{"id":988,"date":"2010-01-29T09:53:40","date_gmt":"2010-01-29T14:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/blog\/?p=988"},"modified":"2010-01-29T10:22:51","modified_gmt":"2010-01-29T15:22:51","slug":"state-of-the-union-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/politics\/state-of-the-union-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"State of The Union 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day was the President\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s State of the Union address<\/a>. Some folk have questioned why I’m uneasy after hearing it and I wanted to put up some of my reasoning. Don’t get me wrong, I think President Obama said some good things, and he did a great job of keying in on the heat the propelled him into office by sounding on those chords of change, hope, and bipartisanship. He reiterated worthy goals that should be in place.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For example, he said that:<\/p>\n

I’m proposing that we take $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And<\/p>\n

I’m also proposing a new small business tax credit — one that will go to over one million small businesses who hire new workers or raise wages.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And<\/p>\n

We need to make sure consumers and middle-class families have the information they need to make financial decisions<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And<\/p>\n

We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support two million jobs in America.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And<\/p>\n

Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And<\/p>\n

We need to invest in the skills and education of our people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These are all worthy ideas as they stand apart from any other information. I agree: we need to invest in the skills and education of our people; I think we need to freeze government spending; I think tax credits for small businesses are a good idea.<\/p>\n

But there are real concerns on my part. He says that we need to invest in skills and education and then stands in the background promoting the \u00e2\u20ac\u009dRace to the Top\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which essentially suffers from the same fundamental problems of No Child Left Behind but with the added problem of no real accountability. Look, I think the heart of NCLB and RttT are good: fix the lower functioning schools, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t send support that way if the schools don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t perform, reward the schools that have programs are functioning. But what we saw was NCLB was teachers educating at tests, programs being structured around looking productive, and ultimately kids falling through the gaping holes.<\/p>\n

Not only that, the awards for RttT go to the states that are ahead of the others with ambitious yet achievable plans\u00e2\u20ac\u201dcall me a cynic for thinking that anyone but schools with proper support systmes already in place will wind up getting any of this.The President has said in the past that this won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t happen but he can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make that assurance for something that is essentially No Child Left Behind coupled with a competition.<\/p>\n

Also, when the President says<\/p>\n

I’m proposing that we take $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He continues to say that<\/p>\n

and use it to help community banks give small businesses the credit they need to stay afloat<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Say what? Let me get this straight. You give the big banks a bailout, something you agreed with the last administration to do, then you want to take the money they give back and instead of putting it back where it belongs\u00e2\u20ac\u201dyou\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to give it to Other Banks in the hopes that they give small businesses money. After all, even the bailout money wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t used by the Big Banks the way it was supposed to be used!<\/p>\n

The President says that:<\/p>\n

We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, that was awesome. I saw my paycheck increase by cents. Oh, you didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t notice? Yeah, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re getting some extra change in your pocket\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true, better in my pocket than the government. But I really don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand why everyone is going nuts with this. One was at one chunk, the other is spread out over 52 paychecks.<\/p>\n

But it makes me wonder where they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re eventually looking to pay for all the stuff he has on the table.<\/p>\n

Well, one area, the President said was with a spending freeze (thank God, and about time):<\/p>\n

Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years.\u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t. And if I have to enforce this discipline by veto, I will<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s funny because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the exact thing that he lambasted McCain for proposing saying that McCain wanted to use a hatchet<\/a> when we needed a surgical knife. Looks different once you get in the oval office, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut it makes me wonder why some people who literally laughed at McCain for suggesting the same thing are currently nodding their heads in somber silence.<\/p>\n

And then we have the Recovery Act which the President said was the source of our great financial boon this year\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhen the Congressional Budget Office themselves aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quick to say this. They have been honest saying that there has been a range of jobs that may have been due to the Recovery Act but it might not have been as well—that there is no way to know. One source said:<\/p>\n

For example, last November, Recovery.gov claimed that in\u00c2\u00a0Arizona’s 15th congressional district<\/a>, 30 jobs had been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. The one problem that was spotted later: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona. <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A lot of this stuff is under the banner of either There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s-no-way-to-know or sure-we-can-dream but the way it is paid for is swept under the rug. That Government spending freeze will cover, what, less than a percent of the total spending? And sure, small businesses accounted for 80% of the current job market growth, but to turn unemployment around from 10% down to 5%, we apparently have to create 250,000 new jobs a month, every month, for five years. The average monthly job creation over the last two<\/em> decades was only 90,000. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a real eye opener right there. He even dipped into his Bush pocket (something that he is prone to do even while slamming that administration) by saying the war against Al-Qaida has been even more successful than 2008\u00e2\u20ac\u201deven though no one can access those secret papers that say what exactly has happened over there. All we know is that more drones have gone out\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

And then there were the things that were outright wrong.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6it’s time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my administration or with Congress. It’s time to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which just about every news source has said a variation of below:<\/p>\n

Obama has limited the hiring of lobbyists for administration jobs, but the ban isn’t absolute; seven waivers from the ban have been granted to White House officials alone.<\/strong> Getting lobbyists to report every contact they make with the federal government would be difficult at best; Congress would have to change the law, and that’s unlikely to happen. And lobbyists already are subject to strict limits on political giving. Just like every other American, they’re limited to giving $2,400 per election to federal candidates, with an overall ceiling of $115,500 every two years.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And<\/p>\n

In February, the administration signed waivers for Jocelyn Frye, former general counsel at the National Partnership for Women & Families, and Cecilia Mu\u00c3\u00b1oz, the former senior vice president for the National Council of La Raza, allowing them to work on issues for which they lobbied.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like why say there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to be a big change when (1) you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re already offering waivers to people in the White House and (2) those bans are already in place.<\/p>\n

He charged Congress saying:<\/p>\n

I’m calling on Congress to publish all earmark requests on a single Web site before there’s a vote, so that the American people can see how their money is being spent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the fact is that this was one of his campaign promises that he said would be kept. No closed-door deals, everything out in the public square, documents published online for several days for general public review\u00e2\u20ac\u201dnone of this is happening! And yet, he totally side-stepped it and pushed it onto Congress.<\/p>\n

Indeed, he boasted about their increased transparency of the visits to the White House log but he failed to mention that:<\/p>\n

But the release of these logs came only after a legal challenge by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington<\/strong>. The group filed suit seeking the logs related to the visits by certain groups. When the Obama administration settled the suit it went further, agreeing to post the logs of all visitors from September 15 onward. While this seems like a big win for transparency, Melanie Sloan, the executive director of CREW, says because the administration voluntarily agreed to release the logs, the administration could later decide to reverse this decision. Additionally, nothing compels the next administration to take the same course<\/strong>. Nothing besides the promise that a reversal would provoke a resumption of legal action!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s this fact-fudging coupled with this pushing off responsibility that really irks me. Just like he did with the Health Reform deal. Instead of offering any clear information on what exactly his bill would contain (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been asking everyone to give me information on this and all they can do is point me to the administrations website with their talking points) he stood right in the middle and let the House or Congress hash it out. I mean, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m happy that he pointed out that health reform isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the salvation of the financial problem (something that health reform advocates have been pushing as if fact) but he did a fine job of just stepping away from it all and nodding.<\/p>\n

PBS Said:<\/p>\n

The President came to that fork in the road tonight and instead of giving Congress a clear sense of where he was willing to put his remaining political capital he just took the fork in the road.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even Alito was surprised (yeah, this is Reytoric: I can’t read the man’s mind) by the length Obama, a constitutional law professor, is willing to go when he takes the recent supreme court decision to make it say something it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say when he knows (or at least I hope he knows) that there is already law in place that stops foreign corporations from spending money in connection with U.S. elections \u00c2\u00a0((see 2 U.S.C. 441e(b)(3)<\/a>). The slickness is in how he worded his statement:<\/p>\n

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe <\/span><\/strong>will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Slick, man. And that, ultimately, is why I was uneasy with even the parts I do agree with. How are you going to work it, President Obama, how are you going to manage it\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand when it gets tough, are you going to blame those around you and couch your rhetoric in safe, passive-aggressive rhetoric.<\/p>\n

\n

Sources: CNN<\/a>, CBS<\/a>, ABC<\/a>, ABC <\/a>(2) PBS<\/a>, FOX<\/a>, NPR<\/a>, MSNBC<\/a>, EXAMINER<\/a>, YouTube Clip<\/a>, Poynter<\/a>, Politofact<\/a>, Cato-At-Liberty<\/a>, FactCheck.Org<\/a>, Race2TheTop<\/a>, No Child Left Behind<\/a>, USCode<\/a>, Huffington Post<\/a>,Chicago Times<\/a>, BarackObama.com<\/a>, SCOTUS<\/a>, Gov Document<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day was the President\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s State of the Union address. Some folk have questioned why I’m uneasy after hearing it and I wanted to put up some of my reasoning. Don’t get me wrong, I think President Obama said some good things, and he did a great job of keying in on the heat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[232,353],"class_list":["post-988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-obama","tag-state-of-the-union"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=988"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":994,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions\/994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}