Obama in Rollingstone: “My confidence in the American people is stronger than it was when I came into office.”

 Paul Mirengoff in 2012 Presidential Election, Media, Obama administration

Obama damns American people with faint praise

Article  from PowerLine:

President Obama has given an interview to Rolling Stone Magazine (more evidence, if you had any doubt, that Obama is really cool). During the interview, he discussed his reading habits. It turns out that Obama reads every single New York Times columnist, and considers Paul Krugman “obviously one of the smartest economic reporters out there.” In addition, Obama reads Andrew Sullivan, and finds that he provides thoughtful analysis.

Obama also told Rolling Stone that “my confidence in the American people is stronger than it was when I came into office.” This amounts to damning the American people with faint praise.

Indeed, according to Jodi Kantor’s book, The Obamas, the president’s confidence in Americans remains low. Kantor writes that “there were many times the president seemed to be giving up on the public, too, convinced Americans would never understand his point of view…” (via The Campaign Spot).

Obama surely is right about this. The American people are quite unlikely ever to understand the point of view of a man who finds insight in Andrew Sullivan’s work and who considers Paul Krugman’s lefty editorializing to be stellar “economic reporting.”

A Quick Review of the Bob Hope View

 Bob Hope was one of the few stars in Hollywood who was an outspoken Repbulican.   He lived to be 100…..and kept his humor throughout his life.

ON TURNING 70
‘I still chase women, but only
downhill’.

ON TURNING 80
‘That’s the time of your life when even your birthday suit needs pressing.’

ON TURNING 90
‘You know you’re getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.’

ON TURNING 100
‘I don’t feel old. In fact, I don’t feel
anything until noon. Then it’s time for my nap.’

ON GIVING UP HIS EARLY CAREER, BOXING
‘I ruined my hands in the ring. The referee kept stepping on them.’

ON NEVER WINNING AN OSCAR
‘Welcome to the Academy Awards or, as it’s called at my home, ‘Passover’.

ON GOLF
‘Golf is my profession. Show business is just to pay the green fees.’

ON PRESIDENTS
‘I have performed for 12 presidents and entertained only six.’

ON WHY HE CHOSE SHOWBIZ FOR HISCAREER
‘When I was born, the doctor said to my mother,

Congratulations, you have an eight pound ham.

ON RECEIVING THE CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL

‘I feel very humble, but I think I have the strength of character to fight it.’

ON HIS FAMILY’S EARLY POVERTY
‘Four of us slept in the one bed. When it got cold, mother threw on another brother.’

ON HIS SIX BROTHERS
‘That’s how I learned to dance. Waiting for the bathroom.’

ON HIS EARLY FAILURES
‘I would not have had anything to eat if it wasn’t for the
stuff the audience threw at me.’

ON GOING TO HEAVEN
‘I’ve done benefits for ALL religions. I’d hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.’

 

Certin humor passes with the times.   We are presently living through a generation which will be known for it absence of humor, but renowned for its foulness, vulgarity, and points South.

 

I have never been a devoted fan of slapstick unless it was silent movies slapstick.   The quirky piano music seemed to accompany the show superbly.

One of the funniest movies I ahve ever seen in my life starred Bob Hope and Jane Russell (a Mnnesota born gal) who was noted for appearances rather than acting. 

It is called:  PALEFACE.

I am certain the film is blacklisted somewhere by the strident lefties  of today’s Hollywood political correct ‘elite’.      Warning:   There is no nudity or swearing in the film.

When comedian George Burns reached his 100th birthday, with his cigar in hand, he quipped:  “If I knew I was going to  live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”

Thank you Bruce Taber for sending the Hope humor listings.

 

Thomas Sowell’s Best Sayings

Skip to comments.

The 25 Best Quotes From Thomas Sowell
Townhall.com ^ | April 20, 2012 | John Hawkins            sent by Mark Waldeland

Posted on Friday, April 20, 2012 6:08:05 AM by Kaslin

Thomas Sowellis not only one of the finest columnists in the business, he’s a prolific author, a brilliant economist, and he has an incomparable knack for simplifying complex concepts that few other human beings can match. Enjoy the distilled wisdom!

25) “Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’of what someone else has worked for?”

24) “Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don’t need to imagine it. It’s called the United States of America.”

23) “Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controlsto keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets.”

22) “What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are given ‘class’ labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing ‘class’ makes class itself a nebulous concept.“

21) “There are few talents more richly rewarded with both wealth and power, in countries around the world, than the ability to convince backward people that their problems are caused by other peoplewho are more advanced.”

20) “The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits ever since 1994. You would never learn that from most of the media. Similarly you look at those blacks that have gone on to college or finished college, the incarceration rate is some tiny fraction of what it is among those blacks who have dropped out of high school. So it’s not being black; it’s a way of life. Unfortunately, the way of life is being celebrated not only in rap music, but among the intelligentsia, is a way of life that leads to a lot of very big problems for most people.”

19) “The first lesson of economicsis scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

18) “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”

17) “The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from ‘society,’ rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibilitywould be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by ‘society’.”

16) “No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”

15) “Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored.”

14) “There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.”

13) “Civilization has been aptly called a ‘thin crust over a volcano.’ The anointed are constantly picking at that crust.”

12) “We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did,but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past.”

11)” For the anointed, traditionsare likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.”

10) “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

9) “Intellectis not wisdom.”

8)” The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?”

7) “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

6) “Experiencetrumps brilliance.”

5) “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”

4) “One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.”

3) “Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in governmentis any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.”

2) “In short, killing the goose that lays the golden eggis a viable political strategy, so long as the goose does not die before the next election and no one traces the politicians’ fingerprints on the murder weapon.”

1) “There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.”

---

Skilled Con and Failure Corzine joins Skilled Con and Failure President Obama as Bundler

Corzine: Obama’s Tainted Bundler

By Jonah Goldberg

Jon Corzine left Goldman Sachs with a net worth far exceeding even that of Mitt Romney today. Many accounts of his tenure at Goldman suggest he “failed up” the corporate ladder.

Pushed out of Goldman in a power struggle (sparked in part by his support for a government bailout of Long-Term Capital Management), he nonetheless pocketed somewhere between $350 million and $500 million when the company went public. He used the cash to buy himself a Senate seat, spending $62 million out of his own pocket.

 After the Senate, he spent nearly $40 million of his own money to win the New Jersey governorship. While he was running for senator, the married-but-separated Corzine struck up a romantic relationship with Carla Katz, also married and head of Local 1034 of the Communications Workers of America. They broke up in 2004, but the flirting apparently never ended. In 2007, Katz and Corzine were both involved in negotiations over a state workers’ contract. In one e-mail during that time obtained by the Newark Star-Ledger, Katz informs the governor, “BTW, I had an over the top erotic dream about you last night. Bad boy!!” 

Bad boy indeed. When the couple broke up, and after her union had endorsed Corzine and worked for his reelection, the governor’s lawyers negotiated a settlement whereby he reportedly paid Katz more than $6 million and forgave a half-million-dollar loan he made to her when they were still an item.When Corzine ran for reelection as governor, both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden stumped for him. Biden explained that from the moment he and the president sat down to figure out their economic strategy, “Literally, the first guy I called was Jon Corzine. It’s not a joke. It’s not a joke. First of all, he’s the smartest guy I know in terms of the economy and on finance, and I really mean that.”

Despite that ringing endorsement, Corzine lost his 2009 reelection bid to reformer Chris Christie. So Corzine went back to Wall Street, as chief executive of MF Global Holdings, a bond-trading firm. A research note from the firm of Sander O’Neill Partners summarized what the Street expected from Corzine: “We suspect that his contacts in Washington could prove useful as MF Global navigates a shifting regulatory environment.”

Corzine proceeded to do exactly the sorts of things Wall Street has become infamous for: making crazy bets with other people’s money, counting on governments to bail out the private sector, and, allegedly, expecting to get friendly treatment from regulators. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was an old friend and colleague of Corzine’s at Goldman Sachs and in Washington. Gensler had been a key aide to Senator Paul Sarbanes and had reportedly worked closely with Corzine writing the Sarbanes-Oxley bill. At MF Global, under Gensler’s watch, Corzine bet more than $6 billion on the European-sovereign debt crisis, using borrowed client money. MF Global also apparently commingled client and company funds to pay off financial obligations, which is illegal. 

Under Corzine, MF Global lost well over $1 billion, and I don’t mean in the profit/loss sense. I mean it was physically misplaced and Corzine cannot account for where it went. The Justice Department is investigating, and news-media accounts suggest a criminal prosecution is likely. Somewhat better late than never, Gensler recused himself after MF Global went bankrupt.So, why the trip down memory lane? Because the Obama campaign just announced that Corzine is still on the list of top-tier bundlers for the Obama reelection campaign. Corzine has raised more than half a million dollars for Obama. 

Obama is constantly denouncing “millionaires and billionaires” for playing by their own rules. It’s true that the campaign told one reporter in February that it wouldn’t take more money from Corzine himself, but it’s been happy to let the man solicit donations for Obama even as Corzine is under investigation by Obama’s own Justice Department. How cozy.Tell me, what’s the point of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and its countless sympathizers in the Democratic party and the media, if that’s good enough? Whatever happened to changing how Washington works?

We’re about to enter a very long campaign in which an apparently squeaky-clean Mitt Romney is going to be demonized for his success and dragged through the gutter. Meanwhile, Obama took cash from a true denizen of the gutter. 

Obama Buys More Votes with 5,400,000 more Disability Checks

More than 5 Million Join Disability Rolls under Obama Administration

A record 5.4 million workers and their dependents have signed up to collect federal disability checks since President Obama took office, according to the latest official government data, as discouraged workers increasingly give up looking for jobs and take advantage of the federal program, says Investor’s Business Daily.

• Since the recession ended in June 2009, the number of new enrollees to Social Security’s disability insurance program is twice the job growth figure.
• In just the first four months of this year, 539,000 joined the disability rolls and more than 725,000 put in applications.
• As a result, by April there were a total of 10.8 million people on disability, according to Social Security Administration data released last week.
• Even after accounting for all those who have left the program — about 700,000 drop out each year, mainly because they hit retirement age or died — that’s up 53 percent from a decade ago.

To be sure, disability rolls have grown steadily as a share of the workforce since the 1990s. 

• The main causes of this broader trend, according to economists David Autor and Mark Duggan, are the loosening of eligibility rules by Congress in 1984, the rise in disability benefits relative to wages, and the fact that more women have entered the workforce, making them eligible for disability.
• But the big factor in the recent surge is the slow pace of the economic recovery after the severe recession.
• That has kept the unemployment rate above 8 percent and created an enormous pool of long-term unemployed and discouraged workers.

Few people who get on disability will ever participate in the labor force again.  What’s more, the explosive growth in enrollment is not only increasing the financial strain on the Social Security Disability Insurance trust fund — which is scheduled to go bankrupt in 2018 — it’s boosting costs for Medicare as well, since enrollees can qualify for Medicare after two years.

Reform ideas so far have spurred little action.  But with the program’s bankruptcy looming just a few years off, and with the economy showing no signs of producing a surge in jobs, that indifference to reform may soon have to change.

Source: John Merline, “5.4 Million Join Disability Rolls under Obama,” Investor’s Business Daily, April 20, 2012.

For text:

http://news.investors.com/article/608418/201204200802/ssdi-disability-rolls-skyrocket-under-obama.htm

For more on Economic Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=17

Michael Goodwin: Obama Bilking the American TaxPayer for Re-election Campaign

O’s ‘Ax’ to grind

By MICHAEL GOODWIN   at the New York Post:

President Obama, we are assured, is “apoplectic” and “furious” over the scandal at the General Services Administration. David Axelrod says so.

How does Axelrod know? The answer illustrates the collapse of governing at the Obama White House.

Axelrod does not work for the United States in any capacity. He is Obama’s campaign strategist. He does not work in Washington. He lives and works in Chicago, headquarters of the Obama campaign.

Yet he is the go-to guy when the administration has something to say, even on important taxpayer business like the GSA scandal. So there he was Sunday, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” segueing between comments on government and the campaign.

He said “we” when he meant the White House, as though they are the same. Sadly, for most purposes, they are.

This is not a case of a man wearing two hats. It is an illustration of how governing has taken a back seat to campaigning. Obama has put aside his day job and turned full time to the quest for four more years.

There is no budget, and no serious attempt by the White House to make one. The explosion of debts and deficits, growing strains on Medicare and Social Security, the expiration of tax cuts, warnings from Europe about the impact of debts on markets— all set aside until after the election. So, too, plans the president has on foreign policy, the Mideast, gay marriage, carbon taxes and regulations.

Incumbency is a powerful tool, and no president forsakes its advantage. Yet the impression of Obama’s first two years, that he never stopped campaigning, has morphed into the sense that he does nothing else. When it comes to the people’s business, there is no there there.

He has held twice as many fund-raisers as George W. Bush at this stage, most involving the ultimate perk — the use of Air Force One, with taxpayers picking up most of the cost.

His official trips outside Washington virtually all involve battleground states. He has been to Ohio 20 times, Florida 16 times, Pennsylvania 15 and Michigan 11, according to CBS News.

Obama’s bid to energize the youth vote is an excuse to visit other swing states. He flew yesterday to the University of North Carolina for his 11th visit to that state, then to the University of Colorado, for visit No. 7 there. Today, he is scheduled to address students in Iowa — his eighth visit there.

He’s making the rounds of another part of his base, the late-night comedy shows. He made his first comments since the dimensions of the Secret Service prostitution case became known on the Jimmy Fallon show yesterday. Yuk, yuk, ha ha.

Taxpayers are on the hook for this charade because the president is using the trip to push a bill to freeze interest rates on student loans. It’s the perfect two-fer, a campaign issue in swing states that passes for government action. All with a little fun on the side, of course.

With Axelrod surely behind the gambit, a cynic could argue that having one man wear two hats is efficient. But the White House doesn’t even have to make that fatuous claim because the press doesn’t question Axelrod’s dual role.

Previous presidents sent a top aide out to explain government business, but this White House seems hollowed out of serious adults. Obama’s latest chief of staff, former budget director Jack Lew, bungled the facts on Senate rules so badly in his first appearance that he went into hiding.

Obama could send out the vice president, though that could be really dicey. Joe Biden visited the Everglades Monday and ended up joking that his Secret Service staff might shoot a Florida official named Ronald Bergeron.

A recording and transcript, available on CNSNews.com, captures Biden’s bizarre ramble: “But you see this man right here, my Secret Service guy? He played in pro football, also was on that national championship team that Clemson had. He said if I go, he’ll shoot you, Ronnie, so I’m only kidding. That’s not true. He didn’t say he’d shoot Ronnie. He said he’d shoot the alligator if I went. I just think it’s incredible, and I still think you’re nuts, Ronnie.”

So that’s what the Obama presidency has come to: Axelrod or idiocy.

Another birdbrain city rule

The Nanny City never sleeps. And neither should you if you want to avoid a hefty fine from Mayor Bloomberg’s busybodies.

The New York Times reports that the health code was amended, giving the Health Department wider power to crack down on . . . birdbaths. Some homeowners report fines of up to $350 for letting sparrows take a dip on summer days.

Somebody ought to make a video game out of it — Angry Bird Lovers.

Because of the West Nile virus, the health code makes it a violation to keep “standing water” instead of just “stagnant water,” a distinction only a bureaucrat could love. And inspectors, beyond citing the breeding of mosquitoes, can also fine for conditions “conducive” to the breeding, the Times says.

In theory, the changes don’t sound dramatic. In practice, zealous agents can turn the nuances into weapons against well-meaning citizens. And they do.

The handful of examples offer a cautionary tale to the mayor’s latest anti-smoking initiative. He wants to require residential landlords to spell out in writing each building’s policy about smoking.

Again, it doesn’t sound dramatic. But how will the policies be used and enforced? What will be the penalties?

The birdbath cases are instructive. Today’s rule is tomorrow’s insanity. Someday soon, there will be stories about apartment owners fined for smoking tobacco in their own homes.

Bet on it.

Terrorists never rest

Osama bin Laden is gone, but the Brooklyn trial of a man who plotted to launch suicide bombings in city subways is a reminder of the many evil plots that grew out of al Qaeda and why we in New York must stay vigilant. A would-be jihadist testified for the government that he was assigned to carry explosives in his shoe and blow up an airliner after 9/11, and another man said he worked on a plan to blow up the Long Island Rail Road.

Imagine — some people think it’s time we lower our guard. Nuts!

Thought bubble

Newt Gingrich has found a way to stay in the news: by thinking out loud about quitting the GOP presidential race. In fact, talk of dropping out is about the only time the two-time front-runner makes news, which means he’s not likely to quit. It would mean giving up show business!

Yank-ee doodle

Headline on Drudge: “Detroit judge proudly pulls a Weiner.”

Because the reference needs no explanation, it’s the sort of thing to make New Yorkers proud. The rest of the country follows our lead, even into the abyss.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/ax_to_grind_se8toyZvlKPOHmwYNEKy4N#ixzz1t4Tqp0t0

More Fraud in Obamacare……Honesty, Forthrightness Constantly Evade Obama

ObamaCare’s Newest Fraud

By David Harsanyi  at Human Events:

If the Obama administration expended as much creative energy saving taxpayers money as it does obscuring the costs of Obamacare, we’d probably have a program worth saving.

But from day one, the health care law has been larded with double-counting gimmickry to conceal its $1 trillion price tag. It started by measuring eight years of services against 10 years of taxes, and it has continued with an avalanche of waivers that shield friends of the White House from the cost of the very law they helped pass.

 We now have another unsavory example of how government-controlled health means politicized health care.

For about 12 million Medicare beneficiaries, private insurance plans lower costs and drive up quality. If the law had been followed as written, Obamacare should have slashed the popular market-oriented Medicare Advantage program this year. The cuts are needed to divert funding to a Medicaid expansion that will provide coverage to millions of uninsured — the central case for the creation of Obamacare.

It’s no surprise that Medicare’s most market-focused program pushes down premiums and enrollment up. So rather than allow millions of enrollees in vital swing states, such as Florida, to experience a major benefit cut right before an election, the administration founded an $8.5 billion pilot program. This year, for example, the program offsets about 70 percent of the cuts in Advantage. The cost will be paid from the Medicare trust fund (which had a $288.3 billion shortfall this year). The consequences will be put off, conveniently, until after the election.

A new report by the Government Accountability Office, though, has called on the Obama administration to shut down that program for obvious reasons. There are two problems with this “demonstration program.” First: It has absolutely nothing to do with quality or consumers.

Medicare rates Advantage plans on a five-star scale. Most Obamacare bonuses were supposed to be reserved for four or five stars. That’s where $145 billion in “savings” will be extracted from over the coming decade. The program, judging by the administration’s own reasoning, would not improve quality, because most of the money in the pilot program was paid out to three- and 3 1/2-star plans that it claims do not offer services worthy of those bonuses.

And the GAO is not alone in making this judgment. The nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission stated that the entire pilot program “sends the wrong message about what is important to the program and how improved quality can best be achieved.” MedPAC Chairman Glenn Hackbarth wrote to Health and Human Services Department officials and said the program “lessens the incentive to achieve the highest level of performance.”

Second: It’s a taxpayer-financed political slush fund.

In its report, the GAO said the size of the pilot project “dwarfs all other Medicare demonstrations — both mandatory and discretionary — conducted since 1995 in its estimated budgetary impact and is larger in size and scope than many of them.” If it offers no benefit to quality and it uses more debt financing as “savings,” then what reason but politics does it have for existing?

HHS spokeswoman Erin Shields claims that the pilot program’s bonuses (which Obamacare would effectively eliminate for savings) help Medicare improve quality, as they “build on the improvements due to star quality ratings to learn how to best incentivize quality while we bring payments down.” The most ironic aspect of all is this: There is already just such a program available that does exactly what this pilot program proposes to do; it offers more choices, incentives for saving and lower costs through competition. Best of all, it doesn’t cost $8.5 billion to implement. It’s called market competition.

 

CNN, at last, challenges Obama to do something besides blaming others

What happens when a news anchor

holds Obama accountable for his performance?

 by Ed Morrissey  at HotAir:

Well, maybe this explains why it doesn’t happen very often.  On Sunday evening, CNN’s Don Lemon told viewers that “people like Sarah Palin have a point” when they say that Barack Obama needs to stop blaming everyone else for the shortcomings in his own performance, including the economy.  Noel Sheppard called this “heresy,” and that’s not as exaggerated as one might think — if you read the responses coming to Lemon from Twitter:

Click below to view a whining Barack Obama blaming others for his absence as Leader of the Free World:

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/04/24/what-happens-when-a-news-anchor-holds-obama-accountable-for-his-performance/

Rep. Issa: “We are busy in Washington with a corrupt government”

Rep. Issa: Obama Admin Proving To Be the Most Corrupt in History

“We have a role to play because we passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act some years ago… We are busy in Washington with a corrupt government, with a government that I said perhaps because of the money, the amount of TARP and stimulus funds, was going to be the most corrupt government in history and it is proving to be just exactly that. This money going though the hands of political leaders is corrupting the process, whether it is Solyndra, GSA, or a number of other scandals. Our mandate is to go after the wrongful acts of government or to review for reorganization laws already passed. In the case of Wal-Mart, they will be punished under existing laws. As we review Wal-Mart, it has to be to look at government’s role not simply hauling people in because it makes good headlines,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) told Bloomberg Television today.

Click on below for video :

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/04/24/rep_issa_obama_admin_proving_to_be_most_corrupt_in_history.html