The Super Majority

Geithner Says US Will Never Lose AAA Debt Rating, Despite $1.6 Trillion 2010 Deficit

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the U.S. is in no danger of losing its Aaa debt rating even though the Obama administration has predicted a $1.6 trillion budget deficit in 2010.

“Absolutely not,” Geithner said, when asked in an ABC News interview broadcast yesterday whether a downgrade is a concern. “That will never happen to this country.”

Geithner said investors around the world turn to U.S. Treasury securities and dollar-denominated assets whenever they are worried about global stability. That reflects “basic confidence” in the U.S. and its ability to bounce back from the global recession, he said.

Moody’s Investors Service Inc. last week said the U.S. government’s bond rating will come under pressure in the future unless additional measures are taken to reduce budget deficits projected for the next decade.

Read the full article at Bloomberg

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 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

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

Political Blunders Doom Obama’s White House

If Scott Brown should defeat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election tomorrow, it will be a fitting metaphor for the political trajectory of President Obama’s first year in office. A year ago Democrats were talking about Obama as the next Franklin Roosevelt, and suggesting that they were on the cusp of an enduring majority. Today, they are struggling to hold Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat.

Coakley will rightly get most of the blame should Brown actually pull off what once seemed to be an impossible victory. Yet much of the responsibility will have to rest with Barack Obama, who has guided his party so poorly that it is having trouble making an appeal to voters in Massachusetts.

To put it bluntly, the Obama White House has been politically inept in the last year. It has made serious miscalculations, and today it is paying a price.

Read the Full Article at Real Clear Politics

Hey Pelosi, Where are the Jobs?

In August 2003, then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi issued a press statement demanding to know from President Bush, “Where Are the Jobs?” The statement was released in response to the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report, which, at that time showed that over 400,000 Americans had given up looking for work and had left the labor force. It should be noted that today, every job measurement she cited is worse now than it was in 2003. We must have overlooked her similar question for President Obama.

From Pelosi’s statement:

Washington, D.C. — House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ announcement that 470,000 people abandoned their job searches in July and that 3.2 million private sector jobs have been lost since President Bush took office:

Read the Full Article at Big Government

Harry Reid Playing Santa Claus with Your Money

We are approaching the eve of Christmas and maybe in that spirit, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid morphed into Santa Claus, giving out presents to the little boys and girls who were naughty and (not so) nice this year.

Of course, he was not using his own money.

America’s overused credit card, issued by the Bank of China, may have to be used one more time to pay for Reid’s deals. The majority leader traded to help ensure the votes of Sens. Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Chris Dodd, Bernie Sanders and others representing 11 states by giving them special perks for staying on the health care bus that’s about to drive us all over the financial cliff.

Read the Full Article at CNN

Ben Bernake Named Time Person of the Year

Time magazine on Wednesday named Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as its 2009 Person of the Year, calling him “the most powerful nerd on the planet.”

Bernanke will be featured on the cover of the magazine that hits stores Friday.

He beat out Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, President Obama, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi among other finalists.

Time said Bernanke was the reason the U.S. financial crisis wasn’t worse.

“The story of the year was a weak economy that could have been much, much weaker. Thank the man who runs the Federal Reserve, our mild-mannered economic overlord,” the article said.

Read the Full Article at CNN

Pelosi’s Hide and Seek Accounting

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s directive for lawmakers to disclose individual office spending online for the first time was billed as a victory for transparency. Well, not really. Earlier this month, the House clerk posted 3,400 pages of expense reports detailing about $300 million in spending on everything from staff salaries to mail, but the effort was a sham. The new disclosure system hides more than it reveals.

Mrs. Pelosi trumpeted the move online for reports that for decades had been released only on paper as providing “a full accounting of Members’ and officers’ spending for official congressional business” that “will expand accountability to taxpayers and the press.” However, instead of including specific details – such as which staffers were taking what trips or what electronics they bought – the speaker has allowed these types of personal expenses to be hidden in broad categories such as “equipment” or “comp. Hardware.” Travel expenses are bundled together with no details about who went where.

Read the Full Article at Washington Times

Judge Sotomayor Meant What She Said

Judge Sotomayor said the following:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Critics have seized on this as evidence that Sotomayor believes in identity politics, or what political scientists call “sociological representation,” the idea that only people of a certain race, ethnicity, or gender, can be competent to speak on certain issues or have certain opinions or represent certain constituencies.

Read the Full Article at South Dakota Politics