Point By Point on the SOTU Speech… Tonight

I’ll have a point by point rebuttal on the State of the Union speech posted sometime tonight.
I’m working on it just now, and will likely end up finishing it sometime after dinner, eastern time.

I’ve never seen a point by point breakout of these things done previously, and given I’ve already been at it a few hours, I can understand why. It’s rather time intensive.

I’ll have the thing up soon as I can.

Clayton Cramer, Idaho Statesman:

Remember back in February 2008 when President Obama came to Boise and spoke at a big rally? He made a big point of saying, “I won’t take away your guns,” because those nasty, dishonest Republicans were saying that Obama was going to do that.

It sure didn’t take long for Obama to reveal his intentions. The afternoon of the inauguration, the White House Web site’s Urban Policy page admitted that he is indeed going to try and do exactly that. “Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals

BO does not like freedom, here or anywhere else.   Free citizens have the right to bear arms.   Serfs do not.   Obama wants to be serfs.   I say to BO, if you think guns are so bad, disarm the Secret Service.

Giving up, falling asleep. I’ll break out the text of the speeches tomorrow

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the sphere: Bitsblog’s Nightly Ramble

• Lost in space…. errr… ocean: This one’s  rather simple, Bruce… If it had made it to space, and it’s data ever made it to someone who wasn’t the acolyte of Gore, it would have ended the argument about AGW, with the AGW preachers made laughing stocks, for once and all. 
• Oh, Say! Can you GMAIL?  I see as of this morning, GMail was a smoking hulk, leaving a lot of people without Email.  It strikes me that for so much of their systems to be inaccessable at one time, so as to wipe out access from a few continents, as apparently occurred here, some sort of coordinated attack apparently happened. Ask me again why I run my own domain instead of putting my business on GMail. (Disclosure: I do maintain a private Yahoo address, but use it only as a second, not primary avenue.)
• SOTU Short version:  Obama’s ‘SOTU speech’ in brief: ‘Nobody but government will own anything, and that which you have will be taken from you.’ Personally, I’m waiting for Jundal’s part. I’m also waiting for the market reaction.  Every time this administration has opened it’s gob, the market goes down another few hundred points. I expect this will be no different.
• It’s the economy, stupid: Seems Mrs Clinton has made a few enemies among the human rights activists for saying that economic issues currently outweigh human rights concerns with China.  Look, say what you will about the Clinton and their associations with the communist Chinese.  I’ll likely not give you much argument on that score. But it seems to me that at last as stated, she’s got this one right. As we are about to find out thanks to anti-capitalist Democrats running things, without a stable economy, the the rest of it hardly matters. Too bad Obama can’t figure that one out and stem the social spending.
• That ain’t the way, Bro: I have said this before, I’ll say it again, Rick Moran: Taxpayer anger is already out there.  Any winning strategy on either side… Democrats or Republicans, is going to have to include dealing with it effectively. There’s two ways Republicans can be in front of this crowd… leading it as a parade, or running from the angry mob they’re becoming. I warn you, the latter option is not a winning strategy… and the polling data confirms this.  Thing is, it’s not just Republicans complaining.  I understand your reluctance to wade in on the negative, but I don’t see that as an either/or situation.  Recall, please, neither did Reagan.
• Another SITYS moment: I see where the Obama Justice Dept has decided that enemy combatants held in Afghanistan don’t have US constitutional rights.  Remember that article I posted to Pajamas Media saying that Obama would be vindicating Bush?  There ya go. VDH speaks to this point, also:
  

  I don’t understand why, after Obama’s brilliant campaign, some are surprised about his conduct in office. From the Wall Street panic instilled by Obama’s gloom and doom rhetoric and Europeanization proposals, to the sloppy nominations of serial tax dodgers, to the surprise that the Bush ‘shred the Constitution’ protocols — hope and change rhetoric aside — were mostly adopted by Obama, it is as if the professional on the campaign trail is mysteriously stumbling after assuming office.

  Which would also tend to explain why Obama is back in campaign mode. He campaigns well. His leadership? Not so much, apparently.

• Obama numbers tank: To that point, Obama’s numbers are starting to look abysmal.  The LA Times this morning is saying his approval ratings are slipping, his disapproval ratings have better than doubled. 
• More: You can’t tell me stuff like this Dodd thing are not affecting those numbers. Most Americans will tell you that having a firebug driving the firetruck is fairly likely to be counter-productive.
• More yet: Then there’s the ethically challanged Rahm Emanuel.  
• More more yet: $10 a week? You’re kidding, right?
• More yet yet: And then there’s Biden.  
• More more, Yet yet: Obama’s own actions aren’t helping, either.
• OOPS: The people are getting concerned. Obama supporters, particularly are starting to wonder if they’ve screwed up. Ah, Democrats. can’t get anything past them, huh? This Obama boat has so many holes in it, it’s hard to know where to start. Does anyone really think that Obama’s going to cover all that ground in one term, much less in tonights SOTU speech?

Today’s BitsBlog SNARK OF THE DAY award goes to an un-named reader of Mark Steyn.

Re my item below on the Illinois Senate’s proposed legislation on the planetary status of Pluto, a reader says:

I think it’s brilliant. But in order to write the best possible bill, I would encourage all Illinois lawmakers to take an in situ fact-finding trip forthwith

Ed Morrisssey, Hot Air, writes:

When discussing war crimes during World War II, two events usually get thrown out as indictments of the Allies: dropping atomic weapons on the Japanese and the raid of Dresden, in which 25,000 people died mostly of the raging fire that swept the German city. Critics accuse the Allies of deliberately attacking a civilian

Quibble whether that should be described as two events, or three.    Yet I agree that  the two atomic raids on Japan and the fire bombing of Dresden do top the list of the retrospective moralists who object to the way we fought and won World War Two.

Yet what was most destructive air raid of the war, and indeed of all time?    Not Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Dresden.   Rather is was the fire bombing of Toyko on the night of of March 9-10, 1945:

The lead attackers arrived over the city just after dark and were followed by a procession of death that lasted until dawn. The fires started by the initial raiders could be seen from 150 miles away. The results were devastating: almost 17 square miles of the city were reduced to ashes. Estimates of the number killed range between 80,000 and 200,000, a higher death toll than that produced by the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima or Nagasaki six months later.

The LeMay Treatment resulted in the most devasting air raid of all time, be it measured in square miles, or lost of human life.   Yet if you listen to the historical revisionist, getting burned to death is somehow less morally offensive than dying from radition exposure.  Go figure.   Or maybe it just racism.  That is it is alright to burn the slant eyed, yellow skinned Japs to death, but not Europeans?    Who knows.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on an attempted mugging gone terribly awry:

(02-20) 11:29 PST OAKLAND — A 23-year-old visitor from the East Coast had just gotten money from an ATM when he told his friend on a cell phone that he had a bad feeling about two men approaching him at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland.

His worst fears were realized when one suspect, Victor Veliz, 18, held a folding knife with a 5-inch blade to his neck and the other, Christopher Gonzalez, 18, threatened to shoot him Thursday night, authorities said.

One perp is dead.   The other perp is in custody charged with felony murder.   Can the intended victim get back home to the East Coast without getting served in wrongful death civil lawsuit by the dead perps’ father and without being charged by Eric Holder, the reprobate who thinks he is Attorney General, with a hate crime?

Bertha Lewis, ACORN:

Housing is a right.

See the video:

Read the transcript, via Steve Gilbert, Sweetness & Light.

No Ms Lewis, housing is not a right.  Housing is a commodity, to wit a product of human endeavor.  You can not give a commodity, say housing, to one person, unless your first take it from another.

Aside to Stuart Varney:   The Constiution does not define the rights of citizens.   It limits the power of the state.  

More Allah Pundit, Hot Air:

Move over, Santelli, there’s a new ostentatiously outraged sheriff in town.

 It does seem that Lewis os part of criminal enterprize.

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere; Bitsblog’s Nightly Ramble

It’s the Corner Store edition. Just a few quick items. In, and out.

• Obama to be upstatged: As you likely already know, Barack Obama will adress Congress for the first time as Presidient, Tuesday night.  The Republicans already have the guy upstaged… Bobby Jindal will deliver the response. Gotta hand it to them, this is simply a brilliant move.  Even moreso, Jindal turned down the ‘stimulus’ money on… wait for it…  on the sheer principle of the thing.  You can bet that will set the tone for Jindal’s response to Obama. As I’ve told you before, people… if this really is the way the Republicans are going, you can expect a large surge in support for Republicans going forward…. and to the exact degree they resist this monster. Surber is asking what’s the excuse when this attempt fails just like the last two times?   I suspect the Republicans are starting to see that not as a chance but an eventuality… and the Democrats are going to be owning this bag of dung they’ve tried to sell to us… but ONLY IF Republican leaders do in fact resist… and loudly…. the way the rank and file is.
• Wall Street vs White House: Jeff Carter suggests at Pajamas Media, today, that the Obama vs Santelli controversy is grounded in the natural animosity between the markets and D.C.  Well, natural since the Democrats got the White House, anyway.  Obama had best watch himself, though; Santelli has far more support than Obama does, if I read the signs aright.
• The Solution: If Obama is looking for ‘shovel ready’ projects, asks Mickey Kaus, why not do the border fence?
• Ya load 16 kids.. what do you get?  Lots of money for one thing,  and a spotlight, for another.  At some point, this circus has to stop.  Given the amount of money being pushed her way at this point, you can imagine I think why Nadya Suleman’s insisting the currently listed sperm donor isn’t the father.  If the biological father steps up for support of the kids, her (Mauch larger) source of funds… IE: people’s charity, dries up… as does the spot light that’s been tranied on her. And is it just me, or do you guys get a chuckle when people nickname this rather troubled woman after a James Bond Flick? And yes, I mean it when I say troubled.  Look, who, after having many kids already, steps up for eight more, doesn’t have serious mental issues?
• It is what it is: I see Jim Bunning is catching hell for speaking the plain truth; Justice Ginsburg will be gone within a year. The fact is that the statistics say she’s got less than a 25% chance of coming through the cancer she reportedly has.  As I told James Joyner this morning: Call it what you will, but you’re not going to convince me that Bunning is wishing evil on the woman, for a couple reasons; First… and I’m sorry about this…  Evil’s already visited her, apparently, and anything further would be a duplication of effort at least. Secondly, and from a national perspective of greater import, is the idea that as bad as she’s been from a constitutional standpoint, any replacement for her will be even worse, given the current administation, and the current Senate. I can hardly imagine Bunning wishing for that. And look, before you start up,  there’s a major difference between defending Bunning and suggesting that the TP reax is overblown. After so many years of alternating liberal manufactured angst and liberal manufactured outrage, this certainly takes on the apparence of the latter at least.
• Type casting: As I remarked to Bruce the other day, one can fully understand Obama sending Hillary Clinton on a mission to China, begging the Chinese to buy up the debt he’s just incurred.  If nothing else, the Clintons are expert at obtaining funding by whatever means… and much of that fundraising involved the Chinese then, too.
• SITYS: So, the race huxter Al Sharpton is trying to use the power of government to silence his critics? Gee, who’d have ever thought he’d do that?  I mean, ignore, for the moment we’ve been warning of this for years.
• Hollywood pats itself on the back, few notice: My wife who watched the Oscars last night, noted that they didn’t hit viewers with a lot of ads. The reason for that of course is they couldn’t sell the spot loads they originally set up. The ratings have been dropping the last several years running. This year was no different; the ratings for last night’s Oscars show an all-time low, in terms of share.  In fact, ratings this year were 20% off even last years abysmal ratings.  They have no clue WHY, of course. They still are disconnected from Joe and Jane Sixpack. A start would be getting prices to a point where Americans can actually afford to go to the movies. Past that, content that is more in tune with their beleifs as oposed to movies and TV being used as a bully pulpit for Hollywood’s narrow views would be a help. Until they figure all that  out, they’re not going to turn this around.,and frankly, it’s just as well that they won’t, under those conditions.
• Why: I told Jen Rubin I was a fan, several weeks back. This column is an example of why.
• Cruel Joke:  Given Joe Biden’s record, this is the unkindest cut of all.  

Christopher Buckley writes today:

It’s tricky, trying to channel your father’s ghost. Hamlet tried it. I think I won’t. But I miss WFB’s takes on—everything that’s going on. Often, I’d find myself flailing aimlessly or circularly about some issue, trying to sort it out in my own head. Then I’d ring him and he’d nail it for me in two or three neat sentences that left me laughing and shaking my head, for the thousandth time, in amazement. Even if I suspected he might be wrong, he was always elegantly wrong.

He died at his desk in Stamford, Connecticut, while working on a book. He’d been ill for many months, worn down by emphysema. His wife of 57 years had died ten months earlier, and he missed her desperately. A DVD had been made of her memorial service, with a PowerPoint slide show I’d assembled of dozens of photos of her through the years. He watched it again and again, tears streaming down his face. I understand now, the business of long-time mates not outliving each other by long.

My father was a man of devout, unflinching, sometimes exasperating Catholic faith. He believed absolutely in heaven and hell. I lost (or misplaced) my faith, but I find myself on this anniversary hoping that I’m wrong, and that he’s there, correcting God’s grammar. I have on my desk an editorial cartoon showing him arriving at the Pearly Gates, St. Peter whispering to an angel, “I’m going to need a bigger dictionary.”

A touching bit of writing this, and unusually honest and open, I think. I say that because it rings true, to me….I understand this stage and Buckley’s words, even better perhaps, than Buckley himself, having lived all the way through this stage and past it, some years ago. It’s as I said, a few father’s days ago:

I’ve come to understand quite a bit about my father in the last 15 years, or so. Oddly, most of my understanding came after he’d died a few years ago, and most of the revelations have been as a result of my having lived life. He’s never far from my thoughts, and so as life events unfold, I always have his guidance nearby to lean on, and his guideposts to measure by. And, as I go though this process, I’m leaning more about both who I am, and who he was.

And, oh boy has a lot ever happened since his death. Think about the changes in the last five years, in your own life. I suppose it could be fairly said that nothing has happened to me, though, that he hadn’t prepared me for. The funny part is, I didn’t know I was being prepared for it, at the time. I think he didn’t know what the future would bring, either. All he could do is impart the basic values, and hope I was able to apply them correctly. Apparently I have, for the most part.

What amazes me is how well I can hear his voice now that he’s passed on; in many ways, better than I ever could while he was alive. Those of you who have lost a parent will understand what I’m saying, here, I think. It is yet another cruel irony, I guess, that his voice seems to ring louder in my ears, in my head, now that he’s gone…. This is particularly true when value judgments come up. I suspect this is as it should be… Those being his most important lessons… But I still marvel at it all.

I also, within the last several years, find myself dimly aware that I’ve managed to pick up some of the traits he had, without trying. These are not things I’d picked up consciously… In fact, when I was seventeen, I think I might have made the choice to avoid these traits. Now at nearly three times that age, I have begun to regard adopting these things as the natural progression… That all is as it should be.

It’s an awful bit of truth, that until that death occurrs, until that modicum of emotional shelter provided by his contiued existance in the world ceases, and has been gone for long enough for you to adjust to that sad fact, you never fully understand him. You never fully understand why he viewed the world as he did.

I suspect Chris Buckley has now come to that point, and is starting to explore, perhaps unintentionally,  the implications of that whole scene. He’s not ready to admit to himself all of those implications, though, eventually, I suspect he will. I suppose that the rebelion in him will continue to damp down as his understanding increases, since that increased understanding will without fail cause at least re-evaluation. I have greater hopes for him in this area than I ever did for, say, Ron Reagan, who to this day doesn’t have even the level of understanding that Buckely apparently has, even at this early stage.

ABC 2 News, Baltimore, MD:

Some community activists could face criminal charges after breaking into a home in Southeast Baltimore.

[…)

After snapping a lock with bolt cutters, ACORN member Louis Beverly told supporters “this is our house now

 ACORN is wrong.  The house on Ellwood Avenue belongs to William Lane. 

The story could use some editting.   Even if you call a mob “some community activists”, they still a mob.   It not Civil Disobedience.    It is Breaking and Entering.

Video of same incidence:

Catch the bit about the house already having been resold. More than enough evidence to put these perps in jail.
?
More, Michelle.

Addendum I:

Promoted from comments, reader Sherry notes:

Thought you might be interested in some REAL information related to this foreclosure; Donna Hanks initially purchased her home (315 South Ellwood, Baltimore, MD 21224) on 7/06/2001 for $87,000. At some date between 2001 and 2006 she re-financed the original mortgage for the amount of $270,000 with a mortgage payment of $1,662.00. The FIRST foreclosure on this home was filed 5/31/2006. Donna Hanks filed for bankruptcy 6/16/06 during which a payment plan was approved for the $10,500 she was behind in her payments. This action stopped the original foreclosure. When she did not meet the terms of the bankruptcy re-payment, a second foreclosure action was started in January 2008. At the time she had not made her mortgage payments since September 2007. It should be noted that her salary per the bankruptcy paperwork was $1625 per month and she was working a 2nd and 3rd job (supposedly giving her an additional $1,275 in monthly income – the employers were not listed). Over extended? Also, during 2007 she was renting our her basement illegally (she was taken to court) and receiving rent while she was not making her mortgage payments. The mortgage company “raised” her payment $300 a month – right? Well, not exactly it was $340. The amount that she had agreed to pay back in arrears. Not exactly truthful, but what I would expect from a person with her criminal record (theft and assault 2nd degree and possession of a dangerous weapon with intent to injure). Oh and there is the small matter of breaking and entering. The house at 315 South Ellwood had already been sold at auction on 6/26/08 for $192,000. It just took them until September 2008 to get her out. Nothing like public information – it seems Acorn could have found this same information before they helped this “poor” victimized woman…………………

Left scratching my head.  Donna Hanks seems like a poor place to draw a line in the sand.   Even Barack Obama widely booed mortage relief plan would be  limited to homeowners who current in their payments, and would not have helped Hanks.

Then too, ACORN is itching for a fight with the banks.  Yet the bank no longer owns Hanks’ former property.  William Lane does.

Addendum II:  (updated and bumped)

Michelle does a massive, can we say Shock and Awe, document dump which both confirms and elaborates on Shelly’s pervious front line reporting.

It is not your home, ACORN.

Here is what the MSM won’t be telling you about the so-called “victim” in that case, ACORN worker Donna Hanks – all based on public records and court documents.

According to real property data search information, Hanks bought the two-story home in the summer of 2001 for $87,000. At some point in the next five years, she re-financed the original home loan for $270,000.

I”ll repeat myself, Donna Hanks seems like an awfully bad place for ACORN to have to drawn a line in the sand.   Let me see, Hanks buys the house for $87,000.   Re-financed the same house for $270,000.   Files for bankruptcy.   I am not a lawyer, but this smells like fraud to me.

Alan Reynolds, New York Post, writes of the Foreclosure Five states:

When President Obama discusses his $275 billion mortgage bailout, he talks as if it was a national problem, caused by a national decline in home prices. “We must stem the spread of foreclosures and falling home values for all Americans,” he says. But there is no national market for homes and no national price for homes. Instead, most of the United States will pay for the folly of few.

The beneficiaries of taxpayer charity will be highly concentrated in just five states – California, Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Michigan

This not a crisis.  It is a bubble.  The nebulous Obama administration is entirely too fond of describing every problem as a “crisis.”    The fact that what mortage problem does exist is limited essentially to but five states, explains the wide spread, and ever growing, opposition to BO’s mortage rescue plan.

Addendum:(Bit)

Dan Riehl notes the story, too, and suggests unemployment is the issue. In Michigan, of course, the auto industry. We’ve spoken to that failure and the Democrat party causes of it for years, now. But California and Nevada? The construction industry. Riehl also suggests that the unemployment rates there are a direct result of the behavior that led to the foreclosures.

I’ll nod assent to that, and I’ll add that the whoe thing comes down to, as we’ve said before, government getting in the way of the free market.

Glenn Reynolds.. no relation to the guy from CATO, AFAIK, has more.

And while I have the editor open on the topic, did you guys notice Fox News Sunday? Who is it they had on giving advice on how we can as a nation get out of this mess democrats have created for us? Ed Rendell and Jennifer Granholm.

Yeah, that works, huh?

Rendell presides over a Pennsylvania that is 48th in job creation. And Granholm, over the sewer that Michigan has become at the hands of liberal democrats. Getting these two to expound on the fixes for our current problems is rather like getting Hanibal Lechter to speak on the problem of canibalism.

(Repost and addendum, database error-Bit)

Michelle is calling it a Tea Party.   William A. Jacobson, Legal Insurrection, offers another analogy:

This movement can succeed if it does not stop at protest and includes changes in economic behavior. Obama’s redistributive plans require higher taxation, but higher tax plans (to be announced this week by Obama) are based on the fallacy that the “rich” will not change their economic behavior in reaction to higher tax rates.

History tells us, however, that economic redistribution plans fail because the producers of society would rather not produce, than have the fruits of their production taken away and given to others. Obama can raise the tax rates on income, but he cannot force people to generate income to be taxed.

Analogies abound, but to pick one, a fire will not burn if deprived of fuel.   Barack Obama’s wet dream of socialist revolution will require vsst sums of your tax dollars.   It is not necessary to deprive the one  of all your tax dollars.   Rather ist only necessary to cut the flow of tax dollars into the Obama treasurer to put Obamamania on a forced diet.

Obama can send his goons to collect taxes.  He can not force people to actually work.

The loyalists to the communist ideal, the ones who have never given up hope about it being the salvation of Mankind,  have forever tried to convince the rest of us that Communism would work if we’d just done it right.  Of course, the fact that every time it’s been tried, it’s failed, hasn’t dissuaded them in the least.

So, imagine my lack of surprise when I notice a post from Matt Yglesias, on  “Think Progress” (which, I am obliged to point out, is a site and a group of writers that represents neither thought nor progress) in which Rahm Emanuel is now saying that we didn’t put enough money into the stimulus package.  We didn’t give enough money to government. And trust me when I tell you that my heart didn’t skip a beat when I noticed that the supposedly, must Paul Krugman and Yglesias himself, apparently both agree with that assessment.

So, these morons have figured out that pouring gasoline in copious amounts onto a fire doesn’t put it out.  Their solution?  Get more gasoline.  I guess that should give you a general idea of how seriously we should take these are suggestions.

There is, of course more to the point; The similarities of the points of view of the loyalists to Marxism/Stalinism and the current day Democrats are close enough that one wonders if there is an iota of difference between them.

That said it would certainly appear Rahm Emanuel is tacitly admitting that the White House plan has such isn’t going to work.  This, of course, will be responded to by the markets come Monday morning .

Khrushchev told us once he would bury us.   After Khrushchev get installed in the wall outside the Kremlin, we already are figured that time had disproven that claim.   But,I tell you, my friends, if someone wanted to go about creating a crash of America’s economy , they could hardly have planted better than the execution of Barak Obama’s White House.

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