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The Palin Effect

Mark Noonan

Crucial to the debate over Obamacare:

For an uneducated, unsophisticated rube and former governor from a backwater state, Sarah Palin sure can drive a debate. With prospects for passage of his sweeping overhaul of the American health care delivery system fading with every speech, President Barack Obama is making it increasingly clear that Palin will be recognized, for good or ill, as perhaps the most prominent single political figure responsible for stopping it in its tracks.

It’s a remarkable story. A failed vice-presidential candidate and resigned governor — unfairly viewed by many as a cruel joke – reached from beyond the political grave her elitist critics prematurely dug for her and her political future to thwart a popular president prematurely regarded by the same elite that shunned her as perhaps the most gifted politician this nation has ever produced. If Sarah Palin were a sitting governor, a failed presidential candidate, or even a state legislator, her influence in the health care debate would not be as unexpected. It is the fact that she is a private citizen, completely out of politics save for a small political action committee, that makes this story unique.

How did she do it? That’s where the story gets even more remarkable.

There were no public appearances or speeches, no glitzy ad campaigns, no publicity tours, no interviews in the mainstream press or any new media outlet. Sarah Plain killed health care reform with a posting on her Facebook page, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and an exquisite sense of timing.

“Death Panels” did it – and I know our liberals still yank their hair in frustration…there was no such thing, they assert. After all, you can comb through the whole series of proposals and never find the phrase “death panel” mentioned. And that, to the liberals, is the end of it…its sort of like their assertion that no one is pro-abortion because no one actually says they are pro-abortion. But just as there are pro-abortion people, so were there “death panels” in the health care reform proposals, disguised as various commissions and committees which would oversea what coverage plans were to provide. And Sarah Palin’s phrasing was crucial to turning the debate firmly against Obama and his Democrats.

Now, the Palin might be out of the running for President – the left smeared her as a dunce, much as they once smeared Dan Quayle as a dunce, even though he was vastly smarter than Al Gore; and that smear might stick. Its hard to overcome public prejudices – it can be done, but its hard. The best person at it, ever, was Ronald Reagan. We’ll have to see if Palin can develope Reaganesque ability to re-shape public perceptions. But, be that as it may, Palin has shown why she rose so far and so fast – and still has a shot at the White House in 2012: she’s very, very smart.

And she’s made the left jump to her tune – that, in and of itself, will provide satisfaction when set against the slanders the left has launched against her.

Wimps in the White House

Mark Noonan

Doesn’t surprise me at all:

Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday has been in the media game for a long time now. He’s reported good news and bad news about both Democratic and Republican presidents, and the White House staffs took most of the bad news in stride. They knew Wallace was just doing his job.

Not Barack Obama and his White House. The president snubbed Wallace and Fox News in his flurry of visits to Sunday news shows tomorrow, and last night, Wallace told Fox colleague Bill O’Reilly that Obama’s team is just as petty as their boss.

“These guys, everything is personal. I gotta tell you, everything,” Wallace said. “They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

It was all supposed to be so easy for them – Obama in the White House, large Congressional majority, a cheer leading MSM, leftist groups being put on the government dime…the opposition was not supposed to be able to do anything. We haven’t stopped them, of course – and, in fact, we can’t stop them: we don’t have the votes…but we have caused them serious pain and the longer this goes on, the worse it gets for them. Remember, if the big ticket items aren’t done before Thanksgiving, they won’t get done before January of 2011 because no one in the House, especially, is going to want to vote on controversial issues next year (and, in fact, they’re already afraid of voting on them, this year).

And now we get Wallace saying they are taking it personal – which is a sure sign of both executive weakness and lack of ability to figure out what to do, next. No one is really minding the store over at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: the President seems fixated on endless campaign stops interspersed with flying visits to foreign lands to denounce America; the First Lady is acting like an Empress; the staff seems to be heading in six directions at once…the change from Bush to Obama is quite stunning. Heck, even Clinton’s relatively slip-shod operation is looking like a model of efficiency compared to Obama’s crew.

Can they pull it together? Perhaps – but by the time they do, the damage might already be done.

Weekly Recap (2009-09-19)

Matt Margolis

FDIC Out of Money

Mark Noonan

Maybe the mattress is the best place for money, after all?

The chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. says she is “considering all options, including borrowing from Treasury,” to replenish the dwindling fund that insures bank deposits.

“I never say never,” FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair told an audience at Georgetown University Friday.

Bair’s remarks go beyond what she said just three weeks ago when asked about tapping the Treasury after the fund that insures regular deposit accounts up to $250,000 hit its lowest point since 1992, at the height of the savings-and-loan crisis. “Not at this point in time,” she said on Aug. 27.

The FDIC estimates bank failures will cost the fund around $70 billion through 2013. Ninety-two banks have failed so far this year. Hundreds more are expected to fall in coming years largely because of souring loans for commercial real estate.

The FDIC’s fund has slipped to 0.22 percent of insured deposits, below a congressionally mandated minimum of 1.15 percent. The $10.4 billion in the fund at the end of June is down from $13 billion at the end of March, and $45.2 billion in the second quarter of 2008.

More failures and less payments in to the fund – the FDIC, of course, only works as long as only a few banks per year fail. As we’ll probably have more than 100 fail this year, and probably as many next year, this is the “push comes to shove” time for the FDIC…and it has failed.

Margaret Sanger's Version of "I Have A Dream" Coming True?

Leo Pusateri

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was demonstrably a racist eugenicist:

The aim of the program was to restrict—many believe exterminate—the black population. Under the pretense of “better health” and “family planning,” Sanger cleverly implemented her plan. What’s more shocking is Sanger’s beguilement of black America’s crème de la crème—those prominent, well educated and well-to-do—into executing her scheme. Some within the black elite saw birth control as a means to attain economic empowerment, elevate the race and garner the respect of whites.

Margaret Sanger, one of the founders of the Malthusian Eugenics movement, thought it a wonderful idea to “do away” with the “undesirables” of society. Unlike Dr. Martin Luther King, who dreamt of the day when little black children and little white children could walk hand in hand, Margaret Sanger (did I mention she was the founder of Planned Parenthood?) dreamed of the day when little white children would be walking hand in hand with each other–with no black children to be found.

And the story in today’s AP looks like Margaret Sanger’s “dream” (to others, a nightmare) is coming ever closer to fruition:

LONDON (AP) – Giving contraceptives to people in developing countries could help fight climate change by slowing population growth, experts said Friday.

More than 200 million women worldwide want contraceptives, but don’t have access to them, according to an editorial published in the British medical journal, Lancet. That results in 76 million unintended pregnancies every year.

If those women had access to free condoms or other birth control methods, that could slow rates of population growth, possibly easing the pressure on the environment, the editors say.

Sounds eerily like…

(Magaret Sanger and fellow eugenicists)… espoused racial supremacy and “purity,” particularly of the “Aryan” race. Eugenicists hoped to purify the bloodlines and improve the race by encouraging the “fit” to reproduce and the “unfit” to restrict their reproduction.

Which, when you think of it, is the liberal elitists’ position on everything. In their mind, their status of being the “enlightened” ones makes them uniquely entitled to the spoils of the world, while the unwashed masses should be happy to live in squalor. While Nancy Pelosi and Algore can have their personal jetliners to jet themselves and their families to points unknown, the rest of the plebian masses can take public transportation. While Rosie O’Donnell can travel with an armed body guard, she seeks to deny the 2nd Amendment right of self-protection to the plebiscite. While Margaret Sanger and her ideological descendants think that they, the enlightened, are entitled to live, the great ‘unwashed masses’ beneath them are a waste of resources and thus are not only expendible, but actually have a duty to curb their numbers.

At any rate, you get the picture.

And the more you look at it, the more the picture begins to look like Dorian Gray.

The Audacity of Arrogance

Leo Pusateri

It was Barack Hussein Obama who once crowed about America’s supposed arrogance toward its allies, while on foreign soil:

President Barack Obama has offered an apology for the Bush era, declaring that America had “shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” towards its allies.

President Obama said the US had “failed to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world”

Physician, heal thyself:

WARSAW, Poland – Poles and Czechs voiced deep concern Friday at President Barack Obama’s decision to scrap a Bush-era missile defense shield planned for their countries.

“Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back,” the Polish tabloid Fakt declared on its front page.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski said he was concerned that Obama’s new strategy leaves Poland in a dangerous “gray zone” between Western Europe and the old Soviet sphere.

Perhaps Barack Hussein Obama, when pondering “Europe’s leading role in the world,” may also ponder that it was Eastern Europe, at one time under the claws of the Russian bear, that was instrumental in breaking the back of Soviet despotism and expansionism, and perhaps they know a thing or two of which they speak.

Yet the arrogance of “The One,” and his administration knows no bounds. But don’t take my word for it. Take the word of our new “regulatory czar“:

“Why is the executive not permitted to construe constitutional ambiguities as it sees fit?” asks Sunstein. “The simplest answer is that foxes are not permitted to guard henhouses … but who is the fox?”

He concludes “the executive should usually be permitted to interpret (law) as it reasonably sees fit.”

“The allocation of law-interpreting power to the executive fits admirably well with the twentieth-century shift from common law courts to regulatory administration if the governing statute is ambiguous,” he writes.

In other words, in Sunstein’s opinion (and no doubt the opinion of his boss, as well), Obama and his administration should have free rein to interpret laws as fits their fancy on a particular day; because, after all, they’re smarter than you, and smarter than the courts.

Hopenchange, baby.

Obama Also Cured Polio and Discovered Uranium

Matt Margolis

I can remember, during Bush’s presidency, the unemployment rate going down every month, the stock market going up, real wages going up, and all sorts of economic indicators supporting the fact that the economy was strong, getting better … for everyone. Despite month after month of data supporting Bush’s claim that his tax cuts succeeded in getting us out of recession into a period of record-breaking economic growth, Democrats found all sorts of ways to talk the economy down, and pretend as though we were living in hard economic times like the Great Depression.

So, now, with an economy now owned by Obama and his party, with the unemployment rate getting higher, we’re getting equally ridiculous claims of how Democrats “rescued” the economy, and today, Obama even tried to take credit for an economic turnaround.

President Obama on Saturday continued his administration’s careful efforts to take credit for the slowly improving economy, using his radio address to tout the economic turnaround since world leaders met in London in April.

At the time of the G-20 summit, the world’s economic situation was dire, Obama said in the radio address. The meeting in London marked “a crisis that required unprecedented international cooperation to jumpstart the world’s economies and help break the downward spiral that enveloped all our nations,” he said.

Next week, Obama and the same world leaders will gather in Pittsburgh for what Obama called “a five-month checkup” on the financial actions taken by their countries.

“Because of the steps taken by our nation and all nations, we can now say that we have stopped our economic freefall,” the president said in the address, which is broadcast on the radio and the internet.

But the president was quick to note that he is not satisfied with the extent of the recovery in the United States or globally, saying that “stopping the bleeding isn’t nearly enough.”

“Our work is far from over,” he said. “We know we still have a lot to do, in conjunction with nations around the world, to strengthen the rules governing financial markets and ensure that we never again find ourselves in the precarious situation we found ourselves in just one year ago.”

How’s that for audacity? As i recently wrote for the American Issues Project, “How can [Obama] claim the economy has rescued even as economists are warning of a double-dip recession, his own economic advisor says there may be high unemployment for years to come, US credit is shrinking at a Great Depression rate, and so on and so forth?” Some economists also put the true unemployment rate in double digits.

Are we really supposed to beliieve Obama when he says that two plus two is five? For Obama to claim he rescued the economy is like him taking credit for curing polio and discovering uranium. Sadly, there are plenty willing to drink that Kool-Aid, and talk about a million jobs “saved or created” as 7.4 million Americans have lost their jobs in less than a year.

Two plus two is five, is that the “change” Obama was talking about?

Did Obama Sell Out Poland for GE?

Mark Noonan

The story – from The Washington Examiner:

Reuters reports an interesting nugget in the wake of President Barack Obama’s decision to grant Vladimir Putin his wish and kill the Eastern European missile shield:

Shortly after the pullback on the shield programme was announced, Russia’s government said Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would meet several U.S. executives on Friday from firms including General Electric, Morgan Stanley as well as TPG, one of the world’s largest private equity firms

General Electric may be the company with the closest ties to the Obama administration (if not, GE is second only to Goldman Sachs), and here we see the company benefiting from an abrupt foreign policy change made by President Obama. But GE isn’t the only company benefiting. Reuters paints the broader picture:

“U.S. companies have arguably lost out to some European companies in joint ventures, and better diplomacy will likely improve the chances for investors in the strategic sectors of the Russian economy,” said Carlo Gallo, senior Russia analyst at London-based consultancy Control Risks.

GE CEO Jeff Immelt sits on Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and GE owns MSNBC, the network famously friendly to Obama.

Obama got some ‘splainin’ to do…