Teleprompter President thanks himself

Obama In St Patrick's Day Teleprompt Blunder

Mr Cowen stopped, turned to the president and said: "That's your speech."

A laughing Mr Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.

Mr Obama is an accomplished orator but is becoming known in America as the "teleprompt president" over his reliance on the machine when he gives a speech.

Looks like he is going to give George Bush a run for his money. Somebody stop him before he teleprompts again! Sphere: Related Content

Cincinnati Tea Party

We are not alone. The time has come to take back this country and reject more Bush/Obama spending. Congress needs to go. Look at how much money they have spent in the three years since Pelosi and Reid took office. They will break the country unless we break them. Sphere: Related Content

Sweden's Government Health Care

Sweden's Government Health Care

Malmo, with its 280,000 residents, is Sweden's third-largest city. To see a physician, a patient must go to one of two local clinics before they can see a specialist. The clinics have security guards to keep patients from getting unruly as they wait hours to see a doctor. The guards also prevent new patients from entering the clinic when the waiting room is considered full. Uppsala, a city with 200,000 people, has only one specialist in mammography. Sweden's National Cancer Foundation reports that in a few years most Swedish women will not have access to mammography.

Our health care system gives people unequal treatment. Some people spend a lot of money for top of the line treatment. Some people don't spend a dime and get what they can at a free clinic. I would hate to think the solution is to give everyone shitty healthcare at a free clinic. Equality in something usually means that everyone has very little.

Dr. Olle Stendahl, a professor of medicine at Linkoping University, pointed out a side effect of government-run medicine: its impact on innovation. He said, "In our budget-government health care there is no room for curious, young physicians and other professionals to challenge established views. New knowledge is not attractive but typically considered a problem (that brings) increased costs and disturbances in today's slimmed-down health care."

These are just a few of the problems of Sweden's single-payer government-run health care system. I wonder how many Americans would like a system that would, as in the case of Mr. D. of Gothenburg, prohibit private purchase of your own medicine if the government refused paying. We have problems in our health care system but most of them are a result of too much government. Over 50 percent of health care expenditures in our country are made by government. Government health care advocates might say that they will avoid the horrors of other government-run systems. Don't believe them.

Walter Williams is one of my heros. Sphere: Related Content

DC Spends $28,813.22 Per Public School Student

Vouchers vs. the District with ‘More Money than God’
Posted by Andrew J. Coulson

That is an quite a bit of money for a horrible public school system. Maybe the answer isn't throwing more money at the problem.

I read a book of Coulson's, Market Education. It was an interesting book and I am a big fan. Sphere: Related Content

Links

Why I Miss Bill Clinton

It's hard to overstate the expansion Obama proposes. Leave aside the supposedly temporary spending binge that constitutes his stimulus package. Under his budget blueprint, total spending would soar by roughly 75 percent above what it was last year.

Of whom else could that be said? Do you expect to be spending 75 percent more 10 years from now? Does your employer?

and this

This increase may not sound like much, but it is. Before the current recession began, reports budget analyst Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation, government spending amounted to about $24,000 per household. Under Obama's plan, it would exceed $32,000 per household (in inflation-adjusted dollars). Someone will have to pay for every cent of that spending, and it won't be just the rich.

Obama's Charitable Taking
When tax increases are "savings," reach for your wallet.

But it turns out that tax increases account for half of those "savings." From Obama's perspective, it seems, letting people keep their own money qualifies as a "wasteful and ineffective program." That makes sense if you believe all resources are the government's to distribute as it sees fit, which is the premise underlying the multitrillion-dollar spending binge that Obama calls "A New Era of Responsibility."

Under the Bush administration, Obama said, "a surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy." Whatever you think about the wisdom of Bush's tax cuts, they amounted to taking less from people, not giving more to them. Obama makes it sound as if there is no meaningful difference between robbing Peter to pay Paul (which is what he has in mind when he talks about "rebalancing the tax code") and leaving Peter alone (or, more accurately, robbing him less thoroughly)—except that the latter option is, in Obama's view, morally inferior.

And this...

In response to nonprofit organizations worried that limiting the deduction for charitable contributions will reduce donations, The Washington Times reports, Orszag "said Mr. Obama took care of that by giving charities government money to make up part of the difference." Orszag noted that "in the recovery act, there's $100 million to support nonprofits and charities." In essence, then, Obama plans to take money people otherwise would have given to the charities of their choice and give it to the charities of his choice.

Editorial: Cap-and-trade plan will sink Michigan

The nation's gross domestic product contracted at an annualized rate of 3.8 percent in last year's fourth quarter -- the worst economic record in nearly three decades. Is this really a good time to be talking about a carbon tax? How will such talk impact investment decisions?

Obama promises to use some of the revenues for tax relief for certain workers and some of the rest for subsidies for alternative energy. But that won't make up for the damage this huge new tax will do to the economy, especially in Michigan.

A similar program in Europe hasn't worked. European automakers complained about carbon dioxide limits the European Union proposed in 2007 as damaging to the economy.

The Obama cap-and-trade program will place even more of the economy under the control of the federal government. The only upside is that the negative impact it will have on economic growth and job creation will take care of the carbon emissions problem, for sure.

An Assault on Authentic Compassion

A study released Friday by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University shows that if the provision had been in place in 2006, charities would have lost almost $4 billion in donations in the intervening period. With the incomes of the so-called wealthy dropping, at the same time that their taxes are going up, it’s hard to see how limiting the deduction will not have a significant impact on charitable giving. The dollars taken away from private donations and directed into government coffers are not going to be magically replaced.

...

The Obama administration’s unprecedented intrusion into the private sector betrays its underlying philosophy. In his speech before a joint session of Congress last week, the president declared that he doesn’t believe in bigger government. Oh yes he does, in ways we have never quite seen before.

With this proposal, President Obama is saying as directly as it can be said that the federal government is better able than private citizens and the charities they support to decide how these donation dollars are best distributed. Conservatives, by contrast, believe in the principle of subsidiarity — which in this instance means that charity is best performed at the most local and immediate level possible, and by “mediating” institutions rather than large, distant, and bureaucratic ones. This is not an abstract doctrine; it is based on the accumulated wisdom of the ages.

A Moderate Manifesto

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”

Sphere: Related Content

Neophyte in The White House

Barack Obama surrounding himself with spivs and chancers

Andrew Bolt has the scoop on Obama from the land downunder.

So for those impressed more by words and racial symbols than performance, the most unqualified president since before even John F. Kennedy remains above the kind of vicious media criticism routinely heaped on Bush.

But how loudly would the people who cheer Obama have screamed if Bush had, for instance, surrounded himself with this extraordinarily long list of spivs and chiselers?

He goes on to list Tom Daschule, Nancy Killefer, Timothy Geithner, & Hilda Solis.

Hmm. What is it about Big Government Democrats that they so hate paying the taxes they impose on others? And we haven't finished with that list, either.

Obama's first choice as Commerce Secretary, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, had to quit to fight grand jury charges of selling favors.

The Neophyte in the White House...

Not being able even to pick a clean team would be embarrassing enough - proof that the neophyte in the White House has run nothing in his life but an election campaign - but worse is that Obama actually promised to transform Washington with "the most sweeping ethics reform in history . . ."

He would take on "the issue of money in politics", ensure that lobbyists "will not work in my White House", and never let influence-peddlers "build relationships with members of my administration based on how much they can spend".

Ah, who you are going to believe: Obama's smooth tongue or his list of new appointees?

Check that list: among the some 150 staff assigned by Obama to government agencies before Inauguration Day were dozens of former lobbyists.

Click the link and read the whole article. It sums up the Messiah's first month rather well. I wonder what would the press reaction be if Bush had started out this way. I also wonder when our slobbering press will begin to even notice.

This guy has never run a damn thing in his life. Now he is running our country into the groud. Big Government here we come.

I don't see a way that he can't fail. No man alive could take on as many projects and hope to achieve them. He is setting himself up to fail and he will do so in a grand fashion. I don't expect the media to blame him or even take notice. It is all George Bush's fault. Sphere: Related Content

Questions for Dambisa Moyo

Q: As a native of Zambia with advanced degrees in public policy and economics from Harvard and Oxford, you are about to publish an attack on Western aid to Africa and its recent glamorization by celebrities. ‘‘Dead Aid,’’ as your book is called, is particularly hard on rock stars. Have you met Bono?
I have, yes, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year. It was at a party to raise money for Africans, and there were no Africans in the room, except for me.

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Chris Floyd for The New York Times

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Deborah Solomon's "Questions For..." Column »
What do you think of him?
I’ll make a general comment about this whole dependence on “celebrities.” I object to this situation as it is right now where they have inadvertently or manipulatively become the spokespeople for the African continent.

You argue in your book that Western aid to Africa has not only perpetuated poverty but also worsened it, and you are perhaps the first African to request in book form that all development aid be halted within five years.
Think about it this way — China has 1.3 billion people, only 300 million of whom live like us, if you will, with Western living standards. There are a billion Chinese who are living in substandard conditions. Do you know anybody who feels sorry for China? Nobody.

Maybe that’s because they have so much money that we here in the U.S. are begging the Chinese for loans.
Forty years ago, China was poorer than many African countries. Yes, they have money today, but where did that money come from? They built that, they worked very hard to create a situation where they are not dependent on aid.

What do you think has held back Africans?
I believe it’s largely aid. You get the corruption — historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty — and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people.

If people want to help out, what do you think they should do with their money if not make donations?
Microfinance. Give people jobs.

But what if you just want to donate, say, $25?
Go to the Internet and type in Kiva.org, where you can make a loan to an African entrepreneur.

Do you have a financial interest in Kiva?
No, except that I’ve made loans through the system. I don’t own a share of Kiva.

You just left your longtime job as a banker for Goldman Sachs in London, where you live. What did you do there, exactly?
I worked in the capital markets, helping mostly emerging countries to issue bonds. That’s why I know that that works.

Which countries sought your help?
Israel, Turkey and South Africa, primarily.

Why didn’t you get a bond issue going in your native Zambia or other African countries?
Many politicians seem to have a lazy muscle. Issuing a bond would require that the president and the cabinet ministers go out and market their country. Why would they do that when they can just call up the World Bank and say, “Can I please have some money?”

I keep reading about a new crop of African presidents who are supposedly free-market guys, including Rupiah Banda, the president of Zambia.
There are lots who are nominally free market, but they haven’t been aggressive about implementing those policies.

What do your parents do?
My mother is chairman of a bank called the Indo-Zambia Bank. It’s a joint venture between Zambia and India. My father runs Integrity Foundation, an anticorruption organization.

For all your belief in the potential of capitalism, the free market is now in free fall and everyone is questioning the supposed wonders of the unregulated market.
I wish we questioned the aid model as much as we are questioning the capitalism model. Sometimes the most generous thing you can do is just say no.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED, CONDENSED AND EDITED BY DEBORAH SOLOMON Sphere: Related Content