When President Obama started talking at his news conference Monday, I listened intently for 15 minutes or so. Then I got fidgety as his half-truths about the debt grew into full-blown whoppers. As he droned on, I did something I never did before during an Obama appearance: I turned off the TV.

Enough. He is the Man Who Won't Listen to Anybody, so why should anybody listen to him?

Tuning out and turning off the president does not fill me with gladness. He cannot be ignored.

But for now, I will leave that unhappy duty to others. I am tired of Barack Obama. There's nothing new there. His speeches are like "Groundhog Day."

His presidency is a spectacular failure, his historic mandate squandered by adherence to leftist ideology and relentless partisanship. His policies are crushing the prospects for growth and dooming the hopes of 24 million Americans who are unemployed or working part-time.

Yet he is not going to change. He listens only to his own voice, which is why he has lost virtually his entire economic team.

The biggest media myth is that he is a centrist. Oh, please. It's a theory without evidence, for there is not a single example on domestic issues where he voluntarily staked out a spot in the American middle.

Sure, on occasion, Obama will be to the right of the far, far left, but that is not the center. That just means he's not Michael Moore.

Nor is he a centrist because he'll make a deal under duress with Republicans, as he did last December. All politicians have a pragmatic streak, otherwise they couldn't get anything done in a divided government.

But Obama's default statist position remains unmolested by facts or last year's landslide that was a rebuke to his first two years. He continues to push bigger and bigger government, higher and higher taxes and more and more welfare programs.

He will compromise if he must, but he still wants what he wants and will come back for it again and again.

That's the subtext of the debt-ceiling talks and his press conference. He voted against raising the ceiling as a senator, calling the need for an increase a "failure."

Now he is not embarrassed to demand a hike of about $2.5 trillion, and more hair of the spending-and-taxing dog. He reveals his belief that your money is really the government's and it will decide how much you can keep. The only cut he is comfortable with is in the defense budget.

He says it's time to "pull off the Band-Aid" and "eat our peas." Translation: It's time for Republicans to give him everything he wants. That's his definition of being an adult and acting in the national interest.

His only concession to public will is to pretend he's got religion about the fiscal problems and wants a "big deal." What he really wants is to get through the election.

In answering a question about a poll showing that two-thirds of voters don't want the debt ceiling raised, he blew off 70 million Americans by saying they aren't paying attention.

There's a novel campaign theme: Elect me because you're too dumb to understand how smart I am.

Harry Truman ran against a "Do-Nothing" Congress. Obama is running against a "Know-Nothing" nation.

He can never be wrong. You always are, unless you agree with him.

That's the story of his presidency. That's who he is.

PERIL OF PASSING THE BUCKS

In a devastating critique of the new city budget, the Citizens Budget Commission predicts Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council soon will be forced back to the drawing board to do what they should have done last month.

Saying they "missed an important opportunity to put the city on firmer ground," Maria Doulis writes on the watchdog group's Web site that "thousands of layoffs and cuts will proceed in 2012 and another multibillion[-dollar] budget gap looms in 2013."

Bloomberg's initial proposal envisioned cutting 9,500 jobs, including laying off 4,300 teachers. Library services would be cut and 20 fire companies closed.

That's not what happened in the agreement between Bloomberg and mayoral wannabe Christine Quinn, the council speaker. Announced on a Friday night like most bad news, it added $521 million to the mayor's proposal, Doulis says.

Even more troubling is how it got there. The teachers union gave up sabbaticals for one year -- Big Whoop -- and agreed to let rubber-room teachers serve as substitutes, saving $60 million. But the biggest windfall came from simply adjusting revenue forecasts upward, instantly giving the pols $300 million more to spend, and spend they did. The fire closings were canceled and library services were actually expanded.

Doulis says the deal ignored the three big problems driving the imbalance. Health insurance, pension contributions and debt service cost taxpayers $11 billion in 2005 and will hit $23.1 billion in 2015. They will go from consuming 22 percent of all revenue to 33 percent, and will continue to force cuts elsewhere.

Mark her words. And remember them the next time City Hall bellyaches about being broke.

The sham of city's schools

The claim that Gotham principals allow students to make up missed course work improperly so they can graduate keeps showing up in teacher complaints. Here's one about Manhattan's Murry Bergtraum HS that was sent to Chancellor Dennis Walcott:

"I would like to tell you what has been happening lately. You cannot give a student a 45 or 50 unless he or she has been absent 15 or 20 times. Thus you have to give the student a 55. It is called seat time.

"During the year and especially in June near graduation time, they have credit recovery. The student can fill out a computer program for about 45 minutes, and he or she gets credit for a course which has gone on for five months.

Of course, many students know this and don't do any work all semester. Tens or even hundreds of students do this. Thus the graduation rates at Murry Bergtraum and, I suppose, at other high schools are totally false."

The letter argues that credit-recovery scams help explain why so few kids who graduate are ready for college, with 75 percent of those going to city community colleges needing remediation.

"They have not done any work all year," the teacher writes. "They also get the message that they do not have to do any work. This is unfair to the students, as well as being dishonest."

Over to you, Chancellor.

Young star makes right turn on reds

In accepting Sgt. Scott Moore's YouTube invitation to the Marine Ball, actress Mila Kunis proves herself a good sport. But in saying no to "friends with benefits," she proves a larger point. "It's like communism," she told GQ magazine. "Good in theory -- in execution, it fails."

Kunis knows communism. She was born in the Soviet Union and escaped with her family to the USA.