The Foundation

“To say that the United States should be answerable for twenty-five millions of dollars without knowing whether the ways and means can be provided, and without knowing whether those who are to succeed us will think with us on the subject, would be rash and unjustifiable.” –James Madison

Editorial Exegesis

“[Barack] Obama’s touted spending freeze for some domestic agencies is the politics of gesture. It would apply to only 17% of the budget, and these programs have already had a 22% increase in their annual appropriations in the past two years, and another 25% increase including stimulus. As for the deficit, CBO shows that over the first three years of the Obama Presidency, 2009-2011, the federal government will borrow an estimated $3.7 trillion. That is more than the entire accumulated national debt for the first 225 years of U.S. history. By 2019, the interest payments on this debt will be larger than the budget for education, roads and all other nondefense discretionary spending. If this borrowing were financing defense investments or tax rate reductions to spur the U.S. economy, we wouldn’t be worried. But most of this money is going to transfer payments to individuals, or subsidies to home buyers and inefficient businesses that do little for wealth creation. As it always does, CBO forecasts that deficits will decline in the later years of its 10-year budget window. But this forecast depends on assumptions about Congress so fanciful that James Cameron couldn’t make them up. … If the President and his party really are serious, they can do more than promise a spending freeze after 2012. They can stop spending more now: Drop the health-care bill, cancel the unspent stimulus spending from last year, kill the $150 billion new stimulus that has already passed the House, and bar all repaid bailout cash from being re-spent. Everything else is marketing.” –The Wall Street Journal

Upright

“The problem is not the ‘crises’ Obama inherited. It’s the ones he’s creating. He has lived in such a socialist policy shell all his life that he doesn’t have a clue that he’s on a different planet than most of us. If he were just slightly less narcissistic, he might be able to figure this out. But … no matter what adjustments he promises to make following the Boston Massacre, he still intends to govern like a socialist. He only wants to do a better job of figuring out how to do it less visibly, hoping we won’t ‘get it’ before it’s too late.” –columnist David Limbaugh

“An across-the-board tax cut is the fairest pro-growth message of them all. Lower tax rates for everybody. Get out of the box of rich people and class warfare. … Republicans must now be bold and fight for across-the-board tax relief, for families, individuals and businesses, along with smaller government, fewer services and across-the-board spending cuts.” –economist Larry Kudlow

“The President could wait months before deciding to give a general the troops he asked for to fight the war in Afghanistan but there was never to be enough time for the health care bill to be exposed in the light of day to the usual Congressional hearings and debate. Moreover, despite all the haste, the health care program would not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election. In other words, the public was not supposed to find out whether the government’s takeover of medical care actually made things better or worse until after it was too late.” –economist Thomas Sowell

“The result in Massachusetts last Tuesday showed that for yet another segment of the population which has had the opportunity to express itself at the ballot box, Obama’s policies have diminished from a lack of resonance to active dissonance. Obama can tinker with the political shop all he wants, but to misquote my neighbor James Carville: It’s the policies, stupid.” –political analyst Rich Galen

“As even Massachusetts demonstrated … most Americans believe Americans know how to solve their problems through initiative, limited government and hard work, not through the nanny state.” –American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

“There is a simple way to get corporate money out of politics: get the government out of our lives and economic affairs. If government has no favors to sell, no one will spend money trying to win them.” –columnist John Stossel

Dezinformatsia

Head in the sand: “Last spring, the polls said people wanted health care reform. They even wanted the public option. … One third of that majority is on a government health program. I’m on Medicare. People who’ve been in the military are on a government health program. And yet the Republicans were able the make the idea that being on a government health program is terrible. How absurd.” –retired ABC newsman Sam Donaldson

Surely, you can’t be serious: “Instead of loudly fighting back, the president tried to bring Republicans into the fold, and it backfired…. On health care reform, instead of telling Americans exactly what he wanted in a health care bill, President Obama left it up to lawmakers. Republicans used the president’s strategy to create fear and confusion among voters.” –CNN’s Carol Costello

We can hope: “Do you think maybe one term is enough?” –ABC’s Diane Sawyer to Barack Obama (No, it’s one term too many.)

Elitism: “Absolutely amazing poll results from CNN today about the $787 stimulus package: nearly three out of four Americans think the money has been wasted. On second thought, they may be right: it’s been wasted on them. … This is yet further evidence that Americans are flagrantly ill-informed … and, for those watching Fox News, misinformed.” –Time mag’s Joe Klein

Non Compos Mentis: “This is a Supreme Court-sanctioned murder of what little actual democracy is left in this democracy. It is government of the people by the corporations for the corporations. It is the Dark Ages. It is our Dred Scott. … Be prepared, then, for the ban on same-sex marriage, on abortion, on evolution, on separation of church and state … for racial and religious profiling, because you’ve got to blame somebody for all the reductions in domestic spending and civil liberties, just to make sure the agitators against the United Corporate States of America are kept unheard.” –MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, hosting his show funded by a giant media corporation, yet reviling the Supreme Court’s ruling that corporations have a free speech right to participate in elections

Newspulper Headlines:

Life Imitates the Onion: “Obama’s Home Teleprompter Malfunctions During Family Dinner” –Onion News Network, Nov. 16 ++ “Obama Uses Teleprompters During Speech at Elementary School” –RealClearPolitics.com, Jan. 24

We Blame Global Warming: “Pelicans Treated for Hypothermia From Calif. Storm” –Associated Press

Questions Nobody Is Asking: “Are You Surprised John Edwards Dropped His Denial and Admitted to Fathering a Child With Rielle Hunter?” –ABCNews.com ++ “Can John Edwards’ Dreadful Image Be Rehabilitated?” –Time.com

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control: “Police Investigating Michael Jackson Giraffe Deaths” –CNSNews.com

Bottom Stories of the Day: “Liberal Talk-Radio Station Air America Files for Bankruptcy, Will Go off the Air” –The Washington Post

(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)

The Demo-gogues

Pride goes before a fall: “Well, the big difference here and in ‘94 was you’ve got me.” –Barack Obama, reportedly reassuring Rep. Marion Berry (D-AR), who is now retiring rather than face voters again

Such humility: “I’d probably say I make a mistake a day, maybe two.” –Barack Obama

Editor’s Note: In a speech about “jobs,” Obama refers to tax cuts twice, small business eight times … and himself 132 times. See the video. Also, don’t miss the new and improved Barack Bingo card for the State of the Union Address tonight.

Is she kidding? “The jobs issue has permeated everything, [every] major initiative that we have. With the recovery package, we not only created jobs – about 2 million saved or created with more being rolled out – but pulled us back from the brink of even deeper recession. In [Obama’s] budget, which we passed 100 days after his swearing-in, he had a blueprint for how we go into the future, create jobs, stabilize the economy [and] do so as we reduce the deficit – [it’s] very central to everything we do – reduce the deficit.” –House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who contributed to nearly quadrupling the deficit in Obama’s first year

Nanny state – because you can’t make it on your own: “[The] proposals by the Obama administration to strengthen the middle class underscore the work of Congress to put the American dream within reach for millions of families. … The House will continue to partner with the Obama administration to strengthen our middle class and put our nation’s families on a path to prosperity.” –Nancy Pelosi (We’d appreciate it if you stopped trying to “help” us.)

Goals: “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” –Barack Obama (We’d love to help with the one-term part.)

Them’s fightin’ words: “It’s going to be a fight. You watch. I guarantee you, when we start on financial regulatory reform, trying to change the rules to prevent what has caused so much heartache all across the country, there are people who are going to say, ‘Why is he meddling in government’ or ‘Why is he meddling in the financial industry? It’s another example of Obama being big government.’ No, I just want to have some rules in place so that when these guys make dumb decisions, you don’t end up having to foot the bill. That’s pretty straightforward. I don’t mind having a fight.” –Barack “Big Government” Obama on his heavy handed regulation of the financial industry

Village Idiots

Talking point screw-up: “[T]he Recovery Act the president passed has created more than – or saved more than 2 million jobs.” –White House adviser David Axelrod on Sunday

“The Recovery Act saved thousands and thousands of jobs.” –White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, also on Sunday

“Just last quarter, we finally saw the first positive economic job growth in more than a year, largely as a result of the recovery plan that’s put money back into our economy, that saved or created 1.5 million jobs.” –White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, again on Sunday

Think what you like: “I think the American people want health care reform…. [They] really do want us to do something about this.” –former DNC Chief Howard Dean

Leftist “tolerance”: “Just as we do not tolerate private racial beliefs that adversely affect African-Americans in the commercial arena, even if such beliefs are based on religious views, we should similarly not tolerate private beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity that adversely affect LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] people.” –Chai Feldblum, an openly lesbian Law Professor at Georgetown University and Obama’s nominee for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in a legal journal in 2006

Blame game: “Democrats would not be playing the blame game with one another for the loss or for the health care debacle if they had only pointed fingers at those (or in this case, the one) who put Americans (and most of the world) in the predicament we’re in: George W. Bush.” –Clintonista James Carville

Short Cuts

“Some conservative Beltway analysts are cheering Obama’s fiscal freeze follies as a step in the right direction, a rhetorical victory and a ‘good start.’ Pardon me for not joining in the standing ovation for the latest performance of White House kabuki theater. Praising the president for carrying on the charade of budget reform because a few piddling cuts are real is like complimenting the Naked Emperor’s fingernails: So he didn’t have any clothes. At least his cuticles were real. It’s a start!” –columnist Michelle Malkin

“At best, the administration’s spending-freeze proposal is akin to going on a monthlong binge in Vegas and then sleeping off the hangover.” –Cato Institute senior fellow Dan Mitchell

“Once again, the people have spoken, and this time they quoted what Dick Cheney said to Pat Leahy. Less than two weeks ago, The New York Times said that so much as a ‘tighter-than-expected’ victory for Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley would incite ‘soul-searching among Democrats nationally,’ which sent Times readers scurrying to their dictionaries to look up this strange new word, ‘soul.’” –columnist Ann Coulter

“ABC News found that Trijicon, which makes rifle scopes for the military, stamps references to Bible verses on its equipment. The defense contractor subsequently announced that it will voluntarily stop stamping these references on combat rifle sights. These sights are used in Iraq and Afghanistan – sometimes to train Muslims, sometimes to shoot them. According to ABC News, this is very important. If a Muslim were to see this code on the side of a rifle and then look up the verse in one of the many Bibles you can easily find in Muslim countries, then that Muslim might become indoctrinated with Christianity and then … chaos or something. Or maybe we just worry that the mere knowledge of a reference to the Bible in those countries will cause all Muslims in the Middle East to panic and randomly shoot each other in the faces….” –columnist Frank J. Fleming