(Democrat) Steve Wynn explains:

…this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next three hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration. And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.

You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don’t want to say that. They’ll say, God, don’t be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama’s deal and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, they’re holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth. And that’s true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I’m telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.

Anyone who ever imagined that Barack Obama was a “centrist” was using some pretty exotic drugs.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Why the Democrat Party is doomed:

Like it or not, Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev: a man forced to preside over the demise of a political system he desperately wants to save.

Democrat champions in the punditocracy confidently predict that the future of the world’s oldest political party is bright. But in fact, the coalition that is the modern Democratic Party is doomed. Every pillar upholding its heavy roof is crumbling.

If so, it’s not a decade too soon. I hope he’s right.

With tax cheat Tim Geithner.

If you are for individual liberty, and the American Dream it should be chilling. Shivers went up my spine. Geithner is a character straight out of central casting.

With regard to the debt ceiling, Geithner doesn’t offer up a compromise at all. It’s the administration’s way, or the highway. This means that there is only one way — vote out the Democrats by a significant margin in the House, Senate and get rid of Obama and his very left wing administration in 2012.

He also outright lies about what will get paid and what won’t.

Listen to his words on Dodd-Frank: “Don’t listen to the bankers because their interests aren’t aligned with the American people.” It could be a phrase right out of Atlas Shrugged.

Bankers need a healthy economy to make money. Geithner and Obama want a government directed economy where government de facto owns the banks.

Listen to him talk about the new activist “Consumer Financial Protection Agency” and avowed big government/public sector ownership advocate Elizabeth Warren. Geithner has no faith in the private sector, or the individual. He wants to trample individual rights.

Also, a bonus reference to advocates of limited government and liberty as “anarchists.”

[Update a few minutes later]

Federal expansion — the real issue in the debt-limit debate.

James Taranto has some thoughts on the fading/faded powers of Barack Obama:

A lot of people have been making fun of the president for supposedly saying, “Don’t call my bluff,” as if he’s admitting he’s bluffing. That seems to us a bit pedantic. Surely what he meant was something like “Don’t think you can call my bluff.”

What got our attention about this exchange as reported by Cantor is the president’s threat to take his case “to the American people.” Would those be the same American people who aren’t paying attention and don’t understand all this complicated stuff?

This seems to us an empty threat not least because since his election, Obama has a poor track record when it comes to taking his case to the American people–who still overwhelmingly oppose ObamaCare, give him poor marks on the economy, and think the debt limit shouldn’t be raised even though it pretty much has to be. He always ends up wishing he’d done a better job “explaining” his position, which at least sounds more humble than saying the American people don’t get it.

Of course, even if that’s what he meant, he’s still implying (in fact clearly stating) that it’s a bluff. And he’s right.

[Update a few minutes later]

Charles K. — “Call Obama’s bluff.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

Eric Cantor — “This is not a game.”

[Update a while later]

“Sounds like Obama won’t even call his own bluff.”

The truth about them.

…or Granny gets it:

…he drew plaudits from what used to be called the mainstream media. “Obama Grasping Centrist Banner in Debt Impasse” read the New York Times headline. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza dubbed him “Dad-in-Chief,” explaining: “Boil Obama’s message down and you get this: Adults sometimes have to do things that they don’t want to do. This is one of those times. So, let’s get it done.”

The kids are acting up, so he threatens to starve Granny to death. That’s just how a strong father behaves.

It looks to us as if Obama may once again be overestimating his persuasive powers by relying for feedback on journalists who, for a combination of ideological, partisan and personal reasons, are predisposed to take his side. NewsBusters.org has a useful compilation of what it calls the “softballs” reporters lobbed at yesterday’s press conference. Some of them were actually a bit adversarial, but only from the left.

I hope he continues to live in his leftist media cocoon. It will only reduce his chances of reelection.

His advice to the American people seems to be that if one has a problem with taxes, one should get better tax software and stop asking so many questions, or find the severed head of a horse in your bed.

If I were a Republican candidate, I’d make a statement that, if I were president, I wouldn’t use the elderly as human shields to compel people meet my unreasonable demands.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of press sycophancy, is Obamageddon coming to a city near you?

The election of the first African-American president was widely hailed as a giant step forward for American racial politics. The future, however, may remember this administration as a giant step back for Black America during a period of deepening alienation, anger and despair in America’s inner cities.

Not since the 1960s, when scores of American cities were shaken by one race riot after another, have African-Americans faced such deadly conditions: high expectations and hopes running up against a reality of vanishing jobs, shrinking government budgets and a fractured and fragmented leadership. Barring an unlikely change in economic fortunes we could soon face a new period of explosive anger and even violence; alternatively, the urban poor could fall prey to a new kind of passive despair and anomie as hope dies on one inner city street after another.

Either way, the mainstream press’s slowly fading intoxication with the Obama administration has led it to miss the dimensions of the new urban crisis now stalking the United States. The liberal Reagan, they swooned back in the good old days. No — the new FDR! No, wait! The new Lincoln!

But as the rosy glow surrounding the administration and all its works slowly dies away, many Americans will be taken aback at the urban crisis that quietly and unostentatiously took shape while the fatuously exhilarated press choirs sang about the hope and the change that was coming our way.

It is ironic that he may be the worst president for blacks, ever.

[Update a while later]

The president needs to stop scaring seniors. Apparently he disagrees.