This is why I will never be a liberal. Check out below in red.
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Barack has no deaf-ense for a tin ear
By MICHAEL GOODWIN
Last Updated: 6:39 AM, December 16, 2009
Posted: 5:11 AM, December 16, 2009
Of all the surprises of President Obama's first year, the biggest is his continuing tin ear for the mood of the country. He often appears clueless about what Americans want.
Almost from the moment he stepped into the Oval Office, the man who smashed the Clinton machine and won an electoral landslide over John McCain seemed to lose his touch with the people who put him there.
Some days, many days, he doesn't look like he cares that big chunks of the country, left, right and center, are giving up on him.
Voters by a large margin have said for months they don't want the health-care overhaul he's pushing, so he pushes harder. They want less spending and debt, so he doubles down on pork, bailouts, handouts and taxes.
They thought he would deliver bipartisanship, and he gives his hard-left allies the keys to the kingdom.
They worry about terrorism, so he wants to close Gitmo and move the worst of the worst to the homeland. With Ground Zero still a mess, he gives the 9/11 plotters civilian trials in New York.
His approval ratings are speeding downhill and some 60 percent say the country is on the wrong track. He responds by giving himself a "good solid B-plus" for his first year.
And he says Wall Street bankers "don't get it."
It comes as no surprise, of course, that our young president has a very, very high opinion of himself. But it is nonetheless shocking he remains so brazenly self-righteous in the face of growing public discontent.
A damn-the-torpedoes style of leadership would be welcome if he were an optimist brandishing an inclusive, sunny-side up vision. He's not. He's too often testy, churlish and downright whiny.
His vision is little more than a string of gauzy utopian platitudes glued together with fear, as when he told fellow Dems yesterday that the flawed health-bill represented "the last chance" for reform.
The last chance? Forever?
His charge that bankers have an obligation "to help rebuild the economy" by making more and presumably riskier loans boggles the mind. Low standards are the hair of the dog that led to liar loans and other housing disasters. By all means, let's do it again.
When something goes wrong, it's not his fault. "Fat-cat bankers," "greedy" insurance companies, doctors who do amputations just for the money, special interests, the media -- the media! -- have all taken their turns being blamed for what he hasn't fixed.
The buck doesn't stop on his desk!
If all other scapegoats fail, there's always George W. Bush. Pressed during last Sunday's "60 Minutes" interview on his decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Obama shared his pain and slandered Bush -- all to distinguish his troop surge from his predecessor's.
"One of the mistakes that was made over the last eight years is for us to have a triumphant sense about war," Obama said. "There was a tendency to say, 'We can go in. We can kick some tail. This is some glorious exercise.' When, in fact, this is a tough business."
So even when he reaches the same conclusion as Bush, pursues the same enemy, relies on the same commanders and the same Defense secretary, it's different.
Why? Because he says so.
Council 'wages' foolish war
Don't tell the City Council and their union puppet-masters that a job is the best social program. They prefer welfare, thank you very much.
That's the only conclusion to be drawn from the job-killing decision by the council to reject a development plan for a vacant Bronx armory. After failing to negotiate a mandate that all retail jobs on the Kingsbridge site pay at least $10 an hour plus benefits, pols pulled the plug on the $300 million project (illustration above), most of it to be privately financed.
Gone are 1,000 construction jobs and 1,200 permanent ones. In a borough where the official unemployment rate is 13.4 percent, that's a scandal.
It's also a stuck-in-poverty mindset. As Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. proudly crowed: "The notion that any job is better than no job no longer applies."
Maybe not in The Bronx, but in the real world, any job is definitely better than no job. Especially when the only legal alternative is welfare.
Or maybe the pols think they've also outlawed the recession.
Nobody gets rich on the minimum wage of $7.25, but most of the jobs would have paid more, some far more. But it's a losing bet to believe retailers would agree to a mandate that they must pay more than nearby competitors.
Indeed, studies show that requiring any wage leads to fewer jobs being created.
Yet common sense was the first casualty. The talks got so loopy that one idea was to have the city subsidize wages to bring them up to the $10 level.
That the idea was seriously discussed reflects how deeply the entitlement culture is embedded in New York. Nothing moves without a government handout.
The developer, Related Companies, an international real-estate company, was in line to get $17.8 million worth of exemptions on real-estate and sales taxes, along with $30 million in state and federal historic tax credits.
That's a pittance compared to what it would have invested to build out retail spaces within the sprawling armory and sign up store tenants. Still, that the real-estate giant was getting any incentives added fuel to the populist argument that everybody ought to get something.
So now nobody gets anything.
Well, not quite. The city, which spent $30 million on the armory's roof and other improvements and planned to sell it to Related, gets to keep an empty building and annual maintenance costs of $1 million.
Some people dare call that a victory.
Vicious cyclists
Best verbal slam of the day: "A Bicycle Luddite." That's what a reader of cityhallnews.com called city Trans portation Commissioner Jan ette Sadik-Khan, a k a Commissioner of Gridlock. Anybody who ever got stuck in her Times Square traffic hell certainly agrees.
WIT ALL DUE RESPECT
As one of Sidney Zion's legion of former editors, I knew he had a way with words. "Yakahoola" was Bill Clinton's dirty deed with Monica and "two parties against the people" described Congress.
At his recent memorial service, I heard some new ones. A friend recalled that Sid, called to speak at the end of a long night of speeches, began by saying, "I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor's ninth husband. I know what I'm supposed to do. I just don't know if I can keep it interesting."
He once vouched for a fellow by saying, "He's a good friend behind your back." And so was Sid. May he rest in peace.
