Archive for February, 2010

New York Gov. David Paterson will abandon his campaign for election to a full term:

Democratic officials in Washington were informed of Mr. Paterson’s plans early Friday, the Associated Press reported.

The governor has faced intensifying pressure to abandon his campaign, as a senior aide quit his administration in outrage and the New York political world responded with disgust to allegations the state police and the Democratic governor interfered with a domestic-violence case involving a top aide.

Mr. Paterson’s administration was plunged into disarray late Wednesday after it was reported by the New York Times that the governor and a member of his security detail had conversations with a woman pursing a protection order against a top administration aide, David Johnson, 37 years old, a close friend and adviser to Mr. Paterson.

Just days ago Paterson, a former lieutenant governor who assumed the state’s top job after Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned due to a prostitution scandal in 2008, had announced his intention to run for a full term as governor.

Paterson began his political career after graduating from Hofstra Law School when he went to work in the Queens County District Attorney’s office. He joined the staff of Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, and was elected to the New York State Senate in 1985, winning the seat once held by his father, former NY Secretary of State Basil Paterson. In 2003, he became Senate Minority Leader and was selected as the running mate by then-NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for the 2006 New York gubernatorial election. Democrats Spitzer and Paterson were elected in November 2006 with 69 percent of the vote, and Paterson was sworn in as Lieutenant Governor January 1, 2007.

When Spitzer resigned in the imbroglio of a sex scandal, Paterson was sworn in as New York’s governor March 17, 2008. As Governor of New York, Paterson has received the lower approval ratings of any New York State governor, and he has been a controversial figure from the beginning. Just one day after his inauguration, both Paterson and his wife acknowledged having had extramarital affairs, one with a state employee.

As governor, Paterson has struggled with his state’s financial crisis. For the 2008-09 fiscal year, he tried to get New York’s record spending under control through budget cuts, but the state legislature only allowed a 6 percent spending reduction. Facing a budget deficit of $15 billion and state debt near $55 billion, Paterson’s 2009-10 budget recommended decreasing state school aid by $1.1 billion and the imposition of a number of new taxes and fees on everything from non-diet soft drinks to haircuts. The unpopular new taxes are one of the major reasons his approval numbers have suffered.

Despite the low approval ratings for Paterson, State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who was widely expected to challenge the governor in the Democrat gubernatorial primary, will now find his path to the governor’s mansion somewhat easier to travel. Cuomo will likely face former U.S. Congressman Rick Lazio in the general election.

- JP

President Obama continues to demonstrate that he not only doesn’t share the priorities of the people, he doesn’t even seem to care what they are. A growing number of Americans are unemployed or underemployed, and those who have jobs are worried about the prospects of losing them. Yet Obama remains focused like a laser beam on ramming down our throats  a government-mandated, government-controlled major restructuring of our health care system in a manner opposed by most Americans.

While Obama remains obsessed with the shiny health care object, new jobless claims have risen again:

Remember in the messy, fingerpointing aftermath of the Democratic debacle in the Massachusetts Senate election, President Obama said that after nearly a year of healthcare speeches, healthcare town halls and secret healthcare legislative meetings, he’d gotten the message and for 2010 his Job One was what Joe Biden calls that three-letter word: J-O-B-S?

Well, that voter-driven focus lasted about a week.

Now here we are today with another carefully stage-managed healthcare summit across the street from the White House because there hasn’t been enough healthcare talk.

And the overwhelming congressional Democratic majorities that Americans believed they elected in 2008 to break partisan gridlock and finally get something done in Washington can’t agree enough among themselves to pass the legislation they wrote themselves. So why not drag in the Republicans as nationally-televised patsies?

And, lo and behold, what happens? Wouldn’t you know. Someone at the Labor Dept. didn’t get the healthcare summit memo.

The surge in new claims filed for unemployment benefits worried investors so much that the stock market took a dive:

An unexpected jump in weekly jobless claims spread ripples of concern that dragged down U.S. stocks on Thursday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was recently down 178 points, or 1.7%, at 10196, with all of its components in the red. The measure’s early losses put it on pace for its fourth triple-digit point decline this month and its worst one-day drop since a 268-point slide on Feb. 4.

[...]

Investors said the new spike in jobless claims undermined last month’s slight paring in the unemployment rate.

“Today’s number was very important,” said Mike O’Rourke, chief market strategist at BTIG, an institutional broker. “That will set the trend going into next week’s February jobs report.”

The Labor Department said Thursday that weekly jobless claims unexpectedly surged last week by 22,000 to 496,000, their highest level in over three months. Economists had expected initial claims to decrease by 13,000.

There’s that word again — “unexpected“:

The AP gets to use its favorite adverb again, and this time it’s even more ridiculous when reading the spin on the latest unemployment news. Initial jobless claims rose again last week, and as the AP explains, it probably comes in part with the massive snowstorm that blanketed the mid-Atlantic region. But if that’s the case, then why would they describe it with the word “unexpectedly”…?

[...]

However, not everyone is convinced that the weather is the primary motivator for the rise in joblessness.

[...]

The problem with the snow explanation is that this is not just a one-week anomaly. The four-week average of initial jobless claims has risen by 30,000 over the last month, a trend that indicates that more businesses have continued cutbacks. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a sudden and significant increase in mass layoff events for January.

As Ed Morrissey correctly concluded, the month-to-month increase in mass layoffs and new jobless claims are not products of snowfall, but of the gloomy outlook economists are taking on economic growth. Businesses are still pruning their workforces and sitting on their cash, reluctant to invest in either payroll or expansion. This is what the market came to terms with today.

Meanwhile, the actual unemployment rate, which includes idled workers who’ve given up on looking for jobs, as well as those who are underemployed in part time positions, is 16.5 percent. But Obama and his Democrat Congress can concentrate on nothing but performing radical surgery on our health care system. Yet they claim that they are not ideologues.  Riiiight, and they also claimed that unemployment wouldn’t rise over 8 percent.

- JP

The relationship between the United States and its allies has changed in significant ways since Ronald Reagan was in the White House and Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street. Over the past year and a half, the Obama administration has been sending a clear message to America’s allies around the world that they can no longer count on us. The president has — quite literally — bent over forwards and backwards to court our enemies while distancing himself from our friends.

Until quite recently, the best example of this tectonic shift in U.S. foreign policy was Obama’s Honduras blunder last summer. But now our leftist president has turned his back on America’s oldest and most trusted friend, Great Britain. It’s much more serious than Obama’s mere gaffes, such as returning the bust of Sir Winston Churchill, which was a gift from Her Majesty’s Kingdom given to the U.S. during the administration of Gorge W. Bush, or Obama’s embarrassing gifts to the Brits such as DVDs recorded in the wrong format for the UK and an iPod full of the Narcissist in Chief’s own speeches.

This time, the US Government has refused to back the U.K. in asserting its claims to sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, while a dispute over oil drilling rights in the South Atlantic threatens to boil over in London and Argentina:

According to reports, the Obama Administration is determined to keep out of the issue, despite its close alliance with the UK.

It has also declined to back Britain’s claim that oil exploration near the islands is sanctioned by international law, saying that the dispute is strictly a bilateral issue.

“We are aware not only of the current situation, but also of the history, but our position remains one of neutrality,” The Times quote a State Department spokesman, as saying.

“The US recognizes de facto UK administration of the islands but takes no position on the sovereignty claims of either party,” he added.

Meanwhile, Argentina has appealed to the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, to intervene in the dispute.

Small wonder that the British feel like they have been stabbed in the back by their once-best friend:

“There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

In an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph, Nile Gardiner put into words what many Britons must be thinking about America:

Even by the relentlessly poor standards of the Obama administration, whose doctrine unfailingly appears to be “kiss your enemies and kick your allies”, this is a new low. The White House’s neutrality in a major dispute between America’s closest friend and the likes of Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez, Argentina’s biggest backer, represents the appalling appeasement of an alliance of anti-Western Latin American regimes, stretching from Caracas to Havana – combined with a callous indifference towards the Anglo-American alliance.

Over the course of the last year, we’ve seen a staggering array of foreign policy follies by this administration, from the throwing under the bus of the Poles and the Czechs over missile defence to siding with Marxists in Honduras. But this latest pronouncement surely takes the biscuit as the most brazen betrayal so far of a US ally.

For well over a century, the U.K. knew that it could always count on the U.S. to at least give it moral support, if not guns and butter. But in less than a year’s time the leftists in Obama’s State Department have scuttled the special relationship that had long existed between the two old friends.

While the U.K. has no present-day Maggie Thatcher, it is abundantly clear that Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan. He isn’t even fit to speak the great man’s name. How many in the U.K. are now pining for George W. Bush, the president British leftists had dismissed as a cowboy? How’s that hope and change working out for those across the pond? Don’t blame me, Britain. I voted for Sarah Palin and the old guy.

- JP

American voters couldn’t be less satisfied with Congress, as their disapproval of the job Senators and Representatives are doing has soared to the highest mark ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports. 71 percent now say the legislature is doing a poor job:

That’s up ten points from the previous high of 61% reached a month ago.

Only 10% of voters say Congress is doing a good or excellent job.

Nearly half of Democratic voters (48%) now give Congress a poor rating, up 17 points since January. The vast majority of Republicans and voters not affiliated with either party also give Congress poor ratings.

Seventy percent (70%) of voters say Congress has not passed any legislation that would significantly improve life for Americans, up 10 points over the past month and the highest level of dissatisfaction measured in regular tracking in over three years. Only 15% say Congress has passed such legislation.

Historically, when voters have expressed their disapproval with Congress, they have usually made exceptions for their own state’s or district’s national legislators, but this election year will likely see the end of that trend:

Earlier this month, 63% of voters said it would be better for the country if most incumbents in Congress were defeated this November. Just 27% of voters say their representative in Congress is the best possible person for the job.

Rasmussen found that only 9 percent of voters feel that most members of Congress are genuinely interested in helping people, and 81 percent believe that most members of Congress are more interested in their own careers, the highest number in years.

Rasmussen’s findings tend to confirm a Washington Post-ABC News poll taken earlier this month which shows the same general proportion of voters who are considering voting against their congressional representatives as were thinking the same thing in 1994 and 2006, the most recent mid-term elections when control on Capitol Hill shifted dramatically between the major political parties.

As we’ve said before, 2010 is shaping up to be an election to remember..

- JP

Indiana’s Governor Mitch Daniels sounds for all the world like a reluctant potential presidential candidate for 2012:

The Republican told The Washington Post over the weekend that he has spoken with former president George W. Bush and others in recent months and has agreed to keep an open mind about the idea.

“Just to get them off my back, I agreed to a number of people that I will now stay open to the idea,” Daniels told the Post.

But Post reporter Dan Balz is skeptical of Daniels’ explanation:

“I don’t think anybody with the experience that he has simply says, ‘Yes I keep open the door’ just because he’s trying to get people off his back,” he told 6News. “I think it would suggest he has at least decided he will think about whether it actually makes sense for him to get in the race.”

Daniels is serving his second term as the Hoosier State’s governor. He work as an intern while attending college for then-Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar, and in just three years became Lugar’s top aide. After Lugar’s election to the U.S. Senate, Daniels followed him to Washington, D.C. in 1977 as an administrative assistant.

In 1982, when Lugar was elected chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Senator named Daniels as its executive director. Daniels also managed three successful Senate campaigns for Lugar. He went to work at the White House when he was given the job of chief political advisor and liaison to President Ronald Reagan in 1985.

Daniels left the White House in 1987 to take the position of CEO of the Hudson Institute, and he is credited for turning the think tank’s financial situation around. He left Hudson in 1990 for Eli Lilly and Co., and was promoted to President of North American operations in 1993 and to Senior Vice President for Corporate Strategy and Policy in 1997.

Daniels left the company in 2001, returning to the White House to serve as George W. Bush’s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where he was also a member of the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council. Daniels was elected Governor of Indiana in 2004 in a 7-point victory and reelected in 2008 by an 18-point margin.

- JP

President Obama stubbornly refuses to take a “clean sheet” approach to health care reform:

President Obama made it clear Monday morning that he intends to make a final push for a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s health-care and insurance system, offering a new health-care plan that largely embraces the approach already taken by the U.S. Senate.

The plan, which went live on the White House Web site at 10 a.m., rejects repeated calls from Republicans to scrap Democratic efforts from last year and start over. Instead, it attempts to merge the Senate legislation with its counterpart in the House in ways that would address some of the most controversial provisions in the stalled bill.

Opposition to the latest revision of ObamaCare is coming from a number of directions. The National Right to Life Committee charges that the president’s latest revision of the bill “threatens to expand abortion even more drastically than the health care bills stymied in Congress over the past several months.” The Christian Science Monitor advises, “Don’t expect much savings from the Obama plan, and so government will need to keep a cap on insurance premiums.” House GOP leader John Boehner warns that Obama’s plan threatens his own proposed health care summit:

“The president has crippled the credibility of this week’s summit by proposing the same massive government takeover of healthcare based on a partisan bill the American people have already rejected,” Boehner said in a prepared statement.

Seanate Minority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, meanwhile called Obama’s move to draft a new plan ahead of the health care summit “disappointing”:

It’s disappointing that Democrats in Washington either aren’t listening, or are completely ignoring what Americans across the country have been saying. Our constituents don’t want yet another partisan, back-room bill that slashes Medicare for our seniors, raises a half-trillion dollars in new taxes, fines them if they don’t buy the right insurance and further expands the role of government in their personal decisions.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the president’s latest prescription is that it raises taxes:

The White House rejected the House-proposed 5.4 percent surtax on high income households, the so-called millionaires’ tax, and instead adopted the Senate approach to raise the Medicare tax on high-income earners to 2.9 percent from 2.35 percent. But the White House plan goes one step further and would impose a new 2.9 percent Medicare tax on some investment income for high-income people. Medicare is the government health insurance program for the elderly and disabled.

The White House plan also modifies the proposed Senate tax on high-cost insurance plans. The so-called “Cadillac” tax would kick in on plans costing $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for family plans. The starting date for the tax is 2018 rather than 2013 as originally called for in the Senate bill. The change is similar to a deal worked out with labor unions, but would apply to all plans.

The proposal also provides higher tax thresholds for firms that have higher costs because they employ mostly women or older workers. It also provides higher thresholds for high-risk professions such as firefighters.

The president’s plan increases proposed new assessments on brand-name pharmaceuticals to raise $23 billion over 10 years compared to $10 billion in the Senate bill. Those assessments would be delayed by one year until 2011.

This latest move by the president casts doubt on his claim that his health care summit will be truly bipartisan.

- JP