Archive for the ‘Obama Lies’ Category

ROSS DOUTHAT-NEW YORK TIMES: Laura Rozen reports on a White House briefing defending the Libyan intervention:

“This is a limited humanitarian intervention, not war,” White House Middle East strategist Dennis Ross, National Security Council strategic planning official Derek Chollet, and two military officials told a group of outside foreign policy experts invited to a briefing at the White House Roosevelt Room Tuesday.

“We were looking at ‘Srebrenica on steroids’ —the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred, and everyone would blame us for it,” Ross explained, according to one attendee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the administration is trying to keep its consultations private …

This is an audacious claim, to put it mildly. By way of comparison, in the Kosovo conflict, so often cited as a precedent for our Libyan intervention, the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign may have claimed 10,000 lives, while the widely-respected Iraq Body Count projects suggests that between100,000 and 110,000 civilians have been killed in the eight years since we invaded in Iraq.

Ross is suggesting, in other words, that upon taking Benghazi, Qaddafi’s forces would slaughtered ten times as many people as Slobodan Milosevic’s thugs did in Kosovo, and that they would have killed as many people in the space of a single campaign as have died in Iraq across eight years of invasion, insurgency, and sectarian civil war. I don’t want to suggest that this is impossible: If the 20th century proves anything, it’s that governments can conduct horrifyingly efficient campaigns of mass murder in relatively short periods of time.

But given that the provisional casualty estimates (civilian and military) for the first month of the Libyan civil war range from 1,000 to 6,500 deaths, I would very much like to know the basis for Ross’s suggestion that Benghazi’s population would have been literally decimated had the rebellion been defeated.

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JIM GERAGHTY-NATIONAL REVIEW:

NPR: “President Obama said Wednesday it was ‘absolutely’ out of the question that U.S. ground forces would be used in Libya.”

How would the president describe the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit? There is no such thing as a purely air-based combat mission; planes have problems and pilots end up on the ground, and then U.S. forces have to end up on the ground, hopefully briefly, to rescue them and bring them home safely. Ask Scott O’Grady how much time you can spend on the ground while patrolling a no-fly zone.

Details on the recent rescue:

The Kearsarge then sent up two MV-22 Ospreys carrying Marine rescue teams. As they were en route, the Harriers dropped two laser-guided bombs near the crash site, apparently to keep Libyans on the ground from approaching the pilot.

With additional helicopters hovering overhead for security, one of the Ospreys landed and picked up the pilot. He was then taken aboard the Kearsarge.

The weapons systems officer was recovered by what U.S. officials described as Libyan opposition forces. He is safe, officials have said.

There are about 2,200 Marines off the shore of Libya right now.

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THE HILL: The Congressional Budget Office on Friday released its analysis of President Obama’s 2012 budget proposal and found it does less to rein in deficits and the debt than the administration had estimated.

CBO estimates Obama’s plan would produce 10 years of deficits totaling $9.5 trillion. By 2021, it would increase the debt held by the public to 87 percent of gross domestic product.

The administration, using different methods, estimated budget deficits would total $7.2 trillion over the next 10 years under the 2012 budget. It forecast that total debt in 2021 would be 77 percent of GDP.
The White House also said total deficits over the next decade would be $1.1 trillion more without the recommendations included in Obama’s budget.

Marc Goldwein, policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said that CBO has found the effects to be almost nil.

He explained that the difference between the CBO’s $9.5 trillion estimate and OMB’s $7.2 trillion estimate comes from two sources: rosy economic growth assumptions by OMB and offsets for the Medicare doc fix as well as transportation spending OMB did not specify in the budget and which CBO will not factor in.

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Obama made the curious claim at his press conference yesterday that U.S. oil production is increasing in the Gulf.  Here’s what he said:

“We’re adapting. We’re producing more oil, and we’re importing less,” he said.

“Now, the hard truth is, is that as long as our economy depends on foreign oil, we’ll always be subject to price spikes,” he noted.

He indicated that “our oil production reached its highest level in seven years. Oil production from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico reached an all-time high,” adding that “for the first time in more than a decade, imports accounted for less than half of what we consumed.”

Huh?

Here are the facts from Kyle Isakower writing in Energy Tomorrow:

• Four days before the Deepwater Horizon accident there were 55 rotary rigs actually drilling offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.
• On May 28, 2010, when the administration announced the six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling, there were 46 rotary rigs operating in the Gulf.
• Last week, 25 rotary rigs were operating in the Gulf of Mexico.
• The Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration reports that production in the Gulf of Mexico is in decline, forecasting a decline of 250,000 barrels a day from Gulf production, due partly to the moratorium and restricted permitting.
• While the annual production figure for 2010 was greater than 2009, EIA’s month-by-month production figures show a peak in May of 2010, and a relatively steady decline since.
• EIA Petroleum Engineer Gary Long told trade publication E&E News that the rig count in the Gulf was cut in half after the Deepwater Horizon accident and that it wouldn’t rebound to previous levels until the end of 2011 under the assumption that the permitting process is restored to historical rates.
• Further, since there is a lag time from the time an exploration permit is approved to the time of actual production, and since no only a handful of permits for new wells have been granted since April of 2010, it is likely that Gulf of Mexico production will continue to be hit hard in 2012 and beyond.

SOURCE: Kyle Isakower – Energy Tomorrow >>>

QUESTION: Is Obama just getting bad information? Or does he know he’s lying?

QUESTION: How stupid does he think we are that we can’t just go look up the facts, especially with such an obvious falsehood as this?

DAILY CALLER: During a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) admitted to double-counting in the Obamacare budget.

In her first appearance before the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee since the health-care law passed, Kathleen Sebelius responded to a line of questioning by Republican Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois about whether $500 billion in Medicare cuts were used to sustain the program or pay for the law.

“There is an issue here on the budget because your own actuary has said you can’t double-count,” said Shimkus. “You can’t count — they’re attacking Medicare on the CR when their bill, your law, cut $500 billion from Medicare.”

He continued: “Then you’re also using the same $500 billion to what? Say your funding health care. Your own actuary says you can’t do both. […] What’s the $500 billion in cuts for? Preserving Medicare or funding the health-care law?

Sebelius’ reply? “Both.”

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“Magic microbes” that were supposed to clean up after the BP oil spill haven’t had much impact, and might be creating something really creepy down on the bottom.

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf ofMexico, according to a top scientist’s video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn’t degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.

That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.

At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn’t.

“There’s some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn’t seem to be degrading,” Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil.

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Weren’t Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed for doing something like this?

U.K. TELEGRAPH: Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.
Defence analysts claim the agreement risks undermining Britain’s policy of refusing to confirm the exact size of its nuclear arsenal.

The fact that the Americans used British nuclear secrets as a bargaining chip also sheds new light on the so-called “special relationship”, which is shown often to be a one-sided affair by US diplomatic communications obtained by the WikiLeaks website.

Details of the behind-the-scenes talks are contained in more than 1,400 US embassy cables published to date by the Telegraph, including almost 800 sent from the London Embassy, which are published online today.

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ALVIN FELZENBERG-U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT: If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what can be said of plagiarism? President Obama’s second State of the Union address contained enough recycled ideas and lines lifted from speeches of others to make historians wince. I suppose this is what one does when one not only has nothing new to say, but is required by custom and Constitution to come forth with a report of some kind by a certain time and day.

Had Obama or his writers been considerate enough to have informed listeners of where some of the president’s best lines and offered-up ideas originated, the speech might be remembered for its cutting and pasting of great and not-so-great moments of the past performance of others. After quoting Robert Kennedy early on, Obama tried to have his listeners believe that everything else he said that we might remember were his or his writers’ creations.

Had the president submitted the text of his second State of the Union Address in the form of a college term paper, he would have been sent forthwith to the nearest academic dean. Once again, our public affairs are such that we have one standard for presidents and another for undergraduates. Now is as good a time as any to let Obama’s listeners in on what the late Paul Harvey would have termed “the rest of the story.”

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ALEX FITZSIMMONS-NEWSBUSTERS.ORG: As it turns out, mainstream media outlets that lauded President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech as “downright Reaganesque” might be on to something.

While ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC exalted the commander-in-chief, at least one observer charged the Democratic president with crafting a speech that was “tantamount to plagiarism.”

In a column on the U.S. News site, presidential scholar Alvin Felzenberg accused Obama of borrowing lines and ideas from other speeches and claiming them as his own.

“President Obama’s second State of the Union address contained enough recycled ideas and lines lifted from speeches of others to make historians wince,” quipped Felzenberg, himself a former presidential speechwriter. “Had the president submitted the text of his second State of the Union Address in the form of a college term paper, he would have been sent forthwith to the nearest academic dean.”

Felzenberg asserted that Obama plagiarized Woodrow Wilson, Mario Cuomo, Margaret Thatcher, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, among others, but broadcast networks and cable outlets have all ignored the charges.

As NewsBusters reported yesterday, ABC, CBS, and NBC fawned over the president’s address but omitted a growing chorus of criticism. On the cable side, both MSNBC and CNN have yet to even mention the allegations. Additionally, a Nexis search revealed that none of the aforementioned outlets have covered the story on their Web sites.

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CAROLINE BAUM-BLOOMBERG: The president’s efforts, including his capitulation on an extension of the Bush tax cuts for all Americans, have paid off. His approval rating jumped to 49.8 percent this month, up from 45.6 percent at the time of the election, according to the Real Clear Politics average.

So is this just a public relations gambit designed to win back independents and assuage business concerns to ensure money and votes in 2012?

Of course it is. The real question is will there be any follow-through?

A careful reading of Obama’s words suggests he’s still stuck in a central-planning mindset. Obama introduces each new appointee as someone who knows how to “grow the economy” and create jobs. The president has been pressing his economic team to come up with job-creating ideas “that excite me,” according to Peter Baker’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday.

Conflict of Interest

Clearly the 3.5 million jobs “created or saved” by Christy Romer’s econometric model (Romer was chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers until September) didn’t convince anyone. Now Obama wants real jobs, more than the 1.3 million private-sector positions created in 2010, to buy him real votes.

Of course, Obama could have elevated Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, from his economic advisory committee to the top spot instead of Immelt, who has regular business before the administration and received a $16.1 billion Federal Reserve bailout in 2008. But why create the appearance of conflict of interest?

Obama doesn’t need any more advisers to tell him the U.S.’s 35 percent corporate tax rate, among the highest in the world, puts the nation at a competitive disadvantage. Or that taxing overseas profits when they’re repatriated to the U.S. doesn’t encourage businesses to bring that money home and invest here.

Bureaucratic Suicide

On the regulatory front, Obama’s intention to submit all federal rules and regulations to a cost-benefit analysis sounds nice, but what bureaucrat has ever declared himself redundant and written himself out of a job?

It reminds me of a joke about the tourist who goes to visit the Agriculture Department. As he’s walking down a long, empty hallway, he hears the sound of crying coming from an office. The tourist peaks his head in and asks the employee, sobbing at his desk, “What’s the matter?”

“My farmer died,” the employee replied.

The Department of Agriculture, like any government agency, never willingly cedes a part of its fiefdom.

In the 1700s, the U.S. was an agrarian nation with 90 percent of workers engaged in farming, according to Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center in Arlington, Virginia. Today the U.S. economy has highly productive agribusinesses employing less than 2 percent of all (legal) workers. Yet “the federal government continues to subsidize agriculture,” de Rugy said. “Spending for the Department of Agriculture in real terms went from $95 billion in 2000 to $142 billion in 2010.”

Double Talk

Obama’s major legislative initiatives — health care and financial reform — left it to regulators to write the rules necessary to implement the laws. To order a review of federal regulations in the face of so many to-be-written laws is talking out of both sides of your mouth.

So nice try, Mr. Obama. You’ll have to do better than executive orders and executive appointments to convince us you have the wherewithal of a business executive.

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