The Speech

Obama’s advisers, including Bill Clinton (do you find yourself wishing we had that guy back?) told Obama to lay off the "end of the world" stuff last night, and he did. But key is that he didn’t know any better; he has been spouting that stuff for two weeks; he had to be told. That’s what we mean about judgement - he has none.

How about facts? We repeat the following from the original effort of AP reporters Tom Raum, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Dina Cappiello (a liberal has to really go the distance to gag the AP).

Obama: "We have launched a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and refinance their mortgages. It's a plan that won't help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values."

FACT: If the administration has come up with a way to ensure money only goes to those who got in honest trouble, it hasn't said so. The head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. suggested this month it's not likely aid will be denied to homeowners who overstated their income or assets to get a mortgage they couldn't afford.

Obama: "I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it."

FACT: According to the Library of Congress, the inventor of the first true automobile was Germany's Karl Benz, who created the first auto powered by an internal combustion gasoline engine, in 1885 or 1886.

Obama: "We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before."

FACT: Oil imports peaked in 2005 at just over 5 billion barrels, and have been declining since.

Obama: We have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade."

FACT: Obama only has a real say on spending during the four years of his term. He may not be president after that and he certainly won't be 10 years from now.

Obama: "Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market."

FACT: This slap at the Republicans is false. It was the Bush administration which tried repeatedly to reform, regulate the twins (Fannie / Freddie), fearing just the catastrophe that ensued. The key near-criminals here - Frank and Dodd. The twins were a cash cow to these clowns, ranking #1 and #2 on the recipient list. - Obama ranked #5 or #6 as a senator, just behind Clinton.

Obama: "In this budget, we will end education programs that don't work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them. We'll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we're not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don't use. We will root out the waste, fraud and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn't make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas."

FACT : First, his budget does not accomplish any of that. It only proposes those steps. That's all a president can do because control over spending rests with Congress. Obama's proposals here are a wish list.

Obama: "Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs."

FACT: The president's own economists, in a report prepared last month, stated, "It should be understood that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error."

Four years to go? Let’s hope the tabloid folks (and now at least two American soldiers) are right and this guy 1) was born out of the country to a mother too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship or 2) his father was a dual citizen. The framers exclude dual citizens from qualifying as "natural born" - the requirement, Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution.

Robert Craven