I can’t believe I actually watched the whole thing. And the Republican rebuttal. The retorts of the rightosphere started almost immediately. Here’s a round-up:
First, to its credit, AP fact checks Obama’s spech and finds ten questionable statements:
FACT CHECK: Obama and a toothless commission
By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press WriterWASHINGTON – President Barack Obama told Americans the bipartisan deficit commission he will appoint won’t just be “one of those Washington gimmicks.” Left unspoken in that assurance was the fact that the commission won’t have any teeth.
Obama confronted some tough realities in his State of the Union speech Wednesday night, chief among them that Americans are continuing to lose their health insurance as Congress struggles to pass an overhaul.
Yet some of his ideas for moving ahead skirted the complex political circumstances standing in his way.
A look at some of Obama’s claims and how they compare with the facts:
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OBAMA: “Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t.”
THE FACTS: The anticipated savings from this proposal would amount to less than 1 percent of the deficit — and that’s if the president can persuade Congress to go along.
Obama is a convert to the cause of broad spending freezes. In the presidential campaign, he criticized Republican opponent John McCain for suggesting one. “The problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel,” he said a month before the election. Now, Obama wants domestic spending held steady in most areas where the government can control year-to-year costs. The proposal is similar to McCain’s.
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OBAMA: “I’ve called for a bipartisan fiscal commission, modeled on a proposal by Republican Judd Gregg and Democrat Kent Conrad. This can’t be one of those Washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem. The commission will have to provide a specific set of solutions by a certain deadline. Yesterday, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission. So I will issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward, because I refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of Americans.”
THE FACTS: Any commission that Obama creates would be a weak substitute for what he really wanted — a commission created by Congress that could force lawmakers to consider unpopular remedies to reduce the debt, including curbing politically sensitive entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. That idea crashed in the Senate this week, defeated by equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. Any commission set up by Obama alone would lack authority to force its recommendations before Congress, and would stand almost no chance of success.
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OBAMA: Discussing his health care initiative, he said, “Our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan.”
THE FACTS: The Democratic legislation now hanging in limbo on Capitol Hill aims to keep people with employer-sponsored coverage — the majority of Americans under age 65 — in the plans they already have. But Obama can’t guarantee people won’t see higher rates or fewer benefits in their existing plans. Because of elements such as new taxes on insurance companies, insurers could change what they offer or how much it costs. Moreover, Democrats have proposed a series of changes to the Medicare program for people 65 and older that would certainly pinch benefits enjoyed by some seniors. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted cuts for those enrolled in private Medicare Advantage plans.
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OBAMA: The president issued a populist broadside against lobbyists, saying they have “outsized influence” over the government. He said his administration has “excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.” He also said it’s time to “require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my administration or Congress” and “to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office.”
THE FACTS: Obama has limited the hiring of lobbyists for administration jobs, but the ban isn’t absolute; seven waivers from the ban have been granted to White House officials alone. Getting lobbyists to report every contact they make with the federal government would be difficult at best; Congress would have to change the law, and that’s unlikely to happen. And lobbyists already are subject to strict limits on political giving. Just like every other American, they’re limited to giving $2,400 per election to federal candidates, with an overall ceiling of $115,500 every two years.
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OBAMA: “Because of the steps we took, there are about 2 million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed. ... And we are on track to add another one and a half million jobs to this total by the end of the year.”
THE FACTS: The success of the Obama-pushed economic stimulus that Congress approved early last year has been an ongoing point of contention. In December, the administration reported that recipients of direct assistance from the government created or saved about 650,000 jobs. The number was based on self-reporting by recipients and some of the calculations were shown to be in error.
The Congressional Budget Office has been much more guarded than Obama in characterizing the success of the stimulus plan. In November, it reported that the stimulus increased the number of people employed by between 600,000 and 1.6 million “compared with what those values would have been otherwise.” It said the ranges “reflect the uncertainty of such estimates.” And it added, “It is impossible to determine how many of the reported jobs would have existed in the absence of the stimulus package.”
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OBAMA: He called for action by the White House and Congress “to do our work openly, and to give our people the government they deserve.”
THE FACTS: Obama skipped past a broken promise from his campaign — to have the negotiations for health care legislation broadcast on C-SPAN “so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.” Instead, Democrats in the White House and Congress have conducted the usual private negotiations, making multibillion-dollar deals with hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and other stakeholders behind closed doors. Nor has Obama lived up consistently to his pledge to ensure that legislation is posted online for five days before it’s acted upon.
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OBAMA: “The United States and Russia are completing negotiations on the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades.”
THE FACTS: Despite insisting early last year that they would complete the negotiations in time to avoid expiration of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in early December, the U.S. and Russia failed to do so. And while officials say they think a deal on a new treaty is within reach, there has been no breakthrough. A new round of talks is set to start Monday. One important sticking point: disagreement over including missile defense issues in a new accord. If completed, the new deal may arguably be the farthest-reaching arms control treaty since the original 1991 agreement. An interim deal reached in 2002 did not include its own rules on verifying nuclear reductions.
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OBAMA: Drawing on classified information, he claimed more success than his predecessor at killing terrorists: “And in the last year, hundreds of al-Qaida’s fighters and affiliates, including many senior leaders, have been captured or killed — far more than in 2008.”
THE FACTS: It is an impossible claim to verify. Neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has published enemy body counts, particularly those targeted by armed drones in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. The pace of drone attacks has increased dramatically in the last 18 months, according to congressional officials briefed on the secret program.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air takes considers the AP article woefully inexhaustive and adds several of his own fact checks:
AP’s ten whoppers from the SOTU speech
Only ten? Maybe the Associated Press got as tired as everyone else listening to Barack Obama’s lengthy State of the Union speech last night and stopped paying attention after an hour. …
The other whoppers:
- Spending freeze – The AP points out that it will save less than 1% of predicted deficits over the next ten years — and that Obama scoffed at such a plan when John McCain proposed it in 2008.
- Health care – Obama said the Democratic plan would allow people to keep their insurance and their doctors, but the bill doesn’t guarantee either. Their plan has massive cuts to Medicare Advantage, which would definitely affect coverage of a large portion of America’s seniors and disabled.
- Lobbyists – Obama has not “excluded” lobbyists from his administration; he’s hired over a dozen for key posts, and the AP notes seven of those waivers were for White House posts. Obama called for restrictions on lobbyist contributions, but those already exist.
- Two million jobs saved through Porkulus – The CBO puts the theoretical range between 600K and 1.6 million, but also cautions that the methodology of estimating jobs “saved or created” is “uncertain.” The last detailed numbers the White House produced totaled 650,000 — and were found to be highly inaccurate.
- Openness: “Obama skipped past a broken promise from his campaign — to have the negotiations for health care legislation broadcast on C-SPAN “so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.” Instead, Democrats in the White House and Congress have conducted the usual private negotiations, making multibillion-dollar deals with hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and other stakeholders behind closed doors. Nor has Obama lived up consistently to his pledge to ensure that legislation is posted online for five days before it’s acted upon.”
The last two are on the rate of killing al-Qaeda leadership and the status on START talks with Russia. In both cases, the AP suspects that Obama overstates his case, but also reports that it’s difficult to measure either. The US has never given body counts on fighting AQ in the Af-Pak theater, mainly because many of the operations are covert, and because enemy body counts fell out of favor with the Vietnam War and have been only reluctantly shared in other conflicts.
Let me add at least one other whopper that the AP doesn’t mention. Obama repeatedly insisted that he inherited massive budgetary problems from George Bush, but the Con Law professor may want to retake his high-school civics class. Congress passes budgets, not the President, and the last three budgets came from Democrats. In three years, they increased annual federal spending by $900 billion, while the admittedly profligate and irresponsible Republican Congresses under George Bush increased annual federal spending by $800 billion — in six years. And during the last three years before taking office as President, Obama served in the Senate that passed those bills, and he voted for every Democratic budget put in front of him.
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January 28, 2010 | Pajamas Media
State of the Union: More Lies, Fewer Facts
By AWR Hawkins… Early in the speech, Obama broached the subject of his pending “fee on … [big] banks.” While this “fee” is nothing less than a bank tax, Obama disguised it as a way “to pay back the taxpayers who rescued [banks] in their time of need.”
Does this mean that those of us who pay taxes in this country will be getting a refund check in the mail? No. Rather, it means Obama plans to take “$30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid,” as well as the money he’ll get from his new “fee,” and give that money to “community banks” so “small businesses [can get] the credit they need to stay afloat.”
In other words, Obama is going to spread the wealth by taking money from successful banks with whom the wealthy invest, and giving it to small banks and credit unions where the poorer people who bought his “hope and change” mantra hook, line, and sinker, can get a loan, or at least feel like they’re sticking it to the rich folks.
Besides going after banks that are solvent, Obama also pledged to raise taxes on oil companies, the money managers who handle investment accounts, and individuals who make more than $250,000 a year. (To be fair, he didn’t come right out and say he was going to raise taxes; he said he would “not continue tax cuts for oil companies, investment fund managers, and those making over $250,000 a year.”)
Regardless of how it’s worded, these pledges mean higher fuel costs and less return on our investments, as oil companies and fund managers charge more to cover their taxes. This also means taking money from productive Americans so it can be redistributed to the frequently nonproductive Americans who voted for Obama.
And in blatant opposition to the will of the American people, the president again asked the House to pass the Senate version of ObamaCare. He tried to overcome the fact that his plan is unpopular by promising those who elected him that the passage of ObamaCare “would protect every American from the worst practices of the insurance industry.”
Does anybody but me wonder who’s going to protect the insurance industry, and the thousands of people employed in it, from our government?
Of course, Obama had to bring up the insurance industry because he’s always in need of a scapegoat. This is why he continued to point the finger at George W. Bush throughout the speech, accusing him of causing our current economic malaise by “not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and [the] expensive prescription drug program” he signed into law on December 8, 2003.
While only a fool would argue that Bush doesn’t deserve some criticism for spending money like a Democrat while in office, there’s absolutely no way to blame him for the approximately $12 trillion deficit Obama has racked up in just one year’s time. …
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January 28, 2010 | Front Page Mag’s “Newsreal” blog
State of the Union: “Woe to the People Whose Leader Has No Teacher”
by David Horowitz… Over and over again the President demonstrated a troubling disconnect from reality, striking in the leader of a political democracy, and indicative of a narcissism that appears to be greater than President Clinton’s. “I have never been more hopeful about America’s future than I am tonight,” he said at the outset of his speech. This in a country with 17 million unemployed, a political majority that is unable to govern, and a national security apparatus that couldn’t identify a terrorist whose own father had turned him in.
In the course of his speech, as Charles Krauthammer observed, the President attacked “Washington” seven times in the name of the people, as though he and his party were not Washington, as though the course he had set for his party and his country was not the source of the people’s rage. Taken as a whole it was an hour-long campaign speech, in which he broke precedent to attack not only the previous Republican Administration and all the Republicans in the chamber but even the Supreme Court justices present as well. And then – as though he had not done that – he scolded the entire assemblage for being politicians instead of non-partisan statesmen, and for running “permanent campaigns.”
But the most disturbing passage of his speech was also the most eloquent, the peroration at the end. In this flourish as throughout his speech there was the world and then there was Obama. In the world “Each time a CEO rewards himself for failure … people’s doubts grow.” But in the mind of Obama, no failure is his. If voters have rejected his plans for the future that is their deficiency not his. “I campaigned on the promise of change … But remember this … I never suggested that change would be easy.” The cowardice and weakness of his own party and the voters who have deserted him are to blame. And they have betrayed not only him but through him the Republic itself. “If people had made that decision 50 years ago, or 100 years ago or 200 years ago we wouldn’t be here tonight. The only reason we are here is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard; to do what was needed even when success was uncertain.” L’etat c’est moi. …
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January 28, 2010 | New York Post
Obama’s answer for America: more of me
By JONAH GOLDBERG… There was no “pivot to the center,” no serious accounting for the Massachusetts miracle or his misfortunes. Instead, there was an innumerate, inaccurate and distinctly unpresidential whine -- blaming George W. Bush for nearly all of his problems (leaving out, among other things, that the Democrats have been controlling Congress and crafting budgets since 2006).
The White House insists that the new wave of populism created by Democratic governance is, in fact, the same populist wave that carried Obama to victory in 2008. In other words, Obama was elected president by the backlash against his own presidency.
This novel theory allows Obama to stick to his view that there’s nothing wrong with his health-care plan, and anyone who feels differently hasn’t heard or understood the president’s explanations.
So, he not only implored Democrats not to “run for the hills” on the health-reform bill, but insisted that as “temperatures cool,” hot-tempered opponents will, of course, realize they were wrong about the bill.
Obama began his presidency insisting that government is the answer to our problems. A year later, he still believes that the era of big government is upon us.
In the same speech in which he preened over a gallingly gimmicky “spending freeze,” the president promised more jobs bills, more “investments” in schools, roads, trains and factories. He even reaffirmed his support for his carbon-tax legislation -- which would send far more jobs overseas than it would create here at home.
But Obama has a bigger problem: Aside from a few throwaway lines of self-deprecation, whenever he grew passionate, it was to blame others.
His predecessor topped his list, of course. But also everyone else who disagrees with him.
Obama insists that Americans need to muster the courage to agree with him, to sign on to his agenda. Just as at Omaha Beach and Bull Run, Americans need to show their mettle. “Again, we are tested. And again, we must answer history’s call.” That “call” is the call of Obama.
“I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I can do it alone.” So come on, you slackers, fall into line.
He decried the politicians who are in “permanent campaign” mode -- the same week he brought into the White House his campaign manager. …
And finally, a piece with a more liberal point of view:
January 28, 2010 | Creators
The Sorry State of the Union
Robert Scheer… There is no doubt that Obama and his party represent the lesser evil, but it is deeply disturbing to have to defend the leaders of our nation in those terms. They were supposed to lead us to peace, but as the cables from the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, printed in The New York Times on Monday, make absolutely clear, the escalation in Afghanistan is tantamount to a disaster without end.
Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who was previously the top American commander in Afghanistan, warned, “Sending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable.”
Obama distracted progressives with a grand crusade for health care reform that reasserted the fundamental fallacy of the previous health reform effort of the Bill Clinton years: Give the insurance companies a captive universal market under the absurd illusion that we can control costs without undermining their greed with a competitive government-run option.
The same is the case with the collapse of the economy, as Obama shamefully continued the George W. Bush administration’s mugging of U.S. taxpayers by throwing trillions of dollars at the Wall Street bandits who caused the financial meltdown. Meanwhile, 7 million Americans have lost their jobs and 15 million families owe more on their homes than they are worth.
Someday our president, whom I still regard as a decent and well-intentioned politician, will have to confront the demons of that fatal opportunism that led him to turn over the economy to the likes of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, who can most charitably be described as hugely successful Wall Street pimps.
Obama knows of Summers’ devilish role, during his time in the Clinton administration, in pushing the radical deregulation of the markets that the president blamed last week for our economic debacle. And he is aware that the TARP inspector general is hot on Geithner’s heels for his role, as head of the New York Fed, in the funneling of $62 billion dollars through AIG to Goldman Sachs and the other bonus payout alchemists.
But there is no indication from the carefully orchestrated leaks of his State of the Union speech that Obama is truly set to reverse course. Rhetoric about the “fat cat” bankers aside, his policies represent more of the same. There will be some hokey gestures of support for the disappearing middle class, but at the heart of his new budget proposal are cuts in needed domestic spending for education, nutrition, air traffic control and just about every other worthwhile domestic program. But there are no cuts for the military budget that already makes up 60 percent of the federal government’s discretionary spending and is comparable to the total military budget for the rest of the world’s nations combined. …
Have a hopey-changey kind of a day!
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