O Defends Himself

President Obama's Defense Of His Policies With False Historical References Looks Foolish

By MARK STEYN
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Our lesson for today comes from George and Ira Gershwin:

"They all laughed at Christopher Columbus/When he said the world was round/They all laughed when Edison recorded sound/They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother/When they said that man could fly/They told Marconi wireless was a phony ..."

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang it in the 1937 film "Shall We Dance?" Seventy-five years on, the president revived it to tap-dance around his rising gas prices and falling approval numbers.

Delivering his big speech on energy at Prince George's Community College, he insisted the American economy will be going gangbusters again just as soon as we start running it on algae and windmills.

He noted that, as with Wilbur and his brother, there were those inclined to titter: "Let me tell you something. If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail — (Laughter) — they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society. Llaughter.) They would not have believed that the world was round. (Applause.)

We've heard these folks in the past. They probably would have agreed with one of the pioneers of the radio who said, 'Television won't last. It's a flash in the pan.' (Laughter.) One of Henry Ford's advisers was quoted as saying, 'The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a fad.' (Laughter.)"

The crowd loved it. But President Algy Solyndra wasn't done:

"There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don't believe in the future, and don't believe in trying to do things differently.
"One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, 'It's a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?' (Laughter.) That's why he's not on Mount Rushmore — (laughter, applause) — because he's looking backwards. He's not looking forwards. (Applause.) He's explaining why we can't do something, instead of why we can do something."

It fell to Nan Card of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio to inform the website TalkingPointsMemo.com that the quotation was apocryphal. Hayes had the first telephone in the White House, and the first typewriter, and Edison visited him to demonstrate the phonograph.

But obviously Hayes isn't as "forward-looking" as a 21st century president who believes in Jimmy Carter malaise, 1970s Eurostatist industrial policy, 1940s British health care reforms, 1930s New Deal-sized entitlements premised on mid-20th century birth rates and life expectancy, and all paid for by a budget with more zeroes than anybody's seen since the Weimar Republic.

If that's not a shoo-in for Mount Rushmore, I don't know what is.

I was interested in the rest of Obama's yukfest of history's biggest idiots. Considering that he is (in the words of historian Michael Beschloss) "the smartest guy ever to become president," the entire passage sounded as if it was plucked straight from one of those "Top 20 Useful Quotes for Forward-Looking Inspirational Speakers" websites.

And whaddayaknow? President Hayes, the TV flash in the pan, the horse is here to stay — they're all at the Wikiquote page on "Incorrect Predictions."

Fancy that! You can also find his selected examples at the Web page "Some Really Really Bad Predictions About the Future" and a
bazillion others.


Given that the ol' Hayes telephone sidesplitter turned out to be a bust, I wondered about the others.

The line about television being a "flash in the pan" is generally attributed to Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948. She was a New Zealand-born lass who, while at Oxford, wrote to the newly founded BBC with some ideas on using radio in schools.

By the '70s, the educational programming she had invented and developed was used in 90% of U.K. schools, and across the British Commonwealth from the Caribbean to Africa to the Pacific. She apparently used the flash-in-the-pan line in a private conversation recounted some years after her death by her fellow BBC executive, Grace Wyndham Goldie, a lady I knew very slightly.

It was in the context of why she was pessimistic about early attempts at educational television. Somerville would not have been surprised by "American Idol" or "Desperate Housewives," but she thought TV's possibilities for scholarly study were limited.
If you remember Leonard Bernstein giving live illustrated music lectures on Beethoven on CBS in the '50s, and you've lived long enough to see "quality public television" on PBS dwindle down to dreary boomer nostalgia, lousy Brit sitcoms, Lawrence Welk reruns and therapeutic infomercials, you might be inclined to agree that as an educational tool TV certainly proved "a flash in the pan".
And that's before your grandkid gets home from school and complains he's had to sit through Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" again.

What was Obama's other thigh slapper? Oh, yes: "The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a fad." The line is generally attributed to "the president of the Michigan Savings Bank" in 1903.

That would be George Peck, born in 1834 on a hardscrabble farm in Connecticut. Due to a boyhood accident, he was unable to use one arm and so was no good for agricultural labor.


So at the age of 16 he started as the lowest paid clerk in a Utica dry goods store. From this unpromising start, Peck built one of the largest dry goods businesses in Michigan.

Was he, as the president said, one of those men "who don't believe in the future"? Not at all. He was president of the Edison Illuminating Co., named for the guy who invented that light bulb the U.S. government has banned. Henry Ford was Peck's chief engineer.
Peck set his son and Ford up in a shop in Detroit to work on their prototype horseless carriages. After Ford departed, the first porcelain spark plug was baked in Peck's shop.

Christopher Columbus? Once upon a time, your average well-informed high-schooler, never mind the smartest president in history, understood that Columbus was laughed at not because everyone believed the world was round: Educated Europeans of his day accepted the earth was spherical and had since Aristotle's time. They laughed because they thought he was taking the long way round to the East Indies. Which he was.

So let's see. The president sneers at the ignorance of 15th century Spaniards, when in fact he is the one entirely ignorant of them.

A man who has enjoyed a million dollars of elite education yet has never created a dime of wealth in his life sneers at a crippled farm boy with an eighth-grade schooling who establishes a successful business and introduces electrical distribution across Michigan all the way up to Sault Ste Marie.


A man sneers at one of the pioneering women in broadcasting, a lady who brought the voices of T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton and others into the farthest flung classrooms and would surely have rejected Obama's own dismal speech as being too reliant on "Half-a-Dozen Surefire Cheap Cracks for Lazy Public Speakers".
A man whose own budget officials predict the collapse of the entire U.S. economy by 2027 sneers at a solvent predecessor for being insufficiently "forward-looking".

A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like Peck, and purveyors of scholarly excellence like Somerville. It's not clear why it needs a smug, overcredentialed President Solyndra to recycle "Crowd-Pleasing for Dummies" as a keynote address.
They all laughed at Columbus, they all laughed at Edison ... How does that song continue? "They laughed at me ..."
At Prince George's Community College they didn't. But history will, and they will laugh at us for ever taking him seriously.
© Mark Steyn, 2012

2013 Fiscal Cliff

The U.S. Cruises Toward a 2013 Fiscal Cliff

As tax cuts expire and spending falls, the economy will be hit with a 3.5% decline in gross domestic demand.

By ALAN S. BLINDER

At some point, the spectacle America is now calling a presidential campaign will turn away from comedy and start focusing on things that really matter—such as the "fiscal cliff" our federal government is rapidly approaching.

The what? A cliff is something from which you don't want to fall. But as I'll explain shortly, a number of decisions to kick the budgetary can down the road have conspired to place a remarkably large fiscal contraction on the calendar for January 2013—unless Congress takes action to avoid it.

Well, that gives Congress plenty of time, right? Yes. But if you're like me, the phrase "unless Congress takes action" sends a chill down your spine—especially since the cliff came about because of Congress's past inability to agree.

Remember the political donnybrook we had last month over extending the Bush tax cuts, the two-point reduction in the payroll tax, and long-term unemployment benefits? That debate was an echo of the even bigger donnybrook our elected representatives had just two months earlier—and which they "solved" at the last moment by kicking the can two months down the road. And that one, you may recall, came about because they were unable to reach agreement on these matters in December 2010. At that time, President Obama and the

Republicans kicked one can down the road 12 months (the payroll tax) and another 24 months (the Bush tax cuts).
The result of all this can kicking is that Congress must make all those decisions by January 2013—or defer them yet again. If the House and Senate don't act in time, a list of things will happen that are anathema either to Republicans or Democrats or both. The Bush tax cuts will expire. The temporary payroll tax cut will end. Unemployment benefits will be severely curtailed. And all on Jan. 1, 2013. Happy New Year!

In a re-election year, the U.S. president is making the world and all its troubles...vanish. Photo: Getty Images.

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There's more. As part of the deal ending the acrimonious debate over raising the national debt ceiling last August, the president and Congress created the bipartisan Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, commonly known as the "super committee." It was charged with finding ways to trim at least $1.5 trillion from projected deficits over 10 years. Mindful that the committee might not prove to be that super, Congress stipulated that formulaic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion would kick in automatically if the committee failed.

Sure enough, it failed. So those automatic cuts are headed our way starting Jan. 15, 2013. To make this would-be sword of Damocles more frightening, the formula Congress adopted aimed half the cuts straight at the Pentagon.

Now, you don't really believe the defense budget will be cut that much, do you? Probably the rest won't happen, either. But if it all did, the resulting fiscal contraction—consisting of both tax increases and spending cuts—would be in the neighborhood of 3.5% of gross domestic product, depending on exactly how you count certain items, all at once. That's a big fiscal hit, roughly as big as what a number of European countries are trying to do right now, though with limited success and with notable collateral damage to their economies. An abrupt fiscal contraction of 3.5% of GDP would be a disaster for the United States, highly likely to stifle the recovery.

At this point, you are probably thinking: Well, of course Congress will find ways to wriggle out of its self-imposed budgetary corset. I agree. But the invisible hand won't do it; someone needs to figure out how.

It is next to certain that nothing will be done about the fiscal cliff during the election season. In fact, some Republicans are now threatening to renege on the spending cap for fiscal year 2013 that they agreed to last summer. In the absence of progress between now and Election Day, Congress will have about eight weeks left—including Sundays, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve—to either (a) find a solution to the long-running fiscal battle or (b) kick the can down the road again.
Bet on (b). Also bet that the agreement will come just before the bubbly flows on New Year's Eve. An outcome like that is far more likely than falling off the fiscal cliff. But my point is that finding a clever way to kick the can down the road again is becoming a bigger and bigger challenge. And Congress has barely coped with previous such challenges.

Fast forward to December 2012. The lame duck Congress will have on its plate all the issues it had to deal with in the December 2010, August 2011, December 2011, and February 2012 budget battles, plus the automatic cuts mandated by the failure of the super committee, plus the legacy of whatever claims and promises are made during the campaign. We may also be bumping up against the national debt ceiling again. And who will have to sort it all out? A Congress whose days are numbered and whose complexion may have been altered dramatically by the election.

The current betting odds say that President Obama will be re-elected in November, with Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate. Does anyone think a mix like that will be less contentious than the one we have now? And does anyone think that Republicans, seeing control of both houses of Congress on the horizon, will be more compromising in the lame duck than they have been in the recent past?

In sum, while we probably will not fall off the fiscal cliff in January 2013, there are ample opportunities for stumbles and slips between now and then. So wouldn't it be nice if the two parties engaged on this issue prior to Election Day?
Mr. Blinder, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, is a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 19, 2012, on page A17 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The U.S. Cruises Toward a 2013 Fiscal Cliff.

Seth Leibson 03-23-2012

Time To Wake Up

As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America

March 23, 2012

By Seth Leibsohn



I wish to pick up where we were last week, discussing how to talk to Democrats and Independents about the election.  As we were saying, we must engage these discussions with “Intuitive empathy.”  Just to go back,   “Intuitive” means instinctive or something based on feeling rather than reason.  “Empathy” means to share feelings, out of concern.  So what we are asking for here is that we speak to our fellow countrymen with a sincere sharing of deep concern about our country or, as I should like to do today: about our countrymen, our citizens.  And for what it’s worth, I think it was Michael Deaver who wrote that Ronald Reagan’s favorite word was “citizen.”



So, for size, try a fact or series of facts that concern you and should concern others and follow it or them up with a question such as I posed last week: “Why would our president do this?”  Here are some examples and I’d love for you to call and email in with more:



Last week, we talked about how the President has made the country weaker as a matter of national defense.  This week, let’s talk about our own general welfare.  What has the President done to make life easier to live, to work, to support your family?  What has he done—in the words of the Constitution—to provide for the General Welfare?  Has he, and have his policies, indeed made life easier in this country or more difficult?  Easier to find work, easier to get to work, easier to raise and support a family?  Or, in fact, have his policies made life more difficult—more difficult to find work, to get to work, to raise and support a family?



Let’s go to the first thing most of us deal with every week—at a minimum: Gas prices.  Gas prices affect all of this and all of us.  Today, the national average gas price is $3.88.  That’s the average—in some places in the country it’s actually $4.50.  In January 2009, when President Obama came into office, the average gas price was just over $1.80.  President Obama had just hired as his Energy Secretary a man who just four months prior said “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”



Why would our President hire a man as his Energy Secretary who wanted to make gas prices higher in America?



And did President Obama and the Obama administration help make gas prices higher?  According to the President of the Institute for Energy Research (as quoted over at the Powerline blog), this administration has “closed development of millions of acres of onshore and offshore federal lands for oil and gas production.”  Additionally, “the Energy Information Administration released data this month that shows oil production on federal lands is down 13 percent this year under the Obama administration. Natural gas production is at a 9 year low.”



Yesterday, the President gave a speech in Oklahoma trying to take credit for opening some oil pipelines.  But the reason they aren’t open now is due to his administration.  And, if he had approved the XL Pipeline: “America would be well on its way to bringing more than 700,000 barrels of Canadian oil on line. That’s more than twice the oil that was produced on federal onshore lands last year, and it could have created as many as 20,000 jobs in the process.”



Now, just briefly, let’s look at a few other energy policies this administration has taken (courtesy of John Boehner’s office):



The Obama administration scrapped “leases for oil-shale development” and canceled 77 leases for oil and gas production in Utah in its first year in office.



In January of 2010, the Obama administration announced new bureaucratic hurdles to American energy production that Secretary Salazar admitted “could add delays to the leasing and drilling process.”



In March of 2010, instead of opening new areas to energy exploration and development, President Obama blocked deep-ocean energy production on 60 percent of America’s Outer Continental Shelf.



In December of 2010, the president re-imposed and expanded the moratorium on offshore energy production.



In May of last year, President Obama issued a formal statement opposing House-passed Restarting American Offshore Leasing Now Act and Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work Act, legislation designed to jumpstart American energy production, address rising gas prices, and help create new jobs.



In June of last year, the White House opposed the House-passed Jobs & Energy Permitting Act that would unlock an estimated 27 billion barrels of oil and 132 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.



In November of last year, the Obama Administration released a plan for a five-year moratorium on offshore energy production, placing “some of the most promising energy resources in the world off-limits.”



Let me give you a few more from last year and you tell me if this administration is trying to make energy—for your homes, for your cars—easier to come by or harder, less expensive or more expensive.  These stats from the API:



-The Administration proposed billions in new taxes on oil and gas industry in FY 2012 budget proposal (February).

-The Administration issued an Advance Notice regarding new regulations for gas gathering lines that would substantially impact development of the Marcellus Shale (August).

-The Administration proposed one-size-fits-all new source performance standards that, lacking a phase-in period to manufacture the control equipment, may significantly hamper oil and gas operations (August).

-The Administration again proposed billions in new taxes on the oil and gas industry (September).

-The Administration issued a new 2012-2017 five-year plan that fails to open any new offshore areas to oil and gas development (November).

-The Administration raised the minimum bid amount for offshore lease blocks in water depths of 400 meters and greater from $37.50 per acre to $100 per acre (December).



So, present any of these facts to your friends and ask: “Why would the President do this?”  Ask: “Do any of these things make life easier or harder on Americans?”



Let’s ask a few more fact-based questions.  What have the administration’s rule-making and regulating policies led to?  More employment and growth of the economy?  More businesses opening up here?  No.  The opposite. According to the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal measure of economic freedom, the United States has fallen from No. 6 to No. 10 since the end of the George W. Bush administration in 2009. The U.S. also has dropped rank in the ease of doing business, as measured by the World Bank, and in global competitiveness, as measured by the World Economic Forum.  The question:  Why has this happened?  Why won’t the administration move heaven and earth in its regulatory agencies to reverse this decline?  Why does it want to tax business owners and entrepreneurs more when it proposes budgets no amount of taxation on the business or owner class can meet?  And, ultimately, who pays for all this?  The wealthy; or the poor and middle class?



Finally, this—Unemployment under President Obama has gone up from over 7 percent to over 10 percent and is now settled at over 8 percent.  Please name me one major business or entrepreneurial incentive program this administration has championed.  Truly, can you name one?  Just one. I’m guessing you cannot.  If you cannot, why not?



What will this President be known for on the domestic front?  Health Care Reform is clearly a contender if not the absolute right answer.  But then ask your friends this: If the President’s health care overhaul was such a good idea, why is it now coming in at a much higher cost than was promised, why have waivers to it been granted to select corporations, and why is it true that today, today, more American adults lack health insurance coverage than in any year since Gallup and Healthways started tracking this in 2008?



These are facts—and these are the questions.  Simple questions that beg answers.  They beg answers of concern to our fellow countrymen, our fellow citizens….because in this democratic country of ours where we hold our officials accountable, such evidence of making life harder and more expensive demands a verdict.



Final note.  It needs to be reported.  After all the alarums and excursions by the Democrats generally, and Barack Obama specifically, about the ruined international relations of the George Bush Presidency, I give you this headline from Gallup this morning: “The majority of Egyptians (56%) now see closer relations with the U.S. as a bad thing for their country, up sharply from 40% in December 2011. They are more likely to see a benefit from closer relations with Turkey and Iran.”  We’ve moved the largest Arab country in the world—an ally—into an enemy, and drove it to Iran.  George Bush do anything like that?  Just another question.

Rush Blasts MediMatters

'Limbaugh Show' responds to Brock
March 21, 2012 02:37 PM EDT

David Brock is so outraged at Rush Limbaugh’s words of three weeks ago that he started organizing a protest — almost 3 years ago.


It was planned ahead and activated at the first moment Brock could manipulate a media frenzy. Make no mistake, Brock’s “marketplace of ideas” offers only one brand: Brand Brock. All others will be forced off the shelves with intimidation and lies.

Media Matters for America stands for censorship, and nothing more than that. Their ginned-up election year anger is directed at the words of their media political opposition — similar expressions are ignored when used by their allies.

It’s different, they claim. It’s always different when they say it is, for an array of implausible reasons. The truth is that they are hypocrites. But that’s the least of their offenses.

By putting small business in the crosshairs of their war on expression, Media Matters is causing real harm. They are hurting these businesses, their employees and their families. As a business owner, imagine waking up one morning and being assaulted by hundreds of coordinated attacks from operatives who never were or will be your customers.

These Media Matters mobs bear a simple message: Renounce our enemies or become one of them. They distribute target lists of advertiser phone numbers, email addresses, Facebook links and Twitter handles, and then they come out of nowhere, en masse, against selected advertisers in rotation. They barrage small business with threats until they cancel their advertising.

Customers either can’t get through the fog of messages, or see a business under attack.

Everyone is so busy with the protestors that no one is left to talk to customers. You call that education, David? Reasonable people identify what you organize by a different name.
If businesses give in to these demands, they lose access to the customers who helped build their company. Let’s be clear — most advertisers aren’t making a political statement when they decide where to spend their money. Most chose varied programs to reach audiences with different points of view. When they buy talk radio advertising in general, or “The Rush Limbaugh Show” in particular, they are reaching an audience, as well as creating jobs and supporting families. That’s all they want.

But Media Matters says you can’t talk to that audience anymore. And when these businesses shrink, because they’ve lost access to half their customers; when they lay off employees or even shut down, whom will Media Matters blame? Probably not themselves.

This is Brock’s cynical marketplace of ideas. He will fail, as every censoring thug has in this country. Americans are smart enough to make our own decisions about what media to consume. We don’t need self-appointed monitors. Black-list censors are some of the most reviled characters in U.S. history.

One day Media Matters will join that list as an advocacy that lost sight of its mission, which was to promulgate a point of view, in order to adopt a darker one, which was to deny that right of expression to others.

It’s ironic that a man so filled with a cynical hatred of what is best about America would label others as broadcasting “hate.” Limbaugh has raised more than $30 million for leading charities, with significant amounts as personal contributions. Limbaugh has broadcast his passionate beliefs to the largest audience in the history of radio for decades. Because they choose to listen, to participate and to disagree — when that is what they believe.

There is nothing hateful about that. In fact, there is always room for disagreement in Limbaugh’s world. That’s a lesson Brock would do well to learn.

Brian Glicklich,
Spokesperson
The Rush Limbaugh Show

ILLiberalism

Liberal Illiberalism

         Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On March 18, 2012

The Liberal Assault on Liberalism
Conservatives are put into awkward positions of critiquing liberal ideas on grounds that they are impractical, unworkable, or counterproductive. Yet rarely, at least outside the religious sphere, do they identify the progressive as often immoral ^[1]. And the unfortunate result is that they have often ceded moral claims to supposedly dreamy, utopian, and well-meaning progressives, when in fact the latter increasingly have little moral ground to stand upon.
Take a few contemporary controversies.

Radical environmentalism. When “conservation” sometime in the 1970s was redefined as “environmentalism,” the morality of the entire issue likewise changed ^[2]. Most Americans had wanted clean air and water; and they were willing to pay to curb pollutants and drive more expensive, but cleaner, cars. They had no desire to see condors die off or kit foxes disappear.

But at some point, the green creed began to dictate that all species were equal to humans. Soon concern for a tiny frog or worm trumped a needed project — a dam, an irrigation canal, an oil well, or a mine — designed to alleviate human suffering. Here I am not talking about large-scale species annihilation, but rather taking a truth about wishing to protect a natural habitat and perverting it into elevating concerns for insects, amphibians, and small fish over people’s elemental struggles to exist and prosper.

When California elites shut down 250,000 acres of irrigated agriculture to divert water into the San Francisco regional delta and bay, purportedly as a remedy to help the three-inch delta smelt, they were making a loud moral statement that those who mostly had secure jobs, mostly nice homes, and well-off environments were going to destroy the jobs of those in agriculture — not just the land owner and foreman, but the agricultural workers themselves — without much worry over the consequences.

In crude terms, the ideology might be paraphrased as something like the following, “I got mine, Jack, and can’t worry about you.” Or, “You don’t interest me as much as does a tiny fish in the delta.” In truth, I would be far more worried that the town of San Joaquin had little money for basic civic services from a cutoff in irrigation water than I would a drop in the delta smelt population.

Had a tractor salesman in Mendota or an irrigator in Firebaugh had an environmental Shane to square off against the Bay Area’s hired Jack Palance, then the dispute might at least have been more equal and honest. By that, I mean surely there are environmental problems with Berkeley’s treated sewage that goes into the Bay; a particular moth larva in theory could be found to be “in danger” when the next UC environmental sciences building is envisioned; and there must be all sorts of ways to ensure the Fish and Game Department’s trucks
and SUVs run only on natural gas or propane, right?

In other words, so often in matters of producing gasoline for the lower middle classes, or cutting timber to ensure affordable housing, or making sure that we have plentiful cheap asphalt to fill potholes, we forget the moral argument that such resource utilization is critical to ensure that average folks have the same sort of chance for jobs, money, and aspirations as do the more wealthy whose green religious zeal makes them absolutely insensitive to — and in truth immoral about — the concerns of others less well off.

When Steven Chu admits both that he wishes gas prices to soar to European levels and that he has no need either to drive or to own a car ^[3], then he is really saying, “I don’t have much concern for the results of my own fantasies.” Yet had his lab and assorted lasers once been put on regular 12-hour blackouts to conserve “skyrocketing” energy, then he might have worried more about the consequences of his utopianism. When Barack Obama both calls for “skyrocketing” energy prices, and on his first January day in office turns up the West

Wing thermostat to tropical temperatures ^[4], then there is a sort of immorality implicit in his entire ideology. At least Jimmy Carter put on a sweater and turned down the temperature to match his malaise rhetoric. Does Al Gore think that the Mexicans, Nigerians, or

Venezuelans who supply some of the jet fuel that allows him to huckster via private aircraft are kinder to Earth in the Balance when they drill than when we would in ANWR or North Dakota?

That moral obtuseness, along with hypocrisy ^[5] and pseudo-scientific bombast, is why Gorism has imploded. In short, radical environmentalism is a sort of medieval sect ^[6] that terrorizes the less well-off.

Multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is another unkind dogma — the very notion that all cultures are professed equal, and those in the West often have a particular obligation to elevate illiberal and intolerant systems above their own in recompense for their supposedly ill-gotten prosperity and success. This week, SheikH Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia — not a minor voice in the world of Islam — announced that he wished, according to his reading of Koranic-inspired statute, that all the churches in the Gulf region be destroyed ^[7]. That threat was met with silence in the West. We know that had the pope said something equivalent (e.g., Europe should be free of mosques), we would have heard loud denunciations, perhaps even a declaration from President Obama that he did not wish his daughters growing up in a world of such religious bias.

But again the press said little or nothing — even though Abdullah’s creepy declaration will spur Muslims even more to persecute Christians, most of whom are Arabs who have been Christian for millennia. Nor does the liberal establishment worry much that Jews are fleeing the Middle East, Africa, and other “third-world” countries, largely because of a new anti-Semitism, fueled by radical Islam.
All over the Middle East, Christians and Jews are treated as untermenschen (only in Israel are they safe), and in immoral fashion we believe that our multicultural fides exempt us from the fact that we are quite callous and unapologetically uncaring over the plight of tens of thousands.

Illegal immigration. Unfortunately, illegal immigration has turned into an abjectly immoral enterprise. Here I won’t dwell on the usual moral dimensions of massive influxes — illegal immigration makes a mockery of federal law in a way that would not be sustainable if the law were so assaulted in other areas; it undercuts the wages of U.S. entry level workers; it results in billions of dollars in remittances, often from subsidized senders, that leave the U.S. economy to Mexico; and it burdens insolvent states with entitlement costs bornd by the strapped general population.

Instead, I am curious why an abstract fact of legal or illegal entry into the United States has become a de facto “Latino” issue. There is zero concern voiced by Democrats over illegal aliens in general, unless, as in the case of the president’s aunt and uncle, they are well-connected. By that, I mean no political leader announces, “We are quite cruelly deporting those who overstay their visas or arrive without one, and just this month unfairly deported 10 South Korean students, 6 Nigerian workers, and 4 Russian tourists.” There is no interest in pondering how to free more Cubans from a totalitarian Castro regime that has systematically jailed and sometimes executed dissidents.

California Latino politicians are instead interested in the issue entirely on tribal grounds, not just out of empathy for those of the same ethnic background, but more practically in political terms of advancing their own careers as self-appointed tribal spokesmen in a multicultural system where hyphenation brings dividends. If the Mexican border were secure, and 1 million French Canadians were pouring into the U.S. without English, legality, education, or capital, the Latino community would be calling for border enforcement, expressing worry about the unfair competition to entry-level American workers, decrying the cost and separatism in providing French-English official documents, and regretting the mockery made of the law. It is hard to recall a comparable example in the history of two nations, in which millions of foreign nationals fled their own nation to a neighboring one, and then immediately made claims upon their new hosts, often in deference to their home country that they had just abandoned due to its failure to provide them basic services and opportunities.

And yet to suggest that illegal immigration has morphed into an issue of ethnic chauvinism, predicated on ignoring the law only in one particular instance — illegal entry into the American southwest from citizens of Mexico and some regions of Latin America — is to incur a charge of racism. How Orwellian that — a largely race-based lobbying effort, aimed at a single ethnic constituency, defends itself by alleging “racism” on the part of any who would so identify its own unapologetic motives as such.

Affirmative Action. Race-based exemption has become illiberal, and increasingly immoral. By that general term, I mean not just discriminatory quotas of a near half-century, or race-based advantages in hiring and admission, but a general pass given to illiberality on the basis of race. Just this last week, Lovie Smith, the coach of the Chicago Bears, released a video for Barack Obama’s reelection efforts.

Here’s what I wrote about it on NRO’s Corner ^[8]:

What are we to make of the coach of the Chicago Bears, Lovie Smith, announcing on a campaign video, “I have the President‘s back and it’s left up to us, as African Americans, to show that we have his back. Also join African Americans for President Obama today.” Does Coach Smith mean that “as African Americans” one has a duty to support the president by virtue of his race rather than his politics alone, or his politics as they relate to the welfare of African Americans? Are those African Americans who oppose Obama, then, doing so “not as African Americans”? Are whites and Hispanics who support Obama doing so because he is also half-white or as “not African Americans”?

And is the coach of the Chicago Bears now starting a precedent that the coaches of all NFL teams shall endorse particular political candidates (e.g., “I have Senator X’s back and it’s left up to us, as (fill in the blanks: White, Latino, Asian) -Americans, to show that we have his back.”), in hopes that their own races and team loyalties will sway voters? If so, Lovie Smith should read Procopius on the Nika riots and the volatile intersection between sport, faction, and politics.

These sorts of Byzantine blue/green tribal loyalties become creepy when our president is encouraging well known Americans to state them so overtly. And, of course, it is only a matter of time now when some will, in counter fashion, publicly state that they are voting against Obama as a matter or racial politics in the way that others are voting for him on that very basis—or perhaps by virtue that they also don’t like the Chicago Bears.

Again, the Obama-Smith strategy of race-based ethnocentrism is a suicidal path for any multiracial society that has hopes of transcending tribalism.

I am not suggesting that Mormons in Utah might not vote for Mitt Romney over Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum because of their shared faith. But I am suggesting that if Mitt Romney overtly were to have the coach of the University of Utah football team proclaim that he supports official Romney-designated “Mormons for Romney” groups, and remind Mormons that it is “up to us as Mormons” to cover Romney’s back (from what?), then such a video would be stupid and morally wrong — and would be widely denounced by liberals.

Where does all this lead? At first, of course, only to embarrassing hypocrisy. Those in the Bay Area who idled critical food-producing farmland would not wish, as the proverbial Committee for Public Safety, the same environmental zealotry aimed at their own offices, cars, homes, and institutions. And they assume that they have the incomes to buy increasingly expensive food when others would not.

The grand mufti would not like Billy Graham to announce that he wanted North America freed of all mosques. La Raza would not like a Volk movement that sought to waive immigration law for Germans on grounds they were once America’s largest immigrant group and should be again. Lovie Smith would not wish other rival coaches to pitch their own favorite presidential candidates on the basis of shared racial affinities.

To do all the above is retrograde and ultimately nihilistic. That something so unsustainable continues then is predicated on one unspoken truth: most in the West will not act like Bay Area greens, the grand mufti, La Raza, or Lovie Smith, because for all others to adopt their favored methodology and ideology would lead to something other than liberal life as we know it. Thus they act as they do because they know others will not act as they do — at least for now.

Tit-for-tat factionalism leads nowhere but to chaos and carnage. But the Western tradition is not made of adamantine metal; it is fragile and singular. Anytime we do not stand up and defend it, however unpopular, we cede to barbarism ourselves.

In other words, the only way to question these illiberal doctrines ^[9] is without apology to identify them as immoral — and to welcome the hysterical reaction that ensues.

BROKEN Window - Obama/Unions

Obama’s Broken Window Company — And His Larger, More Serious Damage

          Posted By Tom Blumer On March 21, 2012 @ 12:02 am

                     In "Green" tech,economy,Elections 2012,Money,Science & Technology,US News |

Readers who detect a disturbing echo from the past in the next several paragraphs aren’t imagining things.

On February 23, a California-based company which owns a window manufacturing plant in Chicago announced that it would close the facility because of poor business conditions, specifically citing ^[1] “ongoing economic challenges in construction and building products, collapse in demand for window products, difficulty in obtaining favorable lease terms, high leasing and utility costs and taxes, and a range of other factors.”

The very next day, the company, Serious Energy, Inc., went all Orwell ^[2]:

Members of the press received incomplete and incorrect information that Serious Energy would be closing the facility immediately. The Chicago plant remains open at this time, and the parties are working together to find a new owner if possible and explore all other options. Both UE and Serious Energy apologize for any resulting confusion.

“UE” is United Electrical Workers Union Local 1110. Serious Energy made no mention of what drove the change which it said wasn’t a change but really was, namely that ^[3] shortly after its original announcement, “about 65 people, mostly employees, locked themselves inside the 268,000-square-foot facility.” In other words, the union and its workers re-occupied the plant.

That’s right, they “re-occupied” it. The plant’s original occupation, in many respects the precursor of the lawless Occupy movement which “somehow” appeared ^[4] in September of last year, came in December 2008. That’s when its then-owner, Republic Windows and Doors, having lost $10 million in the past two years, told employees that it would close the plant in three days. Workers ^[5] “occupied the building,” and said they wouldn’t leave “without assurances they’ll receive severance and vacation pay.”

Bank of America, which had cut off the company’s credit line because of its deteriorating financial condition, was unfortunately but understandably intimidated by the assemblage of politicians, activists, and leftist rabble which had gravitated to what they thought might be the start of a movement. As a result, six days later, it made “an additional loan” (the bank’s words) of $1.35 million to make the problem go away. For some reason, J.P. Morgan Chase also “pledged” $400,000.

The Associated Press’s headline called this result ^[6] “successful.” In reality, it may be the most costly $1.75 million shakedown ever conducted — if not for the workers, certainly for their nation.
Here’s a synopsis of the plant’s subsequent history:

• In mid-December 2008, Republic filed for bankruptcy ^[7].
• Serious Energy bought the plant ^[8] in February 2009.
• In a March 2009 press release ^[9] followed by an April visit ^[10], Vice President Joe Biden declared that the administration’s stimulus plan would “increase demand for its products.”
• The $5 billion “weatherization” element of the stimulus plan which was supposedly going to keep the plant and other window makers going was “initially delayed ^[11] for seven months while the federal Department of Labor determined prevailing wage standards for the industry.” Since then, like Solyndra and so many of Team Obama’s other “green energy” efforts, it has been an epic fail ^[12], accurately characterized as ^[13] a “a complete cesspool of waste” by the conservative fiscal watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste.
• Despite the glowing promises, the union now says ^[9] the company “never hired back more than 75″ of the plant’s workers.
• Serious hasn’t promised to keep the Chicago facility open, but has instead said it will spend 90 days from the date of its announcement trying to find a buyer — and presumably installing really strong locks on its doors and gates.

That’s not all. On February 22, the day before Serious’s original closing announcement, the Federal Trade Commission trumpeted consent agreements ^[14] it had obtained from five window manufacturers relating to their claims that consumers could cut their home energy bills by 40% to 50% with replacement windows alone (it’s really more like 7% to 15%, according to Consumer Reports ^[15]). One of the five? You guessed it ^[16]. It seems quite likely that these companies’ exaggerated claims were used as a basis for estimating how much energy savings the government’s weatherization program would achieve. “Seriously,” you can’t make this stuff up.
The harm done to the nation’s economy by the original Republic occupation was far more serious, and is still with us.

You see, one of those who took the workers’ side in 2008 was President-elect Barack Obama — a point which has gone virtually unmentioned in recent media coverage of the plant’s impending demise. On December 8, Obama pointedly lent his support ^[17] to the workers’ cause while failing to call out their lawless behavior:

“The workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned, I think they’re absolutely right and understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy,” Obama said.

Two days later, the banks caved.
Yours truly immediately recognized ^[18] the much larger problem with what Obama had done:

It won’t take very much of this before businesses conclude that putting employees on the payroll must be avoided as long as possible, if it’s to be done at all. They will more frequently use temporary agency employees as long as they legally can. They won’t replace employees who retire or leave. They’ll have more work done in other countries. They won’t pursue business ideas that require U.S. employees. The trend toward professional employment organizations (PEOs, or “leased employees”) will accelerate.
More such appearances by Obama as rabble-rousing community organizer in chief will go a long way towards ensuring that his “get worse before it gets better” prediction about the economy becomes tragically true.

In hindsight, I believe that Obama’s unprecedented reaction to what had been a private business dispute marred by union and worker lawlessness played a critical and immediate role in deepening and extending the recession, and that it continues to hold back the alleged recovery.

Keep in mind that he, along with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, had already spent the previous six months going back to the beginning of what I have been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy ^[19] since mid-2008 frightening investors, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs with what they said they would do if they achieved power. Those promises were radical: government control of health care, massive income and Social Security tax increases, and cap-and-trade, to name just a few. Employment, which had been declining, began to completely tank.

Obama’s first thirty days as president-elect, though overbearing in many ways, gave some people hope that his Democratic administration, like Bill Clinton’s, might not be as radical as first feared. Obama announced that he would defer originally planned tax increases. His early economic appointments, though insufferably Keynesian, were at least not off-the-chart socialists. What’s more, it was plausible to believe that the economy, thanks to low interest rates and a return of gas prices to under $1.70 per gallon from over $4 five months earlier, might be righting itself ^[20], or at least that the worst of the bleeding might almost be over.

Obama’s statement about the Republic situation completely dashed those hopes. What’s more, his community organizer in chief pronouncement came just in time for January, which is always the worst month of the year for layoffs and terminations. An astounding 3.25 million private-sector workers lost their jobs in January 2009, the largest raw number of job losses in the seventy-plus years monthly records have been kept — by over 700,000. January 2009 was also the worst month on record after seasonal adjustment. The mid-February 2009 passage of the stimulus plan and the Obama-condoned AIG executive intimidation campaign ^[21] only confirmed what everyone in business pretty much already knew, namely that this would become the most aggressively commerce-hostile administration since Franklin Delano Roosevelt — well on its way, especially after considering its mob-rule acolytes, to becoming the worst in U.S. history. Subsequent actions far too numerous to mention here have cast that evaluation in concrete. The worst post-downturn economic performance since the Great Depression is their tragic result.

My response to the administration’s tired propaganda claim ^[22] that the national economic situation was sooooo much worse than they thought when they first took office is as follows: Even if that’s true, it’s because your guy made it that way.

Obama’s Broken Window Company — And His Larger, More Serious Damage Posted By Tom Blumer On March 21, 2012 @ 12:02 am In "Green" tech,economy,Elections 2012,Money,Science & Technology,US News | No Comments Readers who detect a disturbing echo from the past in the next several paragraphs aren’t imagining things. On February 23, a California-based company which owns a window manufacturing plant in Chicago announced that it would close the facility because of poor business conditions, specifically citing [1] “ongoing economic challenges in construction and building products, collapse in demand for window products, difficulty in obtaining favorable lease terms, high leasing and utility costs and taxes, and a range of other factors.” The very next day, the company, Serious Energy, Inc., went all Orwell [2]: Members of the press received incomplete and incorrect information that Serious Energy would be closing the facility immediately. The Chicago plant remains open at this time, and the parties are working together to find a new owner if possible and explore all other options. Both UE and Serious Energy apologize for any resulting confusion. “UE” is United Electrical Workers Union Local 1110. Serious Energy made no mention of what drove the change which it said wasn’t a change but really was, namely that [3] shortly after its original announcement, “about 65 people, mostly employees, locked themselves inside the 268,000-square-foot facility.” In other words, the union and its workers re-occupied the plant. That’s right, they “re-occupied” it. The plant’s original occupation, in many respects the precursor of the lawless Occupy movement which “somehow” appeared [4] in September of last year, came in December 2008. That’s when its then-owner, Republic Windows and Doors, having lost $10 million in the past two years, told employees that it would close the plant in three days. Workers [5] “occupied the building,” and said they wouldn’t leave “without assurances they’ll receive severance and vacation pay.” Bank of America, which had cut off the company’s credit line because of its deteriorating financial condition, was unfortunately but understandably intimidated by the assemblage of politicians, activists, and leftist rabble which had gravitated to what they thought might be the start of a movement. As a result, six days later, it made “an additional loan” (the bank’s words) of $1.35 million to make the problem go away. For some reason, J.P. Morgan Chase also “pledged” $400,000. The Associated Press’s headline called this result [6] “successful.” In reality, it may be the most costly $1.75 million shakedown ever conducted — if not for the workers, certainly for their nation. Here’s a synopsis of the plant’s subsequent history: * In mid-December 2008, Republic filed for bankruptcy [7]. * Serious Energy bought the plant [8] in February 2009. * In a March 2009 press release [9] followed by an April visit [10], Vice President Joe Biden declared that the administration’s stimulus plan would “increase demand for its products.” * The $5 billion “weatherization” element of the stimulus plan which was supposedly going to keep the plant and other window makers going was “initially delayed [11] for seven months while the federal Department of Labor determined prevailing wage standards for the industry.” Since then, like Solyndra and so many of Team Obama’s other “green energy” efforts, it has been an epic fail [12], accurately characterized as [13] a “a complete cesspool of waste” by the conservative fiscal watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste. * Despite the glowing promises, the union now says [9] the company “never hired back more than 75″ of the plant’s workers. * Serious hasn’t promised to keep the Chicago facility open, but has instead said it will spend 90 days from the date of its announcement trying to find a buyer — and presumably installing really strong locks on its doors and gates. That’s not all. On February 22, the day before Serious’s original closing announcement, the Federal Trade Commission trumpeted consent agreements [14] it had obtained from five window manufacturers relating to their claims that consumers could cut their home energy bills by 40% to 50% with replacement windows alone (it’s really more like 7% to 15%, according to Consumer Reports [15]). One of the five? You guessed it [16]. It seems quite likely that these companies’ exaggerated claims were used as a basis for estimating how much energy savings the government’s weatherization program would achieve. “Seriously,” you can’t make this stuff up. The harm done to the nation’s economy by the original Republic occupation was far more serious, and is still with us. You see, one of those who took the workers’ side in 2008 was President-elect Barack Obama — a point which has gone virtually unmentioned in recent media coverage of the plant’s impending demise. On December 8, Obama pointedly lent his support [17] to the workers’ cause while failing to call out their lawless behavior: “The workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned, I think they’re absolutely right and understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy,” Obama said. Two days later, the banks caved. Yours truly immediately recognized [18] the much larger problem with what Obama had done: It won’t take very much of this before businesses conclude that putting employees on the payroll must be avoided as long as possible, if it’s to be done at all. They will more frequently use temporary agency employees as long as they legally can. They won’t replace employees who retire or leave. They’ll have more work done in other countries. They won’t pursue business ideas that require U.S. employees. The trend toward professional employment organizations (PEOs, or “leased employees”) will accelerate. More such appearances by Obama as rabble-rousing community organizer in chief will go a long way towards ensuring that his “get worse before it gets better” prediction about the economy becomes tragically true. In hindsight, I believe that Obama’s unprecedented reaction to what had been a private business dispute marred by union and worker lawlessness played a critical and immediate role in deepening and extending the recession, and that it continues to hold back the alleged recovery. Keep in mind that he, along with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, had already spent the previous six months going back to the beginning of what I have been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy [19] since mid-2008 frightening investors, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs with what they said they would do if they achieved power. Those promises were radical: government control of health care, massive income and Social Security tax increases, and cap-and-trade, to name just a few. Employment, which had been declining, began to completely tank. Obama’s first thirty days as president-elect, though overbearing in many ways, gave some people hope that his Democratic administration, like Bill Clinton’s, might not be as radical as first feared. Obama announced that he would defer originally planned tax increases. His early economic appointments, though insufferably Keynesian, were at least not off-the-chart socialists. What’s more, it was plausible to believe that the economy, thanks to low interest rates and a return of gas prices to under $1.70 per gallon from over $4 five months earlier, might be righting itself [20], or at least that the worst of the bleeding might almost be over. Obama’s statement about the Republic situation completely dashed those hopes. What’s more, his community organizer in chief pronouncement came just in time for January, which is always the worst month of the year for layoffs and terminations. An astounding 3.25 million private-sector workers lost their jobs in January 2009, the largest raw number of job losses in the seventy-plus years monthly records have been kept — by over 700,000. January 2009 was also the worst month on record after seasonal adjustment. The mid-February 2009 passage of the stimulus plan and the Obama-condoned AIG executive intimidation campaign [21] only confirmed what everyone in business pretty much already knew, namely that this would become the most aggressively commerce-hostile administration since Franklin Delano Roosevelt — well on its way, especially after considering its mob-rule acolytes, to becoming the worst in U.S. history. Subsequent actions far too numerous to mention here have cast that evaluation in concrete. The worst post-downturn economic performance since the Great Depression is their tragic result. My response to the administration’s tired propaganda claim [22] that the national economic situation was sooooo much worse than they thought when they first took office is as follows: Evenway if that’s true, it’s because your guy made it that .

Obama’s Broken Window Company — And His Larger, More Serious Damage

Posted By Tom Blumer On March 21, 2012 @ 12:02 am In "Green" tech,economy,Elections 2012,Money,Science & Technology,US News | No Comments

Readers who detect a disturbing echo from the past in the next several paragraphs aren’t imagining things.
On February 23, a California-based company which owns a window manufacturing plant in Chicago announced that it would close the facility because of poor business conditions, specifically citing ^[1] “ongoing economic challenges in construction and building products, collapse in demand for window products, difficulty in obtaining favorable lease terms, high leasing and utility costs and taxes, and a range of other factors.”
The very next day, the company, Serious Energy, Inc., went all Orwell ^[2]:

Members of the press received incomplete and incorrect information that Serious Energy would be closing the facility immediately. The Chicago plant remains open at this time, and the parties are working together to find a new owner if possible and explore all other options. Both UE and Serious Energy apologize for any resulting confusion.

“UE” is United Electrical Workers Union Local 1110. Serious Energy made no mention of what drove the change which it said wasn’t a change but really was, namely that ^[3] shortly after its original announcement, “about 65 people, mostly employees, locked themselves inside the 268,000-square-foot facility.” In other words, the union and its workers re-occupied the plant.
That’s right, they “re-occupied” it. The plant’s original occupation, in many respects the precursor of the lawless Occupy movement which “somehow” appeared ^[4] in September of last year, came in December 2008. That’s when its then-owner, Republic Windows and Doors, having lost $10 million in the past two years, told employees that it would close the plant in three days. Workers ^[5] “occupied the building,” and said they wouldn’t leave “without assurances they’ll receive severance and vacation pay.”
Bank of America, which had cut off the company’s credit line because of its deteriorating financial condition, was unfortunately but understandably intimidated by the assemblage of politicians, activists, and leftist rabble which had gravitated to what they thought might be the start of a movement. As a result, six days later, it made “an additional loan” (the bank’s words) of $1.35 million to make the problem go away. For some reason, J.P. Morgan Chase also “pledged” $400,000.
The Associated Press’s headline called this result ^[6] “successful.” In reality, it may be the most costly $1.75 million shakedown ever conducted — if not for the workers, certainly for their nation.
Here’s a synopsis of the plant’s subsequent history:

• In mid-December 2008, Republic filed for bankruptcy ^[7].
• Serious Energy bought the plant ^[8] in February 2009.
• In a March 2009 press release ^[9] followed by an April visit ^[10], Vice President Joe Biden declared that the administration’s stimulus plan would “increase demand for its products.”
• The $5 billion “weatherization” element of the stimulus plan which was supposedly going to keep the plant and other window makers going was “initially delayed ^[11] for seven months while the federal Department of Labor determined prevailing wage standards for the industry.” Since then, like Solyndra and so many of Team Obama’s other “green energy” efforts, it has been an epic fail ^[12], accurately characterized as ^[13] a “a complete cesspool of waste” by the conservative fiscal watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste.
• Despite the glowing promises, the union now says ^[9] the company “never hired back more than 75″ of the plant’s workers.
• Serious hasn’t promised to keep the Chicago facility open, but has instead said it will spend 90 days from the date of its announcement trying to find a buyer — and presumably installing really strong locks on its doors and gates.

That’s not all. On February 22, the day before Serious’s original closing announcement, the Federal Trade Commission trumpeted consent agreements ^[14] it had obtained from five window manufacturers relating to their claims that consumers could cut their home energy bills by 40% to 50% with replacement windows alone (it’s really more like 7% to 15%, according to Consumer Reports ^[15]). One of the five? You guessed it ^[16]. It seems quite likely that these companies’ exaggerated claims were used as a basis for estimating how much energy savings the government’s weatherization program would achieve. “Seriously,” you can’t make this stuff up.
The harm done to the nation’s economy by the original Republic occupation was far more serious, and is still with us.
You see, one of those who took the workers’ side in 2008 was President-elect Barack Obama — a point which has gone virtually unmentioned in recent media coverage of the plant’s impending demise. On December 8, Obama pointedly lent his support ^[17] to the workers’ cause while failing to call out their lawless behavior:

“The workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned, I think they’re absolutely right and understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy,” Obama said.

Two days later, the banks caved.
Yours truly immediately recognized ^[18] the much larger problem with what Obama had done:

It won’t take very much of this before businesses conclude that putting employees on the payroll must be avoided as long as possible, if it’s to be done at all. They will more frequently use temporary agency employees as long as they legally can. They won’t replace employees who retire or leave. They’ll have more work done in other countries. They won’t pursue business ideas that require U.S. employees. The trend toward professional employment organizations (PEOs, or “leased employees”) will accelerate.
More such appearances by Obama as rabble-rousing community organizer in chief will go a long way towards ensuring that his “get worse before it gets better” prediction about the economy becomes tragically true.

In hindsight, I believe that Obama’s unprecedented reaction to what had been a private business dispute marred by union and worker lawlessness played a critical and immediate role in deepening and extending the recession, and that it continues to hold back the alleged recovery.
Keep in mind that he, along with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, had already spent the previous six months going back to the beginning of what I have been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy ^[19] since mid-2008 frightening investors, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs with what they said they would do if they achieved power. Those promises were radical: government control of health care, massive income and Social Security tax increases, and cap-and-trade, to name just a few. Employment, which had been declining, began to completely tank.
Obama’s first thirty days as president-elect, though overbearing in many ways, gave some people hope that his Democratic administration, like Bill Clinton’s, might not be as radical as first feared. Obama announced that he would defer originally planned tax increases. His early economic appointments, though insufferably Keynesian, were at least not off-the-chart socialists. What’s more, it was plausible to believe that the economy, thanks to low interest rates and a return of gas prices to under $1.70 per gallon from over $4 five months earlier, might be righting itself ^[20], or at least that the worst of the bleeding might almost be over.
Obama’s statement about the Republic situation completely dashed those hopes. What’s more, his community organizer in chief pronouncement came just in time for January, which is always the worst month of the year for layoffs and terminations. An astounding 3.25 million private-sector workers lost their jobs in January 2009, the largest raw number of job losses in the seventy-plus years monthly records have been kept — by over 700,000. January 2009 was also the worst month on record after seasonal adjustment. The mid-February 2009 passage of the stimulus plan and the Obama-condoned AIG executive intimidation campaign ^[21] only confirmed what everyone in business pretty much already knew, namely that this would become the most aggressively commerce-hostile administration since Franklin Delano Roosevelt — well on its way, especially after considering its mob-rule acolytes, to becoming the worst in U.S. history. Subsequent actions far too numerous to mention here have cast that evaluation in concrete. The worst post-downturn economic performance since the Great Depression is their tragic result.
My response to the administration’s tired propaganda claim ^[22] that the national economic situation was sooooo much worse than they thought when they first took office is as follows: Even if that’s true, it’s because your guy made it that way.