The Super Majority

Small Business Tired of Being Obama’s Last Priority

Politicians trying to figure out why the electorate is so angry and frustrated will find answers in a simple chat with shopkeepers and small-business owners on Main Street.

When it comes to small business, the disconnect between reality on the ground and what policymakers are talking about is enormous. Even worse, the aspirations of small-business owners are being eroded not only by economic jitters but also by massive uncertainty about deficits and future government policies.

Many small-business owners feel they’ve been financially and politically redlined — starved of debt and equity capital, shut out of the political conversation and put at the bottom of the priority list while big companies and unions get huge financial and tax breaks.

Read the full article at the Denver Post

Obama’s State of the Union: He Still Doesn’t Get it

Justice Samuel Alito let a pained expression pass his face and muttered, “Not true.” His reaction to Pres. Barack Obama’s demagogic attack on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision aptly summed up the entire State of the Union address.

Obama warned that the decision striking down restrictions on corporate spending opened “the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.” But the court explicitly left untouched a statute that bans election spending by foreign corporations, even “indirectly.” There isn’t even a “loophole” for U.S. subsidiaries of foreign firms, as the White House claimed in damage-control mode.

Since Massachusetts, the Left has been badly disoriented. It can’t process the fact that the cradle of contemporary liberalism elected a Republican in a contest that was a referendum on health care. So, it has thrown up a thick cloud of rationalizations and delusion from which Obama emerged briefly to man his teleprompters before the nation.

He spoke for more than an hour, but the quick gloss might have been, “It’s not my fault, and please ignore your lying eyes.” Obama did everything in the speech – reach out to the middle class, feel people’s pain, try to recapture the stirring magic of past oratory – except acknowledge what people dislike about his agenda and recalibrate accordingly.

Read the full article at the New York Post

Obama’s Spending Freeze Deception Doesn’t Trick Voters

One of the key new initiatives in President Obama’s State of the Union speech is a three-year freeze on discretionary government spending, but voters overwhelmingly believe the freeze will have little or no impact on the federal deficit.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just nine percent (9%) think the freeze will reduce the deficit a lot.

Eighty-one percent (81%) disagree, including 42% who say it will have no impact. Another 39% say the freeze in nearly all areas except defense, national security, veterans affairs and entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will reduce the deficit a little.

Read the full article at Rasmussen Reports

DOJ Drops the Ball on LiveNation/Ticketmaster Merger

At first blush, it looked like a slam-dunk antitrust case for the government.

Ticketmaster, a company that came to dominate the live-music ticketing business by buying up seven of its rivals, was suddenly facing a challenge to its 83 percent market share. Its largest customer, Live Nation, a big venue manager and concert promoter, had decided to launch its own ticketing subsidiary and quickly grabbed 16 percent of the market. Ticketmaster responded in kind by purchasing Front Line Management, which manages tours for 200 of the country’s top music artists.

By early 2009, Ticketmaster vs. Live Nation was turning into one of those price-reducing, service-improving rivalries that benefit consumers much more than shareholders. So in February, the two companies called a truce and announced they were merging. The Obama administration, eager to demonstrate that the era of no-touch antitrust enforcement was at an end, put the deal on hold, launched a wide-ranging investigation and told company lawyers it was prepared to block the transaction.

Read the full article at Washington Post

Senate Approves Additional $1.9 Trillion in Debt Spending

Senate Democrats needed all the 60 votes at their disposal Thursday to muscle through legislation allowing the government to go $1.9 trillion deeper in debt.

Democratic leaders were able to prevail on the politically volatile 60-39 vote only because Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts has yet to be seated. Republicans had insisted on a 60-vote, super-majority threshold to pass the measure. An earlier test vote succeeded on a 60-40 vote.

The measure would would put the government on track for a national debt of $14.3 trillion – about $45,000 for every American – and it served as a vivid reminder of the United States’ dire fiscal straits.

Read the full article at the Washington Post

Economists Say Obama’s Job Bill ‘Grasping at Straws’

President Barack Obama’s job-creation program could produce a short-term political boost, but it’s unlikely to significantly stem job losses and reduce the unemployment rate anytime soon, according to economists.

“People are out of work. They are hurting. They need our help. I want a jobs bill on my desk without delay,” the president said during his State of the Union speech.

But even he acknowledged, that “the truth is, these steps won’t make up for the 7 million jobs we’ve lost over the last two years.”

Specifically, the president wants to give a tax break to businesses that hire workers, eliminate the capital gains tax on small business investments and use $30 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program money to encourage community banks to lend to small businesses.

“He’s trying to turn his microeconomic policies into some macroeconomic solution. He’s grasping at straws,” said Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland.

Read the full article at POLITICO

Pelosi, Reid Plan Secret Plot for Obamacare

Highly informed sources on Capitol Hill have revealed to me details of the Democratic plan to sneak Obamacare through Congress, despite collapsing public approval for healthcare “reform” and disintegrating congressional support in the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts.

President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid all have agreed to the basic framework of the plan.

Their plan is clever but can be stopped if opponents of radical healthcare reform act quickly and focus on a core group of 23 Democratic Congressman. If just a few of these 23 Democrats are “flipped” and decide to oppose the bill, the whole Obama-Pelosi-Reid stratagem falls apart.

Read the full article at Newmax

Obama Needs to Stop Legislating and Start Leading

How bad do things look for Barack Obama? Some historical perspective is useful. His approval ratings after one year in office are about the same as Ronald Reagan’s or Jimmy Carter’s and, in fact, are a bit higher than Bill Clinton’s. The Bushes fared better than all three of them, but for unusual reasons: 41 because he presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union in his first year in office, and 43 because the nation rallied around him after 9/11. As the economy improves, Obama’s numbers will surely rebound somewhat.

Still, last week’s special election in Massachusetts is a sign that Obama has a big problem. The public has clearly registered a protest vote against him, congressional Democrats, and their signature policy proposal: the health-care bill. The size of the swing, the issues raised during the campaign and in exit polls, and the migration of independents all suggest that Obama is confronting not just generalized anger but dissatisfaction with the course that the ruling party has taken. How he responds will shape the rest of his term.

Read the full article at Newsweek

Republicans Balk at Obama’s Debt-Cutting Commission

The Obama administration’s bid to make a bipartisan debt-reduction commission the centerpiece of its budget plans received a serious blow Wednesday when leading Republicans blasted the idea.

Underscoring the problem, the Senate is poised to vote to raise the national debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion, just weeks after a $290 billion increase at the end of 2009. The debt currently stands at $12.322 trillion.

Less than a day after congressional Democrats and the White House reached a tentative deal to use an executive order that would establish a bipartisan commission to tackle the problem, the effort appeared to be on life support.

Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal

Obama Stuffs Geithner in Back Seat in Favor of Volcker

For much of last year, Paul Volcker wandered the country arguing for tougher restraints on big banks while the Obama administration pursued a more moderate regulatory agenda driven by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.

Thursday morning at the White House, it seemed as if the two men had swapped places. A beaming Volcker stood at Obama’s right as the president endorsed his proposal and branded it the “Volcker Rule.” Geithner stood farther away, compelled to accommodate a stance he once considered less effective than his own.

The moment was the product of Volcker’s persistence and a desire by the White House to impose sharper checks on the financial industry than Geithner had been advocating, according to some government sources and political analysts. It was Obama’s most visible break yet from the reform philosophy that Geithner and his allies had been promoting earlier.

Read the full article at the Washington Post