Barackman Geithner Overdrive

Mark Tapscott writes, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet”:

Speaking at a $30,000-per-table fund raiser for an exclusive group of Los Angeles corporate executives Wednesday night, President Obama gave them a grand review of the accomplishments of his first four months in office, boldly claiming his record compares favorably with any chief executive since FDR.

Then, to a thunderous round of cheers from the assembly, Obama declared: “Los Angeles, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!”

It has indeed been an eventful four months. Here are some of the highlights, as compiled by the mischevious research elves at The Heritage Foundation and published today in the must-reading Morning Bell circular:

• Continued to fast-track government control of health care with a $33 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) which isn’t even limited to children andonly worsened our nation’s health spending problem.
• Pushed through a $787 billion stimulus bill that essentially federalized the construction and renovation of public schools, began subsidizing health insurance for unemployed Americans regardless of income, created more than 30 new federal programs, effectively abolished the hugely successful 1996 welfare reform; and created a trillions dollars of new debt, to be dumped into the laps of our children and grandchildren.
• Passed an Omnibus spending bill that raised discretionary spending by 8%, contained 9,287 pork projects costing $13 billion, and spent $123 billion on programs for which government auditors can find no evidence of success.
• Used the $700 billion TARP slush fund to effectively nationalize General Motors, turn Chrysler over to the United Auto Workers union, and strong arm the nation’s banks into accepting taxpayer money and government control they did not want.

These milestones remind that what we’ve seen “nuthin’ of so far during the Obama administration is the aggressive accountability journalism relentlessly aimed at the Bush administration during the eight years prior to the ascension of President Obama.

Meanwhile, the Economist has a penumbra of a clue that, as this Hot Air headline neatly summarizes, “it’s almost as if Obama’s trying to retard capitalism, not ‘fix’ it.” Welcome to the neighborhood of the street of the driveway of the party, fellas!

Or as Mark Steyn wrote a few months ago:

This is the point: The nuancey boys were wrong on Obama, and the knuckledragging morons were right. There is no post-partisan centrist “grappling” with the economy, only a transformative radical willing to make Americans poorer in the cause of massive government expansion. At some point, The Economist, Messrs Brooks, Buckley & Co are going to have to acknowledge this.

Figure right around 2013 or 2017 or so. In the meantime, Stacy McCain has some thoughts about the apparent dearth of investigative reporting on the starboard side of the media ledger, which, post-2008 means, as Tapscott writes above, the dearth of investigative reporting in DC, period.