George H.W. Bush made a “read my lips” no-new-taxes pledge in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in August 1988, and broke it two years later. That seemed a fast turnaround, but President Barack Obama has outpaced him by making, and then signaling his intention to break, a no-new-taxes pledge all in the same address.
“If your family earns less than $250,000 a year,” Obama said in his speech to a joint session of Congress, “you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”
Unless, that is, your family pays a utility bill. Earlier from the same podium, Obama exhorted Congress to send him “legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution.” This cap-and-trade program would increase the cost of energy for everyone, regardless of income. It is a broad-based (if indirect) tax increase of the sort the casual listener would have thought Obama ruled out in categorical language.
Obama’s just-released budget outline proposes using revenues raised by cap-and-trade to fund his “making work pay” tax credits that were part of the stimulus bill. Of those credits, Obama said, “The recovery plan provides a tax cut — that’s right, a tax cut — for 95 percent of working families.” This was a central Obama pledge during the campaign, although he never mentioned he’d fund it with a countervailing tax increase on working families and everyone else.
If you follow the money — out one pocket, in the other — Obama’s campaign promise is exposed as a fraud. Obama counts on no one noticing, in a vindication of the French writer Frederic Bastiat’s definition of politics as “the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
Obama is a talented, but a wily and dishonest, salesman. Nineteenth-century pol Martin Van Buren earned the sobriquet “the little magician” for his skillful manipulation of New York’s political machine. Obama is the rhetorical magician, depending — as all magicians do — on deft sleight of hand.
In his speech, Obama didn’t want his listeners to think he’s a big-government heir to Lyndon Johnson, so he talked of slashing waste. He said his team had begun going “line by line” through the budget, and “we have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.”
In common parlance, “savings” is taken to mean ... well, savings. But half of this $2 trillion is accounted for by Obama’s planned tax increases on the rich — in other words, he has identified revenue, not savings. Much of the rest is arrived at by assuming the Iraq War would cost $170 billion a year for the duration, even though Obama has long planned a drawdown. Obama portrays himself as ruthlessly paring back government when he is simply raising taxes and leaving Iraq.
Obama boasted of a “recovery plan free of earmarks, and I want to pass a budget next year that ensures that each dollar we spend reflects only our most important national priorities.” Again, the casual listener might conclude Obama won’t tolerate earmarks, although a $410 billion spending bill is currently speeding through Congress with 8,500 earmarks Obama stands ready to swallow.
Even as he expands government, Obama forswears any interest in expanding government and says he’s scaling back: “Everyone will have to sacrifice some worthy priorities for which there are no dollars, and that includes me.” Really? The only programs he said he’d cut were ineffective education programs, useless weapons systems, and subsidies to agribusiness, and his budget increases discretionary spending by 12 percent next year. To paraphrase Bob Dole, where’s the austerity?
Obama the writer-president prides himself on a facility with words that has fueled his political rise. He clearly respects words, including their power to manipulate and mislead.
“A good catchword,” Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “can obscure analysis for 50 years.”
To pass a vast program changing the relationship of American government to its citizens, Obama only needs to obscure analysis for about a year.
Friends, there is a danger hiding in practically every home, office and school. It masquerades as a harmless office supply but in reality, it has the ability to make people mentally unstable, disable a school system, and virtually bring a small town to its knees. It's known as (cue scary music), the post-it note.
As a resident of Plainfield and frequent walker on our excellent trail system, I have often wondered what the laws are concerning the marked pedestrian crosswalks throughout town. So I talked to the Plainfield Police Department.
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I'm back from a few shows at the security theater.
I slogged my way through four airports this past month, and played my interactive role in that daily, multi-billion-dollar production brought to us by the federal government with the colossally misleading name of "airline security."
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U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar - vanquished by age, longevity, barrel bottom congressional approval ratings, and an aggressive opponent in Treasurer Richard Mourdock - seemed to be bridging a divided party when he took the stage shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday as the magnitude of the 61 percent to 39 percent landslide against him registered.
The Cleveland Five are a sad-sack collection of wannabe terrorists if there ever was one. The amateurish young men who plotted to destroy a bridge outside Cleveland last week give the impression of needing the attention of a guidance counselor as much as a federal prosecutor.
Human remains may be embedded in the mud of the North Atlantic where the New York-bound Titanic came to rest when it sank 100 years ago, a federal official said.
Commentary
Obama the rhetorical magician
BY RICH LOWRY
George H.W. Bush made a “read my lips” no-new-taxes pledge in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in August 1988, and broke it two years later. That seemed a fast turnaround, but President Barack Obama has outpaced him by making, and then signaling his intention to break, a no-new-taxes pledge all in the same address.
“If your family earns less than $250,000 a year,” Obama said in his speech to a joint session of Congress, “you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”
Unless, that is, your family pays a utility bill. Earlier from the same podium, Obama exhorted Congress to send him “legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution.” This cap-and-trade program would increase the cost of energy for everyone, regardless of income. It is a broad-based (if indirect) tax increase of the sort the casual listener would have thought Obama ruled out in categorical language.
Obama’s just-released budget outline proposes using revenues raised by cap-and-trade to fund his “making work pay” tax credits that were part of the stimulus bill. Of those credits, Obama said, “The recovery plan provides a tax cut — that’s right, a tax cut — for 95 percent of working families.” This was a central Obama pledge during the campaign, although he never mentioned he’d fund it with a countervailing tax increase on working families and everyone else.
If you follow the money — out one pocket, in the other — Obama’s campaign promise is exposed as a fraud. Obama counts on no one noticing, in a vindication of the French writer Frederic Bastiat’s definition of politics as “the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
Obama is a talented, but a wily and dishonest, salesman. Nineteenth-century pol Martin Van Buren earned the sobriquet “the little magician” for his skillful manipulation of New York’s political machine. Obama is the rhetorical magician, depending — as all magicians do — on deft sleight of hand.
In his speech, Obama didn’t want his listeners to think he’s a big-government heir to Lyndon Johnson, so he talked of slashing waste. He said his team had begun going “line by line” through the budget, and “we have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.”
In common parlance, “savings” is taken to mean ... well, savings. But half of this $2 trillion is accounted for by Obama’s planned tax increases on the rich — in other words, he has identified revenue, not savings. Much of the rest is arrived at by assuming the Iraq War would cost $170 billion a year for the duration, even though Obama has long planned a drawdown. Obama portrays himself as ruthlessly paring back government when he is simply raising taxes and leaving Iraq.
Obama boasted of a “recovery plan free of earmarks, and I want to pass a budget next year that ensures that each dollar we spend reflects only our most important national priorities.” Again, the casual listener might conclude Obama won’t tolerate earmarks, although a $410 billion spending bill is currently speeding through Congress with 8,500 earmarks Obama stands ready to swallow.
Even as he expands government, Obama forswears any interest in expanding government and says he’s scaling back: “Everyone will have to sacrifice some worthy priorities for which there are no dollars, and that includes me.” Really? The only programs he said he’d cut were ineffective education programs, useless weapons systems, and subsidies to agribusiness, and his budget increases discretionary spending by 12 percent next year. To paraphrase Bob Dole, where’s the austerity?
Obama the writer-president prides himself on a facility with words that has fueled his political rise. He clearly respects words, including their power to manipulate and mislead.
“A good catchword,” Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “can obscure analysis for 50 years.”
To pass a vast program changing the relationship of American government to its citizens, Obama only needs to obscure analysis for about a year.
(c) 2009 by King Features Syndicate
Friends, there is a danger hiding in practically every home, office and school. It masquerades as a harmless office supply but in reality, it has the ability to make people mentally unstable, disable a school system, and virtually bring a small town to its knees. It's known as (cue scary music), the post-it note.
May 18, 2012
As a resident of Plainfield and frequent walker on our excellent trail system, I have often wondered what the laws are concerning the marked pedestrian crosswalks throughout town. So I talked to the Plainfield Police Department.
May 18, 2012
Mitt Romney went into the wrong line of work. If only he had been a lecturer in constitutional law, he wouldn't have a business record vulnerable to distortion by a desperate incumbent president.
May 18, 2012
And now, hold on to your hats because it's time for ...
Dentists In The News!
May 15, 2012
Now that the Obama administration has officially sided with corrupting man-wife marriage to also mean two men or two women, it's time for Christians to reflect on what's going on in the culture. To be sure, the measure must pass certain hurdles to be the secular law of the land. And, if the Republican candidate wins come November, there may be a further delay in its implementation. But don't count on it.
May 15, 2012
I'm back from a few shows at the security theater.
I slogged my way through four airports this past month, and played my interactive role in that daily, multi-billion-dollar production brought to us by the federal government with the colossally misleading name of "airline security."
May 14, 2012
President Barack Obama insists that he didn't announce his support for gay marriage out of political considerations. He's right. He did it out of self-regard.
May 14, 2012
Is that smoke? I think I smell something burning. Something is definitely scorched. Did someone just burn a ham or did Patricia Krentcil, a.k.a. "tanning mom" just walk into the room?
May 11, 2012
U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar - vanquished by age, longevity, barrel bottom congressional approval ratings, and an aggressive opponent in Treasurer Richard Mourdock - seemed to be bridging a divided party when he took the stage shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday as the magnitude of the 61 percent to 39 percent landslide against him registered.
May 11, 2012
The Cleveland Five are a sad-sack collection of wannabe terrorists if there ever was one. The amateurish young men who plotted to destroy a bridge outside Cleveland last week give the impression of needing the attention of a guidance counselor as much as a federal prosecutor.
May 11, 2012
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Human remains may be embedded in the mud of the North Atlantic where the New York-bound Titanic came to rest when it sank 100 years ago, a federal official said.
April 16, 2012 3 Photos 3 Stories
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