Home Depot Co-Founder: Obama Is Choking Recovery

Bernie Marcus co-founded Home Depot (HD) in 1978 and brought it public in 1981 as the U.S. was suffering from the worst recession and unemployment in 40 years. The company thrived, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and redefining home improvement retailing.

But Marcus says Home Depot “would never have succeeded” if it launched today due to onerous regulation. He recently helped launch the Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit of CEOs and entrepreneurs dedicated to preserving the free enterprise system. IBD recently spoke to him about jobs and the economy.

The Mask Slips, Falls to Ground, Explodes

I know, I know, applying the “mask slips” metaphor to Nancy Pelosi, who appears to have spring full blown from some twisted lefty-nightmare remake of The Stepford Wives, may seem a cliché, but this extraordinary video, posted by RealClearPolitics and flagged by Brian Bolduc over on The Corner, reveals the innermost character of modern liberalism in just a little over one minute.

Eat The Rich

Seems like these days I hear a lot of whiney whiners whining about “out of control government spending” and “insane deficits” and such, trying to make hay out of a bunch of pointy-head boring finance hooey. Sure, $3.7 trillion of spending sounds like a big number. “Oh, boo-hoo, how are we going to get $3.7 trillion dollars? We’re broke, boo-hoo-hoo,” whine the whiners. What these skinflint crybabies fail to realize is that $3.7 trillion is for an entire year – which translates into only a measly $10 billion per day!

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party. He is mainly remembered for his support of the cause of the American Revolutionaries, and for his later opposition to the French Revolution.

Corporate Welfare

In America today, the biggest recipients of handouts are not poor people. They’re corporations.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt is super-close to President Obama. The president named Immelt chairman of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Before that, Immelt was on Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He’s a regular companion when Obama travels abroad to hawk American exports. (Why does business need government to do that?)

Grassley, Smith: Make Lawyers Pay for Frivolous Suits

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, and Iowan Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, are taking action against frivolous lawsuits.”The Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act, which we introduced Wednesday, evens the playing field by imposing monetary sanctions against attorneys who file frivolous suits,” the duo writes on Politico. “The bill simply says that cases brought to court must be based on facts and reasonable interpretations of the law.”

Who’s Polarizing America?

American politics just keeps getting more polarized. Be assured that Obama wants it that way. I argue in Radical-in-Chief that Obama’s long-term hope is to divide America along class lines (roughly speaking, tax payers versus tax beneficiaries). Obama’s attack on the Supreme Court at his 2010 State of the Union address, his offensive against the Chamber of Commerce, his exhortation to Hispanics to punish their enemies, and several similar moves were all efforts to jump-start a populist movement of the left. Like his socialist organizing mentors, Obama believes that a country polarized along class lines will eventually realign American politics sharply to the left. Yet the entire strategy is based on the need for an activated, populist movement of the left. So far, Obama has failed to create such a movement. His expensive economic agenda has provoked a populist counter-movement of the right instead: Obama’s nightmare.