Standing Up(ish)

It's good to see President Obama standing up and calling out on the Tea Party/Republican/Conservative nonsense and slander. Apparently he has finally decided that he cannot charm them with his smile so he is going to bewitch them with his boot.

So he's doing things like the reconfiguring the manned space program, issuing executive orders regarding hospital visitation, telling the opposition to shut up about financial regulation because their crap is wrong... In short, being the left of center leader that we elected him to be. A couple of points.

I wish he would quit with this act he has on tax cuts.

"We cut taxes for this group, we cut taxes for that group." [applause] "We cut taxes uptown, we cut taxes downtown." [applause builds] "We cut taxes left, we cut taxes right, we cut taxes middle. In fact, we cut taxes for 95% of America." [thunderous applause]

The day before this he was blasting the Bush Administration for cutting taxes and digging us into the disastrous economy that he is having to rescue the nation from, and the next day he will be blasting the Bush Administration for... wait for it, yeah, the crime of cutting taxes.

At the same time that he's cutting taxes for everybody, he's "freezing spending" in a frenzy of fiscal sanity. What's frozen are mostly programs that help communities and common people; what's not frozen is spending on a war for which he cannot explain the reason or define victory.

So he is the second president to increase war and decrease the ability to pay for war, exactly what he freely criticizes his predecessor for doing.

He's madly selling "health care reform" after it has been signed into law, largely by telling people on Medicare that they will get a check for $250 this year to "fill a donut hole" that is $3700 wide.

After his "health care reform" success, his next big move is financial reform because, apparently, people are really mad at banks on Wall Street. Undoubtedly true, but polls have quit asking about people's priorities, because the polls kept revealing that the employment issue was first on the list, not health care or financial reform. Seems all the millions of jobless people don't have a lot of money in Wall Street banks. Fancy that.

So while "jobs" was the hoi polloi's first priority, Obama tackled "health care reform" and won big, but couldn't figure out why his and his party's popularity didn't soar. Now while "jobs" is still the hoi polloi's first priority, Obama is tackling financial regulation.

Meanwhile there were 16,000 new jobs last month, and 284,000 new claims for unemployment. And what is he actually doing about jobs?