President Obama has returned to his script that "you can keep your doctor," when he knows that's not true. White House photo, Samantha Appleton

It’s beginning to feel like déjà vu. President Obama jumps on the stage of an auditorium in Anytown, U.S.A. Amid the cheers and applause, someone in the audience shouts, “I love you!” The president quips, “I love you back!”

The president starts reading the teleprompter, and eventually the mirror staring back at him tells Obama to say Americans who like their current health insurance can keep it. “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

We’ve heard it so many times, and not once has it been true.

Such was the case during the president’s speech at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa.

He continued to propagate his fabricated promises about health care reform. And he knows they’re fabricated.

The president told the audience:

And that’s why my proposal builds on the current system where most Americans get their health insurance from their employer. If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

That doesn’t coincide with what the president told House Republicans gathered Jan. 29:

The last thing I will say, though — let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.

In fact, the Congressional Budget Office, whom Obama cites often, said in December that the Senate bill would force some 10 million Americans out of their current health plans. And it wasn’t “some of the provisions that got snuck in” that violate the president’s empty promise.

The health care reform plan raises minimum standards for health insurance coverage. If you’re happy with your current insurance, and it doesn’t meet the new, federally-mandated standards, you won’t get to keep it.

What’s more, in many cases the cost of paying the federal penalty for not carrying insurance (or offering it if you’re a business) will be substantially more affordable to being insured. We can be sure that many people (and many businesses) will choose no coverage and pay the cheaper penalty.

Unless “the provisions that got snuck in” were somehow “snuck out” in the dead of night, they’re still there. Not everyone who is happy with their insurance will be able to keep it. Period.

The president did get something right during his speech. Yet again he said, “the time for talk is over.” Agreed. Especially when the talk is nothing but a bald-faced lie.

Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill, which reduces most people’s premiums and brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion over the next decade because we’re spending our health care dollars more wisely. Those aren’t my numbers. Those aren’t my numbers — they are the savings determined by the Congressional Budget Office, which is the nonpartisan, independent referee of Congress for what things cost.

The president’s claim of $1 trillion in savings during the next 10 years is off — way off. The CBO estimated that the Senate health care bill would reduce projected deficits by $132 billion. Obama’s number is inflated by about $868 billion.

According to Fox News’ Major Garrett, the president misspoke:

When contacted, a White House official said the President meant to say the Senate bill would save $1 trillion in its second decade.

O.K. Sometimes the teleprompter plays tricks.

But claiming a savings of $1 trillion during the second decade of health care reform is still a stretch, at Garrett reports:

The budget office did project possible second-decade savings of up to $1 trillion, but attached this note of caution: “A detailed year-by-year projection for years beyond 2019…would not be meaningful because the uncertainties involved are simply too great.”

In fact, if you read the CBO’s analysis, its cost and savings estimates beyond 2019 are full of caveats and doubts.

More than a year into his presidency, Barack Obama has yet to appoint anyone to the languishing Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. White House photo, Pete Souza

When President Obama took office a bit more than a year ago, his new administration made a big deal about its measures to increase civil liberty protections for foreigners — he promised to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within a year, end military tribunals for suspected terrorists and ban the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on those caught on the battlefield of the war on terror.

But when it comes to protecting the civil liberties of Americans, the president has let his efforts languish.

Michael Isikoff reports in Newsweek:

When President Bush two years ago failed to name members to a federal board to monitor the protection of civil liberties, Democrats and activist groups were duly outraged, seeing it as one more example of his administration’s indifference to the subject.

But more than a year into a new presidency, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board—created by Congress in 2007—remains as much a cipher under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The White House has yet to nominate a single person to sit on the five-person board. It has no members, no staff, and no office.

Civil liberty advocacy groups have now written two letters to the president, as have Democratic representatives Jane Harman and Bennie Thompson, who chair a subcommittee on terrorism and the House Homeland Security Committee, respectively, asking that he appoint members to the board.

The response from the White House?

But when she recently raised the issue of the vacant board with Denis McDonough, one of the president’s top national-security advisers, Harman said the response she got back was “nothing,” just “we’re working on it.”

Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, reaffirmed a previous statement from the White House more than a month ago that the president will nominate members “soon.” But he declined to specify how soon. “The president is committed to constituting the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board,” he said.

In 2008, Obama wasn’t so nonchalant about the civil liberties board. His campaign Web site promised:

Give Real Authority to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board: Created by Congress and recommended by the 9/11 Commission, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board needs to be substantially reformed and empowered to safeguard against an erosion in American civil liberties. As president, Barack Obama will support efforts to strengthen the Board with subpoena powers and reporting responsibilities, will give the Board a robust mandate designed to protect American civil liberties and will demand transparency from the Board to ensure accountability.

Leaving the board vacant for more than a year doesn’t exactly equal “a robust mandate.” Quite the opposite.

In fact, ProPublica reported in July 2009 that the White House scrubbed references to the board from its Web site.

Is the president just giving lip service to protecting civil liberties? One quarter of his term has passed, and the board that is supposed to be review government practices to safeguard our rights is caught in bureaucratic limbo.

“What seemed so imperative under Bush has just dropped off the radar screen,” laments Alan Charles Raul, who served as vice chairman of the earlier Bush civil-liberties advisory board. Now, he says, “No one seems to care.”

From the New York Times:

President Obama “is in excellent health” and likely to remain able to carry out his duties for the rest of his term, his doctor said Sunday after completing Mr. Obama’s first routine medical checkup since he took office.

But Mr. Obama, 48, continues to struggle to stop his 30-year smoking habit and needs to modify his diet, said Dr. Jeffrey Kuhlman, a Navy captain who led the medical team that performed Mr. Obama’s physical.

Obama told reporters last summer that he still smokes, so this really isn’t news. However, it is telling.

In February 2008, candidate Obama claimed to have quit — mainly because his wife said he had to if he wanted to run for president. Clearly that was a lie.

As president, he has signed two pieces of legislation designed to get Americans to kick the habit or prevent them from starting to smoke at all. One increases the tax on cigarettes, the other puts new regulations on the tobacco industry.

So with the president, it’s do as I say, not as I do (as is the case with many smoking parents). As a president who has taken such a stand against smoking cigarettes, Obama should not be smoking. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a big deal (if the president wants a cigarette, let him smoke).

It also means that when Obama says, “I haven’t signed a bill that’s raised taxes yet,” he knows it’s a lie. The price he pays for a pack of Marlboro Reds went up along with the price paid by everyone else — so he could pay for health care for poor kids.

Also in the physician’s report:

The examination also found that Mr. Obama’s cholesterol count has risen to borderline high levels since his last publicly released medical records, though his pulse rate and blood pressure remain normal.

… Mr. Obama’s cholesterol increase comes at a time when his wife, Michelle, has started a program to fight childhood obesity.

He hasn’t followed the First Lady’s directive to quit smoking, but maybe she’ll get him to watch that cholesterol.

The president was right that a single weather event isn’t a true measure of global temperature trends, but he ruined his point by adding a specious anecdote of his own:

First of all, we just got five feet of snow in Washington and so everybody is like — a lot of the people who are opponents of climate change, they say, see, look at that, there’s all this snow on the ground, this doesn’t mean anything. I want to just be clear that the science of climate change doesn’t mean that every place is getting warmer; it means the planet as a whole is getting warmer. But what it may mean is, for example, Vancouver, which is supposed to be getting snow during the Olympics, suddenly is at 55 degrees, and Dallas suddenly is getting seven inches of snow.

Not only is the president doing exactly what he criticizes global warming skeptics of doing, he’s completely wrong.

The lack of snow in Vancouver this time of year is perfectly normal, as noted by Canadian Donna Laframboise:

Excuse me, but I happen to not only live here in Canada, but to have had family and friends who resided for years in or near the breathtakingly gorgeous (not to mention murderously expensive) city of Vancouver.

I know, therefore, that they don’t own many winter coats in that part of our vast country – and that mowing their lawns is a perfectly ordinary February activity. Vancouver’s weather is much like Seattle’s and, as a friend of mine who lives in the American city mentioned this week, her daffodils have begun to bloom.

She points to a Vancouver Sun article about the Olympic Committee’s knowledge of Vancouver’s moderate temperatures before choosing the city to hose the event:

Statistics compiled by The Vancouver Sun indicate that no city with a climate as mild as Vancouver’s has ever hosted the Winter Games.

Past Olympics have been held in picturesque, snowy towns full of residents bundled up in ski gear.

But world sports fans who turn on their TVs in 2010 will probably see the kind of winter Vancouverites know all too well: a cloudy, rainy city full of people carrying umbrellas.

In the month of February, when the Games will be held, Vancouver has an average temperature of 4.8 degrees Celsius.

Ed Morrisey also points out that the average Vancouver temperature in late February is 48 degrees — well above freezing and near the “55 degrees” Obama cited during his town hall.

President Obama mispronounced a Navy corpsman's rank and mixed up his name during the National Prayer Breakfast. White House photo

While speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama talked about God’s grace and the humanitarian efforts of the U.S. armed forces in Haiti. He included a story about a Navy corpsman — but he mispronounced corpsman, saying “corpse man,” twice and he got the corpsman’s name wrong.

One such translator was an American of Haitian descent, representative of the extraordinary work that our men and women in uniform do all around the world — Navy Corpsman Christian [sic] Brossard. And lying on a gurney aboard the USNS Comfort, a woman asked Christopher: “Where do you come from? What country? After my operation,” she said, “I will pray for that country.” And in Creole, Corpsman Brossard responded, “Etazini.” The United States of America.

This is a bit embarrassing for a president who reportedly was so worried about offending the armed forces that he practiced his salute. And we’ve got to wonder, does he say “Marine Corps” or “Marine Corpse?”

Allahpundit at Hot Air writes:

I can’t believe that a guy with a Harvard Law degree wouldn’t know how to pronounce “corps,” so I’m guessing some dumb staffer in charge of TOTUS decided to try to “help him out” by typing the phonetic pronunciation — incorrectly — into the machine. And in true Ron Burgundy fashion, O read it as is right off the ‘prompter. You stay classy, Navy corpse-men!

Even if it was wrong on the teleprompter (which isn’t outside the realm of possibility), the president could have corrected himself — and avoided making the same mistake twice. Especially since he made this same mistake back in October.

And doesn’t anyone proofread the president’s speeches before he gives them? Mixing up the corpsman’s name is just amateur.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood had to quickly clarify his advice to Congress that Toyota owners 'stop driving' their cars. White House photo, Pete Souza

Is Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood taking rhetorical lessons from Vice President Joe Biden?

Immediately after telling a House committee that people who own a Toyota automobile affected by the car maker’s massive accelerator recall to “stop driving” them, LaHood said it was a misstatement.

From the New York Times:

Mr. LaHood, the transportation secretary, was asked what guidance he would give to Toyota owners affected by a series of recalls.

“My advice,” Mr. LaHood said in his characteristically folksy tone, “is if anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop driving it. And take it to a Toyota dealer.”

He finished his remarks to a House appropriations subcommittee, then headed outside the hearing room, where it became clear that his testimony would be remembered for three words: “Stop driving it.”

When greeted by reporters, he immediately tried to modify his words. “What I said in there was obviously a misstatement,” Mr. LaHood said, adding that he meant to say, “If you own one of these cars, or if you’re in doubt, take it to the dealer.”

Here’s CNN’s video:

The secretary’s remark sent Toyota’s shares on the stock market down, even after he “clarified” his remarks.

LaHood may have made the classic mistake of saying something true: A car that accelerates on its own and won’t stop isn’t safe to drive.

Despite that, the incident caused some to ask if the Obama administration was attempting to use its influence to prop up General Motors, of which the government owns a majority share (but that’s just silly).

This isn’t the first time LaHood’s comments had to be quickly withdrawn. Almost a year ago he said the administration would explore taxing drivers on the mileage they traveled — his own department retracted the statement the same day.

With respect to earmarks, we didn’t have earmarks in the Recovery Act. We didn’t get a lot of credit for it, but there were no earmarks in that.

Is Obama telling the truth? It depends on what the meaning of the words ‘is’ is.

The president promised in early 2009 that the stimulus bill would have no earmarks. So he and the Democrats didn’t call them earmarks.

The bill was, however, filled with pet projects and pork that easily fall under the definition of an earmark.

An analysis by ProPublica and WNYC Radio in New York found project after project in the $787 billion bill that, had they been attached to any other legislation, would be defined as an earmark.

In theory and publicity, the package is “earmark free.” But it contains dozens of narrowly defined programs that send money to specific areas or cater to special interests, despite President Obama’s pledge to pass “an economic recovery plan that is free from earmarks and pet projects.”

… In part, the answer hinges on what’s an “earmark.” Democrats insist they are nowhere in the plan; Republicans see “pork” everywhere. So we cribbed from criteria Congress laid out in a 2007 reform bill: language that aims spending at specific programs, states or localities, often at a member’s request.

Specific location? The Senate stimulus contains $50 million for habitat restoration and other water needs in the San Francisco Bay area. There is another $62 million for military projects in Guam.

Specific industry? The House bill includes an amendment authored by Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley setting aside $500 million for biofuel makers, which he says, would bring jobs home to Iowa.

Specific program? There’s $198 million to compensate Filipino World War II veterans for their service. Most don’t live in the United States.

ProPublica even published a partial list.

The president is — and has been for a year — playing semantics. The projects are earmarks.

Obama disingenuously says provisions "snuck" into bill would separate patients from their doctors. White House photo, Pete Souza

While answering questions from House Republicans in Baltimore, the president let this little nugget out of the bag:

The last thing I will say, though — let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.

Just two days before, during his State of the Union Address, President Obama said this:

Our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan.

Analysts, including the Congressional Budget Office, have been saying for months that the health care reform bills in Congress would force people out of their current insurance policies, and therefore away from their doctors. But the president kept making that promise. As recently as two days ago.

Now he admits that the bills wouldn’t keep it. Disingenuously.

President Obama says some provisions were “snuck” into the bills that break his promise. But the CBO said back in August and again in December that the Senate bills, specifically, would drop about 10 million from their health insurance plans.

It’s ridiculous for the president to act like the process “snuck” the government into coming between Americans and their doctors. It’s been in the bills from the beginning.

The “joke” last summer was that members hadn’t read the health care bill before voting on it — apparently the president was just as clueless.

President Obama says a "big chunk" of people have never seen a recession. They must all be under 10-years-old. White House photo

Speaking in Tampa, Fla., President Obama rolled out his old “we inherited” the economic problems when we took office line. This time, he tried to put it into historical perspective:

In the last two years, we’ve gone through the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Think about that. A big chunk of the people here — certainly the younger people here — have never even seen a recession; they don’t even — it doesn’t register on their minds. This is by far the toughest thing that the country has gone through economically since the 1930s.

There’s no exact data on the age of the crowd to which the president was speaking, but the video from the event shows a packed gym of adults — who surely remember the year 2001 — when the last recession occurred.

Just as a reminder, the 2001 recession began in March of that year and lasted until November. Ending the longest period of economic expansion in the U.S. on record (but who’s really keeping track of the beginnings and endings of recessions?).

But, you know, a “big chunk” of people didn’t see it, according to President Obama. Even if the crowd was composed entirely of people who just reached voting age, 18, that would put them at 9-years-old during the last recession. So maybe they missed it. After all, 2001 was a forgettable year … oh wait.

The next time the president addresses national security, will he suggest that a “big chunk” of people in the audience “have never even seen” a terrorist attack?