorities Thursday."
The Washington Post writes that "Democrats remained in disarray Thursday about how to move forward, with at least some pointing at the White House as the cause of the legislative standstill gripping Capitol Hill." On health care, Politico reports "the administration seems to have decided that they need to stop talking process and start emphasizing substance. ... Indeed, many Democrats feel that the relentless coverage of how reform is getting done- including legislative deal making and intraparty conflict - has cost the legislation much of its public support." Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid both vow that the party will still do health care, but there remains no consensus on how. The Wall Street Journal quotes the chairman of PhRMA saying "the group 'hasn't withdrawn support' for the version of health-care reform passed by the Senate, but that the Massachusetts election has 'thrown everything up in the air a bit.'"
If a jobs bill will be at the front of the line, what will be in it? Bloomberg reports Obama "plans to announce details today of a $33 billion package of incentives for small businesses to encourage hiring and wage increases as he refocuses on economic concerns in an election year." USA Today says "some of the nation's job creators are dubious" of Obama's proposal to give employers tax credits for adding jobs. Economists tell Politico the president's "job-creation program could produce a short-term political boost, but it's unlikely to significantly stem job losses and reduce the unemployment rate anytime soon." Harry Reid was planning to unveil the Senate's jobs bill Thursday but postponed it to incorporate the package of proposals coming from the White House. The Hill says "Senate Democrats are haggling over the cost and scope" of the jobs package.
Obama went to Florida Thursday to announce grants for high-speed rail just as the Senate was voting to raise the federal debt limit. "Together, the two developments spotlighted the administration's juggling act as the president calls for more spending to boost employment, while endorsing fiscal discipline to tame a record federal budget deficit," the Wall Street Journal writes. (The paper notes that the Tampa event was "the first joint political appearance" between Obama and Vice President Biden since last February. Discuss.) Paul Krugman mocks "deficit peacocks" -- Obama and Republicans both included -- who strut their commitment to slashing spending even when economic conditions makes cuts unwise. Obama now has another controversy that could distract from his economic message: "Facing mounting pressure from New York politicians concerned about costs and security, the Obama administration on Thursday began considering moving the trial of the chief organizer of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks out of Manhattan, administration officials said," the New York Times reports.
George Will writes that 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." Translation: Part of the speech was about telling Americans "what is good for them -- health-care reform, carbon rationing, etc. -- even if the dimwits do not desire it," while the rest concerned settling "for deferred and diminished but achievable results." Peggy Noonan says presidents should be firm with Congress: "You don't let them blur your picture and make you more common. You don't let them call the big shots." In the State of the Union, she found a "contradiction at its heart. It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place. It was a speech that argued against itself: You need us to heal you. Don't trust us, we think of no one but ourselves."
The day after the State of the Union, the commentariat was still buzzing about Samuel Alito's mouthing "not true" when Obama criticized last week's Supreme Court campaign finance ruling. But while the coverage Wednesday night focused on Alito's seeming breach of decorum, some of Thursday's stories shifted to whether it was Obama who had stepped out of line with his comments before a television audience of millions. "It is not unusual for presidents to disagree publicly with Supreme Court decisions. But they tend to do so at news conferences and in written statements, not to the justices' faces," the New York Times writes. The Washington Post reports "legal experts said they had never seen anything quite like it, a rare and unvarnished showdown between two political branches during what is usually the careful choreography of the State of the Union address." ABC News says "Obama shares some of the blame for this contretemps -- and he knows it."
The Legal Times does some research and finds "Presidents have mentioned the Supreme Court by name only nine times since [1913], and it would be hard to categorize many of those nine as criticisms." The Los Angeles Times notes "the clash between Alito and Obama has some history behind it" -- Obama voted against Alito's nomination in the Senate, Alito wrote the Lily Ledbetter decision that Obama strongly criticized, and Alito skipped a "friendly meeting" at the Supreme Court last January with Obama and Vice President Biden.
The House GOP is in Baltimore for its annual retreat, awaiting today's visit by Obama. "Emboldened by an unexpected victory in Massachusetts and frustrated with a 'partisan' State of the Union address, House Republicans are eager to meet with" the president, the Hill writes. Obama's visit "is unlikely to change Republican behavior," the Los Angeles Times writes, as "Republican leaders did not seem to be in a frame of mind for compromising." In Hawaii, Michael Steele and his fellow Republican National Committee officials are lapping up the warmth (at this writing, Honolulu was 52 degrees warmer than Washington) even as they squabble over the party's future. The Washington Post says "Steele defended his decision to convene the meeting at a lush beach resort even as millions of Americans are without jobs," as his opposition to a "purity test" for Republican candidates helped doom the proposal. Dick Armey has told "Steele that his plans to align the Republican Party with the 'tea party' movement will fail unless
Mr. Steele proves his bona fides on taxing-and-spending issues," the Washington Times reports.
Ben Pershing
3.
CAN'T WE AT LEAST GET A TOASTER?
Ann Coulter
In the wake of the Massachusetts Miracle last week ("The other Boston Massacre"), President Obama adopted a populist mantle, claiming he was going to "fight" Wall Street. It was either that or win another Nobel Peace Prize.
Now the only question is which Goldman Sachs crony he'll put in charge of this task.
If Obama plans to hold Wall Street accountable for its own bad decisions, it will be a first for the Democrats.
For the past two decades, Democrats have specialized in insulating financial giants from the consequences of their own high-risk bets. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs alone have been rescued from their risky bets by unwitting taxpayers four times in the last 15 years.
Bankers get all the profits, glory and bonuses when their flimflam bets pay off, but the taxpayers foot the bill when Wall Street firms' bets go bad on -- to name just three examples -- Mexican bonds (1995), Thai, Indonesian and South Korean bonds (1997), and Russian bonds (1998).
As Peter Schweizer writes in his magnificent book Architects of Ruin : "Wall Street is a very far cry from the arena of freewheeling capitalism most people recall from their history books." With their reverse-Midas touch, the execrable baby boom generation turned Wall Street into what Schweizer dubs "risk-free Clintonian state capitalism."
Apropos of the Clintonian No-Responsibility Era, Goldman Sachs and Citibank became heavily invested in Mexican bonds after a two-day bender in Tijuana in the early '90s. Any half-wit could see that "investing" in the dog track would be safer than investing in a corrupt Third World government controlled by drug lords.
But precisely because the bonds were so risky, bankers made money hand-over-fist on the scheme -- at least until Mexico defaulted.
With Mexico unable to pay the $25 billion it owed the big financial houses, Clinton's White House decided the banks shouldn't be on the hook for their own bad bets.
Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, former chairman of Goldman, demanded that the U.S. bail out Mexico to save his friends at Goldman. He said a failure to bail out Mexico would affect "everyone," by which I take it he meant "everyone in my building."
Larry Summers, currently Obama's National Economic Council director, warned that a failure to rescue Mexico would lead to another Great Depression. (Ironically, Summers' current position in the Obama administration is "Great Depression czar.")
Republicans in Congress said "no" to Clinton's Welfare-for-Wall-Street plan.
It's not as if this hadn't happened before: In 1981, Reagan allowed Mexico to default on tens of billions of dollars in debt -- Mexico claimed the money was "in my other pair of pants" -- leaving Wall Street to deal with its own bad bets.
As Larry Summers expected, this led like night into day to the Great Depression we experienced during the Reagan years ... Wait, that never happened.
At congressional hearings on Clinton's proposed Mexico bailout a decade later, Republicans Larry Kudlow, Bill Seidman and Steve Forbes all denounced the plan to save Goldman Sachs via a Mexican bailout.
So the Clinton administration did an end run around the Republicans in Congress and rescued improvident Wall Street bankers by giving Mexico a $20 billion line of credit directly from the Treasury's Exchange Stabilization Fund.
Relieved of any responsibility for their losing bets, Wall Street firms leapt into buying other shaky foreign bonds. Soon the U.S. taxpayer, through the International Monetary Fund, was propping up bonds out of South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, then Russia -- all to save Goldman Sachs.
The IMF could have saved itself a lot of paperwork by just sending taxpayer money directly to Goldman, but I think they're saving that for Obama's second term.
Throughout every bailout, congressional Republicans were screaming from the rooftops that this wasn't capitalism. It was "Government Sachs." As Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) put it, the same rules that apply to welfare mothers "ought to apply to rich Greenwich, Conn., investors who are multimillionaires."
But Wall Street raised a lot of money for the Democrats, so Clinton bailed them out, over and over again.
Before you knew it, once-respectable Wall Street institutions were buying investment products even more ludicrous than Mexican bonds: They were buying the mortgages of Mexican strawberry-pickers.
Why shouldn't Wall Street trust in suicidal loans no sane person would ever imagine could be paid back? Time after time, when their bets paid off, they pocketed huge fees; when their bets failed, they sent the bill to the taxpayers.
With nothing to fear, the big financial houses bought, repackaged and resold investment products that included loans like the one issued by Washington Mutual to non-English-speaking strawberry pickers earning a combined $14,000 a year to purchase a $720,000 house.
But the financial wizards on Wall Street were trading these preposterous loans as if they were bars of gold. They may as well have bet the entire U.S. economy on a dice game in an alley off 44th Street.
Every mortgage-backed security bundle was infected with suicidal, politically correct loans that had been demanded by community organizers such as Barack Obama -- as is thoroughly documented in Schweizer's book.
On the off chance that mammoth mortgages to people who could barely afford food somehow went bad, Wall Street firms could be confident that their Democrat friends would bail them out.
Even the Republicans would have to bail them out this time: They had strapped the dynamite of toxic loans onto the entire economy and were threatening to pull the clip. Wall Street had infected every financial institution in the country, including completely innocent banks.
But now Obama says he's going to "fight" Wall Street, which is as plausible as claiming he'll "fight" the trial lawyers.
As Schweizer demonstrates, whenever the Democrats "regulate" Wall Street, the innocent pay through the nose, while Wall Street swine lower than drug dealers and pornographers end up with multimillion-dollar bonuses so they can run for governor of New Jersey and fund lavish Democratic fundraisers in the Hamptons.
Republicans should respond the way they always have: Support the free market, not looters and welfare recipients on Wall Street, especially the Democrats' friends at Goldman.
4.
GOP Disappointment at President’s Non-Response
Washington, D.C. – Republican Study Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-GA) issued the following statement regarding President Obama’s visit with House Republicans in Baltimore.
“The President's visit today was appreciated, but his evasion to many questions was disappointing,” said Chairman Price. “House Republicans invited the President to our conference in the hopes that together we could have a sincere dialogue about the future of our country. Since the first day of his administration, we have put forth positive solutions for all the challenges we face, and it was encouraging to hear the President finally acknowledge that fact. The President’s obfuscation on why his administration has previously denied the existence of these ideas, however, did little to respond to the concerns that we and the American people have in regard to working together. We can only hope that this time the President will follow his words with real action and allow Republicans a substantive role in the upcoming policy debate.”
Note: Earlier, House Republicans presented President Obama with Better Solutions, a compilation of GOP policy alternatives put forward between January 2009 and the present.
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