The King's Speech

Obama could win an Academy Award for chutzpah in his campaign kickoff address before Congress!

Roll together all the familiar recycled rhetoric with it's partisan tone, fingerpointing, straw men arguments, failed policies of tax and spend and you have the recipe for Obama's empty suit speech before a Joint Session of Congress Thursday evening.

But beside all these familiar devices Obama introduced something new. No longer is he asking for an immediate vote on a bill thousands of pages long that no one has read. Now he wants Congress to pass a bill that hasn't even been written.

Counting from the official White House transcript, President Obama used some variation of the phrase "pass this bill" eighteen times during the address. Yet, as I said there is no bill to pass. Just some rather vague ideas for more spending and another visit to the well of class warfare with demands for higher taxes.

And it was this dig at the wealthy who already pay 70% of income taxes "to pay their fair share," which was the only suggestion for how to pay for the approximately $450 billion in new spending, much of it directed to purposes that benefit Obama's big labor backers. I guess it was no coincidence that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was sitting in the First Lady's box next to Michelle Obama.

Obama's proposal to pay for the majority of his vague plan is to dump the cost onto the deficit reduction Super Committee which is already hard pressed to find a way to cut $1.5 trillion from the federal budget.

Unless of course the Super Committee wants to recommend the abolition of ObamaCare and the trillions in new spending it entails, there is no way to pay another $450 billion for this latest rehash of failed Obama stimulus.

Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress would be foolish to buy another pig in a poke from Obama considering the performance we have seen from past Obama efforts.

Senator Mitch McConnell: "Insane" to support more failed stimulus

In a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate Thursday afternoon, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell said:

[I]n a two-party system like ours, it shouldn’t be surprising that there would be two very different points of view about how to solve this particular crisis. What is surprising is the President’s apparent determination to apply the same government-driven policies that have already been tried and failed. The definition of insanity, as Albert Einstein once famously put it, is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. Frankly, I can’t think of a better description of anyone who thinks the solution to this problem is another Stimulus. The first Stimulus didn’t do it. Why would another one?

“This is one question that the White House and a number of Democrats clearly don’t want to answer. That’s why some of them are out there coaching people not to use the word Stimulus when describing the President’s plan. Others are accusing anybody who criticizes it of being unpatriotic or playing politics. Well, as I’ve said, there’s a much simpler reason to oppose the President’s economic policies that has nothing whatsoever to do with politics: they don’t work. Yet, by all accounts, the President’s so-called jobs plan is to try those very same policies again, and then accuse anyone who doesn’t support them this time around of being political or overly partisan, of not doing what’s needed in this moment of crisis.

“This isn’t a jobs plan. It’s a re-election plan. That’s why Republicans will continue to press for policies that empower job creators, not Washington.

This speech was about one job only: re-electing Obama!