Fausta's Blog

Always the uniter, Obama’s ‘Jedi mind meld’ mixes sci-fi worlds

A “Jedi mind trick” is a power exercised by Jedi Knights in “Star Wars,” usually accomplished by verbal ma­nipu­la­tion (Famous example: “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”)

But “mind meld” is a phenomenon from “Star Trek.” It’s a method of communication used among Vulcans, like Spock.

Voilà!

Live long and prosper, grasshopper!

Dr. Krauthammer‘s on the case, on TV:

and here: Hail Armageddon

The Obama administration has every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity — cuts the nation survives. Are they threatening to pare back consultants, conferences, travel and other nonessential fluff? Hardly. It shall be air-traffic control. Meat inspection. Weather forecasting.

A 2011 Government Accountability Office report gave a sampling of the vastness of what could be cut, consolidated and rationalized in Washington: 44 overlapping job training programs, 18 for nutrition assistance, 82 (!) on teacher quality, 56 dealing with financial literacy, more than 20 for homelessness, etc. Total annual cost: $100 billion-$200 billion, about two to five times the entire domestic sequester.

Are these on the chopping block? No sir. It’s firemen first. That’s the phrase coined in 1976 by legendary Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters to describe the way government functionaries beat back budget cuts. Dare suggest a nick in the city budget, and the mayor immediately shuts down the firehouse. The DMV back office, stacked with nepotistic incompetents, remains intact. Shrink it and no one would notice. Sell the firetruck — the people scream and the city council falls silent about any future cuts.

After all, the sequester is just one-half of 1 percent of GDP. It amounts to 1.4 cents on the dollar of nondefense spending, 2 cents overall.

Because of this year’s payroll tax increase, millions of American workers have had to tighten their belts by precisely 2 percent. They found a way. Washington, spending $3.8 trillion, cannot? If so, we might as well declare bankruptcy now and save the attorneys’ fees.

Obama was counting on the sequester, make no mistake.

Ace:

Woodward’s sin was exposing “big whoppers” the Administration told on the sequester.

There are several lies Woodward has exposed:

1. Obama, despite the media blitz to blame the GOP, actually conceived of and proposed the sequester.

2. Obama, despite now claiming that tax increases must be part of the deal to avoid the sequester, agreed last year that only spending cuts would constitute the plan to avoid the sequester. Thus, he’s “moved goalposts” yet again.

3. Obama does not in fact have to release illegal aliens or cancel ship deployments due to the sequester — he’s doing these things by choice, for political purposes.

Welcome to The Obamaian Universe,

He doesn’t want to cut spending. He wants more of it. Forever. Public spending is beyond ideology for Barack Obama. It’s the oxygen in his universe.
…
Maybe it’s time to come to grips with the fact that he sees the public economy of federal spending as the life force of the nation as no president ever has, not even Franklin Roosevelt.

Indeed!

As you all know by now, Bob Woodward, the guy who brought down Nixon, has made the White House unhappy by (correctly) asserting that sequestration was Obama’s idea in the first place. So unhappy that, after being yelled at for an hour, Woodward received an email from Gene Sperling, economic adviser to the president, promising(?)

But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.

The charm oozes from the email later on, when Gene apologizes for yelling at Bob, but Bob isn’t the only one getting the yeller (h/t Instapundit): Ron Fournier writes,

As editor-in-chief of National Journal, I received several e-mails and telephone calls from this White House official filled with vulgarity, abusive language, and virtually the same phrase that Woodward called a veiled threat. “You will regret staking out that claim,” The Washington Post reporter was told.

Once I moved back to daily reporting this year, the badgering intensified. I wrote Saturday night, asking the official to stop e-mailing me. The official wrote, challenging Woodward and my tweet. “Get off your high horse and assess the facts, Ron,” the official wrote.

Lanny Davis (audio starts immediately) told Washington, D.C.’s WMAL this morning that the Obama White House had threatened the Washington Times over his column.

Woodward says sequestration is “a kind of madness I haven’t seen in a long time.”

So, is Woodward overreacting, or has he created a perfect storm of a timely controversy about the media and individual reporters?

Mind you, not just any individual reporter, but the reporter who brought down a POTUS, and had Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson (as Jack Foreman) play him in movies a generation ago.

Or is this just a generational thing that young voters will brush aside?

RELATED:
The presidency as theater:

And thus the facade continues: promising peace and delivering expanded war, with new frontiers broken for drone killings of children and other innocents, legal justifications crafted for killing Americans, and near-limitless executive power over nearly every aspect of our lives. Reciting the Progressive line while delivering impoverishment, decreased access and less-affordable healthcare, clearly it matters only what he says, not what is. His hoped-for next act: new goals of gun control that would make the most vulnerable more so, an increased minimum wage that would further exacerbate the inability of those with no work experience to get an entry-level job in which to hone the skills that will put them on the economic ladder, and “green” measures, based, like the Life of Pi, on computer-generated fantasy so much more appealing than dry real-world data.

If You Don’t Buy This Budget, We’ll Kill This Seal

(Click on link for full size)

Government by Freakout
Obama’s scare tactics aren’t much of a long-term strategy.

In a way it’s all brilliant showbiz: Scare people into supporting your position. But we’ve been though it before, and you wonder, again, why a triumphant president and a battered Republican House majority can’t reach a responsible agreement.

And then you remind yourself why. Because Mr. Obama thrives in chaos. He flourishes in unsettled circumstances and grooves on his own calm. He spins an air of calamity, points fingers and garners support. His only opponent is a hapless, hydra-headed House. America has a weakness for winners, and Republicans just now do not look like winners. They have many voices but no real voice, and no one saying anything that makes you stop and think. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, is a singular character who tells you in measured tones that we must have measured answers. Half the country finds his politics to be too much to one side, but his temperament is not extreme and he often looks reasonable. With this gift he ties his foes in knots to get what he wants, which is higher taxes. He wants the rich to pay more and those he judges to be in need to receive more. End of story. Debt and deficits don’t interest him, except to the extent he must give them lip service.

And so far this seems to be working fine for him. A USA Today/Pew Research Center poll out this week reported half the respondents said it will be the Republicans’ fault if the sequester goes through. Only a third said they’d blame the president.

The question is, is Obama overplaying his hand?

Q at the movies:

(That last one looks rather familiar…)

Q at the weather service:

Snow stuns golfers in AZ...
BEARS DOWN ON MIDWEST...
Severe T-storms, Tornados in Deep South...
WATCHES/WARNINGS...

‘Q’ TARGETS 30 MILLION

In other news, not only have the oceans stopped rising, the fat has melted away: White House Credits ‘Let’s Move’ for Halting and Reversing Childhood Obesity Trend

The press release does not include any data to bolster the claim.

And George Galloway’s a firm supporter of human rights:

Hillary Clinton To Charge $200k Per Lecture. In case you missed it,

This is what teen unemployment has been for the last six years:

With that dismal number, the President proposes a 25% increase in minimum salary to $9/hr. The result? The least educated, experienced and skilled will be priced out of the market.

In today’s WSJ:
The Minority Youth Unemployment Act
A higher minimum wage will hurt Obama’s most loyal supporters.

The damage from a minimum wage hike depends on the overall labor market. If the job market is buoyant, as it is in the fracking boomtown of Williston, N.D., fast-food workers may already make more than $9 an hour. But when the jobless rate is high, as it still is in California and New York, the increase punishes minority youth in particular.

That is what happened during the last series of wage hikes to $7.25 from $5.15 that started in July 2007 as the economy was headed toward recession. The last increase hit in July 2009 just after the recession ended, and as the nearby chart shows, the jobless rate jumped for teens and black teens especially. For black teens, the rate has remained close to 40% and was still 37.8% in January.

A study by economists William Even of Miami University and David Macpherson of Trinity University concludes that in the 21 states where the full 40% wage increase took effect, “the consequences of the minimum wage for black young adults without a diploma were actually worse than the consequences of the Great Recession.”

William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, says that after the July 2009 increase 600,000 teen jobs disappeared in the next six months even as GDP expanded. In the previous six months, when the economy was still shrinking, half as many teen jobs were lost. The overall teen jobless rate was still 23.4% last month, which means demand for unskilled workers is low even at $7.25 an hour. Demand will be lower at $9.

As for that family Obama referred to,

But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we’ve put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s wrong.

Wrong, indeed,

He left out that most minimum-wage earners are not the primary bread winner. Nearly 40% live with a parent or relative. The average family income of a household with a minimum-wage worker is about $47,023—which is far above the poverty line of $23,550 for a family of four.

Mr. Obama didn’t even tell the whole story about parents raising a family on a minimum-wage income. A full-time minimum-wage worker earns roughly $15,000 a year. But that worker also receives a cash supplement from the earned income tax credit of roughly $5,000, and many states provide benefits on top of that to reward working. That doesn’t count government benefits like food stamps, Medicaid, child care and more. According to data from the Employment Policies Institute, about two of every three minimum-wage workers also get a raise within one year.

There’s also the erroneous premise that people are forever stuck at minimum wage, when, in fact, minimum wage jobs are entry-level jobs where workers gain the experience they need to advance. More on that in the video: