Wildman’s Hangout

A teacher in New York asked her 6th grade class how many of them were Obama fans… Not really knowing what an Obama fan was, but wanting to be liked by the teacher, all the kids raised their hands except for Little Johnny.

The teacher asked Little Johnny why he decided to be Different… again.

Little Johnny said, ‘Because I’m not an Obama fan.

The teacher said, ‘Why aren’t you an Obama fan?’

Johnny said, ‘Because I’m a Republican.’

The teacher asked why he’s a Republican.

Little Johnny answered, ‘Well, My Mom’s a Republican and my Dad’s a Republican, so I’m a Republican.’

The teacher asks, ‘If your Mom was a moron and your Dad was an idiot, what would that make you?’

With a big smile, Little Johnny replied, ‘That would make me an Obama fan..’

I always liked Little Johnny

Monday, April 19, 2010

America’s “Great Compromiser” Henry Clay called government “the great trust,” but most Americans today have little faith in Washington’s ability to deal with the nation’s problems.

Public confidence in government is at one of the lowest points in a half century, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center. Nearly 8 in 10 Americans say they don’t trust the federal government and have little faith it can solve America’s ills, the survey found.

The findings illustrate the ominous situation President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party face as they struggle to maintain their comfortable congressional majorities in this fall’s elections. Midterm prospects are typically tough for the party in power. Add a toxic environment like this and lots of incumbent Democrats could be out of work.

Released Sunday, the survey found that just 22 percent of those questioned say they can trust Washington almost always or most of the time and just 19 percent say they are basically content with it. Nearly half say the government negatively affects their daily lives, a sentiment that’s grown over the past dozen years.

This anti-government feeling has driven the tea party movement, reflected in fierce protests this past week.

“The government’s been lying to people for years. Politicians make promises to get elected, and when they get elected, they don’t follow through,” says Cindy Wanto, 57, a registered Democrat from Nemacolin, Pa., who joined several thousand for a rally in Washington on April 15 — the tax filing deadline. “There’s too much government in my business. It was a problem before Obama, but he’s certainly not helping fix it.”

Majorities in the survey call Washington too big and too powerful, and say it’s interfering too much in state and local matters. The public is split over whether the government should be responsible for dealing with critical problems or scaled back to reduce its power, presumably in favor of personal responsibility.

About half say they want a smaller government with fewer services, compared with roughly 40 percent who want a bigger government providing more. The public was evenly divided on those questions long before Obama was elected. Still, a majority supported the Obama administration exerting greater control over the economy during the recession.

Only twice since the 1950s has public skepticism dipped this deeply — from 1992 to 1995 during which time it hit 17 percent, and 1978 to 1980, bottoming out at 25 percent. The nation was going through economic struggles during both of those periods.

“Trust in government rarely gets this low,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan center that conducted the survey. “Some of it’s backlash against Obama. But there are a lot of other things going on.”

And, he added: “Politics has poisoned the well.”

The survey found that Obama’s policies were partly to blame for a rise in distrustful, anti-government views. In his first year in office, the president orchestrated a government takeover of Detroit automakers, secured a $787 billion stimulus package and pushed to overhaul the health care system.

But the poll also identified a combination of factors that contributed to the electorate’s hostility: the recession that Obama inherited from President George W. Bush; a dispirited public; and anger with Congress and politicians of all political leanings.

“I want an honest government. This isn’t an honest government. It hasn’t been for some time,” said self-described independent David Willms, 54, of Sarasota, Fla. He faulted the White House and Congress under both parties.

The poll was based on four surveys done from March 11 to April 11 on landline and cell phones. The largest survey, of 2,500 adults, has a margin of sampling error of 2.5 percentage points; the others, of about 1,000 adults each, has a margin of sampling error of 4 percentage points.

In the short term, the deepening distrust is politically troubling for Obama and Democrats. Analysts say out-of-power Republicans could well benefit from the bitterness toward Washington come November, even though voters blame them, too, for partisan gridlock that hinders progress.

In a democracy built on the notion that citizens have a voice and a right to exercise it, the long-term consequences could prove to be simply unhealthy — or truly debilitating. Distrust could lead people to refuse to vote or get involved in their own communities. Apathy could set in, or worse — violence.

Democrats and Republicans both accept responsibility and fault the other party for the electorate’s lack of confidence.

“This should be a wake-up call. Both sides are guilty,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. She pointed to “nonsense” that goes on during campaigns that leads to “promises made but not promises kept.” Still, she added: “Distrust of government is an all-American activity. It’s something we do as Americans and there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Sen. Scott Brown, a Republican who won a long-held Democratic Senate seat in Massachusetts in January by seizing on public antagonism toward Washington, said: “It’s clear Washington is broken. There’s too much partisan bickering to be able to solve the problems people want us to solve.”

And, he added: “It’s going to be reflected in the elections this fall.”

But Matthew Dowd, a top strategist on Bush’s re-election campaign who now shuns the GOP label, says both Republicans and Democrats are missing the mark.

“What the country wants is a community solution to the problems but not necessarily a federal government solution,” Dowd said. Democrats are emphasizing the federal government, while Republicans are saying it’s about the individual; neither is emphasizing the right combination to satisfy Americans, he said.

——

On the Net:

Pew Research Center: http://people-press.org/

The liberals are asking us to give Obama time.

We agree and think 25 to life would be appropriate.

America needs Obama-care like Nancy Pelosi needs a Halloween mask.

o    Q: Have you heard about McDonald’s’ new Obama Value Meal?

o    A: Order anything you like and the guy behind you has to pay for

it.

o    Q: What does Barack Obama call lunch with a convicted felon?

o    A: A fund raiser.

.

o    Q: What’s the difference between Obama’s cabinet and a

penitentiary?

o    A: One is filled with tax evaders, blackmailers and threats to

society. The other is for housing prisoners.

.

o    Q: If Nancy Pelosi and Obama were on a boat in the middle of the

ocean and it started to sink, who would be saved?

o    A: America!

.

o    Q: What’s the difference between Obama and his dog, Bo?

o    A: Bo has papers.

.

o    Q: What was the most positive result of the “Cash for clunkers”

program?

o    A: It took 95% of the Obama bumper stickers off the road.

By THOMAS SOWELL

IN A SWINDLE that would make Bernie Madoff look like an amateur, Barack Obama has gotten a substantial segment of the population to believe that he can add millions of people to the government-insured rolls without increasing the already record-breaking federal deficit.

Those who think in terms of talking points, instead of realities, can point to the fact that the Congressional Budget Office has concurred with budget numbers that the Obama administration has presented.

Anyone who is so old-fashioned as to stop and think, instead of being swept along by rhetoric, can understand that a budget — any budget — is not a record of hard facts but a projection of future financial plans. A budget tells us what will happen if everything works out according to plan.

The Congressional Budget Office can only deal with the numbers that Congress supplies. Those numbers may well be consistent with each other, even if they are wholly inconsistent with anything that is likely to happen in the real world.

The Obama health-care plan can be financed without increasing the federal deficit — if the administration takes hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare. But Medicare itself does not have enough money to pay its own way over time.

However money is juggled in the short run, the government’s financial liabilities are increased by adding this huge new entitlement of government-provided insurance. The fact that these new financial liabilities can be kept out of the official federal deficit projection, by claiming that they will be paid for with money taken from Medicare, changes nothing in the real world.

I can say that I can afford to buy a Rolls-Royce, without going into debt, by using my inheritance from a rich uncle. But, in the real world, the question would arise immediately whether I in fact have a rich uncle, not to mention whether this hypothetical rich uncle would be likely to leave me enough money to buy a Rolls-Royce.

In politics, however, you can say all sorts of things that have no relationship with reality. If you have a mainstream media that sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil — when it comes to Barack Obama — you can say that you will pay for a vast expansion of government-provided insurance by taking money from the Medicare budget and using other gimmicks.

Whether this administration, or any future administration, will in fact take enough money from Medicare to pay for this new massive entitlement is a question that only the future can answer, regardless of what today’s budget projection says.

On paper, you can treat Medicare like the hypothetical rich uncle who is going to leave me enough money to buy a Rolls-Royce. But only on paper. In real life, you can’t get blood from a turnip, and you can’t keep on getting money from a Medicare program that is itself running out of money.

An even more transparent gimmick is collecting money for the new Obama health-care program for the first 10 years but delaying the payments of its benefits for four years. By collecting money for 10 years and spending it for only six years, you can make the program look self-supporting, but only on paper and only in the short run.

This is a game you can play just once, during the first decade. After that, you are going to be collecting money for 10 years and paying out money for 10 years. That is when you discover that your uncle doesn’t have enough money to support himself, much less leave you an inheritance to pay for a Rolls-Royce.

But a postponed revelation is not part of the official federal deficit today. And that provides a talking point, in order to soothe people who take talking points seriously.

Fraud has been at the heart of this medical-care takeover plan from Day One. The succession of wholly arbitrary deadlines for rushing this massive legislation through, before anyone has time to read it all, serves no other purpose than to keep its specifics from being scrutinized — or even recognized — before it becomes a fait accompli and “the law of the land.”

Would you buy a used car under these conditions, even if it was a Rolls-Royce?

Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His Web site is www.thomassowell.com