A New Foundation for Growth?

How about a new foundation for the lies of Democrats and the Obama Administration?

Received in my e-mail today from David Plouffe, who, until the middle of this month, continued to sign his e-mails;

David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

This is the first e-mail with his "title" removed.

Here's the e-mail:

President Obama recorded a special message for you about the budget he's submitted to Congress and what you can do to help it pass.

The budget President Obama has proposed isn't the same old document Washington has come to expect year after year.

Right now, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to finally confront the systemic problems that have held America back for far too long in energy, health care, and education.

But it's up to you to get involved and make it happen. Join a canvass this weekend and talk with everyone you know about the President's plan to secure long-term prosperity for our families.

After watching the President's video, you can also look up your elected representatives and let them know you support this new foundation for economic growth:

http://my.barackobama.com/budgetaction

Thanks,

David Plouffe

At My Barack Obama Link (which contains links to an Obama video and a How-To Go Door-to-Door Video):

President Obama submitted a budget to Congress that challenges the status quo and directly confronts the long-term threats to our prosperity.

But it's up to you to make sure Washington knows that Americans across the country stand by the President's plan to invest in energy, health care, and education.

Watch President Obama's message and get involved in the effort to make this plan a reality by calling your elected representatives and by joining a canvass this weekend.

Obama wants you to go door to door, on his behalf, to push his insane budget which will, undisputedly cause generational debt despite Obama’s false overtures about his entire Presidency being “for the children of today and the future”, on your relatives, friends, and neighbors.

Will you do that now? Especially since you now know the Obama Administration is responsible for protecting the salaries and bonuses to federally bailed-out loser corporations (thank you, Chris Dodd); since you now know the Obama Administration knew that our tax dollars were going to be sent to overseas banks, but now the Obama Administration is lying to you and telling you it didn't know a thing about it?

FoxNews
Shepard Smith, March 18, 2009

More on what Shepard Smith was reading about:

How Congress Protected AIG's Bonuses
March 17, 2009 4:09 PM

ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reports: During late-night, closed-door talks last month, negotiators for the House, Senate and White House stripped out a measure to the stimulus bill that could have restricted the AIG bonuses.

Here's the story:

Last month, the Senate unanimously approved an amendment to the stimulus bill aimed at restricting bonuses over $100,000 at any company receiving federal bailout funds. The measure, which was drafted by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., applied these restrictions retroactively to bonuses received or promised in 2008 and onward.

But then...

The provision was stripped out during the closed-door conference negotiations involving House and Senate leaders and the White House. A measure by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., to limit executive compensation replaced it. But Dodd's measure explicitly exempted bonuses agreed to prior to the passage of the stimulus bill.

Here's the exact language from Dodd's measure in the stimulus: "The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009..."

Obama rushed that bill through knowing no one had time to read it because those things would have been discovered. Especially after the Democrats killed two Republican additions which would have made sure federally bailed out banks and agencies would not have had even the option of bonuses or retro pay. The Democrats knew those protections and payments were in the bill. Geithner wrote the damn thing! Geithner was Obama's only choice as Treasury Secretary.

Putting two and two together yet?

It's another reason Obama is going on the Leno show tonight. He will be reaching the non-news-junkie and non-political crowd, the uninformed, the non-questioning masses (you've seen Jay Walking, haven't you?).

Obama keeps trying to blame the entire state of the economy as something he inherited. President Bush left a budget comprised of $3.1 trillion which Obama completely disassembled and changed.

Bush's Budget (from The Weekly Standard, February 12, 2008):

Bush's $3.1 trillion budget projects a near-record deficit ($401 billion, or a shade under the politically unpalatable 3 percent of GDP) for the coming fiscal year, and a surplus in 2012. But Bush has included only enough money to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the start of the fiscal year on October 1 until after the next president is inaugurated. The projected surplus assumes that congress will go along with cutting or eliminating some 151 domestic programs--which it won't. It ducks the question of reforming entitlement programs, the major domestic spending items; fails to cope with the impending crisis created by the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), designed to nab tax-avoiding millionaires but now ensnaring middle-income families; and assumes that the Bush tax cuts will be made permanent when they expire in 2010, which they won't if a Democratic congress has its way. A realistic guide to America's future priorities the Bush budget is not.

Obama's Budget (from The Weekly Standard, March 9, 2009):

The era of big government is back. But conservatives ought not simply to worry about the size of government or the federal deficit--although a $1.7 trillion deficit is an eye-popper. They should worry, too, about the shape of American government. Barack Obama may be running up World War II levels of debt, but he'll be running down the U.S. military.

Of course, that's not what the headlines on administration press releases or in the actual newspapers say. Even the leading defense industry paper, Defense News, trumpeted "Obama Budget to Boost Spending" for 2010. But a closer reading of even the sketchy budget charts provided by the administration this week paints a very different picture.

Take first the question of the current budget, the fiscal year 2010 spending that Congress will approve this year. As during the Bush years, there are two critical accounts to track: the normal or "baseline" defense budget and the "emergency supplemental" appropriations to cover wartime costs. In order to understand what's really happening, it's crucial to try to keep these distinctions clear. To make an everyday analogy, it's the difference between the sticker price of your car--what it costs to bring it home from the dealer--and the expenses of filling it with gasoline and keeping it running.

In 2009, the Bush administration's baseline budget was $513 billion, and the plan was to spend $523 billion in 2010. The Obama administration announced this week that it would "boost" the 2010 figure to $533 billion. So the Obama budget is bigger than the Bush budget, right?

The reality, though, is something quite different. Here's where the question of wartime supplementals comes into the picture. The Bush administration's last supplemental requests were for $188 billion in 2008--at the height of the Iraq surge--and a $65 billion installment on the war costs of 2009. The Obama budget adds another $75 billion in war costs for 2009, for a yearly total of about $140 billion. What accounts for the whopping difference between the 2008 spending of $188 billion and the $140 billion to be spent in 2009? It's not, unfortunately, that the success of the Iraq surge or the drawdown now beginning in Iraq are saving much money. Indeed the immediate costs of a safe withdrawal are no different from those of staying on. And, with a second surge--really, a long-term ramping up--of forces in Afghanistan about to begin, the supplemental cost of those operations is going way up.

What's happening is probably that what previously has been counted as "war costs" is migrating from the supplemental appropriations to the baseline budget. This is what reformers, good-government types, and the folks in the Obama Pentagon mean when they talk about "honest budgeting."

Particularly in the 2007 and 2008 supplementals, tens of billions of dollars were spent to "reset" the Army, which has seen its equipment stocks decimated by the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to buy needed gear like the heavy Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle--the Big Wheel-like carrier that is being used in convoys and for patrols instead of the thin-skinned Humvees. The Washington Post reported, too, that the costs of countering improvised explosive devices, the increasingly sophisticated "IEDs" that account for a disproportionate share of American casualties, are now to be paid for out of the baseline budget. The bottom line is this: The Obama defense budget isn't "boosting" anything. As should become apparent over the next two months as the administration prepares detailed defense budget proposals, this actually is the beginning of significant cuts in defense programs. What the president really means when he talks about "hard choices" is a less capable U.S. military.

The Obama budget is an especially stark and in-your-face announcement of a new direction for the country. Indeed, budgets are the most concrete expression of a government's prejudices and ambitions.

Consider how, per the budget, Obama imagines the America of 2016. The economy has recovered in fine style. The stimulus produced a spurt of growth and the economy is expanding permanently at about 2.5 percent per year. Inflation remains low, about 2 percent, the annual federal deficit is "only" $500 billion, and total GDP is a touch more than $20 trillion. These are the assumptions enshrined in the Obama budget.

But the government itself looks more like the government of France than what American governments have looked like in the past. We'll be spending $4.5 trillion on social entitlements--Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--debt servicing, and other mandatory programs. That's about 22 percent of GDP. Discretionary domestic programs--the prime source of congressional pork--have grown to nearly $700 billion, another 3.5 percent of GDP. Defense spending will be smaller. The baseline defense budget will be $594 billion, less than 3 percent of GDP. That's half the 50-year Cold War average.

The United States cannot remain the sole superpower, the guarantor of the international system, if it chooses to spend just 3 cents of every dollar on defense. The Obama administration loves to talk about "soft power" and "smart power," but the fact is that "hard power" is still real power. The Obama budget is a plan for steady American decline.

It also plans on a rapid retreat from current commitments. Announcing his Iraq withdrawal plan in a speech at the Marine base at Camp Lejeune, N.C., on Friday, Obama said--"as plainly as I can"--that U.S. combat forces would be out of Iraq by August 31, 2010, and that the "residual" force of advisers and trainers would be gone by the end of 2011. The budget codifies this timetable in dollars: The projected wartime supplemental for 2010 drops to $130 billion. The largest slice of that pie will pay for the withdrawal of 12 combat brigades from Iraq, while it's likely that the costs of fighting in Afghanistan--where commanders see 2009 as a holding of the line in preparation for more effective operations in 2010--will begin to equal Iraq costs. But the big drop is planned for 2011, the year that the Iraq status-of-forces agreement takes full effect. In that year, the Obama budget has a "placeholder" for wartime costs of just $50 billion. Based on the numbers, by 2011 Obama plans to be fighting the "Long War" at less than one-third the cost of the effort of 2008. He's fulfilling his end-the-war campaign pledges, but almost certainly at the sacrifice of any lasting victory.

An American retreat that leads to a longer-term American decline will make for a very different world. Obama's budget is a signal to friend and foe alike that the United States is turning inward, will be a less certain ally and a less powerful adversary. It's there in the numbers. Indeed, these numbers almost perfectly reprise the Clinton "peace dividend" of the 1990s--minus the peace. How the world will respond to the combination of a deep and long-lasting economic contraction and a shrinking of American power is difficult to say. The historical precedents are not encouraging: These are the conditions that preceded World War II.

There is nothing inevitable in any of this. President Obama is presenting one path forward. Other political leaders--especially those who understand America's role in the world--can present an alternative way forward.

The majority of people that watch Jay Leno don't know or understand any of this. Hell, they don't even know who the Speaker of the House is, nor are they able to recognize Joe Biden's photograph as Joe Biden.

That's why appearing on Leno is a win-win for Obama. Nothing to lose. Look like a regular guy, while demeaning the stature of the Office of the Presidency and of the White House, crack a few jokes, and answer mundane and idiotic questions that don't even come close to holding Obama to account for his insanity. The viewing public will never notice, nor will they care. It's Obama. You obey. He "won".

Be sure to keep your ears perked for the "we inherited this mess" line to be said over and over again. Listen to how many times Bush will be blamed by Obama, Obama completely unwilling to accept responsibility for his own failings and inexperience, choosing instead to be seen as a weak and unsuspecting victim - the liberal standby when nothing else is working.

Instead of Obama appearing on Jay Leno, why isn't he appearing in a setting such as the Fireside Chats (is there NOTHING original about this man?) he is proposing to hold (five of them). Networks would gladly fork over the airtime for Obama to speak to the nation. Why Jay Leno? It's all about appearances and his so-called charm (snake oil salesmanship). Get to those suckers that are born every minute.

With public outrage with the Obama Administration growing exponentially with each passing hour, I don't believe this Jay Leno appearance will have the overwhelming success Obama believes it will.

No wonder Obama chose to opt out of any kind of debate format show on network or cable. He simply does not want to be asked the hard questions because he has no answers. Especially since his pet teleprompter and tight scripting won't/can't be at his side.