In an attempt to defend the trillion-dollar health care overhaul bills currently being marked up in Congress, and to shift attention from his own actions to those of his predecessor, President Barack Obama (D-IL) declared in his July 18 radio address that “The same folks who controlled the White House and Congress for the past eight years as we ran up record deficits will argue | Read More »
Anyone who remembers, say, his campaign pronouncement that a Kansas tornado had left “ten thousand dead” and “an entire town destroyed” (the 2007 storm actually killed twelve people) knows that President Barack Obama (D-IL) hasn’t been one to worry about playing fast and loose with a few facts or numbers. However, his dogged refusal to deviate from his standard talking point of “150,000 jobs created | Read More »
Update by Jeff: Perhaps this comment will shine a bit more light on the import of this issue. WHO SHOULD HAVE CONTROL over your medical care: your family doctor, or a bureaucrat you’ve never met whose sole job is to look out for the government’s financial bottom-line? That question, which is the subject of today’s AOL Hot Seat poll, is being debated in court right | Read More »
Here’s video of Sen. Chris Dodd (DEMOCRAT) telling CNN he wrote the bonuses-are-OK loophole into the Porkulus bill that not one Senator nor Representative read before voting on: So…what now? Congress and the president are talking about having those executives who, under this law written by Democrats and lobbyists, passed by House Democrats without one single Republican vote, passed by the Senate with only Benedict | Read More »
Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) sent a letter to the South Carolina General Assembly today in which he outlined his intent to request a waiver from the Obama administration that would allow him to use the $700,000,000.00 in Porkulus cash due his state “to pay down South Carolina’s sizable debt and contingent liabilities,” rather than to fund new pork-barrel, make-work projects. Sanford has said he will | Read More »
Last November, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (R) took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal in an effort to publicly repudiate the ongoing talk about states increasing personal and national debt by accepting multi-billion dollar bailouts from Washington. In an op-ed titled “Don’t Bail Out My State,” Sanford wrote: I find myself in a lonely position. While many states and local governments are | Read More »
Only twelve Senators voted against TARP, the Big 3 auto bailout, and the Porkulus boondoggle. Who were they? (Answer below the fold) Speaking of which, does anybody else out there have some good trivia? Let’s make this an open thread, with a slight emphasis on brain-expanding question-and-answer in the comments. My personal favorite subject is ancient history
It doesn’t get much simpler or more clear-cut than this. During his campaign, President Obama promised that he “will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.” The so-called “stimulus” bill was passed by the Senate just before midnight on Friday night (after Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-OH, arrived on | Read More »
A post-Porkulus video from the Whip’s office: Kudos once again to the House GOP, which held the line in unanimity not once, but twice, against the Democrats’ Porkulus charge. Senator McConnell, the day you rein in Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe and lead your caucus in holding the line on a transformational piece of legislation like this, we might have space for a | Read More »
What do Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe have in common? Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe are, together, the reason we will be, come Monday (or Friday, if President Obama departs entirely from character and keeps his word for once), $787,000,000,000.00 further in debt, with nothing but ultra-funded pet pork projects in heavily Democratic districts to show for it. Bravo, Arlen Specter, | Read More »
At some point this evening, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown (D) will be the 60th and final vote in favor of the Porkulus. The vote is being held open while President Obama sends a private jet to pick him up in Ohio, where he has been attending his recently deceased mother’s viewing, and brings him back to cast a ballot for the $800 billion bill neither | Read More »
While visiting Caterpillar headquarters in Peoria, IL, yesterday, President Obama instructed employees of the construction company to tell their representative, Congressman Aaron Schock (R-IL), to support his $800 billion spending package. On the floor of the House this morning, Schock announced that not one single employee came up to him after Obama’s speech — and that, contrary to the president’s claims, every one of the | Read More »
Watch him on the House floor early this afternoon stating the obvious: that not one single member of the House of Representatives had read the 1,000-page, $800,000,000,000.00 borrow-and-spend bill they were about to vote on, and that the unanimously-passed instruction that Americans receive 48 hours to read the bill before its passage had been knowingly — and dishonestly — scrapped. Throwing the bill onto the | Read More »
Here’s a nice little tidbit: the so-called “stimulus” bill includes a provision that allows state legislatures (like, perhaps, South Carolina’s) to override their Governors’ (like, perhaps, Mark Sanford, R-SC) decision not to accept borrowed bailout funds, simply by passing a concurrent resolution. In other words, state legislatures can override the GOP Governors out there who have kept their respective spines and integrity intact, and force | Read More »
Below, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) takes us on a brief tour of the 1,073 page “stimulus” package, which was released last night at 11:00pm (after K Street had gotten good and done with it), and on which floor action was to commence at 9am today. One Hill staffer emailed me that he had to “re-load the printer twice” with paper in order to print the | Read More »
The claim that President Obama and Speaker Pelosi were going to bring “unprecedented transparency, rigorous oversight and clear accountability” to government, “so taxpayers know how their money is being spent and whether it is achieving results,” has proven to be even less grounded in truth than skeptics like myself initially expected. Note Exhibit A, at right: the conference report on the $800 billion “stimulus” bill, | Read More »
He’s a member of the President’s economic advisory team (h/t mjm1 in the comments of my earlier post on the subject). According to the Peoria Journal-Star: Caterpillar Inc. Chairman Jim Owens…on Friday was named to a team of economic advisers who will advise President Barack Obama on ways to boost the economy and help the country out of the recession. Owens was one of 16 | Read More »
Given his penchant for “misremembering” conversations (and for apparently misreading people entirely despite years of close contact — see Exhibit A, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for an example), we can’t be sure that President Obama is even accurately recounting what Caterpillar CEO James Owens said to him in their conversation. However, here‘s what he seems to think went on: President Barack Obama says Caterpillar’s chief executive | Read More »
This morning, a very senior contact within the House GOP informed me that Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Harry Reid (D-NV) met at length last night to put together the House/Senate conference report on the “stimulus” package. Only Democratic conference committee members were informed of the meeting and permitted to attend. The purpose behind the meeting was apparently to produce a conference report on the over | Read More »
Multiple sources are reporting that Republican Senators Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins have reached an agreement with Democrats on a final $780 billion version of the so-called “stimulus” package. Way to sell out your team, folks. Update by Jeff: According to the AP, Democrats expect this “bipartisan” agreement to be little more than a formality necessary to get the bill through the Senate | Read More »
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