Obama on Various Things…

A coupla not-good quotes from the official phenom of '08:

"We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control," Obama said. "The fallout from the housing crisis that's cost jobs and wiped out savings was not an inevitable part of the business cycle, it was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington."

Obama opened his campaign for next week's Wisconsin primary inside a General Motors plant in Janesville, one day after General Motors Corp. posted a $38 billion loss, the largest ever for a U.S. auto company. He criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was signed during the Clinton administration, and offered a series of plans to inject more jobs into the economy.

"You know, in the years after her husband signed N.A.F.T.A, Senator Clinton would go around talking about how great it was and how many benefits it would bring," Obama said. "Now that she's running for president, she says we need a time-out on trade. No one knows when this time-out will end. Maybe after the election."

I smell…intervention in the economy.

Here's a quote that's a little better, though I'm not sure I believe he would have been a voice of dissent in an Senate that voted 77-23 in favor of authorizing force in Iraq:

"It's a Washington where politicians like John McCain and Hillary Clinton voted for a war in Iraq that should've never been authorized and never been waged - a war that is costing us thousands of precious lives and billions of dollars a week," Obama said.

More here. Truth-teller Bill Clinton calls Obama's war stance "the biggest fairytale I've ever seen," and argues that Obama is more like John Kerry when it comes to bombs away. And reason's Jacob Sullum reported a while back that Obama's position on marijuana decriminalization is twitching back and forth like Robert Downey Jr. on a Friday night.

I believe in change, yes I do. But I believe in cash even more.