The empty suit gets exposed once again. Go and try and find some recorded footage, audio or video of this imbecile trying to speak extemporaneously. He's a stumble bum. This guy is such a fraud and the American public bought into it. Thats the scary thing. We've become so dumbed down in this country that no one looks deeper than what they get from the liberal media. Thus we have the disaster that is unfolding in front of us now because of the liberal messiah. This from Politico:

Obama's safety net: the TelePrompter

• Carol E. Lee Carol E. Lee – Thu Mar 5, 1:04 pm ET

President Barack Obama doesn’t go anywhere without his TelePrompter.

The textbook-sized panes of glass holding the president’s prepared remarks follow him wherever he speaks.

Resting on top of a tall, narrow pole, they flank his podium during speeches in the White House’s stately parlors. They stood next to him on the floor of a manufacturing plant in Indiana as he pitched his economic stimulus plan. They traveled to the Department of Transportation this week and were in the Capitol Rotunda last month when he paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln in six-minute prepared remarks.

Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual — not only because he is famous for his oratory, but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events, large and small.

After the teleprompter malfunctioned a few times last summer and Obama delivered some less-than-soaring speeches, reports surfaced that he was training to wean himself off of the device while on vacation in Hawaii. But no such luck.

His use of the teleprompter makes work tricky for the television crews and photographers trying to capture an image of the president announcing a new Cabinet secretary or housing plan without a pane of glass blocking his face. And it is a startling sight to see such sleek, modern technology set against the mahogany doors and Bohemian crystal chandeliers in the East Room or the marble columns of the Grand Foyer.

“It’s just something presidents haven’t done,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a presidential historian who has held court in the White House since December 1975. “It’s jarring to the eye. In a way, it stands in the middle between the audience and the president because his eye is on the teleprompter.”

Just how much of a crutch the teleprompter has become for Obama was on sharp display during his latest commerce secretary announcement. The president spoke from a teleprompter in the ornate Indian Treaty Room for a few minutes. Then Gov. Gary Locke stepped to the podium and pulled out a piece of paper for reference.

The president’s teleprompter also elicited some uncomfortable laughter after he announced Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as his choice for Health and Human Services secretary. “Kathy,” Obama said, turning the podium over to Sebelius, who waited at the microphone for an awkward few seconds while the teleprompters were lowered to the floor and the television cameras rolled.

Obama has relied on a teleprompter through even the shortest announcements and when repeating the same lines on his economic stimulus plan that he's been saying for months — whereas past presidents have mostly worked off of notes on the podium except during major speeches, such as the State of the Union.

Ari Fleischer, a former spokesman for George W. Bush, said while it’s entirely a matter of personal style, using a teleprompter at these smaller events has its drawbacks.

“It removes you from the audience in the room,” Fleischer said. When speaking from notes, Fleischer said, the president can pick up his head and make eye contact with those in the audience, as opposed to focusing on the teleprompter to his left and right.

Bush, Fleischer added, “would use the teleprompter for his major big events, but when he would travel around the country or do events, he would almost always work off of large index cards.”

The White House says Obama’s point of reference is insignificant.

"Whether one uses note cards or a teleprompter, the American people are a lot more concerned about the plans relayed than the method of delivery. This is not always true of the media," said Bill Burton, deputy press secretary.

Obama has never tried to hide his use of a teleprompter. It was a mainstay during the final months of his campaign. He brought it to county fairs and campaign rallies alike — and once had it set up in the ring at a rodeo.

In a break from his routine, Obama did not use a teleprompter during his pre-Inauguration speech at a factory in Bedford Heights, Ohio — and his delivery seemed to suffer. He paused too long at parts. He accentuated the wrong words. And overall he sounded hesitant and halting as he spoke from the prepared remarks on the podium.

As president, the stakes in what he says are higher. Governing is not campaigning, and, as a former first-term senator, Obama has not held a previous elected position where his words carried even close to this level of influence.

“In this kind of environment, you don’t want to make mistakes — on the economy you’re talking about doing things that affect the markets,” Kumar said.

But be it extra precaution, style or a mental crutch, Obama has shown in the past that he needs the teleprompter. And while he still has his prepared remarks placed on the podium in a leather folder, the White House has shown no sign of trying to wean him off of it.

Before Obama entered a room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Wednesday to announce his crackdown on defense contracts, a CNN reporter asked an Obama aide if the teleprompter could be moved further away from the podium or lowered. The answer was an unequivocal ‘no.’

“He uses them to death,” a television crewmember who also covered the White House under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush said of the teleprompter. “The problem is, he never looks at you. He’s looking left, right, left, right — not at the camera. It’s almost like he’s not making eye contact with the American people.”

Wednesday’s event posed another scenario photographers and television crews have to work around. Obama had five others join him at the announcement, including Sen. John McCain. The takeaway shot was of Obama and McCain. But the teleprompter on Obama’s left was almost directly in front of McCain.

“You couldn’t get a good angle on him with McCain,” said a White House photographer who also covered Bush. “So if there’s someone else important in the frame, it’s hard to get a shot without the teleprompter.”

Bill Clinton is looking more and more responsible for this mess...

Dont care what you think about him, read this post. Slick Willy really helped do us in. Now the messiah in office now will finish us off.

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_022409/content/01125108.guest.html

The Turning Tide

It only took a little over a month in office, but already Obama is making the Great Unwashed sick. Now we're bailing out losers who cant pay their mortgages? The idiots who live beyond their means? While those of us who did what we were supposed to foot their bill? There are some dolts out there who voted for Nobama who already realize their mistake. There is a ground swell of opposition forming against this mess we have in office now. Tax revolt is around the corner. Maybe we can elect some true reformers and small government types next election. What a disaster this empty suit is! Remember, as always, you cant blame me, I voted Libertarian.

I am so sick and tired of this worthless federal government of ours. If your fed up like me, start voting Libertarian. Thats todays rant, and that is all!

Yeah right Slick Willy, you're guilty as hell and you know it. (See below) This clown still thinks he's bullet proof. I'll tell you what else you can blame him for as well. High gas prices. He let the Federal Trade Commission approve all the major oil company mergers in the nineties that consolidated power and stifled competition. So thanks for that as well Slick Willy.

Clinton Says Don't Blame Him for the Economic Crisis

From Time Magazine

Given the sweep and severity of today's global economic crisis, it would seem there's plenty of blame to go around. But Bill Clinton doesn't think any of it should fall on his shoulders.

On Monday morning's Today Show, Ann Curry's interview with the former president - recorded over the weekend outside a Clinton Global Initiative event in Texas - addressed Clinton's inclusion on TIME's list of the "25 People to Blame" for the global economic collapse. "Oh no," he responded, "My question to them is: Do any of them seriously believe if I had been president, and my economic team had been in place the last eight years, that this would be happening today? I think they know the answer to that: No." (See TIME's list of the 25 people to blame for the collapse)

The magazine's story, which apportioned blame widely between such figures as Countrywide co-founder Angelo Mozilo, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld and President George W. Bush, zeroed in on two specific economic policy decisions made during the Clinton administration. Clinton ushered out the Glass-Steagall Act, which for decades had separated commercial and investment banking, and signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act - which exempted all derivatives, including the now-notorious credit-default swaps, from federal regulation. His administration also loosened housing rules, which added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods.

"None of it was an endorsement of permissive lending and risk-taking," the magazine concluded. "But if you believe deregulation is to blame for our troubles, then Clinton earned a share too."

In a separate interview this past weekend with CNN, Clinton did allow that his administration could have done more to "set in motion some more formal regulation of the derivatives market," but he also vehemently denied that the repeal of Glass-Steagall or his administration's housing policies helped cause the financial crisis. Both interviews took place only hours after the Senate passed the $787 billion economic stimulus bill, which President Barack Obama is expected to pass into law Tuesday.

Earlier in the interview, Clinton told Curry that he agreed with the assessment of Dennis Blair, President Obama's director of national intelligence, that the world financial crisis has surpassed terrorism as the country's most significant "near-term" security concern. He also gave the new president high marks for the way he's used his first month on the job: "I think he's off to a good start ... Given the fact that they had to do it in a hurry, and he had to deal with Congress and the inevitable compromises, I think he got quite a good bill out of this. This package that he's going to sign is our bridge over troubled waters."

As for who troubled those waters, it's still up for debate.

Obama the big phony

Charles Krauthammer lays it out in the Washington Post:

The Fierce Urgency of Pork

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 6, 2009; A17

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."

-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.

The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.

He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.

At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend.

And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Well, here you have it. Proof that Obama needs to shut his yap. This from the CBO and the Washington Times:

CBO: Obama stimulus harmful over long haul

Stephen Dinan
Wednesday, February 4, 2009Click-2-Listen

President Barack Obama speaks to the House Democratic Issues Conference on Thursday in Williamsburg. Associated Press

President Obama's economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

CBO estimates that by 2019 the Senate legislation would reduce GDP by 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent on net. [The House bill] would have similar long-run effects, CBO said in a letter to Sen. Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Republican, who was tapped by Mr. Obama on Tuesday to be Commerce Secretary.

The House last week passed a bill totaling about $820 billion while the Senate is working on a proposal reaching about $900 billion in spending increases and tax cuts.

But Republicans and some moderate Democrats have balked at the size of the bill and at some of the spending items included in it, arguing they won't produce immediate jobs, which is the stated goal of the bill.

The budget office had previously estimated service the debt due to the new spending could add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of the bill -- forcing the crowd-out.

CBOs basic assumption is that, in the long run, each dollar of additional debt crowds out about a third of a dollars worth of private domestic capital, CBO said in its letter.

CBO said there is no crowding out in the short term, so the plan would succeed in boosting growth in 2009 and 2010.

The agency projected the Senate bill would produce between 1.4 percent and 4.1 percent higher growth in 2009 than if there was no action. For 2010, the plan would boost growth by 1.2 percent to 3.6 percent.

CBO did project the bill would create jobs, though by 2011 the effects would be minuscule.