Obama’s Failing Ratings and the State of the Union 2013

Via Breitbart, from Gallup:

If it weren’t for Dick Cheney agreeing with Obama on drone strikes, he’d be all in negatives.

Of course, given that even MSN is calling bullshit on Obama’s State of the Union address, maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising:

• The president claimed that “both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion.” But that’s only an estimate of deficit reduction through fiscal year 2022, and it would be lower if the White House used a different starting point.

We haven’t reduced the deficit at all, and we’re still running trillion-dollar deficits.

The “estimate of deficit reduction” is like writing out a diet.  You come up with a plan that says you’re only going to eat 2000 calories a day, you’re going to run 3 miles a day, lift weights for an hour, and do another hour of cardio.  By the end of 2013, you should be ready to run in an iron man triathalon.  Of course, when the day after you write that plan, you eat 4000 calories, waddle 30 yards to the fridge and back in a day, lift only food to your mouth, and do another hour of sleeping to rest from all your eating… you won’t find yourself at the end of the year ready to run an iron man triathanlon.

• Obama touted the growth of 500,000 manufacturing jobs over the past three years, but there has been a net loss of 600,000 manufacturing jobs since he took office. The recent growth also has stalled since July 2012.

That job growth just keeps “unexpectedly” stalling, just like the rest of the economy keeps “unexpectedly” stalling.

To continue with the working out analogy, Obama’s growth of jobs is like adding a half hour of running to your daily workout in the evening… after you take out an hour of running from your daily workout in the morning.  You can say you’re running an extra half hour, because it is a different half hour, but you still have a loss.

• He claimed that “we have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas.” Actual mileage is improving, but Obama’s “doubled” claim refers to a desired miles-per-gallon average for model year 2025.

The Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards that the government imposes are as fanciful as any other soviet pipe dream.  The party will dictate that it must be so, and when it cannot be produced, oh well – it’s the worker’s fault.  Obama declares that all cars must average 54.5 mpg by 2025.  That’s 12 years from now.  12 years ago, a 2001 Ford Taurus got 19 mpg combined.  Today, a 2013 Ford Taurus gets 23 mpg combined (and that’s ignoring that there was a massive Taurus redesign after some idiot wunderkind at Ford cancelled it).  The 2001 Toyota Camry 4-cylinder got 24 mpg combined.  The 2013 Toyota Camry 4-cylinder gets 28 mpg combined.

Ford and Toyota both make good cars.  The Taurus with a V6 over 12 years was able to be improved by 4 mpg.  The Camry with a 4-cylinder over 12 years was able to be improved by 4 mpg.  The new demands by government are that they go up to 54.5 mpg.  For the Taurus, that’s requiring an increase of 31.5 mpg – more than double.  For the Camry, that’s requiring an increase of 26.5 mpg – almost double.  And remember again, that’s average economy, so for every fun, desirable vehicle like the Ford Raptor, Toyota FJ, Jeep Wrangler, Ford Mustang, Dodge Challenger or any of the light trucks that are made that get in the teens to 20s for mpg, they’ll have to crank out some ridiculous number of vehicles that get above 55 mpg.

Keep in mind this is the Obama government that declared that we need to be running on biofuels that DO NOT EXIST.  They can make mandates, and when the mandates can’t be met, they impose fines, or seize control.  The objective is to fundamentally transform America, and it’s working.  Auto manufacturers will have to either stop making cars people want, or they’ll have to make the ones the government lets them.

And government-made cars suck.

• Obama said the Affordable Care Act “is helping to slow the growth of health care costs.” It may be helping, but the slower growth for health care spending began in 2009, before the law was enacted, and is due at least partly to the down economy.

Obamacare is a trillion-dollar tax hike.  Those taxes will be passed on to consumers.  We’ve already begun to see it, as businesses like Stryker Medical start cutting jobs; and they will be raising costs.  All those taxes have to come from somewhere.  Obamacare is also scheduled to cost every family about $20,000.

There is nothing there that will “slow the growth of health care costs” under Obama policies unless you have a very fanciful vision of the future… just like the 54.5 mpg cars, magic biofuels, increasing jobs, and recovering economy.

GUNS:The Republicans have already given in.

Reblogged from Doc Thompson Show:

A friend has a connection in the office of a Member of Congress (in a leadership position.)
He forwarded this email exchange that seems to indicate the Republicans will agree to SOME new laws that limit your 2nd Amendment rights. Could it be that, behind closed doors, they have ALREADY caved in?

Very interesting post over at the Doc Thompson show.  Veracity unknown, but would be unsurprising.  Happy new year.

Today’s Gun Control News Roundup

To start off, the First Amendment is under attack as well as the Second.  From Bunch Blog:

All of these video games, do they really need to be so violent? is the question that will come next. Studies show that video games lead to murder! ideologues will shout. Why are we teaching our kids to kill? Don’t believe me?

My point? Just this: Gamers should be extremely, extremely wary about the liberal impulse to “do something” in the wake of a tragedy. Guns aren’t going anywhere. Video games about war marketed to easily impressed teens and young adults (the demographic that tends to commit mass murder)? Well, they’re slightly less secure.

Keep in mind the people who wanted to ban music the most in the 1990s were Democrats led by Tipper Gore; and those who went after video games included then-Democrat Joe Lieberman (now an independent due to totally unrelated factors).

Quentin Tarantino’s new movie Django Unchained, which is a dose of the old ultra-violence, struck me as strange over the weekend.  Listening to CNN and FOX on XM radio, almost every commercial break from the Connecticut mass murder was an ad for a movie… about mass murder.  Is it justified in context of the film?  Haven’t seen it.  But it brings up some questions, which Tarantino has addressed by having the premier cancelled, but otherwise just saying:

Speaking in New York Quentin Tarantino said: “I just think you know there’s violence in the world, tragedies happen, blame the playmakers. It’s a western. Give me a break.”

The Oscar-nominated director of Inglourious Basterds and the Palme d’Or winning Pulp Fiction, said blame for violence should remain squarely with the perpetrators.

The only people responsible for crimes and violence are those who commit them.  Millions of people every day who are also immersed in popular culture don’t go out and commit murders.

Reason Magazine has a couple of good pieces today on how gun control doesn’t work – the first about how mass shootings aren’t really on the uptick:

those who study mass shootings say they are not becoming more common.

“There is no pattern, there is no increase,” says criminologist James Allen Fox of Boston’s Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.

The random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox says. Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer….

Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.

Another Reason piece highlights the Magical Thinking of Gun Controllers, summed up easily in their last sentence:

The notion that restrictions like these can have a noticeable impact, let alone that they can “end” or “stop” occasional outbursts of senseless violence, is hard to credit unless you believe what Obama insists he does not: that evil can be legislated out of the world by acts of Congress.

And finally, from the Atlantic, a piece that notes that we’ve already had the debate on gun control.  And gun control lost to gun rights:

There isn’t anything wrong with gun-control advocates lamenting what, by their lights, is a public that’s reaching wrongheaded conclusions on the subject and is trending in the wrong direction.

But too many pieces I’ve read make a mockery of robust debate in a pluralistic society by ignoring the fact that current policy is largely (though not entirely) a reflection of the U.S. public disagreeing with gun reformers. The average American is far more likely than the average journalist or academic to identify with gun culture, to insist that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to bear arms, to exercise that right, and to support various state concealed-carry laws.

…

Opponents of gun control have been widely vilified in the past week. Very few attempts have been made to understand what motivates them — and given that they’re a subset of Americans with little representation in the national media, attempts at understanding would likely do a lot to inform the rest of the American public. For the most part, these people aren’t in fact motivated by selfishness, as so many critics have stated or implied in the last few days, and almost without exception, gun-control opponents are as horrified by the events in Newtown as anyone calling for a new assault-weapons ban or better background checks or a ban on ammunition.

The point isn’t whether they’re being treated fairly or not. It’s that a gun debate can only be productive in a country as pro-gun as this one when the folks on either side at least understand the deeply held disagreements at issue. So far, too many newly vocal reformers are operating under the conceit that if only America “finally” had a conversation about gun violence, everyone would immediately see the wisdom of the position reformers have advocated all along.

It’s an interesting piece in that it recognizes that journolists and reporters are widely in opposition to the actual citizenry.  It’s somewhat screwed up in that it assumes there’s a debate to have between the wrong (gun grabbers who ultimately support tyranny, whether knowing or unknowing) and right (citizens’ rights advocates).  There are a few restrictions (violent felons, mentally ill, etc.) that are important, but beyond those very, rare few who are incapable of being responsible citizens, shall not be infringed means what it says.

Many people need to understand how rights work:

A HUMAN RIGHT.

Obama’s Newtown Speech

Full transcript here, but the important part is this:

Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?

Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

There’s a problem to this.  Obama is anti-gun.  He has been since he advocated a total ban on handguns when he was in Illinois.  The “politics are too hard” argument is because he faces resistance from some Republicans and a few Democrats who listen to their constituents.

Violence visited against children, like violence against adults, can be stopped.  The Israelis prevent it every day.  Kids are not traumatized.

The Second Amendment, and modern firearms, are necessary.

I’ve told the story about my Russian professor, how she lamented Columbine, but how when asked about the disappearances of intellectuals in her country by government agents, suddenly understood.  Any death by violent maniacs is a tragedy.  Disarming a population, to subject them to violence by the government, is ultimately a million tragedies – one that becomes so overpowering that it becomes a statistic.  My professor understood because a professor of hers when she was a student was “disappeared” by the government.  She understood that in a painful way that yes, there is a price for liberty – and we can, should, and must do things about lunatics abusing liberty.  The problem is that the loss of liberty and freedom results in a total loss of liberty and freedom in the long run.

She understood what Benjamin Franklin said about liberty:

Those that sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither, and will lose both.

Unless, by some bizarre one in a million chance that Obama means the “price of freedom” by how we quit institutionalizing lunatics decades ago due to corruption at one or two institutions and instead medicate them and send them off into the world to be dangers to themselves and others.  If he meant that, he’d find everybody behind him, myself included.  Of course, he doesn’t, because it’s easier to attack an inanimate object it is to make judgements about people; even if that inanimate object is ultimately a tool used far more often for freedom and liberty than for tyranny.

Update: And by the way, Obama let funding for school security lapse:

Beneath the expressions of grief, sorrow and disbelief over the Connecticut school massacre lies an uneasy truth in Washington: over the last few years the Obama administration and Congress quietly let federal funding for several key school security programs lapse in the name of budget savings.

Government officials told the Washington Guardian on Friday night that two Justice Department programs that had provided more than $200 million to schools for training, security equipment and police resources over the last decade weren’t renewed in 2011 and 2012, and that a separate program that provided $800 million to put police officers inside the schools was ended a few years earlier.

The Cliff/Stimulus Problem Summarized in One Phrase

From Yahoo News:

The total bill: about $255 billion out of the federal government’s pocket – an amount the GOP would likely say needs to be offset by spending cuts elsewhere.

For emphasis, I’ll write it again, if you missed it the first time, and I’ll put it in bold.

The total bill: about $255 billion out of the federal government’s pocket – an amount the GOP would likely say needs to be offset by spending cuts elsewhere.

The federal government doesn’t have pockets.  It doesn’t have money of its own.  It has what it takes from the taxpayer.

That right there sums up so much of the problem – the belief that government has money and that it doesn’t take it from taxpayers… and that can be extended to a lot more problems in the proposition, as well as pretty much all of the root overspending causes.

This is the proposition:

How about a little government economic stimulus?

That may sound incongruous considering the budget deficit and the push from Republicans to cut government spending.

But President Obama’s first offer to avoid going over the “fiscal cliff” holds out the hope of at least some stimulus. This would include extending the 2 percentage point Social Security payroll tax cut, boosting a tax incentive to businesses, establishing a $50 billion bank for long-term infrastructure projects, and extending unemployment benefits.

Stimulus doesn’t work, it’s more Keynesian idiocy.  Why doesn’t it work?  Because it takes from the citizen either through direct taxation or through devaluation of the citizens’ currency, strains it through government, and redistributes it to losers that can’t function in a free market.

This is redistribution plain and simple.  The government will take $255,000,000,000 from taxpayers, then turn around and spend much of that money on an army of bureaucrats to filter it through, then give it to programs and policies that aren’t working and aren’t solvent on their own, and in some cases, those that directly hurt both the nation’s ability to engage in an economic recovery.

UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS

And, finally, Obama wants to extend unemployment benefits, which would cost about $30 billion.

Under current law, if Congress does nothing, the maximum number of weeks in which an individual could receive jobless will drop to 26 from the current 73 weeks for states with unemployment over 9 percent and 63 weeks for states with unemployment over 7 percent.

If Congress does nothing about the program during the lame-duck session, some 2.1 million jobless will lose their benefits in the first week of January, says Judy Conti, a federal advocacy coordinator at the National Employment Law Project (NELP) in Washington. By the end of the March, she says, another 900,000 people will lose their benefits.

“Forty percent of the unemployed are long term unemployed,” she says. “They have been out of the workforce for over six months.”

Oh really?  You think the reason they might be out of work for 6 months is because they get 17 months of unemployment benefits that incentivize not working?  Of course, Ms. Conti is an advocacy coordinator (a job that would not exist in the free market) whose existence in life is entirely dependent on her ability to take from some by force and redistribute to others.

There’ve been studies done on unemployment before, and every time, the eggheads who study it are shocked to find out that when unemployment runs out, people get jobs.

Consider the Welfare Cliff from the other day:

Unless you’re making a lot, there are diminishing returns to actually working.  And when you’re making close to $50,000-$60,000 in benefits for not working, why bother?

The planners are either naively blind to this, or are embracing it as a destructive means to obliterate the United States.  Of course, it’s “government money”, as in, once again, taken from productive citizens and given to non-productive citizens, all the while enshrining the state as the lord and savior of the poor, naive serfs.

And the politics of it are Obama setting the doofus Republicans up to either take the blame for tax rate increases (that the Democrats were opposed to during the Bush years) when he doesn’t work with Republicans, or for being the winner when he gets to institute whatever policies he feels like if they cave… and he’ll still blame their “obstructionism” for his own failures.

ZoNation: Obama Represented, Romney Didn’t

Alfonso Rachel is a very, very sharp guy.

Can we have Colonel Allen West in 2016, please?

He may not be busy, depending on how many extra votes the Democrats find.

Big Bird, Binders, and Bayonets

Sharp.

But why has it taken this long to juxtapose the words that came out of both sides of his mouth?

On Bayonets and Horses

One of the highlights of last night’s presidential debate was Obama, who can’t pronounce corpsman, smugly insulting Romney about what the military uses and doesn’t use.  The highlight of the highlight, was of course, horses and bayonets.

We don’t use horses, either, according to Obama.

This is where Obama’s stupid really meshes with other types of stupid.  The saying is that you always fight the last war.  For those unfamiliar with the saying, what it shows is that your military acquires experience based on one war, and then tries to reapply it.  Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t.  Civil War and Napoleonic tactics weren’t up to the task of The Great War, WWI tactics and strategies and tools weren’t up to use in WWII, WWII tactics had to change for Korea, Korean ideas didn’t work in Vietnam, Vietnam didn’t work in Gulf War I, Gulf War I didn’t work in Afghanistan, Afghanistan didn’t work the same in Iraq, and Iraq’s successes don’t translate back to Afghanistan so well.  Generals had years to train on what they just fought, though, with up-and-coming officers and NCOs who set the culture of the military being those who fought the last war, so they apply that expertise and often forget the past.

Obama’s spiel about aircraft carriers was not only insulting to Romney, but it ignores that there are ways to make carriers go away.  A couple ASBMs and suddenly the carrier is a white elephant.  And with Obama’s pledge to slow development of future weapons systems and missile defense, we know we won’t have a defense against ASBMs.  The technology he wants to rely on he also wants to keep undeveloped.  You can’t have it both ways, Mr. President.   And you certainly can’t lecture us on technology you’re halting as the solution.  A large navy is very important to power projection.  Numbers of ships are important.

This dovetails into the recent news story about Congress putting money away for tanks the military says it doesn’t need.

Congress doesn’t want to kill any jobs in their districts and argue that tank production is “necessary to protect the industrial base.”

Not so necessary on the battlefield though, since the last real tank battle occurred in the First Gulf War. Since then tanks have largely been used for anti-personnel purposes, or for making new doors in structures to aid the movement of ground troops. Nevertheless, the U.S. hasn’t halted production since before World War II.

Congressmen not wanting to kill jobs and “protecting the industrial base” is stimulus and earmark pork nonsense.  They’re speaking Keynesian gibberish and want to keep govt. money flowing into their districts and that’s the best they can come up with.  Maintaining tooling and factories for production certainly isn’t a bad idea, but that has to be balanced with what the country should and should not be spending.

On the other hand, the argument that “the last real tank battle was 20 years ago” is precisely the “last war” mentality.  The “last war” is now Iraq and Afghanistan.  Suddenly, smart men with no wisdom declare we will never again need tanks because we didn’t need them this week.  There’s some semi-famous quote saying how military men are like children and how they’ll drop blankets when it’s warm and rain gear when the sky is clear because they can’t think for tommorow; and there are plenty of proverbs about prudent men vs foolish men.  Exactly opposite the article, we should be keeping up tank production and refurbishment exactly because they’re valuable military tools.  That they provide jobs in some congressman’s district is entirely irrelevant to the inherent military usefulness of a tank.

While it doesn’t float and is ultimately crewed by DATs, it’s a very useful tool.

Obama’s ignorance of the military isn’t just that we still use horses and bayonets, it’s that he doesn’t understand why we use them, nor does he understand that technology (that he’s trying to stop, no less) is not magic.

Update: HotAir has an excellent piece on how horses, bayonets, and most importantly ships still matter.  Ships are power projection, and that piece goes into much greater detail.  It’s worth the read.

Joe Biden: Laughing at the Issues

When a wise man has a controversy with a foolish man, The foolish man either rages or laughs, and there is no rest.

- Proverbs 29:9

Big Bird and Big Government

During the first presidential debate, Romney mentioned that he’d cut public funding for PBS, which really is kinda outside the mandate of the Constitution.  Sure, there might be a way to squeeze it in under Article I Section 8 with “promoting science and the useful arts”… if you completely ignored the end of that sentence, but basically the point was that PBS’s 7% or so funding received from the government is a waste of money.  It’s especially a waste when the govt. needs to tighten its belt and leave taxpayers more of their money, in order to leave people to spur the economy on.  Big Bird can stand on his own two huge feet because he’s plenty marketable, and something like 93% of Sesame Street’s money comes in from merchandising.  What’s merchandising, you ask?

Heck, as a coworker pointed out to me, Abelardo Montoya, as in Big Bird in Mexico (from Plaza Sesamo) is so well off as to have a section of a Formula One track running through (or immediately adjacent to) the big Sesame Street theme park in Monterrey.  He also has a nice fountain.

This guy survives through being something people love and want, and are willing to buy stuff from.

Why does American Big Bird make $314,000/year and still need money from taxpayers?

It was all meant as an explanation of how spending taxpayer money is supposed to be for important constitutional functions, not for just throwing at “things we feel we want”.

And naturally, the Dems took it overboard, to the point of alienating everyone.

And now, as HotAir reports, they’re doubling down on stupid.

As prominent Democrat Dick Harpootlian put it, “Big Bird is iconic. He — or it — she — I don’t know what it is — is an icon with a whole generation or two of Americans.” Well said. If Mitt Romney won’t stand up for giant muppets, who will he stand up for?

And Dems are running with it even though Sesame Street wants nothing to do with this and sent a cease-and-desist order.

Sesame Workshop is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization and we do not endorse candidates or participate in political campaigns. We have approved no campaign ads, and as is our general practice, have requested that the ad be taken down.

Big Bird is successful without government money.  Oh, and Big Bird in the US also has theme parks.  Big Bird doesn’t need big government subsidies.  He’s not too Big Bird to fail, he’ll fly on his own.