No Runny Eggs

John Hawkins over at Right Wing News once again took the temperature of the right end of the blogosphere, this time in response to a rather kooky Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll of “self-identified ‘Republicans'”. I honestly don’t remember (Shoebox:  I did it.  Usually I forget these things.  This one didn’t require a lot of thought and I’m good at that!)  whether it was Shoebox or I that provided the answers for the blog (it’s been that kind of week), but I’ll fire in my two-cents’ worth (my answers are bolded, and the “not sures” from the Kos poll, which are not tabulated in the RWN straw poll, are not copied here):

Would you favor or oppose giving illegal immigrants now living in the United States the right to live here legally if they pay a fine and learn English? (RWN – 24% favor/76% oppose, Kos – 26% favor/59% oppose)

That doesn’t go far enough. Illegal aliens also need to go back to their country of orgin, apply properly, and enter the line at the point they do so.  Shoebox:ditto

Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates White people? (RWN – 29% yes/71% no, Kos – 31% yes/36% no)

Obama hates conservatives regardless of skin color.  Shoebox:  Ditto

Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election? (RWN – 20% yes/80% no, Kos – 21% yes/24% no)

Allow me to clarify. Without ACORN and affiliated groups, including the Soros-bought-and-paid for secretaries of state, Shoebox and Birdman would not be calling Al Franken “Senator”. However, Obama’s election was by beyond the margin of fraud.  Shoebox:  I voted no because this was based on the Presidential election.  I agree with Steve on the Franken mess.

Should openly gay men and women be allowed to serve in the military? (RWN – 53% yes/47% no, Kos – 26% yes/55% no)

The key word here is “openly”. For the record, I am also against co-ed military units where fraternization cannot reasonably be limited. What a military member does off-base, so long as it doesn’t violate the laws or involve intimate relations with another military member, does not matter.

Shoebox:  This was the hardest one for me.  I believe in equal employment opportunities regardless of sexual orientation, therefore I voted yes.  The “openly” for me is almost irrelevant because as best I know, it’s not a good thing to be caught “openly” having heterosexual sex while on duty.  I believe the real issue comes down to performance.  As long as we keep the ACLU out of it, I think the military has plenty of ways to deal with disruptive behavior of any kind.  I don’t think the government needs to micromanage this one.

Should same sex couples be allowed to marry? (RWN – 24% yes/76% no, Kos – 7% yes/77% no

For those who say that marriage is simply a religious function, explain why the former Soviet Union sanctioned marriages and specifically limited it to one man and one woman.

Shoebox:  ditto 

Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not? (RWN – 11% yes/88% no, Kos – 39% yes/32% no

Obama meets the Constitutional requirements of the office of President, was duly elected in accordance with the Constitution, and hasn’t done anything like lie to a grand jury or direct a coverup of a break-in.

Shoebox:  I’ll put one caveat on Steve’s point; we haven’t heard the testimony on the Blagojevich case yet!

Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not? (RWN – 86% yes/14% no, Kos – 42% yes/36% no)

See above.  Shoebox:  distraction.  Move on!

Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist? (RWN – 89% yes/11% no, Kos 63% yes/21% no)

If one seizes companies like a socialist, one parcels out pieces of said seized companies to favored political interests, specifically unions, like a socialist, and one dictates the maximum level of compensation at companies not quite completely under the ownership of the government like a socialist, one is a socialist.

Shoebox:  I marked yes but I actually think he is a Marxist.

Do you believe your state should secede from the United States? (RWN – 6% yes/94% no, Kos – 23% yes/58% no)

We’re not at that point in the course of human events where it is necessary to dissolve those political bands…yet.

Shoebox:  Besides, at least while I’m living in MN, there’s no way we’d leave the losing side!

John also asks a question not asked by Kos/Research 2000 that has had (see below) Shoebox on one side, Birdman on the other, and me somewhere in limbo.

Do you think the Democrats are going to pass a health care bill? (26% yes/74% no)

Call me hopeful, but I don’t see how Nancy Pelosi has 217 (yes, the majority is 217 now that there are two vacancies) votes for the abortion-and-payoffs Senate version of PlaceboCare. I also don’t see the troika of Obama/Pelosi/Harry Reid accepting anything less than full socializatin of health care complete with full abortion-on-demand funding. If they couldn’t ram the full monty through in the 6 months they had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, despite having said full monty allegedly certified for “reconciliation”,….

Shoebox:  anything is possible but I think this is dead.  I think there are too many electoral bodies stacking up even for ideologues like Pelosi, Reid and Obama.

Remember when the Left made hay with former Sen. Norm Coleman’s DC housing arrangements? Jim Geraghty the Indispensible found that Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN Who Knows Where) used the business address of his campaign treasurer as his “home-state address of record” on his current Statement of Candidacy. Said Statement of Candidacy was filed with the secretary of the Senate, and signed by Bayh, in July 2005.

While the Constitution is silent on the DC-area living arrangements of Senators, it isn’t exactly silent on where a Senator must be living at the time of his or her election. From Article I, Section 3 (emphasis added):

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

Rasmussen Reports’ Daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that whatever bounce Barack Obama got post-State of the Union speech has gone. This weekend’s numbers:

Saturday – -15 Approval Index (26% strongly approve/41% strongly disapprove), -11 overall differential (44% approve/55% disapprove)
Sunday – -17 Approval Index (26%/43%), -12 overall (44%/56%)
Monday – -15 Approval Index (26%/41%), -8 overall (46%/54%)

The average between the beginning of the year and the SOTU address is a -14.42 Approval Index (26.21% strongly approve/40.63% strongly disapprove) and a -5.71 overall differential (46.79% approve/52.50% disapprove). I believe the operative word is, “Splat!”

John Hawkins answers the complaints from the oh-so-“tolerant” Left about Sarah Palin’s use of her hand to hold a couple of bullet points on her speech before the “National Tea Party Convention” Saturday. John, you should’ve used the backhand.

The Weekly Standard‘s Matthew Continetti deconstructs the One Week Hate unleased by the Left upon Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI, and my Congresscritter):

Key fact: Ryan’s plan preserves the current entitlement system for everyone over the age of 55. The rest of us will see dramatic changes in the structure of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the tax code–changes the CBO says will solve the long-term budget problem, in ways that increase individual choice and limit government’s scope. If nothing is done, America faces high interest rates, inflation, and economy-crushing tax rates. Is this the future Democrats prefer? After all, they have provided no alternative way to achieve the Roadmap’s outcomes.

As a matter of fact, they do prefer that to one with low interest rates, low inflation and low tax rates, especially if that invovles a limited scope of government and increased individual choice. In fact, the Left is more afraid of limits on government and the corresponding increase in individual freedom than they are about going the route of the Soviet Union.

Refusing to take any message of “you’ve gone too far” out of the Scott Brown victory, President Obama told Senate Democrats that he is moving full steam ahead with his agenda:

“We’ve got to finish the job on health care. We’ve got to finish the job on financial regulatory reform. We’ve got to finish the job, even though it’s hard.”

Defiantly, Obama blamed Republicans for the inability to pass the health care legislation.  Never mind that up until Scott Brown, Republicans had no was to delay the legislation had Democrats themselves been united.

Obama urged the Senators to forge ahead with even greater urgency.  With regard to the loss of the Senate super majority, Obama said:

We still have to lead.

Leading is well and good.  In fact, I’d welcome some rational leadership from this administration.  The challenge with leading is that you should have an idea of where the path you are leading along goes.  If you don’t, charging ahead full steam without any caution could create some unexpected problems:

The “Bush’s fault” theme has been the favorite mantra of the ObamiNation, from its head to its foot soldiers, since Teh Won burst onto the scene. With that in mind, let’s update the chart I posted yesterday, itself an update of a chart the Washington Post put together during the debate on the first Obama budget last March, with another “baseline” projection from the CBO, this one from January 8, 2009, going out to FY2019.

Click for the full-size chart

Do note that the 2009 CBO baseline includes absolutely nothing that was passed in 2009, and very specifically does not include Porkul…er, the “stimulus” pack…er, the “Grow Government Act of 2009”. It also does, like the 2010 CBO baseline, assume the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule. Let’s run some numbers:

• In FY2009, Obama and his fellow Democrats added an additional $0.227 trillion in deficit spending (once again, I will use a single “base”) to what they “inherited” in deficit spending.
• In FY2010, they will add an additional $0.853 trillion in deficit spending, more than what they “inherited” in deficit spending.
• In FY2011, Obama wants to add an additional $0.769 trillion in deficit spending, close to double of the deficit spending he “inherited”.
• In FY2012, Obama wants to add an additional $0.564 trillion in deficit spending, more than double of the deficit spending he “inherited”.
• In his first 4 years (and hopefully, his only 4), Obama has added and wants to add $2.413 trillion in deficit spending on top of $2.651 trillion of “inherited” deficits.
• Through 2019 (the last year the comparison can be made), Obama wants to add $6.177 trillion in deficit spending on top of the $4.321 trillion he “inherited”.

Given that, on January 20, 2009, the day that Obama assumed the office of President, the publicly-held debt (i.e. the cumulative deficit spending from the founding of the country up through the end of the George W. Bush administration) was $6.307 trillion (and that included a significant portion of the the 2009 “inherited” deficit), it is a mind-numbing number.

Bonus item – Speaking of that public debt amount, the public debt on the last business day of the Clinton administration (January 19, 2001) was $5.728 trillion. At the close of business this past Friday (1/29/2010), it was $7.759 trillion.

Revisions/extensions (3:39 pm 2/2/2010) – (H/T – Karl) Keith Hennessey provides more analysis, this time based on percentage of GDP instead of absolute dollars. Behold his more-colorful chart…

Do note that Hennessey assigns the entirety of the FY2009 deficit to Bush due to the effects of TARP. I dealt with that by using the CBO’s 2009 “baseline” from January 2009, which assigned just under $1.2 trillion of the FY2009 deficit to existing policies. Without the FY2009 budget, Bush’s deficits averaged 2.0% of GDP (that black line in the middle of Bush’s column).

However, neither that nor removing the first three years of “recovery” reduces Obama to anything near Bush deficit spending levels. The takeaway from Hennessey (emphasis in the original):

You can see that each of these comparisons, which allow you to “not count” the recovery years in the average for Obama, still result in average budget deficits that far exceed even the worst portrayal of the Bush Administration’s average.

In fact, the smallest annual deficit proposed by President Obama is 3.6% of GDP, in 2018 and 2019, the two years after his second term would end. The lowest during his hypothetical eight years would be 3.7% in 2017 and 2018. The lowest proposed budget deficits in a hypothetical “Obama decade” would exceed the Bush average budget deficit, even if we assign most of the TARP spending to Bush.

This leaves an open question: Which is the decade of profligacy?

R&E part 2 (6:23 pm 2/2/2010) – Thanks for the link love, and the treasure trove of links, go out to P-Mac. It’s all about making government bigger at the expense of everybody, but mostly the aspiring-to-be-rich.

R&E part 3 (11:50 am 2/3/2010) – Somehow I forgot to link to the January 2009 CBO report. Also, down in the comments, I explored both what keeping the third of the Bush tax cuts that Obama doesn’t want to keep and what keeping the Bush tax cuts in their entirety would have done had Obama and the Democrats not loaded up on the spending last year. Suffice it to say that the problem is not the tax cuts.

In last week’s SOTU speech, Barack Obama suggested a 3-year non-defense/TARP/bailout discretionary spending “freeze”. Today, he unleashed a budget that, put together with his FY2009 and FY2010 budgets, will result in, by his administration’s own admission, another deficit of over $1 trillion ($1.27 trillion to be exact) in FY2011, a historic first-term (FY2009-FY2012) $5.07 trillion deficit (with a projected 4-year “low” of $0.83 trillion in FY2012), a “minimum” deficit of $0.71 trillion (in 2014), and a ten-year projected $8.53 trillion deficit between FY2011 and FY2020. Oh yeah; this year’s budget, at a projected deficit of $1.56 trillion, will top last year’s record $1.43 trillion deficit.

Those numbers are significantly worse than the “baseline” estimates released by the Congressional Budget Office just last week. The comparable numbers from the CBO estimates are a $1.44 trillion deficit this year, a $0.980 trillion deficit in FY2011, a $0.65 trillion deficit in FY2012, a “first-term” deficit of $4.48 trillion, a ten-year $6.05 trillion deficit between FY2011 and FY2020, and a “minimum” deficit of $0.48 trillion (also in FY2014).

A couple of side notes before I continue. First, while I could have used billions for the numbers under $1 trillion, I decided to keep the numbers in the same “base”. In the chart below, since the Washington Post used billions in their original, I decided to do so in my remake as well.

Second, a word of note about the CBO “baseline” – it assumes that the only changes to current tax law are those already part of law (e.g. the Bush tax cuts expire in their entirety, and the Alternate Minimum Tax doesn’t get its annual “fix), and that spending on discretionary spending increases at “only” the rate of inflation.

I’m sure you remember the chart from the Washington Post produced near the end of March comparing the OMB estimate of deficits in Obama’s FY2010 to the CBO estimate. Since Kevin Binversie appears to be looking for an update, I’ll provide one.

Click for the full-sized chart

Revisions/extensions (6:55 pm 2/1/2010) – In one of my previous drafts, I had the 10-year minimum deficit as projected by OMB today. Somehow, I had lost it in the published version. I have put it back in.

Howard Dean has been the proverbial gift that keeps on giving.  Starting with his scream in Iowa and through incidents like:

“I think with a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, you can’t play, you know, hide the salami, or whatever it’s called.” –urging President Bush to make public Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers’s White House records

Dean becomes a characitured face of many of the things that are wrong with Democrat thinking.  Don’t get me wrong, I want Dean to stay where he is.  His frequent foot-in-mouth episodes help crystallize the absurdity of many of the Democrat policies.

On the other hand, I don’t admire the same characteristics from our current RNC chairman!

Michael Steel is also a gaffe machine.  From picking a fight with Rush Limbaugh a short time after he became Chair to more recent statements like saying that Republicans aren’t ready to lead and saying:

`Critics should ‘get a life,’ ‘shut up,’ ‘fire me’  … or get out of the way’

after he received criticism about his ability to lead the party. 

While verbal gaffes are many times the result of an inexperience or inability to “think on one’s feet” and can be occasionally excused, gaffes of planned events or execution are much less so.

Under the direction of Michael Steele, the RNC decided to have their winter meeting in……..Hawaii! 

“Imagine lush tropical gardens, waterfalls, exotic wildlife and priceless artwork,” boasts the website of the Hilton Hawaiian Village Beach Resort & Spa. “This one-of-a-kind Honolulu Hawaii hotel resort is the only true resort property in Waikiki.”

Editor’s note – This post will be at the top of the blog until the end of the STF…er, SOTU address. If there are newer posts, they’ll be below this one.

You have spoken, and my liver will be taking the abuse. If you’re expecting genteel discussion, sorry about that because I’ll have my Jules Winnfield impersonation going.

The rules are simple…

– There will be no drinking games because we will be drinking constantly and the only ones that will be gaming are the enemy.
– The language will be extra-salty.
– Paraphrases from Teh Won will be in italics (if I remember to hit the italics button).
– This show will get on the road about 7:45 pm Central.
– Depending on how many show up, not all comments will make it (that’s how Cover It Live works – I can only auto-approve so many people).
– No “Ellie Lights” allowed.

Other than that, jump on in…

Oh yeah – drunkblogging is made possible by The Man, The Legend (and no, he’s definitely not a myth) – Stephen Green, who will take his usual place with martinis in hand and in the hold.

A story has surfaced over the past week about a prolific OpEd writer by the name of Ellie Light. 

Ellie’s OpEd offers support for President Barack Obama.  Her OpEd makes the argument that Obama never promised us a Rose Garden.  Rather she argues, Obama told us it was going to be a tough slog to fix the economy.  She further argues that those who criticize him of not having fixed the economy are guilty of unrealistic expectations.

OK, so MS. Light and I won’t agree on Barack Obama’s economic letter grade.  But, that’s not what makes Ms. Light interesting or the subject of my post.  Turns out that Ms. Light’s OpEd has been printed in at least 40 newspapers across the country.  In nearly every newspaper, she is listed as a reader who lives within the service area of that publication.

Because of her ability to be published in so many papers and portray herself as from the local economic area, a form of sleuthing has begun to determine who exactly Ellie Light is.

In an email to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the paper who uncovered Ms. Light’s country wide travels, Ms. Light gives this defense of her actions:

“I’m flattered, and I must give the Tea Partiers credit for even knowing who [Power] is,” Light’s e-mail said. “But what I want to point out is that, if I were a person trying to imply this huge groundswell of support for our beleaguered president, then I would have signed the letter with different names. However, as you may have noticed, my main point is that absence of support for the president.

“I am not surprised that an article that tends to discredit a pro-Obama letter-writer has lots of readers. I understand that there are 10 million dittoheads that daily scour the airwaves, print and online press for something nasty to say about the president, so I’m sure your article will get more hits,” she wrote in another e-mail later Sunday. “I’m not sure why you would write me that people would probably be interested in what I have to say. My impression is that my letter could contain Chinese food recipes with a Pro-Obama subject line, and the event would be interpreted as fodder for that same highly-motivated, but narrow class of people.”

Ms. Light closes her defense with the following:

“If my letter were boilerplate [White House senior adviser David] Axelrod dribble, as has been suggested by your new fan club, it would not have been published. Many of my friends have written letters to the editor and bemoan the fact that they never get published. I reply that everything they wrote in their letters has been said before by others. I think, however, this one letter that I wrote, is unique enough, that it was worth widespread attention, simple as that.”

After reading Ms. Light’s OpEd and her defense article, I commissioned a clandestine NoRunnyEggs operative to investigate Ms. Light.  My goal was to determine who “Ms. Light” actually is.

After untold minutes of investigation that included a couple of rereadings of “her” letters, I believe I have the answer.

It’s clear that “Ms. Light is a supporter of President Obama.  That observation reduces us to only about 40% of the population.  Based on the words used, and the phraseology, I think it’s safe to say that “Ms.” is actually a Ms.  That takes us to about 20% of the population.  Ms. Light specifically slights David Axlerod.  The general public has no idea who or where  David Axlerod is since he hasn’t been seen in about 4 months.  From this we can conclude that Ms. Light is a Washington insider.  Finally, Ms Light seems to ascribe to the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy theory as she belittles the tea parties and those affiliated with them.

Yes, Ms. Light is none other than Hillary Clinton!  You doubt me?  Can you think of anyone who is more concerned about Obama completely screwing things up than Hillary Clinton?  Let’s see, Clinton is a part of the Obama administration; can you think of a bigger blotch on a presidential hopeful’s resume than to be a part of a catastrophic administration? Really?  You don’t think this is a problem?  Does the name Walter Mondale mean anything to you? 

The other possibility is that it Barack Obama himself.  I considered that but there weren’t references to “I” every other point.  No, it has to be Hillary.  Case closed!

After months of saying “no” and “hell no,” the American people, represented by the voters of Massachusetts, sent a clear message to President Obama; quit your head long run towards Socialism!  While I’m not sure they’ve gotten the message, the election of Scott Brown has clearly taken the wind out of the Administration’s sails.

From his interview with George Stephanopoulos where he claimed that he and Scott Brown were elected under the same “hope” agenda, to his blatant and obvious attempt at populism when he introduced his bill to penalize banks on the day following the repudiation of placebocare, it’s clear that the Obama administration has lost their momentum and is seeking a way to get it back.

With his mojo deflated, pundits and talking heads have been filling airwaves and electronic and printed media asking what will Obama do next.  In general, their question comes down to this; is Obama an ideologue who will not take no for an answer and continue to push his extreme left agenda or, will Obama become the reincarnation of Bill Clinton and learn the art of triangulation.  This skill that will be required if he wants any success with what will surely become a much more Republican filled House and Senate.

I’ve claimed from the start that Obama is an ideologue.  I have seen nothing in his character or agenda that suggested to me that he had anything other than a hard left perspective.  From Jeremiah Wright to Van Jones to his full bore tilt to have government control or dictate to all major American industries, it looked like he was an ideologue’s ideologue.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading the book “The Argument” by Matt Bai.  The book largely outlines the progression of the far left from theory on a slide show post 2002 elections, to the core of the Democrat party, and ultimately the presidency, by 2008.  In this book, Bai reports on one of the first encounters that then, Senator Barack Obama, had with the nutroot bloggers.

In 2005, while debating John Roberts for chief justice, Patrick Leahy had come out to support Roberts.  Obama said he would vote against Roberts but then supported Leahy’s position saying that those who didn’t accept diverse opinions were knee-jerk, amongst other things.  As the story goes forward, Obama is roundly criticized by the nutroots for not being “pure” on this issue.  Obama couldn’t handle the criticism so after brooding over it for a while, he wrote a two thousand word plus response which was posted on the nutroot’s holy site.

In this missive, Obama started by laying out the argument that the nutroots and their kind, were interested only in purity and that through enforcing this, eventually they would elect enough officials and the public would see just how right their positions are/were.  He then explained why this philosophy was flawed.  As quoted in the book, part of Obama’s response was:

I think this perspective misreads the American people.  From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and supicious of jargon.  They don’t think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent.  They don’t think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game tot he detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs.  They don’t think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated…

Bai follows up this section of Obama’s letter with his own interpretation and further Obama quotes:

If Democrats really wanted to win the trust of these voters, Obama lectured, they couldn’t go around demonizing those who disagreed with them, nor could they impose some kind of purity test on their elected leaders.  “To the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, “true” progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward,” he said.  Citing Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., Obama said the country’s most compelling voices had been those who could “speak with the utmost conviction about the great issues of the day without ever belittling those who opposed them, and without denying the limits of their own perspectives.”

Note that the bolded items are my embellishments.

Look back at the bolded items.  Note how Obama, when addressing the nutroots was arguing directly against the attitude and policies that he has implemented as President!  “Bush is a good man but wrong”, “Don’t blame corporations” and “America is not a brute” has been replaced by the exact opposite talking points in Obama’s presidency.  “Recognizing, appreciating and considering diverse perspectives” has been replaced by a dogmatic “I won” mentality on every topic and approach.

What’s my point?

While I believe his core is that of a hard left ideologue, there have been times where Obama has at least, “talked” the game of a pragmatist.  I don’t know whether the “talk” was just that, “talk”, and he never was a pragmatist, or whether perhaps, he really did/does view his election and the corresponding sweep of Congress, as a mandate for a hard left transformation of the country and thus believed being an ideologue was what the people voted for.

If Obama took 2008 as a mandate, I suspect we will see some moderating of his hard left agenda.  I don’t think he’s going to recommend a reduction in taxes as a solution to our economic challenges.  However, it’s possible that some of the talk of extending the Bush tax cuts for a year could be just this kind of pragmatism coming to the fore.  On the other hand, if Obama is the ideologue he has portrayed in the first year of office, it will be a long three years.

If Obama continues to lead the nation believing that solutions come from the hard left, the results will be further increases in spending with little to no economic recovery.  If Obama continues as an ideologue, we will see damage done that could well cause the United States to cease being a world economic power.

That last sentence is a pretty sobering thought and not one that I wrote just as hyperbole.  The Obama presidency is at a cross roads.  If Obama recognizes that the American people are not with him, at least on his approach, and with a bit of humility leads the Democrats back to a plan that Independents support, he may yet have a chance to shape America.  If he doesn’t, any reshaping will result in long term damage to America.  While Obama regularly refers to “the last eight years,” if Obama doesn’t understand the implications of the Brown election, we may have Presidents for a generation referring to “the four years of Obama” as the cause for the problems they then face!