“Tonight’s speech was a reminder that, for decades, the policies of Republicans and Democrats alike have failed. Libertarians are asking people to take matters into their own hands. Instead of just complaining, we’re encouraging ordinary Americans to step up and run for Congress on the Libertarian Party ballot line.

I can say exactly the same thing about President Obama’s speech tonight that I said about George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech in January 2008: ‘Tonight’s State of the Union address went much as expected. Instead of calling for a more limited role of the federal government in American society, the President laid out plans that would only increase the government’s intervention into the realm of economics, health care, education and foreign policy.

I am weary of the President’s unspoken premise that only government–indeed, only the federal government–can accomplish good in our society.

President Obama seems to be totally blind to the concept that government can cause problems rather than solve them. His speech was filled with ‘More’: more handouts, more spending, more programs, more bailouts, more regulations. We Libertarians want less government, not more.

Not to be outmatched by the Democrats, the Republican Party conveyed its lack of seriousness in addressing this nation’s government spending problems by having Bob McDonnell, Virginia Governor for eleven (11) days, deliver its rebuttal to the President. If they were really serious about addressing the dire fiscal circumstances of this nation, they would have had Paul Ryan, a six-term congressman from Wisconsin, who has proposed the most serious plan of anyone in the two older parties to keep us from going off a fiscal cliff.

Last week, Alan Auerbach, Professor of Economics and Law at UC Berkeley and US government fiscal policy expert, said that the Democratic and Republican parties are in a ‘death embrace’ with their government spending. The only political party that is rationally and forthrightly addressing the need to cut government spending and end our culture of ever expanding entitlements is the Libertarian Party.

As Americans lose hope in Obama, we Libertarians are warning voters against running back to the Republicans who got us into such big messes in the first place. Republicans started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Republicans made the false intellectual case for bailing out banks and car companies. Republicans argued that deficits don’t matter. Republicans gave us the giant Medicare expansion bill.

The President’s suggestion of a ‘spending freeze’ was especially ludicrous and insulting to the intelligence of Americans. The amounts involved are minuscule, and Congress won’t accept them anyway. Will Obama sign the spending bills that ignore his ‘freeze’? You bet he will. Instead, the President should demand across-the-board cuts in all areas, including entitlements.

The President talked a lot about jobs. Unfortunately, the policies he supports are responsible for most of the unemployment we see today. High taxes, minimum wage laws, hiring regulations, firing regulations, mandatory unemployment benefits, and other government interference make it much more difficult for businesses to hire and keep employees. As expected, the President’s prescription is to increase the dosage of this government poison.

While our nation is declining dangerously right now, a turnaround could be straightforward and simple with steps like these: 1. Bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan; 2. Stop rewarding failed companies with bailouts; 3. Cut taxes and spending and let the free market work.

Finally, on the matter of political rhetoric, I call upon the two older parties to stop spoon feeding politics to the American people as if we are a bunch of overgrown children. These are difficult times that call for more than rhetorical flourish or positioning a group of diverse people around a politician. Older party politicians need to be specific about their proposed policies, as Libertarians are.

And, I know I’m probably just wasting electrons, but can’t we go back to the days in which the President sent a copy of his speech to Congress and left it at that. The speech last night took 1/7000th of an entire year. I think the vast majority of the American people would agree that we have better ways to spend our time.”

William Redpath has served as the Chairman of the Libertarian Party since 2006. For more information, or to arrange an interview, call LP Executive Director Wes Benedict at 202-333-0008 ext. 222.

The LP is America’s third-largest political party, founded in 1971. The Libertarian Party stands for free markets and civil liberties.

For those who thought that President Obama was going to be a different type of politician, I guess you’re kicking yourself in the ass now. Republicans and Democrats alike will increase spending in the federal government and to do so, they have to raise taxes to pay for it. Taxes are a necessary thing in a society that is as advanced as the United States. The problem comes into play when too much spending is going on. We don’t need to spend millions of dollars to build a dog park for just one city. How is that going to create growth? Yes it will create a couple of dozen for a few months, but what happens after the park is done? How about the $4.545,000 for wood utilization research? Since 1985 taxpayers have already spent $90 million on this research and they still don’t know how to use wood.

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, head of the President’s National Economic Council, was asked if the administration would keep to their word of not raising taxes on 95% of the American people, their answer was that they weren’t too sure. Tiny Tim Geithner said “We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically, that’s going to require some very hard choices. “We will not get this economy back on track, recovery will not be strong and sustained, unless we convince the American people that we are going to have the will to bring these deficits down once recovery is firmly established,” he said.

What recovery is he referring to??? The recovery is just a bunch of spending of American taxpayer’s money to satisfy the industries that backed the Obama while he was running for office. The problem is that there shouldn’t be a deficit of 1.7 trillion dollars as we currently have thanks to Obama and friends.

There is a big difference between debt and deficit. President George W. Bush put us in debt, but Obama is giving us a major deficit. The Obama Administration has spent more money than all other presidents combined and he did it in less than six months.

Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president’s approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to “accomplish too much,” and 57 percent think the country is on the “wrong track.”

As writers who inveighed against last year’s GOP candidate and called George W. Bush’s presidency a “disaster,” we’re equal-opportunity critics. As taxpayers with children and hence some small, almost certainly unrecoverable stake in this country’s future (not to mention that of General Motors, Chrysler and AIG), we write with skin in the game and the fear that our current leader will indeed start busting out the 1970s cardigans.

The key to understanding Obama’s predicament is to realize that while he ran convincingly as a repudiation of Bush, he is in fact doubling down on his predecessor’s big-government policies and perpetual crisis-mongering. From the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists to gays in the military to bailing out industries large and small, Obama has been little more than the keeper of the Bush flame. Indeed, it took the two of them to create the disaster that is the 2009 budget, racking up a deficit that has already crossed the historic $1 trillion mark with almost three months left in the fiscal year.

You can read the whole article by clicking the link at the top of the page.

Some of the comments are worth reading also. Of course there’s the 7th graders acorn crew with their “you lost nah nah” comments but you can skip over those.

Shocking to some to see the media doing their job for a change instead of being Obama’s bootlickers.

Beautiful piece. Bush was bad. Carter was horrible. And now we have Carter on steroids AND meth. It will take a decade to undo this mess Obama is making.

Obama is a socialist/marxist that wants to REMAKE this country; he has said so more than once. Those that surround him are of like mind. Of course, remember that the “rulers” will be miraculously insulated and immune from the chaos and misery that their policies will create. Carter was a least a decent, honest man with good intensions, but was a terrible president. I find nothing in Obama but a cold, arrogant, elitist, that has been raised and mentored to loath and despise this country.

What’s next? Cardigans? What may be next is what Presidents like Jimmah Cawter and Obama attract like offal to flies– an international crisis brought on by enemies who know how weak and ineffectual they are. It’s frustrating that in these times of real danger and challenge, we have a President who talks big, does little except spend money, and at the end of day winds up as soundbites on cable news. President Obama is the Peter Principal cubed. I hope all you rubes who voted for him are bleary-eyed and happy.

Speaking of the left, seems a growing number of them are dissatisfied with Obama. Josh Gerstein from Politico writes;

Barely four months into his presidency, Obama is confronting growing dissatisfaction among members of his liberal base, who feel spurned by a series of his early decisions on issues ranging from guns to torture to immigration to gay rights. A few, like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, have even hurled the left’s ultimate epithet – suggesting that Obama’s turning into George W. Bush. For liberals who viewed Obama as something of a savior after eight years of Bush, the discontents are piling up.

A growing number of organizations, bloggers and pundits, many of whom kept quiet about slights in Obama’s first few months, are now going public with their disillusionment.

Michael Meyers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition said many Obama supporters (with support from voices on the right) built him up to be more of a liberal icon than his public speeches and writings ever justified.

“They invested in Obama everything they wanted the next president to be. They thought, ‘He’s black, liberal, anti-Iraq War… urban, young.’ He was all of that and smart and he went to a radical church. They just knew,” Meyers said. “They exaggerated him. They saw him as a messiah. No president is a messiah.”

“He’s not the person that people thought he was,” Meyers said. “The left is finding that out and the right is finding that out.”

Also from Politico, Andy Barr writes about Republican leaders who are backing Cheney’s criticism of Obama;

Republican leaders on Sunday backed Dick Cheney’s attacks on President Barack Obama, calling the former vice president
a strong asset for the party.

“It doesn’t hurt us, it helps us,” House Minority Leader John Boehner said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” calling Cheney a “big member in our party.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said ” We know Obama changed his mind in Iraq and decided to follow the advice of the military generals, and we also know that he’s now ordered a surge in Afghanistan just like the one that was successful in Iraq. So I think the administration has responded to the critique of the vice president” that the country is moving in the “wrong direction on national security issues.”

“Independent voters believed Candidate Obama when he said he would be mainstream. Their trusting votes gave him a narrow victory,” said Donny Ferguson, Libertarian National Committee Communications Director. “But now that the real Barack Obama has revealed himself, they’re not following his bootlegger turn toward the radical left. They still believe the same Big Government that Obama promises as our global salvation will be America’s undoing.”

“Only one party in America agrees with independent voters, and that is the Libertarian Party,” said Ferguson. “Republicans spent 14 years fattening government with their ever-escalating budgets. Even the Republican ‘alternative budget’ called for massive deficits and bigger spending.”

“Once again, Libertarians are the only mainstream party in America. Only Libertarians will reduce the size and cost of government. Obama and the Republicans have us spiraling towards national bankruptcy.”

A Rasmussen Reports poll released Monday asked 1,007 adults “which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future –”big business”, big labor or “big government?” Fifty-nine percent (59%) of politically independent Americans viewed “big government” as the greatest threat, virtually unchanged from the 60 percent measured the last time the question was asked in 2006 – before the financial crisis and election of Barack Obama.

Only 30 percent answered “big business” and 8 percent answered “big labor,” both also virtually unchanged from the 26 percent and 10 percent measured in 2006.

Since the question was asked major financial crises have weakened the economy and the White House has been occupied by a president pushing radical expansions of government size and power — with virtually no effect on independents. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus three percent.

The poll was released on the same day the White House released numbers showing the economy performing worse than Obama promised, and the federal budget deficit growing to a size four times larger than the 2008 Bush record. Under Obama, the federal government will borrow nearly 50 cents for every dollar it spends, an unsustainable and inflationary level of borrowing.

In more bad news for Obama, the only Americans buying into his opposition to capitalism are largely those who already voted for him, leaving little room to expand his support.

Democrats in 2006 feared “big government” more than “big business” by a 55 percent to 32 percent margin. Following in lockstep with Obama, they have flipped their views. Now, Democrats fear job creators more than government by a 52 percent to 32 percent margin.

Opposition to “big government” grew among grassroots Republicans, though their party leadership doesn’t seem to share that view, based on their “alternative budget.” In 2006, Republicans feared “big government” more than “big business” by a 68 percent to 18 percent margin. That grew in 2009 to 80 percent to 10 percent.

“Grassroots Republicans oppose Big Government and want a party that agrees with them. Once again, the Libertarian Party is the only party that proposes cutting spending. We don’t follow the still-vibrant Republican tradition of making government bigger and costlier each year,” said Ferguson.

For more information on this issue, or to arrange an interview with the Libertarian Party, please call Director of Communications Donny Ferguson at 703-200-3669 or 202-333-0008, x. 225, or email Donny.Ferguson@lp.org.

The Libertarian Party is America’s third-largest political party, founded in 1971 as an alternative to the two main political parties. You can find more information on the Libertarian Party by visiting http://www.LP.org. The Libertarian Party proudly stands for smaller government, lower taxes and more freedom.

There was a time that the rest of the world would come to us for assistance and aid, now they just come to us for our military aid and to buy more our debt. Over the last five months, our Presidents (Bush and Obama) have passed bills to try to stimulate the economy. It will cost the United States citizens trillions of dollars to pay back the debt that has been added to our already high debt.

China has bought most of the contracts to our debt, which is a treat on our security of this country. What will happen in seven years when we are expected to pay back the Chinese for the money they let us? Will we be able to pay them back or do we just give them the rights to some of our major components of our economy as collateral.

In the last three decades, the United States have been sending many (if not most) of our factory and manufacturing jobs oversea to China. In the process, we’ve lost our edge on being the leader of the industrial age. As we enter the technology age, we’ve already started sending quite a few of those jobs to India. India is also another country that hold a lot of America’s debt. So not only are they advancing their own country’s economy, but they’re also buying our county without us even being aware of it.

Our politicians have been spending way too much money on things they can’t afford. Yes, this country needs to be put back together economically, but they are going about it all wrong. When your family is in a financial bind, do you spend more money to get a hold of the issue or do you spend less to make ends meet?

The United States is in a bad position (between a Barack and a hard place). Our government is spending money that they don’t have, China is a good position to taking over parts of our economy and India is not too far behind them doing the same thing. Add on top of all of it, the fact that we have North Korea shooting long-range missiles and our President isn’t even doing anything about it.

Write your elect official to tell them that they need to secure the safety of this country by not selling our debt to other countries that don’t really care about us. If you’re like me and prefer to talk to them on the phone, then call the U.S. Senate @ 1-202-224-3121

President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.

President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina. Citing the Bush Administration’s “unconscionable ineptitude” in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims. Obama visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more trips to the region. He worked with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to introduce legislation to address the immediate income, employment, business, and housing needs of Gulf Coast communities.