"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans
began to slow and our planet began to heal"
Barack Hussein Obama
event
description
Rick Santelli & Kudlow Respond
"Worse than Nixon Attacks on Dan Rather" and "The worst press
relations we've seen in our lifetime" ( 04:51)
Transparency?
Obama has
ordered defense officials to sign a pledge stating they will not
share 2010 budget data with individuals outside the federal government.
In an undated non-disclosure agreement obtained by Defense News, the
administration tells defense officials that "strict confidentiality"
must be practiced to ensure a "successful" and "proper" 2010 defense
budget process.
The secrecy pact comes as dozens
of Bush-era Pentagon appointees remain on the job, asked to stay on by
the Obama administration until replacements are confirmed to ensure
continuity during wartime.
The Pentagon and Office of Management
and Budget have agreed on a fiscal 2010 defense budget top line figure
of $537 billion. That level is nearly $50 billion lower than the
$585 billion defense plan created during the final months of the Bush
administration, and $24 billion higher than the already enacted $513
billion 2009 defense budget.
The pledge covers any data about the
2010 budget, including: "planning, programming and budgeting system
documents and databases, and any other information" that concerns the
administration's internal discussions about "the nature and amounts of
the president's budget for fiscal year 2010, and any supplemental budget
request during the current fiscal year."
The administration is
requiring defense officials to promise they will not divulge the kinds
of information covered in the document "to any individual not authorized
to receive it."
"Under no circumstances will I disclose such
information outside the Department of Defense and other government
agencies directly involved in the defense planning and
resource-allocation process, such as the Office of Management and
Budget," the agreement said.
One wonders if The New York Times
will leak Obama administration secrets with the same vigor they used
during the Bush administration? I'll bet not.
Taxes, Taxes, Taxes
Obama is putting the
finishing touches on an ambitious first
budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four
years, primarily by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy and by
slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration
officials said.
In addition to tackling a deficit swollen by
Obama's $787 billion stimulus reparations/redistribution package and
his other efforts to increase the
nation's economic crisis, the budget blueprint will press aggressively
for "progress" on the domestic agenda Obama outlined during the
presidential campaign. This would include key changes to environmental
policies and a major expansion of health coverage that he hopes to enact
later this year.
A summary of Obama's budget request for the
fiscal year that begins in October will be delivered to Congress on
Thursday, with the complete, multi-hundred-page document to follow in
April. But Obama plans to unveil his goals for scaling back record
deficits and rebuilding the nation's costly and inefficient health care
system tomorrow, when he addresses lawmakers and budget experts at a
White House summit on restoring "fiscal responsibility" to Washington.
Obama also seeks to increase tax collections, mainly by making good
on his promise to eliminate some of the temporary tax cuts enacted in
2001 and 2003. While the budget would keep the breaks that benefit
middle-income families, it would eliminate them for wealthy taxpayers,
defined as families earning more than $250,000 a year. Those tax breaks
would be permitted to expire on schedule in 2011. That means the top tax
rate would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, the tax on capital
gains would jump to 20 percent from 15 percent for wealthy filers and
the tax on estates worth more than $3.5 million would be maintained at
the current rate of 45 percent.
The budget also puts in place the
building blocks of what administration officials say will be a broad
restructuring of the U.S. health system, an effort aimed at covering
some of the estimated 46 million Americans who lack insurance while
controlling costs and improving quality.
"The budget will kick
off or facilitate a focus on getting health care done this year," the
senior official said, adding that the White House is planning a health
care summit.
"Fiscal responsibility"
and "Washington" in the same sentence -- that's a whoop -- even for the
Washington comPost!
Obama's Massive Greenhouse Gas Tax
FReeper Kristinn
warns
us that Obama will propose a massive business tax on greenhouse gases in
his FY 2010 federal budget to be presented this week.
The massive
tax increase and power grab was buried at the end on article on Obama's
forthcoming budget
proposal in The New York Times:
On energy policy, Mr.
Obama’s budget will show new revenues by 2012 from his proposal to
require companies to buy permits from the government for greenhouse gas
emissions above a certain cap. The Congressional Budget Office
estimates that the permits would raise up to $300 billion a year
by 2020.
Since companies would pass their costs on to customers,
Mr. Obama would have the government use most of the revenues for
relief to families to offset higher utility bills and related
expenses. The remaining revenues would cover his proposals for $15
billion a year in spending and tax incentives to develop alternative
energy.
The proposal is in keeping with a policy
announcement candidate Obama made in 2007, as
reported then by The New York Times:
"No business will be
allowed to emit any greenhouse gases for free," Mr. Obama said in
Portsmouth, N.H. "Businesses don’t own the sky, the public does, and if
we want them to stop polluting it, we have to put a price on all
pollution."
Obama famously
said in 2008 he would make American citizens' electricity rates
skyrocket under his plan:
"What I've said is that we would
put a cap-and-trade system in place that is more -- that is as
aggressive if not more aggressive than anybody else's out there, so if
somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can, it's just that
it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for
all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.
"When I was asked
earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know, under my plan of a
cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.
Regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because
I'm capping greenhouse gases, coal-powered plants, you know, natural
gas, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would
have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money, they will
pass that money on to consumers. If you can't persuade the
American people that, yes, there's going to be some increase in
electricity rates on the front end, but that over the long term because
of combinations of more efficient energy usage and changing light bulbs
and more efficient appliances, but also technology improving how we can
produce clean energy, that the economy will benefit. If we can't
make that argument persuasively enough, you -- you can -- you can be
Lyndon Johnson, you can be the master of Washington, you're not gonna
get that done."
Obama, of course, has no intention of
persuading the American people, he's going to ram his Marxist agenda up
their tailpipes.
That
"relief to families" is just more of Obama's reparations and
redistribution -- and his defenders say he's not a socialist. I
say if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and poops like a duck,
it's probably a duck.
Gitmo
According to a Pentagon
review, ordered by Obama, the Guantanamo Bay military prison meets
the requirements of the Geneva Conventions.
The fact is, Obama
promised to close Gitmo before he had all the pertinent facts regarding
whether the place should be shuttered in the first place. His
public, campaign statements put him in a box. Obama's first
post-inauguration act was to
order the
closing of Camp Delta, the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Obama has
said he screwed up in the past. Can he do it again?
By that, of course, I mean can he admit he screwed up? The
probability that he'll screw up is a metaphysical certainty.
