Toby Harnden thinks yesterday’s speeches by Barack Obama and Dick Cheney represented a major public competition to mold national opinion and that the former Vice President won.

The spectacle of two duelling speeches with a mile of each other in downtown Washington was extraordinary. I was at the Cheney event and watched Obama’s address on a big screen beside the empty lectern that the former veep stepped behind barely two minutes after his adversary had finished.

So who won the fight? (it’s hard to use anything other than a martial or pugilistic metaphor). Well, most people are on either one side or the other of this issue and I doubt today will have prompted many to switch sides.

But the very fact that Obama chose to schedule his speech (Cheney’s was announced first) at exactly the same time as the former veep was a sign of some weakness.

The venues for the speeches said something. Obama showily chose the National Archives, repository for many of the founding documents of the US, and spoke in front of a copy of the Constitution – cloaking himself in the flag, as Republicans were often criticised for doing.

To hear Cheney speak, we were crammed into a decidedly unglamourous and cramped conference room at AEI, favourite think tank of conservative hawks.

The former veep’s speech was factual and unemotional and certainly devoid of the kind of hokey, self-obsessed, campaign-style stuff like this, from Obama’s address today: “I stand here today as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents. My father came to these shores in search of the promise that they offer. My mother made me rise before dawn to learn their truths when I lived as a child in a foreign land.”

In terms of Obama’s purported aim for his speech – to present a plan for closing Guantanamo Bay aimed at placating Congress – he failed. The reception on Capitol Hill was lukewarm with even Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Cheney’s speech wasn’t stylish, there were no rhetorical flourishes and the tone was bitingly sarcastic and disdainful at times. But it was effective in many respects and Cheney showed that Obama is not invulnerable.

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The Politico agrees that Obama is on the defensive.

For the first time in his presidency, Americans are getting a glimpse of Barack Obama on defense.

Over the past few weeks, Obama has been back on his heels over torture and terror, issues on which he surely thought he had the upper hand.

And he spent Thursday battling charges from a man he surely thought he had vanquished in November, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

It took some worried calls from Capitol Hill Democrats, congressional aides said, to convince him otherwise – that he needed to give a speech defending his plan for closing the terror prison at Guantanamo Bay, and rebutting Republican claims that the move would endanger Americans where they live.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and others made clear “that we’re going to need a lot more cover if we’re going to be able to deal with this issue,” said one Democratic leadership aide.

So on a day when Obama would have rather been anywhere else – remaking the auto industry or cheerleading an economic recovery – he was sharing TV screens with Cheney. …

“The White House didn’t want to do it — they want to drive the agenda, they want to be focused on health care right now,” said Heather Hurlburt, the executive director of the National Security Network, a Democratic think tank. “The Hill asked him to do this and he did it.”

That forcing of Obama’s hand marks a remarkable turnabout for a president who holds the most commanding position in American politics in two decades.

The most popular politician in the country found himself pushed up against a wall by one of the least popular in Cheney – the leading voice in a budding Republican attack on Obama over national defense, one of the GOP’s oldest (and most successful) cudgels against Democrats.

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Obama’s speech

Cheney’s speech

Karl Rove notes that now that he’s in office Americans are getting basically the opposite of what Barack Obama promised during the campaign. Obama has continued some of his campaign rhetoric, but has again and again contradicted himself by continuing Bush Administration national security policies.

Barack Obama inherited a set of national-security policies that he rejected during the campaign but now embraces as president. This is a stunning and welcome about-face.

For example, President Obama kept George W. Bush’s military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an “enormous failure” and a “legal black hole.” His campaign claimed last summer that “court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists.” Upon entering office, he found out they aren’t.

He insisted in an interview with NBC in 2007 that Congress mandate “consequences” for “a failure to meet various benchmarks and milestones” on aid to Iraq. Earlier this month he fought off legislatively mandated benchmarks in the $97 billion funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama agreed on April 23 to American Civil Liberties Union demands to release investigative photos of detainee abuse. Now’s he reversed himself. Pentagon officials apparently convinced him that releasing the photos would increase the risk to U.S. troops and civilian personnel.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama excoriated Mr. Bush’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, insisting it could not succeed. Earlier this year, facing increasing violence in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama rejected warnings of a “quagmire” and ordered more troops to that country. He isn’t calling it a “surge” but that’s what it is. He is applying in Afghanistan the counterinsurgency strategy Mr. Bush used in Iraq.

On the other hand, during the campaign, Obama promised fiscal moderation, and in that department, too, he is delivering the exact opposite of those campaign promises.

Mr. Obama campaigned on “responsible fiscal policies,” arguing in a speech on the Senate floor in 2006 that the “rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy.” In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he pledged to “go through the federal budget line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work.” Even now, he says he’ll “cut the deficit . . . by half by the end of his first term in office” and is “rooting out waste and abuse” in the budget.

However, Mr. Obama’s fiscally conservative words are betrayed by his liberal actions. He offers an orgy of spending and a bacchanal of debt. His budget plans a 25% increase in the federal government’s share of the GDP, a doubling of the national debt in five years, and a near tripling of it in 10 years.

On health care, Mr. Obama’s election ads decried “government-run health care” as “extreme,” saying it would lead to “higher costs.” Now he is promoting a plan that would result in a de facto government-run health-care system. Even the Washington Post questions it, saying, “It is difficult to imagine . . . benefits from a government-run system.”

Making adjustments in office is one thing. Constantly governing in direct opposition to what you said as a candidate is something else. Mr. Obama’s flip-flops on national security have been wise; on the domestic front, they have been harmful.

In both cases, though, we have learned something about Mr. Obama. What animated him during the campaign is what historian Forrest McDonald once called “the projection of appealing images.” All politicians want to project an appealing image. What Mr. McDonald warned against is focusing on this so much that an appealing image “becomes a self-sustaining end unto itself.” Such an approach can work in a campaign, as Mr. Obama discovered. But it can also complicate life once elected, as he is finding out.

Mr. Obama’s appealing campaign images turned out to have been fleeting. He ran hard to the left on national security to win the nomination, only to discover the campaign commitments he made were shallow and at odds with America’s security interests.

Mr. Obama ran hard to the center on economic issues to win the general election. He has since discovered his campaign commitments were obstacles to ramming through the most ideologically liberal economic agenda since the Great Society.

Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or, if he did, he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time, those things can catch up to a politician.

John Steele Gordon warns that Barack Obama’s plans for nationalized industries have plenty of precedents, all of which show that government-run business enterprises are a disaster.

The Obama administration is bent on becoming a major player in — if not taking over entirely — America’s health-care, automobile and banking industries. Before that happens, it might be a good idea to look at the government’s track record in running economic enterprises. It is terrible.

In 1913, for instance, thinking it was being overcharged by the steel companies for armor plate for warships, the federal government decided to build its own plant. It estimated that a plant with a 10,000-ton annual capacity could produce armor plate for only 70% of what the steel companies charged.

When the plant was finally finished, however — three years after World War I had ended — it was millions over budget and able to produce armor plate only at twice what the steel companies charged. It produced one batch and then shut down, never to reopen.

Or take Medicare. Other than the source of its premiums, Medicare is no different, economically, than a regular health-insurance company. But unlike, say, UnitedHealthcare, it is a bureaucracy-beclotted nightmare, riven with waste and fraud. Last year the Government Accountability Office estimated that no less than one-third of all Medicare disbursements for durable medical equipment, such as wheelchairs and hospital beds, were improper or fraudulent. Medicare was so lax in its oversight that it was approving orthopedic shoes for amputees.

These examples are not aberrations; they are typical of how governments run enterprises.

Read the whole thing.

Needing to keep his job with CBS, golf analyst David Feherty apologized for saying what he really thinks in a quip published in recent Dallas-area magazine.

Fox News quotes the “unacceptable” joke:

David Feherty apologized Sunday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for a morbid joke that went bad in a Dallas magazine.

Feherty, one of the most popular golf analysts for his sharp wit and self-deprecating humor, was among five Dallas residents who wrote for “D Magazine” on former President George W. Bush moving to Dallas.

“From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this though,” Feherty wrote toward the end of his column.

“Despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.”

Feherty, a former Ryder Cup player who grew up in Northern Ireland, has gone to Iraq over Thanksgiving the past two years to visit with U.S. troops, and he created a foundation to help wounded soldiers.

“This passage was a metaphor meant to describe how American troops felt about our 43rd president,” Feherty said in a statement. “In retrospect, it was inappropriate and unacceptable, and has clearly insulted Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid, and for that, I apologize. As for our troops, they know I will continue to do as much as I can for them both at home and abroad.

Feherty has to apologize for this “inappropriate and unacceptable” “morbid joke,” but one does not find Wanda Sykes apologizing for jokingly referring to Rush Limbaugh as “the 20th (9/11) hijacker” or anyone calling her expressing hope that “his kidneys fail” morbid or inappropriate. Instead, there is Barack Obama right next to her, grinning his head off.

Personally, I think we are all adults here and people in public life who are prominent leaders of sharply divided political factions should expect to be the subjects of uncomplimentary jokes. We can do without the prim and prissy faux outrage, particularly when it only is applied hypocritically in one direction.

“Mr. Rearden,” said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, “if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling, but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders — what would you tell him to do?”

“To shrug.”

Bruce Webster decides to re-read Atlas Shrugged and finds that Ayn Rand’s dystopian predictions are starting to read like the morning paper.

For a work written half a century ago, Atlas Shrugged remains surprisingly timely. In an eerie echo of today, many (if not most) critical economic and political decisions are made not by the President or Congress, but by a host of civilian advisors who spend as much time jockeying amongst themselves for position and influence as they do trying to solve the country’s problems. In the novel itself, the focus on trains, mining, steel, and manufacturing, especially within the United States, all seem very quaint and archaic in our digital/silicon/networked/globalized civilization, but every few pages, Rand will have a passage that is not only relevant but often prescient.

For example, consider this passage regarding one major (unsympathetic) character who ends up as a powerful government bureaucrat:

“My purpose,” said Orren Boyle, “is the preservation of a free economy. It’s generally conceded that free economy is now on trial. Unless it proves its social value and assumes its social responsibilities, the people won’t stand for it. If it doesn’t develop a public spirit, it’s done for, make no mistake about that.

Orren Boyle has appeared from nowhere, five years ago, and had since made the cover of every national news magazine. He had started with a hundred thousand dollars of his own and a two-hundred-million-dollar loan from the government. Now he headed an enormous concern which had swallowed many other companies. This proved, he liked to say, that individual ability still had a chance to succeed in the world.

“The only justification of private property,” said Orren Boyle, “is public service.” (p. 45)

Coming soon to a city near you?

Congressional Republicans (1, 2) and democrats are raising serious questions about Barack Obama’s plans to release terrorist detainees from the US holding facility in Guantanamo Bay into the United States, pointing to already existing statutes barring entry to recipients of terrorist training and introducing further legislation to block the president’s plans.

Jennifer Rubin, at Commentary, thinks Obama has painted himself into a corner on this one, and is going to incur serious political costs whichever way he decides in the end to proceed.

So what does the president do now? To go back on his promise to close Guantanamo would mean incurring the wrath of not only the Left in the U.S., but of the fawning European leaders and public who praised his decision to shut the place down. And it would, of course, be a humiliating admission that his initial pronouncement — made even before Eric Holder visited Guantanamo — was ill-conceived. He can try to fudge the issue or delay, but ultimately he has to do one or the other: proceed to close Guantanamo and begin releasing the detainees, or admit error and adhere to the Bush policy of housing dangerous terrorists there. It is not “a false choice,” but a very real one. We’ll see which audience, American or European, he is willing to offend.

Tom Suhadolnik explains how Barack Obama is simply setting aside conventional bankruptcy law in order to nationalize the automobile industry while moving simultaneously to nationalize the financial system using existing regulatory powers combined with intimidation.

How many Americans who pulled the democrat lever last November really intended to vote for Marxism?

At the end of April the Obama administration tested its ability to take direct control of the US financial system. The test was a success. There is a revolution underway which would impress Chavez or Castro. If you were like most people, you did not realize it happened.

As the details of the GM restructuring plan emerged, on Monday, April 27th, Lawrence Kudlow was one of the first to sound the alarm as secured lenders and bond holders were being given a fraction of the amount owed to them under long established bankruptcy law.

What is going on in this country? The government is about to take over GM in a plan that completely screws private bondholders and favors the unions. Get this: The GM bondholders own $27 billion and they’re getting 10 percent of the common stock in an expected exchange. And the UAW owns $10 billion of the bonds and they’re getting 40 percent of the stock. Huh? Did I miss something here? And Uncle Sam will have a controlling share of the stock with something close to 50 percent ownership. And no bankruptcy judge. So this is a political restructuring run by the White House, not a rule-of-law bankruptcy-court reorganization. …

To understand the gravity of the events you need a basic understanding of bankruptcy laws. The pecking order of bankruptcy claims is supposed to be:

1. Debtor in Possession (DIP) financing which is loaned to the restructuring company
2. Secured Lenders – creditors whose loans are backed by assets such as real estate or equipment
3. Unsecured Lenders – creditors such as bond holders, vendors and the UAW
4. Equity Owners – shareholders

When a company files for bankruptcy the claims that are superior (represented by a lower number) in the pecking order are paid first. Claims with equal status are treated equally; those claims are almost always paid on the same pro rata basis. It is an explicit goal of our bankruptcy system is to treat all creditors equally. …

In the case of GM, the UAW and bond holders are both unsecured creditors with equal rights under bankruptcy law. As The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Monday April 27th, interim GM CEO Fritz Henderson contends a 2007 deal between GM and the UAW gives preference to unsecured claims of the UAW. The bond holders never explicitly agreed to have their claims subordinated to the union so that contention is certainly open to debate in bankruptcy court.

Considering GM owes the UAW $20 billion (Henderson says the figure is closer to $30 billion) and bond holders $27 billion, they should receive a similar ratio of shares in the restructured GM. The deal announced by Henderson gives roughly 40% of the stock in a reorganized GM to the UAW, 50% to the government and 10% to the bond holders. The math does not make sense even if you accept Henderson’s contention that the UAW is owed $30 billion. …

The Chrysler reorganization details are more bizarre. At Chrysler the institutions owed $6.9 billion by Chrysler are secured creditors. As a matter of law, the secured claims would be superior to those of the UAW in bankruptcy court.

Putting the Chrysler deal in terms of household finances, the secured creditors would be the banks holding the mortgage and car note. Instead of the car and house going back to the bank in bankruptcy, the Chrysler deal calls for the car and house to be shared with unsecured creditors like credit card companies and the cable company. That is not how the system is supposed to work.

These bedrock principles are codified in our bankruptcy laws. …

Obama has made it clear he is willing to use his political muscle on the banks as well. …

The Obama administration will be able to make a plausible argument that nationalization of the banks was forced upon the administration by capitalism run amok. Given the type of patently absurd statements made by politicians of all stripes, this rather nuanced position will pass without a second thought.

In summary, the mechanism to nationalize the US financial system is now in place. All the levers are controlled by the executive branch. Here how it works:

1. The government determines various loses have eroded a particular bank’s balance sheet and regulatory intervention is necessary.
2. The bank is ordered to raise additional capital to maintain the proper asset ratio.
3. Increasing government activism causes private capital to avoid investing in banks.
4. The government is “forced” to loan more money to the bank in exchange for more stock and control via loan conditions like those found in earlier TARP loans and legislation.
5. As government acquires more power they force the bank to accept loses to benefit key constituencies of the administration (like the UAW) or the sale of toxic assets to firms like Pimco.
6. If the government does not own the majority of the bank’s stock return to step 1and repeat.

On May 5th, Fox reported as many as 10 of the top 19 banks in the country will need to raise additional capital following the stress tests. The troubled asset auction program is expected to start within a few weeks. If the administration chooses to do so the largest banks in the country can be nationalized by the end of summer.

There is no additional legislative action required to allow the executive branch to continue on this path. The regulatory framework was reviewed and approved by the judicial branch decades ago. The public at large may not even notice what is happening. Anyone looking for strutting fascists will be disappointed; this revolutionary change will be brought about by clean cut men and women in pinstripes.

Not only can it happen here, it is happening here.

Read the whole thing.

They had a lot to do with bringing down George W. Bush. Jack Kelly wonders if Obama has not recently made the wrong enemies.

Has Barack Obama made an enemy who can sabotage his presidency?

The presidency of George W. Bush began to unravel when some in high positions at the Central Intelligence Agency began waging a covert campaign against him.

It began in the summer of 2003 when officials at the CIA asked the Justice department to open a criminal investigation into who had disclosed to columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, wife of controversial former diplomat Joseph Wilson, worked at the CIA.

The officials knew at the time the Intelligence Identities Protection Act did not apply to Ms. Plame, who’d been out of the field for more than five years.

Another blow was struck with the publication in 2004 of the book “Imperial Hubris” by Michael Scheuer, who’d headed the bin Laden desk during the Clinton administration. It was harshly critical of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror in general, and the invasion of Iraq in particular.

Never before had a serving officer been allowed to publish such a book.

The CIA typically slow-rolled and censored books even by retired CIA directors.

“Why did the CIA allow such a controversial book to be published in the first place?” asked attorney Mark Zaid, who specializes in national security law. “There is simply no question that the CIA could have prevented the publication of Scheuer’s book if it had wanted to do so. And no court would have sided with him.”

Why would some at the CIA want to sabotage President Bush? One motive might have been to deflect blame for intelligence failures. The CIA confidently had predicted Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. But none were found. The tactical intelligence the CIA provided to the U.S. military forces invading Iraq proved nearly worthless. And the CIA was caught flat-footed by the insurgency that developed several months after Saddam’s fall.

There may have been a simpler motive. The novelist Charles McCarry was a deep cover CIA operative for ten years. “I never met a stupid person in the agency,” he said in a 2004 interview. “Or an assassin. Or a Republican.”

The CIA’s war against President Bush was motivated by ass covering, or by political partisanship. But with President Obama, it’s personal.

Pravda columnist Stanislav Mishin enjoys the last laugh as the American free enterprise system is eliminated by the Obamessiah’s commissars.

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. …

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish. …

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them? …

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Read the whole thing.

These charts from Policy Watch demonstrate “the change” in action.

Americans responded to the election of a democrat-dominated federal government by buying enough guns in 3 months to outfit the entire Chinese and Indian Armies. We also bought 1,529,635,000 rounds of ammunition in the month of December 2008 alone.

You have to give him credit. Obama certainly has turned one sector of the economy around.

Ammoland.com