Fausta’s Blog

The Hill:
White House rules out sequel to stimulus bill

resident Obama’s economic team is looking for ways to accelerate the agonizingly slow economic recovery, but the top White House spokesman on Thursday said a large spending measure is not being considered.

“Some big, new stimulus plan is not in the offing,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.



The WaPo:
Obama’s economic team considering new stimulus package

With the recovery faltering less than two months before the November congressional elections, President Obama’s economic team is considering another big dose of stimulus in the form of tax breaks for businesses – potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the talks.

Either a. someone’s keeping Gibbs out of the loop,
b. depends on what the meaning of “stimulus” is,
or
c. we’re being taken for a ride.

Your pick.

Ace lets it rip while Steve Hayes is twittering Gibbs.

TIME Mag explains (mostly to themselves) How Barack Obama Became Mr. Unpopular and they have an unflattering photo of Mr. Unpopular to go with the story:

Long are the days (two years ago) of picturing him with a halo:

You can read the three-page long article at TIME Mag, or you can take Ed Morrissey’s more concise explanation of why Obama lost his mojo:

Obama has become unpopular because voters are angry over the bait-and-switch that Democrats used to get him elected, with the help of a cheerleading media. After 19 months, the nation knows Obama a lot better than they did in 2008, and they see an inexperienced and incompetent executive who has a dedication to an agenda of arrogance and top-down control.

You think?

UPDATE
Well, that sure didn’t take long: Hillary Clinton for president ad hits airwaves

In today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern,
​Moe Lane​ talks about the latest news, including the reporting on James Jay Lee, the Discovery Channel kidnapper.

Related links:
I see that they shot the eco-freak.
Gunman’s Environmental Grudges Well Known Before Discovery Channel Hostage Standoff

and its spokeswoman Dolores Huerta, who wants us to imitate Hugo Chavez:

“a lot isn’t wrong, as long as you use it for the people like Hugo Chavez is doing in Venezuela.”

Dolores ought to ask Franklin Brito’s widow about how Hugo treats his “people“.

Visit it: Liberty.com

Nancy Pelosi famously said, “we have to pass the bill so you know what’s in it.”

Now the Dems want to fix the bill.

Dear Patients: Vote to Repeal ObamaCare
Don’t believe Democrats who promise to fix the bill once they’re re-elected.

Facing a nationwide backlash, Democratic congressional candidates have a new message for voters: We know you don’t like ObamaCare, so we’ll fix it.

This was the line offered by Democrat Mark Critz, who won a special election in Pennsylvania’s 12th congressional district after expressing opposition to the law and promising to mend it—but not to repeal it. As a doctor I know something about unexpected recoveries, and this latest attempt to rescue ObamaCare from repeal needs to be taken seriously.

For Democrats who voted for ObamaCare, this tactic is an escape route, a chance to distance themselves from the president with a vague promise to fix health-care reform in the next Congress.

Don’t fall for it, says, Hal Scherz:

“Please remember when you vote this November that unless the Democratic Party receives a strong negative message about this power grab our health care system will never be fixed and the doctor patient relationship will be ruined forever.”

And irremediably.

Paul Mirengoff writes about Obama’s limp and boring speech

President Obama’s speech from the oval office, only the second of his presidency, was surprisingly limp. With three momentous subjects to cover – Iraq, Afghanistan, and the U.S. economy – Obama struggled to say anything new or interesting. It isn’t just that the soaring rhetoric of 2008 has disappeared; Obama is now affirmatively boring.

In “turning the page” on Iraq, the Great Speechifier could find no words with which to give meaning to our epic struggle there. Let’s give Obama the benefit of the doubt and assume this is because he thinks the struggle had no meaning, except as it related to domestic politics in the U.S. But then why give a speech about it?

Perhaps the idea was to signal our resolve going forward. The best he could do on this front was to say that after our troops leave at the end of 2011, we’ll still have diplomats, aid workers, and advisors on the scene. But we have diplomats, aid workers, and advisors all over the world; what if Iraq needs more than that, given all of its challenges? If Obama signaled anything in this speech, it was his lack of interest in Iraq’s past (Saddam who?), present, and future.

Incidentally, while I was at the gym this morning, CNN was playing a report on “Iraq’s children”, who “have only known war”. The reporter couldn’t be bothered with researching just what kind of lives those children would have lived under the threat of Saddam’s torture rooms. But I digress.

Despite the fact that Afghanistan has become Obama’s war in a way Iraq never did, the president displayed no great interest in, or true sense of commitment to, that action either. In ten short months, Obama once again pledged, we will begin pulling out of Afghanistan too. These words can only comfort our terrorist enemies and cause sleepless nights for anyone in Afghanistan who has ever supported us.

When it came to the economy, Obama had nothing new to offer. So instead, he provided America with a pep talk, exhorting us to “honor” our troops by “coming together” with a great sense of urgency to “restore our economy.”

Presumably, this means rallying around Obama’s unpopular domestic agenda. In any case, Americans are unlikely to be impressed by a president whose answer to our economic woes sounds something like “hug a soldier and hope that some of his grit rubs off.”

We won’t be deriving any grit from the speech, indeed, which you can read on its entirety here.

Roger Kimball is even more assertive in his dislike,

I thought it one of the worst speeches in modern memory. Not only was it long on empty boilerplate, it was scrubbed clean of anything memorable or forthright. It also flirted shamelessly with incoherence.

Max Boot, on the other hand, says,

I thought that this speech was about as good as we could expect from an opponent of the Iraq war — and better than Obama has done in the past.

Max’s low expectations were met, for sure.

Jonah Golberg is offended by Obama’s conflating the troops with his agenda,

what Obama is saying is that not only do we owe it to the troops to rally around his discredited and partisan economic agenda (“It’s our turn”), not only is it a test of our patriotism to sign on with his environmental and industrial planning schemes, but that doing so “must be our central mission as a people.”

The Oval Office had been redecorated for the occasion, and I find it, well, bland and boring (was the speech written to match the decor?). Gone is GWB’s sunburst rug, which I really liked, replaced with…beige, which goes along with the New Depression fad that I mentioned last Friday: Dust Bowl colors for a Dust Bowl mindset.

I’ll leave it to Cassandra and MOTUS to provide insight on the decor, but replacing the sunburst emanating from the Seal of the United States with an ocean of beige is more than just a little symbolic. What do you think?

UPDATE
Suzette wants to know, Yeah. You Tell Me What This Is Made Out Of.

Will Mexico’s prize catch La Barbie’ stand trial in U.S.?

While speculation surged that Mexico would deport Edgar Valdez-Villarreal, a 37-year-old former football star from Laredo, Texas, to stand trial in the United States, where he’s still a citizen, there was no immediate sign of action by Mexico or the U.S.

National security spokesman Alejandro Poire described Valdez-Villarreal as “highly dangerous,” a reference to his drug cartel’s practice of beheading its enemies.

The accused drug lord “has one foot in the airplane bound for the United States,” the usually well-informed El Universal newspaper reported.

Security officials paraded the handcuffed Valdez-Villarreal before the media early Tuesday in an airplane hangar. Hooded security agents stood at his side, and a black helicopter provided the backdrop. Valdez-Villarreal smirked, and even chuckled, at the assembled journalists.

Federal Police Commissioner Facundo Rosas said the capture of Valdez-Villarreal, who’s known by the unlikely nickname of “La Barbie,” came after a yearlong hunt that involved as many as 1,200 law enforcement officers.

By Monday afternoon, a ring of security officers encircled the rustic mountain house in Salazar, about 20 miles west of Mexico City, where Valdez-Villarreal had holed up, Rosas said. Mobile phone service in the area was spotty, and the target and six underlings couldn’t summon backup to fight their way free, he said. They were detained around 6:30 p.m. without any gunfire.

“Intelligence information indicates that ‘La Barbie’ trafficked 1 ton of cocaine each month,” Federal Police counternarcotics chief Ramon Pequeno said at the news conference.

Valdez-Villarreal’s capture gives a boost to President Felipe Calderon, who declared war on drug cartels after taking office in late 2006. The death toll, which recently soared past 28,000 people, has soured many Mexicans on Calderon’s tough drug enforcement policies. Valdez-Villarreal is the third top drug lord to be arrested or killed in nine months.

Government officials seemed to be seeking to regain support by offering abundant details about Valdez-Villarreal’s background and capture.

Poire declared that Valdez-Villarreal maintained ties to drug gangs operating in the U.S. and Central and South America, and a series of arrests during the day in Colombia appeared to bear out that claim.

Born in Laredo, Valdez-Villarreal moved to Mexico City, where in 1998 he met Arturo Beltran-Leyva, a drug lord working for the surging Sinaloa Cartel, Pequeno said. As the Texan worked his way up the criminal chain, first in Nuevo Laredo along the border, then starting in 2004 in the Pacific Coast resort of Acapulco, he nurtured a reputation for extreme violence, including frequent beheadings of the Beltran-Leyva group’s enemies.

The grisly reputation contrasted with his unlikely nickname, given because of his blue eyes and fair complexion – reminiscent of Ken, the Barbie doll’s companion.

By 2007, Valdez-Villarreal ranked senior enough to take part in a meeting in the weekend getaway of Cuernavaca in which bosses of the Sinaloa, Juarez and Gulf cartels – along with the Gulf Cartel’s armed wing, Los Zetas – gathered to hash out an end to conflict between the rival groups, Pequeno said.

Valdez-Villarreal had many enemies, but one of his bitterest feuds dated to his stint in Nuevo Laredo, where he battled the Gulf Cartel and its henchmen, Los Zetas, for smuggling routes, Pequeno said. His hatred of the No. 2 Zetas leader, Miguel Trevino Morales, alias “El L-40,” was so severe it nearly caused a falling out with his own boss, Pequeno said.

Eventually, Beltran-Leyva and his underlings broke from the Sinaloa Cartel, and when the drug lord died in a shootout in December with Mexican marines, his gang was ripped apart by violence, with “La Barbie” seizing control of a faction and becoming a major trafficker in his own right.

Valdez-Villarreal entrenched himself in Guerrero state, surrounding Acapulco, but also had operations in the states of Morelos, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Quintana Roo and in Mexico City, police said.

Narcotics agents hunting “La Barbie” got a lucky break in a raid on Aug. 9 in the elegant Bosques de las Lomas district of Mexico City, which turned up evidence leading them to the accused drug lord’s mountain safe house in Salazar, Rosas said.

The State Department had offered a $2 million bounty for Valdez-Villarreal and Mexican authorities held out a similar reward of around $2.2 million.

Valdez-Villarreal faces numerous federal narcotics charges in Texas, Louisiana and Georgia, the earliest dating back to 1998 and the most recent announced in June in Atlanta.

The Economist:

The capture of Mr Valdez, like that of Teodoro El Teo García, an ally of Mr Guzmán, and the killings of Arturo Beltrán Leyva and Ignacio Coronel, Sinaloa’s third-in-command, show that Mr Calderón has successfully transformed his security apparatus. The government has vastly increased its intelligence capacity, and improved its cooperation with United States authorities. And its agents have now proven they can conduct sensitive operations without advance warning leaking to their targets (although Mr Valdez did reportedly escape capture by a few hours earlier this month). Mr Valdez was the first top-tier drug lord to be captured by the federal police, which Mr Calderón has made into a credible security force, as opposed to the army or navy. The government announced on August 30th that it has dismissed 3,200 federal police officers this year for suspected corruption, almost 10% of the total.

I’ll talk about this news in today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern.

Related:
As drug violence escalates, entire length of US-Mexico border to be patrolled by unmanned drones, h/t Instapundit.

Certainly the buck doesn’t stop at Obama; the spending doesn’t end, since he proposes more and more spending, and the blame goes to Bush and the Republicans.
Obama: “It Took Nearly A Decade To Dig The Hole That We’re In”

President Obama criticizes the economic policies of former President Bush and the current “partisan minority” in Congress. Obama asks Republicans to drop the economic “blockade.”

Of course the Dems in control of both the Senate and House can’t seem to agree on dropping their economic “blockade” of Obamanomics…

Video here for the full hooey,

Jeannie DeAngelis deconstructs the hooey,

Stepping toward the podium, Obama dove right in.  However, due to technical difficulty, it took Obama three tries to blame Bush for the appalling economy.  Stumbling over well-planned condemning comments, even the microphone refused to broadcast Barack’s never-ending drivel.

The solemn, accusatory president began by saying that when elected he was completely unaware of the depth of America’s “economic hole,” let alone how long it would take to “climb out.” However, when in a fix, Obama appears extremely knowledgeable as to how effectively project perpetual culpability onto everyone other than himself.

Obama expressed the following opinion about the flagging economy:  “What we did know was that it took nearly a decade – to dig the hole we are in.” Then the President gave himself eight years of economic leeway following the “dig the hole” comment with an “even longer to dig our way out.”

After the sound system issues, garbled statements and flyover airplane interference ceased, the President continued blaming G.W. and then segued directly into pointing the finger at Senate Republicans.  Never once did Obama acknowledge any personal culpability for being completely and hopelessly clueless.

Maybe someone should have raised their hand and reminded Obama that during the first six years of Bush’s tenure the economy was booming.  It was the last two years, after a national referendum on Iraq, that Democrats took over both houses and the economy began to falter. Adding Obama’s liberal-socialistic policies to the already ailing economy turned a benign common cold into a case of full-blown pneumonia.

Obama claimed Republicans are now in the process of obstructing an “initiative [he] proposed to cut taxes that will encourage small businesses to hire and expand, as well as a $30 billion small business lending initiative.”

Partisan President Obama actually had the temerity to accuse Senate Republicans of damaging economic growth by “holding this bill hostage.” The man who impedes everything from individual freedom to economic recovery dramatically uttered the scripted slogan: “Drop the blockade.”

Soberly droning on, uttering meaningless poppycock, Obama continued reading off the teleprompter.  The president’s rhetoric included references to small businesses, middle class tax cuts, job creation and economic growth. As usual, in a five-minute statement Obama managed to fit in incendiary lingo like “partisan minorities” and “political games.”

Towards the end, the sun must have been in Obama’s eyes because the President stumbled over words like “effort,” correcting it to “attack.” Before turning and walking away, the smooth talker slipped up and blurted out the very apropos “silver spoon” instead of “silver bullet.”

The effect?

A few hours after the technically-challenged economic encouragement/blame-Bush undertaking, the Dow plummeted 140 points, proving the point that, like everything Barack does, the ready-to-wreak-havoc Rose Garden declaration was just another in a long list of “smashing” Obama successes.

Why is Wall Street deserting Obama? Maybe the question at this point ought to be, what took them so long?

CBO: Eight Years of Iraq War Cost Less Than Stimulus Act

As President Obama prepares to tie a bow on U.S. combat operations in Iraq, Congressional Budget Office numbers show that the total cost of the eight-year war was less than the stimulus bill passed by the Democratic-led Congress in 2009.

According to CBO numbers in its Budget and Economic Outlook published this month, the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom was $709 billion for military and related activities, including training of Iraqi forces and diplomatic operations.

The projected cost of the stimulus, which passed in February 2009, and is expected to have a shelf life of two years, was $862 billion.
…
The CBO figures show that the most expensive year of the Iraq war was in 2008, the year when the surge proposed by Gen. David Petraeus and approved by President Bush was in full swing and the turning point in the war. The total cost of Iraq operations in 2008 was $140 billion. In 2007, the cost of Iraq operations was $124 billion.

Major Schadenfreude Alert

And, lest we forget, The stimulus jobs cost taxpayers $195,000 each.

UPDATE
Can’t Blame War For Spike In Deficit