Obama: again with the orator

The New Neo Posted on by

I am truly puzzled.

In this article by economist Laurence Kotlikoff, he criticizes Obama’s budget speech although he’s an Obama supporter. He thinks Obama offered no proposals of his own, and he thinks Paul Ryan’s approach to Medicare is pretty good.

That’s not the puzzling part, although it’s rare for an Obama-supporter to be fair enough to say anything good about Ryan. No, the really puzzling part for me was this:

I voted for and even campaigned for the president, and my jaw drops every time I hear him speak. But eloquence is no substitute for substance. We need real leadership now, not after the next election.

I read that paragraph several times in a vain attempt to parse it. The last sentence was no problem; it was the first that made my jaw drop. Whatever verbal spell it is that Obama casts—one that I seem to have always been immune to—this man is still at least partially under it.

No doubt he’s not alone.

[NOTE: Kotlikoff may not be alone, but more of America seems to be slowly emerging from the spell, if this new poll is any indication.]

[ADDENDUM: Unlike Kotlikoff, fellow economist Paul Krugman is busy excoriating Ryan and lauding the glorious specificity of Obama’s budget proposal. Noel Sheppard asks “whaaaa??”]

Obama, birthers, and horns

The New Neo Posted on by

This response of Obama’s to a Stephanopoulos question indicates that he knows a good opportunity for ridicule of birthers when he hears one:

I think a problem for [birther-candidates such as Trump] when they want to actually run in a general election where most people feel pretty confident the President was born where he says he was, in Hawaii. He– he doesn’t have horns”¦we’re not really worrying about conspiracy theories or– or birth certificates…

I think there are two interesting things about this statement. The first is Obama’s use of the third person to describe himself. Not sure what it means, but it’s a bit odd, especially for Obama, who usually seems to like to say “I.”

The second is the segue into the charge about having horns.

What did he mean? It may have been a reference to his not being the Antichrist—after all, that Biblical figure, according to prophecy, will have ten horns (it will also have a few other attributes, such as seven heads and ten diadems on the horns, and will be allowed to exercise authority for forty-two months rather than the forty-eight Obama’s in for in his first term).

The horn thing also is a conventional way of referring to the devil. But yet another reference would be to being Jewish: it was long a common misconception, based partly on a Bible passage and Michelangelo’s statue of Moses, that Jews have horns. So is Obama hinting that he might be Jewish? Birthers, take note.

And speaking of Jews with horns…

Mubarak & Sons…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are now in prison (sons) and hospital detention (father).

I can’t help but think that the message received by dictators around the world is that it’s much better to be a US enemy than a US friend.

Here’s more about what might be going on in Egypt:

The arrest of Mr Mubarak has been a key demand of protesters. Many analysts believe the latest moves against the Mubarak family are a politicised bid to mollify angry demonstrators, who have recently shifted their attention to the titular head of the military, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, a long-serving Mubarak-era minister.

”I seriously doubt that after all this the Mubaraks will be released,” said Ragia Omran, a human rights lawyer and pro-change activist. ”There’s been a lot of anger in the Egyptian street over the demands of the revolution not being met, and the ruling generals have arrested the Mubaraks in an effort to calm the people. To let them go now would be political suicide.”

It will be interesting to see how the new government shapes up in terms of revenge against the former regime. Will there be a Reign of Terror? Or amnesty? Or something in-between?

Obama’s budget speech

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t watch Obma’s speech last night. Fortunately, I was busy doing other—and more pleasant—things.

But from the reports I see, I don’t think anyone was pleased with it, left or right, with the exception of a few of the president’s most partisan shills. Joe Biden used it as an opportunity to get some shuteye. Clive Crook thinks Obama’s speech was a pitiful waste of breath.

In his speech, Obama abandoned any temporary pretense of bipartisan rhetoric and indulged in his tried-and-true Bush/Republicans bashing mixed with a liberal helping of class warfare. Perry Bacon at the WaPo certainly noticed the intense partisanship:

In the speech, he used as many words to attack the GOP proposal as to lay out his own…

Even as he savaged the GOP proposal, Obama was less than specific about his own. He did not say exactly how he would reform how corporations are taxed, what he would do to achieve a simpler tax system or which defense programs he would cut. On Social Security, he not only didn’t announce a proposal but would not say whether one was likely to be included in the final legislation.

And Obama, who rarely personally interjected himself into the negotiations on the federal budget over the past two weeks, seems prepared to play a similar role on the deficit: He announced that a group of 16 members of Congress and Vice President Biden would negotiate over the legislation, allowing the president to remain out of the day-to-day politicking on the issue.

This is Obama’s m.o. as we have come to know it, from the time of his campaign for president: blame the Republicans and distort and demonize their stand, then remain vague about what you’re proposing as an alternative. As Fred Barnes puts it, Obama didn’t rise to the occasion; he sank.

That doesn’t mean that at the end of the day he won’t come out ahead in this series of negotiations. I don’t think most people listened to the speech, but many more will pay attention to the final result, or at least their perception of the final result. Obama is counting on Republicans being scattered and weakened by fighting among themselves . And he may indeed be correct on that score.

[NOTE: Obama also indulged in another of his favorite pastimes, dissing those present at the speech without their being able to answer back. Talk about captive audiences! In earlier speeches it was the conservative Supreme Court justices; this time it was Rep. Paul Ryan. As Jim Geraghty points out:

Perhaps one of the reasons Obama loves the setting of the grandiose national address is that there is rarely a rebuttal. Any interruption to dispute the facts ”” like, say, Rep. Joe Wilson yelling out, “You LIE!” during an address to Congress ”” comes across as rude to the office of the presidency. The Supreme Court is completely unused to being criticized to their faces; members of Congress are used to the back-and-forth of debates on the floor in which every accusation and assertion can be rebutted and cross-examined.

I’m reminded of Saul Alinsky’s Third Rule: Wherever possible, go outside of the experience of your enemy.

Obama is, among other things, a petty bully and a demagogue who seems to get off on inviting his enemies to a front seat (literally) and then making them squirm.

And here, in case you want it, is a more sober analysis of the Ryan plan.]

Phone home: not!

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently I saw a depressing article in the NY Times about the decline of the telephone conversation. And the comments were even sadder.

It seems the phone is going the way of the dodo and the calling card. People would rather text. People don’t have time to chat. People see it as an intrusion. People want to get to the point. People have better things to do.

Like what? Are most people so engaged in earth-shaking activities that time out for a little conversation is so onerous? Or are people just immersing themselves more and more in the safety of solitary technology, which eliminates all messy demands from others and gives us more drastic control of input and output?

I confess that, although I certainly spend more than average time on a computer, I love the contact of the phone and use it regularly. Always have. I have a lot of friends and loved ones who are far away. I have a great many local friends who are busy and for whom the phone is the best way to communicate. Even though I’m a writer, I prefer to supplement email contact with the human voice, which conveys feeling and tone and jokes and interactions in real time.

And (gasp!) I even prefer face-to-face contact over telephones. That’s just the sort of dinosaur I am.

[NOTE: I’ve also noticed that business contacts on the phone are becoming stranger and more difficult. I’m not talking just about the usual wait for the message (“press 1 if you would like to speak to…”) to run through its laborious paces, but the contact itself once you get to speak to someone. The person on the other end—be he/she computer techie or salesperson or airline information agent—increasingly seems vaguely hostile and irritated right from the start.

All too often, “customer service” has now been relegated to what is almost a battle, even for one’s request to be understood, much less answered. And I’m not just talking about those times when the person on the other end hails from Mumbai, either. I’ve noticed that, in general, the agent can’t seem to respond to a question or a situation of any complexity whatsoever.

No doubt they’d rather be texting.]

It’s taxing: hikes and breaks

The New Neo Posted on by

In President Obama’s speech tonight, he will speak of “tax reform,” among other topics But the details are being closely guarded.

It’s unclear whether he will propose some sort of tax hike for the “rich,” or the expiration some of the Bush tax cuts, as many have advocated. Some say that would be an excellent way to reduce the deficit. Some say it wouldn’t matter at all, and could even make things worse because raising taxes is almost invariably followed by raising spending (see also this).

What’s a poor voter to do, except be skeptical? Actually, the two positions I cited in the paragraph above are not inherently contradictory, because the first—that higher taxes would be highly effective in deficit reduction—also presupposes that Congress will not do anything to raise spending. The second says that’s unrealistic: saying that Congress can resist using the revenue for new goodies is like saying you’ll only eat one potato chip when there’s a bag in the cupboard crying out to be consumed.

That’s the practical issue, or at least one of them. Another is whether raising taxes actually provides the expected revenue, or whether people tend to adjust their behavior accordingly to foil the government.

And then there are the philosophical questions. One of the many differences between those on the left and those on the right is that the latter think that, for the most part, when rich people earn money it belongs to them, and that if we take that away we take away a great deal of the incentive that drives prosperity. The former think that rich people have stolen the money from the rest of us and that when we take it away from them we are just reclaiming what we rightfully own. So to the left (except for rich people on the left who are just as assiduous in hiring tax lawyers to take advantage of all loopholes), taxes on the rich are an inherently good thing, and they themselves are a bunch of modern-day Robin Hoods and his not-so-merry men and women.

The progressive People’s Budget

The New Neo Posted on by

Byron York reports on the budget that the House’s Progressive Caucus would like to see passed. The caucus is not small; it contains “76 members, about 40 percent of the 192 Democrats in the House,” including Barney Frank, John Conyers, George Miller, Charles Rangel, Rosa DeLauro, Jerrold Nadler, and Louise Slaughter.

And the name of the budget that I put in my title above is not my own ironic invention; it’s theirs. Here are some of the details:

How can such fiscal miracles be accomplished? By tax increases that would make even some top Democrats gasp. Perhaps the most extraordinary is the caucus plan to raise the Social Security tax to cover nearly all of a taxpayer’s income. Right now, the tax is imposed on the first $106,000 of earnings. For people who make more than that, the caucus would tax a full 90 percent of income — no matter how high it goes. The caucus would raise the Social Security tax that employers pay as well.

The caucus would create three new individual tax brackets for the highest incomes, topping out at 47 percent. It would also raise the capital gains tax, the estate tax and corporate taxes. It would create something called a “financial crisis responsibility fee” and a “financial speculation tax.” And of course it would repeal the Bush tax cuts.

As if anyone needed reminding, the “People’s Budget” is proof that the liberal idea of budget balancing is tax, tax, tax. If you’re looking for spending cuts, you’ll find just one really big one: national defense.

York mentions that in the olden days Obama would have been one of the supporters of the plan. I have no doubt he’s right. And I agree with him that at this point Obama would oppose it for political reasons. However, since the House is in Republican control right now, the People’s Budget is so much hot air, except as an indication of what liberal Democrats would do if they had the chance and the power.

Strangely, they did have the chance and the power, last session. They had the House, the Senate, and a simpatico president. But they didn’t try to pass any budget at all. Hmmm.

Bloggers sue Huffington and AOL

The New Neo Posted on by

This news is hardly surprising: bloggers for HuffPo who didn’t share in the AOL acquisition monies are suing both Arianna Huffington and AOL in a class action suit. As I noted when the news of the sale of HuffPo first came out, “it’s interesting that there are 6,000 bloggers working for free for HuffPo, and they didn’t get a dime. We bloggers, what we do for love!”

But HuffPo is no longer a lovefest. As former HuffPo blogger and lead plaintiff Jonathan Tasini indicated to Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici during a phone call, “Tasini vowed to make Huffington ‘a pariah in the progressive community’ and said his goal is to set a precedent that writers must share in the value they create.”

The bloggers understood themselves to be volunteers; what does that mean when the product they help develop is sold for tons of money? Under contract law, not much. But the plaintiffs are not suing under contract law, their cause of action will be based on unjust enrichment.

Tasini has more to say to Arianna:

She’ll never [be invited to] speak. We will picket her home. We’re going to make it clear that, until you do justice here, your life is going to be a living hell.”…Anybody blogging for the Huffington Post now is a scab,” he says. “They’re a strike breaker. They’re producing content for somebody who is attacking workers.”

Ah, the left and its fine rhetoric. Arianna may do a rerat and end up taking refuge on the right again before this is through.