Back then, total federal debt was about $8.5 trillion, just over 60% of GDP. Auditioning for the role of a fiscal hawk, then-Senator Obama took to the Senate floor:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

I gotta admit, the man had a point. We certainly did, and do, deserve better. Of course now that he’s in the White House, Obama thinks we absolutely must increase the debt ceiling. One his chief economic advisors recently went public, warning that if we don’t increase our ability to borrow money:

The impact on the economy would be catastrophic. I mean, that would be a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008

So let me gets this straight, back when our debt was 60% of GDP Obama thought that an increase in the debt ceiling was a ‘failure of leadership’ and ’shifting the burden of bad choices.’ Now, our debt is over $14 trillion or, more ominously, just about 100% of GDP and Obama thinks that NOT increasing the debt ceiling would be an economic ‘catastrophe’?

Remember, the economy was stilling growing in 2006, providing at least some ability to finance additional debt. Any economic growth today is, at best, a rounding error.

There is absolutely no rational economy philosophy where it is bad to borrow money when you owe 60% of your income but absolutely necessary to borrow more money when you own ALL of your income.

But, there is a political philosophy. Today, Press Secretary Gibbs was forced to defend ‘evolution’ in Obama’s fiscal thinking:

Gibbs said Obama’s vote was not necessary at the time to secure passage of the bill, which squeaked by 52-48, and that he was using the occasion to call for fiscal discipline.

“I think it’s important that the outcome — based on the outcome of that vote, as I mentioned, the full faith and credit was not in doubt — the full faith and credit of our government and our economy was not in doubt. And the president used it to make a point about needing to get serious about fiscal discipline,” Gibbs said.

Wait…he only said these things because his vote wasn’t need to pass it? So, if they had needed his vote to raise the debt ceiling, he would have voted to ’shift the burden of bad choices’? Obama just thought, ‘hey, this is going to pass anyway and I’ve never had the chance to make a speech on fiscal discipline. I’d like to try that’? He may not have believed a damn thing in his speech, but I’m sure he had fun taking some shots at President Bush.

As to Gibbs’ second point, what color is the sky in his world? America’s fiscal solvency is in question today BECAUSE of the Administration’s borrowing binge. Again, so Obama WILL borrow more when world markets doubt we can afford it, but WON’T borrow when world markets are certain we can.

Exit Question: Since 2006, our economy has grown from around $13 trillion to around $14 trillion, generating somewhere around $4 trillion of additional output. At the same time, the government has added around $5.5 trillion in debt. Add in the debt issued by states and municipalities and I have one question: Where the hell did all the money go?

Episode 1 is “Reefer Madness”

That’s right, we have learned for example, that when David Axelrod leaves the White House every night, he finds time to stop at the Washington DC Zoo, and well, lets just say he accepts foreign donations.

I have been asked about these charges, specifically the New York Times looked into Axelrod’s love life specifically and said that Axelrod is not putting any part of himself into foreign objects. He has been spending lots of time at the petting zoo, said the times but the only thing being stroked is his ego. There is no evidence says the Times, that David Axelrod has a “sheep” problem. Bob Schieffer of CBS News says that Axelrod’s animal problem is just peanuts.

Hogwash I say, Hogwash!.  True there is no evidence that White House adviser is sleeping with sheep, but does anybody have evidence that he is not?  And as far as Mr. Schieffer’s comment, sheep do not eat peanuts, Elephants do. The fact is that while Axelrod has asserted these rumors are not true, but the fact that he won’t release any home videos of his sex life is at the core of the problem here.

What we’ve seen in part is because of a loophole in the press coverage, we  have seen thousands of hours of press reports filed this year and not one investigation, not one of David Axelrod’s sex life. The media is keeping from the public, for example,  that the Presidential Adviser’s favorite nursary rhymes are Mary Had a Little Lamb and Baa Baa Black Sheep.

By the way, there has also been rumors about Robert Gibbs and horses, but those rumors are incorrect, the Gibbs rumor started because someone misheard. The Press Secretary was simply being compared to a specific part of the horses anatomy.

Some of you have asked me, “Come on Jeff, even if you hate his politics, how could you make baseless charges against a public servant? How could you smear Axelrod’s name like that?”

Folks, this isn’t smearing anybody, this is learning from our great Commander-in-Chief. I have learned from our President that it is perfectly OK for a blogger to create baseless charges. Our President believes in equality for all and social justice (Axelrod does also). So if Think Progress can invent charges against the Chamber of Commerce and get extra traffic, so can I.  The President will just think of it as “Redistribution of Web Traffic.”

Think about it as you watch this video from David Axelrod’s Favorite Movie.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took such a liking to this weekend’s NY Times story on House Minority Leader John Boehner and his lobbyist friends that Gibbs has posted about it on Twitter four times, beginning with one saying, “Headline says it all…A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists.”

Maybe Mr. Gibbs should think twice before he makes that argument. He should at least look at how his party fares in a discussion of lobbyist influence.

If you look at the top Members of Congress who receive the most money from lobbyists this campaign season, 15 out of the 20 are Democrats. None of the 20 were named John Boehner.

If you concentrate on the House of Representatives where John Boehner serves the story is just as bad for Gibbs and the progressive Democrats. There are 60 Members of the House who accept more lobby money than Bohner, 45 of them (75%) are members of the President’s party. Boehner’s $39.5 thousand in lobbyist donations (the red bar) pale on comparison to that of the Democratic house leadership.

Not included in any of this are the labor unions such as the SEIU and the AFL/CIO who have influenced Obama’s policy in a big way.  Here again it the President’s party beholden to special interests. When you look at all members of Congress who receive union money, 20 out of the top 20 are Democrats.

In the case of Unions, if you examine only the Members of the House of Representatives, the story is a bit different than the lobbyist data. Forgetting John Boehner for a second, you have to go through 147 Democrats just to get to the first Republican, Congressman McCotter (MI). If  Press Secretary Gibbs wanted to find Congressman Boehner he would have to skim past 242 Democrats and 13 Republicans, all of whom get more union cash than Boehner at number 256.

In fact when you look at total campaign contributions to members of Congress $40.3 million of the total $43.2 million union dollars given to candidates (93%) was given to Democrats. Now I wouldn’t dare suggest that all those campaign contributions led to the passage of union favored programs such as the Stimulus, or Obamacare. Nor would I suggest the fact that President Obama received 94% of the $570 thousand spent by labor unions in the presidential campaign caused him to issue the executive order known as the “High Road Contracting Policy.” This order gives preferential treatment to government  construction contractors that pay their hourly workers a “union wage”  and provide additional benefits such as health insurance, employer-funded retirement plans and paid sick leave. In other words, they will be “cutting out” the non-union shops out of the $500 billion dollars worth of Federal construction jobs and raising the cost of construction jobs between 10-20%, increasing the federal deficit.

Robert Gibbs is just trying to scare away conservative Democrats and independents from voting for GOP candidates by casting the House minority leader, John Boehner as the essence of evil who should never become Speaker of the House. If the President, and his team of progressives really want to go in that direction, they should understand that it is an argument that hurts them more than it hurts their opponents.  And Robert Gibbs should understand that Press Secretaries work in lobbyist houses should not throw stones.

Mr. Gibbs also suggested that critics of the auto bailout wanted to walk away from a million jobs. Such talk is unfounded political speak. One would have a hard time finding any serious critic who advocated such a thing.

Quoting Mr. Gibbs,

“I’ll let those that sat in the cheap seats a year and a half ago and wanted to walk away from a million, explain to every one of those workers why they made that decision and… whether they thought the decision they made 16 or 18 months ago, different than that of the president of the United States, whether they still stand by it.”

As one who sat in the so-called cheap seats, Mr. Gibbs, I never advocated walking away from a million jobs, but I absolutely do stand by the position that the GM/Chrysler bailout was a terrible thing to do and made no economic sense.

It seems that the President is unable to grasp – or unwilling to accept – some of the most basic economic principles surrounding this issue.

“Supply and demand” is one of the most fundamental economic concepts, and the approximate amount of viable jobs in the auto industry is essentially a result of the demand for the cars being produced. The number of viable jobs is not the result, and cannot be correlated to, the government pumping money into any auto manufacturing company. Of course, non-viable jobs can be artificially supported through bailouts. However, those are not sustainable without a subsequent demand increase, and such a bailout would not and should not have to be tied to saving a particular company.

In a free market economy, it’s nobody’s business to walk away – or to not walk away – from jobs. Indeed, nobody even has such ability. In a free market economy, it is everybody’s business to buy a car when they decide that they need one. This is a called “demand,” Mr. Gibbs. It is demand for cars that will create the jobs to make the cars. If x number of cars are demanded, then x number of cars will be produced and sold, and that is where the jobs come from. The particular company that manufactures the cars is of little relevance to the economy or the number-of-employed.

By saving so many jobs at Company A, President Obama kept roughly as many jobs from Company B. Thus, it can be argued that the President did not save a single job. He only saved a poorly-run company. Is it wise to spend taxpayer money on a poorly-run, inefficient company, rather than to have a well-run, more efficient company expand naturally and bring those jobs unto itself? The simple explanation of that process is that if you do not save Company A, then it goes into bankruptcy, and Company B purchases its factories and equipment. Company B then excitedly hires the already-skilled workers formerly employed by Company A and puts them back to work to meet that “demand,” which we have no control over. Moreover, it is likely that in such a situation, many of the jobs will not even have to be relocated, because the factories are already in place and tooled up. This is nothing more than practical, free-market economics.

Regardless of your crafty words, Mr. Gibbs, the President’s trick has been unveiled. He spent our money to bailout the unions. He kept and continues to keep two poorly-run companies on taxpayer-funded life support, while saving no jobs.

But what the establishment media didn’t tell you – unless you waded through the details in a select few news articles or saw this fairly balanced short article in the Washington Post – is that Wednesday evening,  hours after the first cloture vote failed and hours after  I informed BigGovernment.com readers about an effort by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), to narrow the scope of what I have been calling the Obama-Dodd-Frank-Everything’s A Bank Bill, Democrats blinked and Vitter’s amendment passed without objection by voice vote.

Vitter’s amendment to the so-called “Restoring American Financial Stability Act” gives a precise meaning to the term “financial company” – changing the definition from Dodd’s original language of “substantially engaged in activities in the United States that are financial in nature” to that of the much stricter “predominantly engaged.” And his amendment precisely defines “predominantly engaged” as a business that makes no less than 85 percent of its revenue from financial activities.

As a result of Vitter’s measure that passed during the brief 24-hour period of most of the GOP standing together in opposition (along with Democrats Maria Cantwell and Russ Feingold for their own reasons), a very important change was made.

There are still many horrors in this bill, but at least now a business will only fall under the new regime of the Federal Reserve for taxation, regulation, and nationalization if it is “predominantly engaged” in financial activities. Most retailers and manufacturers — although still hit by other parts of the bill such as the broad reach of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection – will not come under Fed supervision for “financial stability.”

Ironically, I concluded my article in BigGovernment.com, “There are many reasons for the GOP and truly moderate Democrats in the Senate not to grant cloture. Even if the bill was primarily concerned with Wall Street, it still does nothing about Fannie and Freddie, But making sure the Wall Street bill is actually about Wall Street – or at the very least about banks – should be a line in the sand. There should this firm message. ‘No Vitter amendment. No cloture.  No dice!’” The amazing thing is, though not necessarily as part of a conscious effort of all who voted “no,” this is pretty close to what happened.

The lesson from the fight for Vitter’s amendment – which was assisted by support from the measure by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and many businesses large and small, as well as a Center-Right coalition letter signed by CEI and other groups that specifically called out the bill’s broad definition of financial company– is clear. From health care to financial regulation, the progressives will paint the enemy as unpopular big business – from big insurers to big oil to big Wall Street firms.

But once the Center-Right forces them to debate, as the Vitter amendment did, how a particular bill would affect entrepreneurial Main Street businesses, they will duck and cover and sometimes retreat.. Despite opposition from the Huffington Post crowd and other progressives, the Obama administration and Senate Democrats made a significant concession likely because they did not want to be seen as going after the entrepreneurial firms that are rightly seen as the backbone of this country.

Main Street businesses do not have to be necessarily small, either. Just examples of the American dream that the public can relate too. Vitter made the excellent point that under the bill as written, Google could have been considered a bank. Google may be big, but it grew that way because it pleased its customers, and no one can rationally accuse Google of contributing to the financial crisis.

And despite what many in the establishment media say, this fight is not over, as even President Obama seemed to acknowledge in his speech yesterday when he talked about “lobbyists” trying to thwart a House-Senate conference. Reconciling the House and Senate bills is not going to be a cakewalk. There are many differing provisions.

The Senate bill lacks, for instance, the provisions in the House bill to comprehensively audit the activities of the Federal Reserve. The House bill, at the behest of “Blue Dog” Democrats, also limits on the jurisdiction Consumer Financial Protection Agency, so that it cannot have jurisdiction over orthodontists who spread out payments for braces or small stores with layaway plans.

Time magazine liberal columnist Michael Grunwald wrote this about the uncertain prospects for a final bill about a week ago: “Even if the Senate bill did attract 60 votes, it would have to be reconciled with the House bill, and then the House and Senate both would have to pass the reconciled bill — and all probably before the pre-election August recess, while dealing with a Supreme Court confirmation battle and jobs bills and whatever else comes down the pike. I’m not a Beltway insider anymore, but that sounds hard! “

And even White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has said it will likely be the Fourth of July before the House and Senate forge an agreement and the President Obama has a final bill on his desk.

There is a window to make known the impact of the many terrible things that remains in this bill – from a massive new consumer agency with the power to track virtually every financial transaction to share with other big agencies like the IRS, proxy access provisions that would federalize state incorporation laws and empower unions and other progressive shareholders to wage director campaigns at the company and other shareholders’ expense, and no attempted reform of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the center of the financial mess.

To slightly alter a popular saying, it’s never over until the same bill passes both the House and Senate and is sent to the President’s desk. The Center-Right coalition should learn an important lesson from Vitter’s smart and principled fight and should not waste this window.

In those days, there was a clock ticking in the background, but no one in Washington seemed to pay it any heed. Nancy Pelosi was in her counting house counting all the votes. Steny Hoyer was exploring whether one could somehow bend the rules so that his colleagues could pass a controversial bill while telling their constituents that they had nothing to do with it. Bart Stupak, caught between the dictates of religious faith and political allegiance, was pondering when and how to sacrifice the former to the latter. And President Barack Obama issued threats to members of his own party in the House of Representatives. All of this was done in pursuit of passing into law a profoundly unpopular bill that promised to bankrupt the country, drive prospective physicians out of the profession, deprive the elderly of Medicare benefits they had paid for long ago, and reduce the quality of medical care for all but those comfortably ensconced within what came to be called the American nomenklatura. There was also material for burlesque. After being accused of sexually harassing the fellows on his staff, one Democratic Congressman attacked the White House Chief of Staff, calling him a “son of the devil’s spawn” and describing in arresting terms the manner in which the man practiced in the shower the ballet steps learned in his days as a bagman for the Daley machine in Chicago. It would have all been quite comic had there not been that clock in the background steadily ticking . . . in a country far away of which the Americans knew little or nothing.

There were, to be sure, other events. In a coordinated effort directed by the President, Joe Biden picked a quarrel with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Hillary Clinton vented her spleen against the Israeli government for announcing that it intended in a modest manner to increase the size of a long-established, already sizable, strategically located settlement on the outskirts of Jerusalem; Robert Gibbs snarled and sneered and ran his mouth on a subject about which he knew little or nothing and cared even less; and the President met with the Israeli Prime Minister in circumstances designed to broadcast his disdain to the Arab world. All of this was done with an eye to bringing down a democratically-elected Israeli government and setting the stage for a Middle East settlement between Israel and a Palestinian leader who lacked firm Palestinian support, who would have fallen from power when Hamas seized the Gaza strip had the Israelis not used their checkpoints on the West Bank to thwart Hamas’ operations there, and who was in no position to negotiate any sort of lasting agreement with anyone about anything at all. This, too, would have been a matter of comic relief had that infernal clock not gone on ticking . . . in distant Teheran.

Barack Obama appeared to think that he would be remembered and celebrated as the architect of an historic healthcare reform, and he seemed to have persuaded nearly everyone in his party that this was so. He seemed also to have entertained an expectation that it would fall to him to preside over a comprehensive Middle East settlement. Neither was destined to happen. By hook or by crook, the Democrats managed to shove the healthcare bill through the House, but it turned out to be nothing more than a last-ditch, suicide mission on the part of a Progressive coalition on its last legs. And the Obama administration’s inept maneuvers made the Middle East settlement that the Americans had long sought all the more elusive.

Most of what went on in those years in Washington – apart from the buffoonery – was unremarkable. If President Obama is remembered at all, it is because it was on his watch that the fascist dictatorship in Iran got nuclear weapons. In comparative perspective, nothing else that he did or did not do really mattered at all.

Such is the verdict that, I think, will be rendered – for our time resembles an earlier epoch about which a similar verdict has already been reached. Who remembers the social programs adopted in England and France between 1933 and 1936? It was with them, however, that Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Pierre Laval, Leon Blum, and the like were largely preoccupied. It was as if, when the ship of state came within sight of a political iceberg, its officers and crew turned to rearranging the deck chairs on what was for them a functional equivalent of the Titanic.

In that earlier period, Europe was deep in the Great Depression; class strife loomed large; and the French, in particular, suffered from a stalemate between the right and the left. Almost no one had the stomach to contemplate a renewal of war. Their experience in the trenches during the First World War had encouraged the English and the French to embrace pacifism, and Ramsay MacDonald, prime minister of Britain in 1933, was not alone in hoping that Nazi Germany could be appeased.

Of course, attempts were made to contain Germany. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania negotiated the Little Entente Pact of Consolidation. Austria, Hungary, and Italy signed the Rome Protocols. The Soviet Union appointed a Jew as foreign minister, joined the League of Nations, and signed mutual assistance treaties with Czechoslovakia and France. The British, the French, and the Italians formed the Stresa Front.

These gestures were, however, all half-hearted. At no time did anyone make serious military preparations, and Adolf Hitler found it easy to pick apart these nascent alliances. Poland signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in January 1934; Britain signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in June, 1935, shortly after joining the Stresa Front; and Benito Mussolini, who had massed troops at the Brenner Pass after Hitler had engineered the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss on 25 July 1934, opted in the end to attempt to play the two sides against one another; and, when it became clear which was the stronger and the more resolute, he jettisoned the Rome Protocols and lined up with his fellow fascists. It was not hard for Il Duce, as he called himself, to read the handwriting on the wall – for when Germany’s like-named Fűhrer remilitarized the Rhineland in early March, 1936, the British and the French did nothing more than register pro-forma diplomatic protests.

The British and the French at that time had more excuse then than we can claim today. They felt only revulsion when they contemplated the carnage of World War I, and the former had long since become persuaded that Germany’s treatment in the Versailles Treaty was unjust. The combination of a sense of guilt with terror can all too easily paralyze a people. None of this, however, can justify their resolutely looking the other way when Hitler repudiated the central terms of the Locarno Pact, remilitarized the Rhineland, and laid the groundwork for a decisive shift in the balance of power on the continent of Europe. To anticipate what was to come, one had only to read Mein Kampf.

But, of course, no one at the time wanted to read Hitler’s magnum opus and think about the unthinkable. It was far less distressing to suppose that the German leader could not have really meant what he had written ten years before. In any case, we are in no position to level criticism today. We have not suffered carnage on the scale that the British and the French did in World War I. In the course of the Cold War, we hardly suffered at all. And there is no reason whatsoever for us to feel any guilt with regard to our conduct during or in the aftermath of that struggle. The Cold War was America’s finest hour. In human history, there has never been a sustained confrontation between two great hegemonic powers lasting half a century in which, relative to the size of the existing populations, there was less collateral damage inflicted by the victorious power.

Of course, when in a tizzy, one can always punt. That is what the Europeans did in the early 1930s, and that is what we with less justification have repeatedly done in the last few years. What other purpose does the United Nations these days serve? It is the perfect place in which to bury troublesome questions that one does not want to face. By referring matters of moment to it, as our European allies have so frequently shown, one can stake out the moral high ground and leave everyone with a comforting sense that something is being done without having to do anything substantive oneself. On the Iranian nuclear program, we have had report after report, and the Security Council has passed resolution after resolution. All that happens is that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad plays for time, alternately pretending to negotiate and then threatening his Arab neighbors, the state of Israel, Europe, and the United States – all the while thumbing his nose with aplomb at everyone concerned.

Some will say that Iran is not Germany, that it is in no way as formidable as German once was – and, of course, they are right. But this only makes our inaction less excusable – for if an Iran lacking nuclear weapons is not especially formidable, one cannot say the same about an Iran equipped with long-range missiles and brandishing nuclear weapons. One could, of course, point to the Iranian capacity to interfere with the transport of oil in the Persian Gulf; one could allude to the damage that Hezbollah could do; and one could refer to the capacity of the Iranian regime to unleash terrorist cells throughout the world. But if one were to lay emphasis on the Iranian capacity to project power and disrupt the world economy in the present circumstances, what would one be saying about Ahmadinejad’s ability to do both once his compatriots have equipped themselves with nuclear weapons and the systems necessary for their delivery?

There are two brute facts that are pertinent. First, like Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, Ahmadinejad’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles would profoundly alter the balance of power. Is there anyone who seriously thinks that, when it had a relatively free hand, the Islamic Republic of Iran would conduct its affairs in the manner of a saturated power? In assessing the significance of what is about to take place, one must keep in mind the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf and just how large a percentage of the oil that fuels the world economy is exported through that narrow body of water.

The second brute fact is no less easy to discern: In matters such as the one that concerns us here, diplomacy is bound to be ineffectual if it is not backed by a credible threat that, if one’s requests are refused, one will resort to force.

Think about what it means that, in circumstances as dire as those we now face, our leaders are devoting their energy to ramming a highly unpopular healthcare bill down our throats and to attacking a democratically elected government for announcing a modest increase in the size of a strategically located settlement. As Obama, Pelosi, Hoyer, Emanuel, Clinton, and Gibbs waste their energy on comparatively inconsequential matters, the clock in Teheran merrily ticks on – and for us time will soon, by all reports, be running out.