Look how's now meddling:
Why did Obama decide to intervene on behalf of a "president" obviously abusing his power and to prevent the military from removing him once he started acting like a dictator? He didn't put nearly that much effort into assisting Iranians who have gone into the streets and died to protest the mullahcracy that oppresses them.
And yet our president, acting contrary to American interests, chose the route of least resistance and condemned what many Hondurans believe was a restoration of constitutional order. The president will find himself in familiar territory with this condemnation - Castro, Ortega, and other Latin American leftist thugs also condemned the coup. Maybe someone could look it up but when was the last time we were on the same side with Cuba on any international issue?
We're getting a close look at Obama's priorities, and they're hideously out of step with democracy and the rule of law.
Basically, after standing aside and saying he can't judge Iran, Obama leaps into action and snarls against the removal of someone trying to unconstitutionally declare himself president-for-life.
Hopechange!
Hotair wonders:
At the risk of exploding what little right-wing blog cred I have left, I can't believe The One would align himself with Chavez without some compelling reason. Even if you believe the worst conservative suspicions about him, i.e. that he's some lefty dictator fanboy, the political price he'll pay for doing this is too steep to justify it unless there's a greater good he's aiming at. Witness Drudge's headline right now ("Obama lashes out at Honduras; sides with Chavez, Castro") or Krauthammer in the clip [above] offering a useful rule of thumb for Latin America.
Barry's going to eat a ton of shinola for this — but why? What's the strategic benefit? Is he so focused on isolating Iran that he's willing to take Chavez's side on Honduras in order to peel him away from Ahmadinejad? If so, how does that affect Iran's nuclear agenda? I don't get it. The most likely explanation is that Obama's simply obsessed with "repairing America's image in the world," and if that means occasionally taking the side of a Chavista stooge to prove he's the anti-Bush, then that's what he'll do.
Labels: BHO, Smart Diplomacy
This is exactly what I've beent alking about
Tom Blumer uses the dark arts of math on a few policies.
Applying basic math to recent news reports can unearth very useful information. Here, phrased as those dreaded "word problems," are four such examples (numbers are rounded in some cases to make calculating the results easier).
Problem 1: Chrysler sold 79,000 vehicles in May during 26 selling days. During the month, before 800 dealers were terminated, it had 3,200 dealers. How many cars did the average Chrysler dealer sell per day in May?
Answer: Less than one (79,000 ÷ 26 ÷ 3,200 = 0.95).
Comments: That really makes you wonder what your billions of tax dollars are subsidizing, doesn't it? Even with the dealer reductions, if overall sales volume stays the same, the average Chrysler dealer will be selling about 1.27 cars a day. Big whoop.
Problem 2: The Underground Railroad Freedom Center in downtown Cincinnati may receive a two-year subsidy of $3.1 million from the State of Ohio to keep its doors open. The Center receives 62,000 visitors per year who pay $9 or less to get in. If attendance is stable, how much will each visit be subsidized by state taxpayers during the next two years?
Problem 3: President Obama claims that his health care plan will cost $1 trillion over 10 years while reducing the number of Americans without health insurance from 46 million to 30 million. If all of this comes to pass, how much will taxpayers shell out for the average newly insured person per year, even if the expected drop in the number of uninsured occurs immediately?
Problem 4: An advocacy organization claimed in mid-June that "clean energy" jobs grew by 9.1% during the decade ending in 2007, while jobs in the economy as a whole grew by only 3.7%. Seasonally adjusted data found at the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that there were 124 million Americans working at the end of 1997 and 138 million at the end of 2007.
A) What was the percentage of job growth in the whole economy during the decade?
B) What does that result do to the claim by the advocacy group that "the number of jobs in America's emerging clean energy economy grew nearly two and a half times faster than overall jobs between 1998 and 2007″?
The answers will shock and depress you.
But as shown by the stimulus there's a reason the mass media doesn't ask questions like this, and present the uncomfortable answers.
Let's look at the Stimulus when broken down
1) President-elect Obama claims that spending approximately $800 billion will create 3.675 million new jobs. That comes to $217,000 per job. This doesn't sound like a very good value, especially with the national average salary around $40,000. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just mail each of these workers a $40,000 check?
Huh... and right now the stimulus is doing far worse than the White House's prediction if we did nothing.
Similarly with healthcare:
If all of this comes to pass, how much will taxpayers shell out for the average newly insured person per year, even if the expected drop in the number of uninsured occurs immediately?
Answer: $6,250 ($1 trillion ÷ 10 ÷ the 16 million alleged reduction in the uninsured).
So why doesn't the gove just cut a check? It'd be porkish and grossly unfair, but at least it would be cheaper and less liberty-killing.
The real reason, of course, is that neither option allows for as much increase in the government, and their cronies, consolidation of their power and control of your life.
So, is the mass media that weak on basic analysis that they can't question the magnitudes of how much these policies really cost? Or are they being deliberately incurious?
Some simple hand calculations can give basic information on how much a program costs, how effective it is, and so on. It's like these people have never balanced a checkbook, run an experiment, organized a business project, price-compared goods or services, or built anything.
Its like they have no concept of tradeoffs, of weighting the pros and cons, that the variable space is limited (see: speed versus weight versus power). It's almost like they believe their plans will always work and have no downsides. That any naysayers are looking at false choices.
Labels: Math
For argument...
Ed Morrissey gets to the core of Obama's seeming desire to not offend and later on talk with the mullahs.
The mullahs aren't going to go for it anyway. They need big-time scapegoats to explain big-time repression. We can expect the mullahs to blame the US and Israel for this crisis, hoping to leverage anti-American and ati-Semitic fervor to get them off the hook for their brutality against their own people. They will paint Mousavi and his allies as puppets of the CIA and Mossad, if they haven't already started. While they do that — and it would take years to make that stick this time — they're not going to have tea with Obama, Hillary Clinton, or anyone else from the US.
It's interesting that the totalitarian regime has the exact same talking points as the leftists that way "Obama can't speak out!". Make of that what you will.
But let's say, for argument, that the mullahs suddenly got a hankering for Hope & Change and offered a sit-down between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Barack Obama. Why would we accept that offer and bolster Ahmadinejad's prestige? How would that make the US look, sitting down publicly with a regime that bloodily suppressed peaceful demonstrations that demanded accountability for a stolen election? We would be an accessory to Iran's oppression by giving the mullahcracy more credibility than its own people.
Is this "smart power"?
It's what happens when an idealized fantasy world crashes into reality.
Labels: BHO, Iran, Smart Diplomacy
Pesky Reality
Steven Den Beste has some thoughts on Iran
This collection of photos from Iran is really quite amazing.
Fifteen years ago it wouldn't have been possible. Fifteen years ago the people risking their lives with those cameras would have been using film. Fifteen years ago it would have taken days if not weeks for them to smuggle film out of such an area, get it developed, and get the pictures published (on paper). That's because fifteen years ago pictures were a physical medium. That's all changed. Now pictures are bits.
Now the cameras are digital, the smuggling is by satellite phone or internet, and publishing is on the web. In some cases the picture can be seen by thousands around the world within an hour of when it is taken.
The Iranian government reportedly is trying to prevent this, by shutting down the phone system and seriously limiting access to the internet, but unless they're willing to cut the internet entirely there's really no way to prevent the word from getting out.
I am always amused by poets, artists, musicians, playwrights who claim they're going to change the world. It's all blather, self-important presumption. Poetry and paintings don't change the world.
Digital cameras and the internet are changing the world, and it's scientists and engineers who did that, not poets or artists or musicians.
But it's not all good
I am growing increasingly appalled at the silence from the Obama administration. I think I understand it, of course.
It goes against the grain for Obama to endorse Ahmadinejad's victory, when it was so obviously fraudulent. But if Obama comes out and endorses the protesters, and they lose, then he fears it will poison any chance he might have of negotiating with the Ahmadinejad government after things calm down. So he's waiting until he sees how things begin to resolve there, and in the mean time he isn't even willing to condemn the Iranian security forces for using live ammunition to shoot protesters.
I understand that. But it still makes him and us look lily-livered and unprincipled.
I have an intuitive feel that there's also some deer-in-the-headlights going on. Obama's world view is being shaken: this wasn't supposed to be happening. When he got elected and went on his world apology tour, it was supposed to usher in a new era in international relations where everyone would unclench their fist and begin to negotiate in a spirit of comity. After Obama made his speech to the Muslims in Cairo, the whole region was supposed to calm down and be less confrontative. And somehow it isn't happening like that. It's like he doesn't really have any idea just how to cope with how things actually are happening now.
This is what I think is a central problem with Obama. Simply put: the man never failed. There was never a situation where his worldview, his theories came to a crashing failure-riddled explosion.
Part of that is intrinsic to the Senate of course, the buck rarely stops with any one senator so responsibility doesn't have it's grubby impact, but there's more to it than that. For example the first (of two pre-Presidential) autobiographies was not planned to be an autobiography. The publisher thought they had hired Mr. Obama to write a book on race, not on... himself. However, Obama got more money for his efforts, more insulation from consequences.
The mass media is also doing its hardest to insulate and secure Obama, to keep reality from going in and intruding with his vision. That's why things like hard employment numbers, the intelligence results of waterboarding, Obama's actual record at university, and things like Iran are... inconvenient.
The result of this is that Obama's worldview is not tempered by –well- reality. He truly believes in his own abilities and his own rhetoric. And why not? Look at how far his ability to strongly and charismatically recite someone else's words has gotten him. He became President, without any major legislation under his belt, without any executive experience, without even finishing a senate term.
Now, if only reality didn't get in the way of his rhetoric. If only other nations did what he wanted. If only...
Best of hands.
Gatewaypundit has Obama's response
And guess what... den Beste was right.
Barack Obama finally responded to the Iranian crisis today.
He said, "It's up to Iran to determine its own leaders."
"We need a deeper assessment of what's going on," [State Department spokesman Ian] Kelly said.
Meanwhile... The regime is shooting at protesters from rooftops.
But, Obama needs more time to assess the situation.
Ahh... can you smell the bulwark of democracy? Much better than that boorish bush
And here's another roundup from Ace of Spades
And related to the previous post Hotair reminds: Health care is a 'crisis.' This is but a 'situation.'
Labels: BHO, Iran, Science
Why don't we have longer to debate?
Because then people woudl say no.
Sure, we all pay for expensive treatments for other people who are going to die soon, anyway. But we also all get to enjoy the benefits of a industrious and profitable health care industry. And even if we ourselves don't get to live to be 90 or 100 or more, there's a much better chance that our kids or their kids will.
And yet Washington is in such a rush to "fix" what's not broken, that six weeks is all we have to stop this madness. Just yesterday Joe Biden admitted the Porkulus Bill was pretty much a waste. That was nearly $800 billion down the drain, because we "needed" to pass a bill so quickly that no one had the time to figure out what was really going on. Now we're talking another $1.5 trillion in nationalized health care spending.
Shouldn't we take a little longer than six weeks to talk about it?
And risk it not passing? Perish the thought.
And why Don't we Fix Medicare First?
Because then there'd be evidence of how well Obama's "savings" and reform would preform. Better, for them not us, to simply cram these "reforms" down all of our throats.
And here's another national health program that doesn't work.
It's like their solution to failure is to try it again, but bigger and more expensive with less individual choice.
Hope and Change.
Labels: BHO
From "Death to Amercia" to "Death to Goverment"?
Iranians protest their goverment stealing an election. Rojer L. Simon notes:
As far as I know, our reactionary president still wants to negotiate with the mullahs, despite an obviously stolen election in an already phony democracy. The people of Iran are obviously feeling differently. Here they chant "Death to the government that cons the people!" in the streets of Iran. Pass this video around. Our president doesn't support democracy. We can.
Shameful but unsurprising. Our president has a nasty habit of insulting our allies, sucking up to our enemies, and ignoring the plight of the opressed in favor of the "plight" of his cronies.
Michael Totten has a continuous roundup. And has the footage of Iranians chanting "Death to Goverment."
Richard Fernandez has some thoughts as well.
Events in Iran will inevitably put the spotlight on the administration's police of engagement. As I wrote in the previous post, 'engagement' with a dictatorial regime is an all purpose word which is meaningless without the the modifiers 'for regime change' or 'for behavior change'. Despite the fact that current unrest is centered around the vote stealing; it is not about whether Mousavi is better than Ahmadinejad. The vote is bizarrely enough, a referendum on the legitimacy of the regime. Michael Ledeen notes that Ahmadinejad's opponent, Mir Houssein Mousavi, is no democrat. His qualification for popularity is tsimply hat he is not Ahmadinajad. Some of the emotion we are witnessing now can only be understood as a protest against the status quo. Whether Ahmadinajad or Mousavi won isn't the central fact. The central fact is that the Ayatollahs remain in power by fraud and coercion.
Steve Schippert at Threatswatch argues that the silver lining in Ahmadinejad's election is that the current administration can no longer pretend it is negotiating with a 'moderate' — something it might have done if Mousavi won. But the question is why Washington should want to pretend. It is important to consider the extent to which tacitly accepting the current regime in Teheran legitimizes it; and thereby makes it harder for the Iranian people to topple. The US may not be able to materially aid in the regime's overthrow, but like a doctor, it shouldn't hurt where it cannot help.
Labels: BHO, Iran
Pesky Reality!
The Obama Stimulus: Predictions vs. Reality
Remember each penny is 200 jobs. Feeling Stimulated yet?
Don't just sit there Do Something!
We have added at least a trillion dollars to our national debt and the accomplishments for that spending are worse than if we had done nothing. Where is the Do Nothing Congress and the Do Nothing Presidency when you need them? If only they had put the effort into raising the price of electricity while lowering the reliability of supplies. Well they are doing that.
Hat Tip: Glen Reynolds.
Labels: BHO, Math
Unspinnable?
Is the economy getting that bad?
Never before have we seen the US unemployment rate rise so quickly over a 4 month period since they started tracking the statistic in 1948 than we have today under the Obama Administration.
The unemployment rate under Barack Obama has gone from 7.6% in January to 9.4% in May-- nearly two full points in 4 months.
Tensions are also rising on Obama's economic people too. Though that doesn't keep them from blaming Bush.
A few numbers.
The May Unemployment numbers are in. Care to see how they track with the Administration's expectations?
Why it's almost like the stimulus is worse than doing nothing!
How shocking.
Meanwhile the number of people that strongly disapprove of Obama now equal those that strongly approve. Note the long term trend. And note that it's 34%-34% Quite polarizing for such a "New Politics", Bipartisan fellow.
Meanwhile Cheney's numbers are going up.
Polls have errors and are problematic in putting too much sway in, but the long term trends can give relative motions. Here's amore detailed chart of Obama's approval ratings.
Meanwhile the media...
Let's just say that them calling Obama a messiah is not an exaggeration anymore
Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama's Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: "I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above – above the world, he's sort of God."
But don't worry, you can trust these folks to tell you the truth about what the Whitehouse is up to.
Also on the link is the media's latest brazen talking point. Sure Obama changes his position, but since its for the greater good its justified.
You see lying and conning America is a-okay because it's for a higher purpose. The common rabble have to be lied to, the truth would scare them or make them angry. Isn't it comforting to see the media agree with the political class, agree that it's for the best if they all coverup and lie for the Whitehouse, after all it's for your own good.
Labels: BHO, The News