:: March 2009 ::
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New Era : Spend and Blame
[nyp] : For a guy who talks so much about wanting a new era of re sponsibility, President Obama spends an awful lot of time blaming Republicans for all the wild and reckless spending he crammed into his own budget.
After running a campaign against the $1 trillion deficit he "inherited" from President Bush and the Republicans, Obama quickly matched it. During his first 50 days in office, he and his Democratic-controlled Congress spent $1 billion an hour.
Under Obama's proposed budget, the overall national debt doubles in five years and triples in 10.
Not exactly "moving from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest," as he promised.
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Ignoring The 'Tea Parties'
[ibd] The press need not support every protest it covers. But when it ignores a grass fire movement against government spending while its favored politician watches closely, then there's dereliction of duty.
Five more "tea parties" took place last weekend to protest runaway congressional spending. Showing up with hand-lettered signs were people not often seen at protests. [...]
But the real reason the major media aren't interested in these protests is that they don't agree with them. In the final analysis, these affairs are really taking issue with the political party they helped elect without hiding bias in the last election.
That's why a small scrum of Acorn-financed wackos on a bus tour to intimidate AIG execs last weekend made the news while the tea parties didn't.
But unlike the staged, sparsely attended Acorn event, the tea parties are national, growing and indicative of a shift of public sentiment. If proof is needed, one need look no further than the attention the protests are getting from the Obama administration.
One of the biggest protests so far drew 15,000 on March 8 in Fullerton, Calif. But a Los Angeles Times blogger dismissed the event as "a radio stunt" because it was organized by local radio deejays. There was no explanation why the Times and other media were all over a 2006 immigration protest that was also called by deejays.
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Bush Deficit vs. Obama Deficit
[heritage] : President Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed that his budget would cut the deficit by half by the end of his term. But as Heritage analyst Brian Riedl has pointed out, given that Obama has already helped quadruple the deficit with his stimulus package, pledging to halve it by 2013 is hardly ambitious.
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The 0bama Press Conference
[lat] : [...] At times the president appeared to be mailing in his delivery.
He made no notable news and did so quite smoothly. Unless sticking by his guns over cutting charitable deductions is news.
And the former constitutional law professor did go on in his answers, perhaps not by accident. Holding the floor is another means of control for any president. Like males hold the TV remotes.
The result: only 13 questions in 57 minutes.
And as The Ticket noted during its live blogging, not one single question on either war, including the one the commander in chief recently ordered 17,000 more Americans to march into.
Nothing holding the president to account for the conflicting timelines on who knew what when about the stunning AIG bonuses. Nothing asking him to detail the incredible $40 billion in savings he claims to have discovered in defense spending.
Even when the president was confronted with a blunt question of whether he'd accept the budget without certain favored provisions, he passed up the chance for a clear answer for one re-expressing his confidence that after the legislators have their way with the proposal, he'd get his budget the way he wants it. That's the standard bargaining stance this early in the process, even when the president's own party controls both sides of Capitol Hill.
But claiming "complete confidence" means absolutely nothing.
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Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA
[slshdt] "The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. [...]
Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"
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House GOP obtains e-mails from Countrywide's VIP loan program
[wt] : A new report showcases the lengths executives at Countrywide Financial went to in order to provide below-market mortgage rates to well-connected Washington insiders.
Countrywide's CEO Angelo Mozilo granted sweetheart mortgages to a number of influential lawmakers including Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd, who is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and Democratic Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota. E-mails obtained by government investigators show Countrywide employees often discussed the political influence wielded by "Friends of Angelo" as grounds for granting the discounts. [...]
Countrywide also gave discounts to congressional staffers who served influential members. E-mails about a mortgage for Joyce Brayboy, chief of staff for Rep. Melvin Watt, a Democrat from North Carolina, noted "[Brayboy] reports directly to Congressman Mel Watt who introduced predatory lending legislation to address unscrupulous lending practices, and they do view Countrywide as a trusted advisor."
Other e-mails related to Dodd and Conrad are revealing but not as explicit.
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Drug cartels' new weaponry means war
[lat] : Narcotics traffickers are acquiring firepower more appropriate to an army -- including grenade launchers and antitank rockets -- and the police are feeling outgunned. [...]
Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semiauto- matic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. [...]
How many weapons have been smuggled into Mexico from Central America is not known, and the military-grade munitions are still a small fraction of the larger arsenal in the hands of narcotics traffickers. Mexican officials continue to push Washington to stem the well-documented flow of conventional weapons from the United States, as Congress holds hearings on the role those smuggled guns play in arming Mexican drug cartels.
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Five Signs of a Flailing Presidency
[tws] : You don't have to be an old Washington hand to spot the telltale signs of a presidency and an administration in serious trouble. There's nothing new about these clues. The inability to get their stories straight--that's a hardy perennial of high-level officials caught in the vise of political embarrassment. A president who skips town to avoid the White House press corps and speak directly to the American people--we've sure seen that before. So in a sense the AIG mess has touched off nothing more than business as usual.
What goes on in Washington usually comes across as background noise to the public, but not this time. Bonuses for AIG executives are like the infamous Bridge to Nowhere--an issue that's broken through outside Washington. And we know it's become a major political problem for the president because he and his administration act as if it has. Here are five signs of this:
1. His allies are moving to protect the president [...]
2. The president gets out of town [...]
3. Top spokesmen dismiss the crisis as a distraction [...]
4. Administration figures can't keep their stories straight [...]
5. The president indulges in hyperbole [...]
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Incompetence and Questionable Trivial Pursuit
[wapo] A $14 trillion economy hangs by a thread composed of (a) a comically cynical, pitchfork-wielding Congress, (b) a hopelessly understaffed, stumbling Obama administration, and (c) $165 million.
That's $165 million in bonus money handed out to AIG debt manipulators who may be the only ones who know how to defuse the bomb they themselves built. Now, in the scheme of things, $165 million is a rounding error. It amounts to less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion federal budget. It's less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bailout money given to AIG alone. If Bill Gates were to pay these AIG bonuses every year for the next 100 years, he'd still be left with more than half his personal fortune.
For this we are going to poison the well for any further financial rescues, face the prospect of letting AIG go under (which would make the Lehman Brothers collapse look trivial) and risk a run on the entire world financial system?
And there is such a thing as law. The way to break a contract legally is Chapter 11. Short of that, a contract is a contract. The AIG bonuses were agreed to before the government takeover and are perfectly legal. Is the rule now that when public anger is kindled, Congress will summarily cancel contracts?
Even worse are the clever schemes being cooked up in Congress to retrieve the money by means of some retroactive confiscatory tax. The common law is pretty clear about the impermissibility of ex post facto legislation and bills of attainder. They also happen to be specifically prohibited by the Constitution. We're going to overturn that for $165 million?
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Obama White House Bars Press From Press Award Ceremony
[lat] : We are not making this up:
Barack Obama was elected commander in chief promising to run the most transparent presidential administration in American history.
This achievement and the overall promise of his historic administration caused the National Newspaper Publishers Assn. to name him "Newsmaker of the Year."
The president is to receive the award from the federation of black community newspapers in a White House ceremony this afternoon.
The Obama White House has closed the press award ceremony to the press.
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The Hits Just Keep Coming : Obama Compares His Bowling to Special Olympics
The guy is a one man carnival of laughs. He compares AIG to suicide bombers and now he suggests that his bowling is like someone participating in the Special Olympics. Good one Barry! It's easy to see how you've come as far as you have. What a charade and an impostor.
Of course the media suck ups and sycophants call it just a 'gaffe' or say that The Commander of The Politically Correct just had a misspoken moment or some such nonsense. This underscores one of my peeves and the thinking that the PC mindset allows and even enables the liars and phonies. Yes, certainly it's not cool to say many things, but if you're ignorant enough to do so, well, good for you. At least everyone can see that and not be sucked in by a politician-like prattle of sheer BS.
Personally, I'd rather know where I stand and who is the ignoramus, right up front, so they are exposed and I can then choose to avoid them. Say what you like and receive the estrangement that may come with that freedom.
It would seem that this surprisingly growing number of jackass examples expose a mindset and show what the character of the man truly is, how he really thinks. You know, when he's not reading his teleprompter, which is obviously 98% of the time and will probably now get notched up further. Orator supreme!
Yes, the list of these things now seems endless, these 'can you imagine if Bush' had said that examples. This one, or any of the many other verbal ignorances or 'gaffes' would be run every 10 minutes on every station for months. Too many to enumerate, but the reality is only lost on the willingly blind. Keep on keepin' on exposing yourself Barry. It's healthy and ever so cool.
World Leaders Exchange Gifts
Gordon Brown presents the new President with: a pen holder carved from the timbers of HMS Gannett, a sister ship of HMS Resolute; the commissioning certificate of HMS Resolute; and a seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill. In return, the Prime minister gets 25 DVDS, which don't work in Britain.
[telegraph:top10]
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Unbeliveable : Obama AIG-Suicide Bomber Analogy
[csm] : [...] Just two days ago Grassley told an Iowa radio station that AIG executives should consider suicide as an option. He later clarified that his remarks were just rhetorical and they should live.
[...]today, President Obama took that rhetoric in a different direction. He actually upped the ante explaining that AIG is like a suicide bomber.
“We had to step in, it was the right thing to do, even though it is infuriating,” Obama said, explaining why the government needed to bail out the troubled banks.
“The same is true with AIG,” he said. “It was the right thing to do to step in. Here’s the problem. It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.”
What an amazing orator. The guy is just so super cool. It's the height of cool to compare AIG to suicide bombers. You bet.
We've barely begun this administration and the hits just keep coming. I honestly expected more, at least some down time and allowing of work to get done, even if at base I disagree with it.
Never mind that this group of Dems are bold faced liars, robbers, incompetents, and the saddest clowns to come down the pike, it's well beyond insult to spout this brain dead nonsense. Get the teleprompter back up jackass.
The ever enlightened, great ideas just keep flowing from the President Teleprompter administration. After it dawned on some Sage that a policy allowing private insurance companies to charge veterans for the treatment of "service and war-related injuries" wasn't the greatest idea we keep going down this path:
Guantanamo Detainees May Be Released in U.S.
[wsj] Attorney General Eric Holder said some detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may end up being released in the U.S. as the Obama administration works with foreign allies to resettle some of the prisoners. [...]
For "people who can be released there are a variety of options that we have and among them is the possibility is that we would release them into this country," Mr. Holder said. "That process is ongoing and we've not made any determinations or made any requests of anybody at this point."
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Funny If It Wasn't Pathetic : Irish PM Starts Reading President Teleprompter's Speech By Mistake
[yahoo] Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was just a few paragraphs into an address at a St. Patrick's Day celebration at the White House when he realized something sounded way too familiar. Turns out, he was repeating the speech President Barack Obama had just given. [...]
But Cowen was 20 seconds into his second address when it dawned on him that he was giving word for word the speech that Obama had just read from the same teleprompter.
Cowen stopped and looked back at the president to say, "That's your speech."
Obama laughed and returned to the podium to offer what might have been Cowen's remarks. In doing so, President Obama thanked President Obama for inviting everyone over.
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The Pathetic Dodd
After blowing smoke and shoveling blatant manure for a solid day, this lowlife tries to spin away his nonsense. "Obviously."
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Dodd Tries to Undo Bonus Protections in the 'Dodd Amendment' Rules
[fox] : Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) on Monday night floated the idea of taxing American International Group (AIG: 1.33, 0.38, 40%) bonus recipients so the government could recoup some or all of the $450 million the company is paying to employees in its financial products unit. Within hours, the idea spread to both houses of Congress, with lawmakers proposing an AIG bonus tax.
While the Senate was constructing the $787 billion stimulus last month, Dodd added an executive-compensation restriction to the bill. The provision, now called “the Dodd Amendment” by the Obama Administration provides an “exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009” -- which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are now seeking to tax.
Dodd’s original amendment did not include that exemption, and the Connecticut Senator denied inserting the provision.
“I can't point a finger at someone who was responsible for putting those dates in,” Dodd told FOX. “I can tell you this much, when my language left the senate, it did not include it. When it came back, it did.”
“Because of negotiations with the Treasury Department and the bill Conferees, several modifications were made,” Dodd Spokesperson Kate Szostak in a response to FOX Business.
The provision excluding those bonus payments made it into the final version of the bill, and is law.
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Got to be Kidding? Seriously...Barney to 'Revamp' Freddies and Fannie
[wsj] Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he hopes to introduce legislation later this year to restructure government-backed mortgage investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
"The current model is broken," the Massachusetts Democrat said in an interview Tuesday. One possibility, he said, is to separate the companies into entities serving two functions: one that would ensure adequate funding for the home-mortgage market as a whole and another that would provide government subsidies for housing low-income people.
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Send Out The Clowns : Treasury and Fed Knew of Bonuses Last Fall
[nyt] [...] The Treasury and Federal Reserve officials said they had known about the bonus program as far back as last fall. The program has provoked public protests from a handful of critics and at least one Democratic lawmaker in Congress — Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, a member of the House Committee on Government Oversight, who demanded without success in December that A.I.G. provide information about the bonuses.
Mr. Cummings said he had been communicating regularly with A.I.G.’s chief executive, Edward M. Liddy, about the bonuses ever since December. Mr. Cummings said he was particularly concerned that the bonuses were supposed to be paid by March 15, adding that he assumed Treasury officials had the same worries.
“I assumed that they were well aware of it and would take appropriate action” before the March 15 deadline, Mr. Cummings said. “In light of the biggest quarterly loss in history, you would think that A.I.G. and Mr. Liddy would have been able to convince folks who were supposed to be getting these retention payments, based at least in part on performance, that they might want to voluntarily not take all or part of them.”
Treasury and Fed officials said they knew that A.I.G. paid $55 million in bonuses in December.
But administration officials said that the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, did not personally become aware until last week that an even bigger round of payments was due on March 15. Administration officials said Mr. Geithner learned of the deadline early last week, when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York alerted him that the bonus payments were coming due.
Mr. Geithner, according to Treasury officials, insisted that the bonus plan was “unacceptable” and called Mr. Liddy on Wednesday to demand changes.
A.I.G. executives said they would never have proceeded with the bonus payments before getting approval from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
The Stimulus Bill Explicitly Guarantees Contractual Bonuses Executed Before February 11
[nro] : Who in their right mind would codify in law that bonus payments to executives at bailed-out companies could not be prohibited?
Well, Chris Dodd.
From page H1412 of the Final Stimulus Bill, “SEC. 111. EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE:
'(iii) The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009, as such valid employment contracts are determined by the Secretary or the designee of the Secretary.”
This amendment provides an exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009, which exempts the very AIG bonuses Obama is condemning every single chance he gets. The amendment is in the final version and is law.
That's the amendment that Dodd got placed in the Obama stimulus bill. You know, the one that passed with no House Republican votes, and only three Senate Republican votes.
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Dem 'Group of 15': Slow It Down Mr. O
[politico] [...] There is rising doubt among Democrats — particularly moderates already concerned about the big costs and deficits called for in Obama’s budget — that either Obama or Washington have enough bandwidth this year to stimulate the economy, overhaul the failed financial sector and move on to a far-reaching domestic agenda.
“From the standpoint of the Congress, there’s only so much that we can absorb and do at one time,” Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, told POLITICO Tuesday. “To maintain a schedule like the one we’ve got at this moment, throughout the year, I don’t know if it will be healthy.”
Democrats’ comments were muted, with few directly criticizing Obama for being too ambitious. But several lawmakers made clear that they have trouble with Obama’s logic that deep economic troubles make it more urgent, not less, to take on expensive projects such as health care and education reform.
“Everybody has to bring something to the table,” said Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, a leader of a 15-member caucus of conservative and centrist Democrats. “That doesn’t mean that you have to postpone your aspirations forever. But until we’re through this crisis and growth has resumed, there’s going to be some belt-tightening that’s necessary.”
These doubts reflect conflicting currents in Obama’s political circumstances just 60 days into his administration.
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Dem groups quietly align
[politico] A broad coalition of left-leaning groups is quietly closing ranks into a new coalition, "Unity '09," aimed at helping President Barack Obama push his agenda through Congress.
Conceived at a New York meeting before the November election, two Democrats familiar with the planning said, Unity '09 will draw together money and grassroots organizations to pressure lawmakers in their home states to back White House legislation and other progressive causes.
The online-based MoveOn.org is a central player in the nascent organization, but other groups involved in planning Unity '09 span a broad spectrum of interests, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Council of La Raza to Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions and environmental groups. [...]
Along with the groups previously mentioned, others involved in planning discussions include the Sierra Club, Media Matters for America, and Health Care for America Now.
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Obama Camp : "Economy is Sound" : People Somehow Find Meaning Different This Time
[yahoo] The economy is fundamentally sound despite the temporary "mess" it's in, the White House said Sunday in the kind of upbeat assessment that Barack Obama had mocked as a presidential candidate.
Obama's Democratic allies pleaded for patience with an administration hitting the two-month mark this week, while Republicans said the White House's plans ignore small business and the immediate need to fix what ails the economy. After weeks projecting a dismal outlook on the economy, administration officials — led by the president himself in recent days — swung their rhetoric toward optimism in what became Wall Street's best stretch since November.
During the fall campaign, Obama relentlessly criticized his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, for declaring, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." Obama's team painted the veteran senator as out of touch and failing to grasp the challenges facing the country.
But on Sunday, that optimistic message came from economic adviser Christina Romer. When asked during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" if the fundamentals of the economy were sound, she replied: "Of course they are sound."
"The fundamentals are sound in the sense that the American workers are sound, we have a good capital stock, we have good technology," she said.
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Honeymoon Bliss Fading...
[nyd] Not long ago, after a string of especially bad days for the Obama administration, a veteran Democratic pol approached me with a pained look on his face and asked, "Do you think they know what they're doing?"
The question caught me off guard because the man is a well-known Obama supporter. As we talked, I quickly realized his asking suggested his own considerable doubts. [...]
Polls show that most people like Obama, but they increasingly don't like his policies. The vast spending hikes and plans for more are provoking the most concern, with 82% telling a Gallup survey they are worried about the deficit and 69% worried about the rapid growth of government under Obama. Most expect their own taxes will go up as a result, despite the President's promises to the contrary.
None other than Warren Buffet, an Obama supporter, has called the administration's message on the economy "muddled." Even China says it is worried about its investments in American Treasury bonds. Ouch.
Much of the blame falls on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whose appalling tax problems softened the ground under him before he took office. After his initial fumbling presentations, he became a butt of jokes on "Saturday Night Live," not a sustainable image for the point man in a recession. And still the market waits for his answer to the banks' toxic assets.
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[H] : [...] Some Democrats have started to worry that voters don’t and won’t understand the link between economic revival and Obama’s huge agenda, which includes saving the banking industry, ending home foreclosures, reforming healthcare and developing a national energy policy, among much else.
While lawmakers debate controversial proposals contained in the new president’s debut budget — cutting farm subsidies, raising taxes on charitable contributions, etc. — there is a growing sense that time is running out faster than expected.
Democrats from states racked by recession say Obama needs to produce an uptick by August or face unpleasant consequences. Others say that there is more time, but that voters need to see improvement by the middle of next year.
The most optimistic say Obama and Democrats in Congress will face a political backlash unless the economy improves by Election Day 2010.
“We’ve got to see an uptick by August or the Democratic majority is in jeopardy,” said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), whose state had an 11.6 percent unemployment rate in January.
Stupak doesn’t fault Obama for pursuing healthcare reform, because high medical costs are intertwined with the economic difficulties, he said.
But Obama must move quickly, he added, saying, “By summer there is no more honeymoon. Period.”
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Yet again....The People Call Bullshit
[wsj] President Barack Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill Wednesday that includes thousands of pet projects inserted by lawmakers, even as he unveiled new rules to restrict such so-called earmarks.
At the same time, after Democrats criticized former President George W. Bush's signing statements, Mr. Obama issued one of his own, declaring five provisions in the spending bill to be unconstitutional and nonbinding, including one aimed at preventing punishment of whistleblowers.
Presidents have employed signing statements to reject provisions of a bill without vetoing the entire legislation. Democrats and some Republicans have complained that Mr. Bush abused such statements by declaring that he would ignore congressional intent on more than 1,200 sections of bills, easily a record. Mr. Obama has ordered a review of his predecessor's signing statements and said he would rein in the practice.
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Did Obama Cause the Stock Slide?
[businessweek] : [...] Polls still show the President has strong popularity among the general U.S. population, and Obama continues to command power in Congress. But among investors, fairly or unfairly, there is griping that the new Obama Administration is at least partly to blame for the recent slide in stocks. Since Nov. 4, Election Day, the broad Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is off about 25%, and since Jan. 20, when Obama took office, the "500" is down 15%.
It's never easy to determine exactly why the stock market moves in a particular direction. Plenty of other factors have influenced stock prices since November. For example.....
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Obama, Geithner : Low Grades From Economists
[wsj] : U.S. President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner received failing grades for their efforts to revive the economy from participants in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey.
The economists' assessment stands in stark contrast with Mr. Obama's popularity with the public, with a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll giving him a 60% approval rating. A majority of the 49 economists polled said they were dissatisfied with the administration's economic policies.
On average, they gave the president a grade of 59 out of 100, and although there was a broad range of marks, 42% of respondents rated Mr. Obama below 60. Mr. Geithner received an average grade of 51. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke scored better, with an average 71.
The economists, many of whom have been continually surprised by the depth of the downturn, also pushed back yet again their forecasts for when a recovery would begin. On average, they expect the downturn to end in October.
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"I've come to see Maher as an anti-intellectual unable to sustain a debate outside the authoritarian context of his comedy routine, he always reminded me of a type of undergrad from my northeastern liberal college days: the lounge-lizard faux erudition, the stockpile of glib phrases, the skills of a class cut-up -- but no staying power. As soon as we broke up into debate groups, the glazed eyes, the lit cigarette, the lost interest." -Raven [bighollywood]
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[msnbc]
This from the MSNBC site? The cheerleadering, leg tinglers of the Obama camp? Why aren't we hearing a mention of this (OK, admittedly, I can't stomach the station at all, so maybe they have mentioned it - yea, sure.) on the station or craptastical CNN or elsewhere? Gee...I wonder. Hey, and what up with John Edwards? Where's he been anyway? Which of his "two Americas' do you think he's living in? Why aren't we hearing the endless drone of this hair cut super-boy and his current life? Surely it's got to be newsworthy, akin to the latest on Britney or puppies and swingsets? Just wondering.
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Lights Are On : Nobody Home
[dsurber] Barack Obama is too busy posing for magazine covers to actually do the job to which he was elected.
There is a price to be paid when a president throws a party every other night, weekends in Chicago or Camp David and poses for magazine cover after magazine cover.
After 51 days in office, Barack Obama has appointed only 73 people to 1,200 jobs that require Senate confirmation.
If they require Senate approval, they are important jobs.
But Obama is too busy to properly vet the people and appoint them to fill the jobs to get the work done.
Cabinet chief: Obama team 'unreachable'
[independentuk] : Last week, it was all smiles and handshakes as Gordon Brown and President Barack Obama put on a show of unity in Washington.
But yesterday, Sir Gus O'Donnell, Britain's most senior civil servant, exposed transatlantic tension when he protested that Downing Street was finding it "unbelievably difficult" to plan for next month's G20 summit in London because of problems tracking down senior figures in the US administration. "There is nobody there. You cannot believe how difficult it is," the Cabinet Secretary told a civil service conference in Gateshead.
Last night Downing Street insisted the comments – reported on the Whitehall and Westminster World website – had been taken out of context. It added that Britain and the US had established a "very good and close working relationship" in the run-up to the G20 conference in London on 2 April. [...]
The Cabinet Secretary's comments were removed from the website after the Government protested.
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Embarrassing! : Not The O's Fault
[salon] Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing series of flubs that have overshadowed President Obama's first seven weeks in office and given the scattered, demoralized Republicans a huge boost toward regrouping and resurrection. (Michelle, please use those fabulous toned arms to butt some heads!)
First it was that chaotic pig rut of a stimulus package, which let House Democrats throw a thousand crazy kitchen sinks into what should have been a focused blueprint for economic recovery. Then it was the stunt of unnerving Wall Street by sending out a shrill duo of slick geeks (Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag) as the administration's weirdly adolescent spokesmen on economics. Who could ever have confidence in that sorry pair?
And then there was the fiasco of the ham-handed White House reception for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which was evidently lacking the most basic elements of ceremony and protocol. Don't they read the "Iliad" anymore in the Ivy League? Check that out for the all-important ritual of gift giving, which has cemented alliances around the world for 5,000 years.
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[mramirez]
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Murtha's 'Earmark Factory'
[politco] Over the course of the past decade, Rep. John P. Murtha has earmarked millions of dollars for the Electro-Optics Center at Penn State University — money that has, in turn, gone to clients of the PMA Group, the Murtha-linked lobbying shop that was raided in November as part of a federal criminal probe.
Founded in 1999 as a joint enterprise run by Penn State and the Office of Naval Research, the EOC promotes electronic research needed for state-of-the-art military equipment.
But sources familiar with the EOC’s operations say Murtha has used the center as a “front” for PMA and other lobbyists and contractors with ties to the Pennsylvania Democrat.
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Pelosi Unprecedented Demands for Military Aircraft and Wasted Taxpayer Resources
[jw] : Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents from the Department of Defense (DOD) detailing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's multiple requests for military air travel. The documents, obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), include internal DOD email correspondence detailing attempts by DOD staff to accommodate Pelosi's numerous requests for military escorts and military aircraft as well as the speaker's last minute cancellations and changes. The following are a few highlights from the documents, which are linked in full below.....
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Fleischer and "The Tingler" Matthews
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Romney's Prospects Raised
[b] : For a while, it looked like Mitt Romney would become more a figure of ridicule than promise. Stiff, square, and allegedly two-faced, the former Massachusetts governor was a triple-punchline target of late-night comics.
But now, with a more statesmanlike bearing and some measured criticisms of the Obama administration, Romney suddenly seems like the only adult left standing among the 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls.
It's early, of course - ridiculously early - for anyone except potential candidates to be thinking about the next presidential race. But there's been plenty of positioning going on in the now-leaderless GOP, including a head-scratching debut by one promising contender, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and a parade of speeches by some others at the Conservative Political Action Conference late last month.
And while much of the CPAC spotlight went to someone who isn't a candidate for president - radio personality Rush Limbaugh, who came off as either boorish or straight-talking, depending on your political temperature - it was Romney who walked away with the best reviews and victory in the convention's presidential straw poll.
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It Is To Laugh...
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Founding Fathers Would Want Telepromter to Failure
[dcex] : James Madison was not specifically contemplating Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, when he wrote Federalist No. 63. But reading the document — one of the seminal arguments in favor of adopting the U.S. Constitution — it’s clear Madison knew their type. And he knew they would come along again and again in American history, if Americans were lucky enough to have a long history.
Obama and Pelosi, along with their most ardent supporters, are the types to see a crisis, like our current economic mess, as a “great opportunity,” as the president put it last Saturday. They are the types, after a long period out of power, to attempt to use that “great opportunity” to push through far-reaching changes in national policy that had only a tangential connection, if at all, to the crisis at hand. And they are the types the Founding Fathers wanted to stop.
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10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America
[time] 24/7 Wall St. has created a list of the 10 major daily papers that are most likely to fold or shutter their print operations and only publish online. The properties were chosen on the basis of the financial strength of their parent companies, the amount of direct competition they face in their markets and industry information on how much money they are losing. Based on this analysis, it's possible that 8 of the nation's 50 largest daily newspapers could cease publication in the next 18 months
1. The Philadelphia Daily News
2. The Minneapolis Star Tribune
3. The Miami Herald
4. The Detroit News
5. The Boston Globe
6. The San Francisco Chronicle
7. The Chicago Sun-Times
8. The New York Daily News
9. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
10. The Cleveland Plain Dealer
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Smile Charlie : Faces of The "Transparent, Ethical" Democrat Party
What a disgusting piece of slime. As amusing as this video might be, it is definitely not funny.
This is the kind of guy that some of you keep electing, time and time again. This is the kind of guy that makes my arguments with some of you so easy.
In case some wayward reader has forgotten or doesn't quite know what Chucko the Clown's current position is:
[wiki] Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means : The Committee of Ways and Means is the chief tax-writing committee of the United States House of Representatives. Members of the Ways and Means Committee cannot serve on any other House Committees, though they can apply for a waiver from their party's congressional leadership. The Committee has jurisdiction over all taxation, tariffs and other revenue-raising measures, as well as a number of other programs including:
* Social Security
* Unemployment benefits
* Medicare
* Enforcement of child support laws
* Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a federal welfare program
* Foster care and adoption programs
The U.S. Constitution requires that all bills regarding taxation must originate in the House of Representatives, and House procedure is that all bills regarding taxation must go through this committee. These stipulations make this House committee particularly powerful, especially in comparison with its Senate counterpart, the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance.
The Ways and Means Committee in the 111th Congress is chaired by Representative Charles Rangel of New York, whose political strength is weakened as the House investigates his alleged ethics violations and calls have increased for him to step down from chairing the powerful committee, at least while the investigation continues. Next in line behind Rangel to chair the Ways and Means Committee is Representative Pete Stark of California, one of the most liberal Democrats in the House.
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Obama to Restore ‘Science Integrity’ as Part of Stem-Cell Shift
bloomberg] President Barack Obama will reverse the U.S. government’s ban on funding stem-cell research today and pledge to “use sound, scientific practice and evidence, instead of dogma” to guide federal policy, an adviser said.
Harold Varmus, co-chair of a science advisory group to the President, said Obama will ask the White House Office of Science and Technology to create guidelines to incorporate ‘scientific integrity’ into decision-making by U.S. agencies. The action on stem cells, which can grow into any kind of tissue, may help speed research into cures for major illness.
Academic laboratories, led by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and companies already using stem-cell technology, led by Geron Corp., of Menlo Park, California, could gain tens of millions of dollars in funding because of the decision. A “significant amount” of $10 billion given the National Institutes of Health in Obama’s stimulus plan will go to this area of research, Varmus said.
Rethink?
[nyt] [...] Members of Congress and advocates for fighting diseases have long spoken of human embryonic stem cell research as if it were a sure avenue to quick cures for intractable afflictions. Scientists have not publicly objected to such high-flown hopes, which have helped fuel new sources of grant money like the $3 billion initiative in California for stem cell research.
In private, however, many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells. Their chief interest is to derive embryonic stem cell lines from patients with specific diseases, and by tracking the cells in the test tube to develop basic knowledge about how the disease develops.
Despite an F.D.A.-approved safety test of embryonic stem cells in spinal cord injury that the Geron Corporation began in January, many scientists believe that putting stem-cell-derived tissues into patients lies a long way off. Embryonic stem cells have their drawbacks. They cause tumors, and the adult cells derived from them may be rejected by the patient’s immune system. Furthermore, whatever disease process caused the patients’ tissue cells to die is likely to kill introduced cells as well. All these problems may be solvable, but so far none have been solved.
Restrictions on embryonic stem cell research originated with Congress, which, each year since in 1996, has forbidden the use of federal financing for any experiment in which a human embryo is destroyed. This includes the derivation of human stem cell lines from surplus fertility clinic embryos, first achieved by Dr. James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin in 1998.
President Clinton contemplated but never implemented a policy that would have allowed N.I.H.-financed researchers to study human embryonic stem cells derived by others. Research was able to begin only in August 2001, when President Bush, seeking a different way around the Congressional restriction, said researchers could use any lines established before that date.
Flashback: Labs Create a Stand-In Without Eggs, Embryos
[wapo] : Researchers in Wisconsin and Japan said yesterday that they have turned ordinary human skin cells into what are effectively embryonic stem cells without using embryos or women's eggs -- the previously essential ingredients that have embroiled the medically promising field in a nearly decade-long political and ethical debate.
The ability to turn adult cells into embryo-like ones capable of morphing into virtually every kind of cell or tissue, described in two scientific journal articles yesterday, has been a major goal of researchers for years. In theory, it would allow people to grow personalized replacement parts for their bodies from their skin cells and give researchers a powerful means of understanding and treating diseases.
Until now, only human egg cells and embryos, both difficult to obtain and laden with legal and ethical issues, had the mysterious power to turn ordinary cells into stem cells. And until this summer, the challenge of mimicking that process in the lab seemed almost insurmountable, leading many to wonder whether stem cell research would ever unload its political baggage.
As news of the success spread in recent days, stem cell scientists seemed almost giddy that their field could suddenly become like other areas of biomedical science: appreciated, eligible for federal funding and wide open for new waves of discovery.
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A View of the Financial Meltdown
Another glance at the financial meltdown.
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Keep 'em' Coming : Two US Treasury Candidates Withdraw
[afp] : Two top US Treasury candidates have withdrawn from consideration, as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's struggles to build up his staff amid the financial crisis, US media reported.
Annette Nazareth, who was expected to be chosen as deputy secretary, and Geithner's choice for undersecretary for international affairs Caroline Atkinson, have withdrawn their names, the Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition, citing people familiar with the matter.
The two candidates "withdrew in part because of the long vetting process, which had dragged on for weeks and included several rounds of intense questioning," the financial newspaper said.
For Nazareth, "there was also some concern on Capitol Hill about her previous role at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)," it added.
She was an SEC commissioner and headed the division that oversees US securities markets.
"The White House doesn't comment on a personnel matter," a White House official told AFP.
The withdrawals dealt a setback to the Treasury as it works to battle the worst US recession in decades. Five weeks since taking the job, Geithner is the only nominated Treasury official in place at the agency.
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President Teleprompter
[politico] President Barack Obama doesn’t go anywhere without his TelePrompter.
The textbook-sized panes of glass holding the president’s prepared remarks follow him wherever he speaks.
Resting on top of a tall, narrow pole, they flank his podium during speeches in the White House’s stately parlors. They stood next to him on the floor of a manufacturing plant in Indiana as he pitched his economic stimulus plan. They traveled to the Department of Transportation this week and were in the Capitol Rotunda last month when he paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln in six-minute prepared remarks.
Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual — not only because he is famous for his oratory, but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events, large and small.
After the teleprompter malfunctioned a few times last summer and Obama delivered some less-than-soaring speeches, reports surfaced that he was training to wean himself off of the device while on vacation in Hawaii. But no such luck. [...]
“It’s just something presidents haven’t done,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a presidential historian who has held court in the White House since December 1975. “It’s jarring to the eye. In a way, it stands in the middle between the audience and the president because his eye is on the teleprompter.” [...]
Obama has relied on a teleprompter through even the shortest announcements and when repeating the same lines on his economic stimulus plan that he's been saying for months — whereas past presidents have mostly worked off of notes on the podium except during major speeches, such as the State of the Union.
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Limbaugh To Obama : Come On My Show : Explain To Everyone How Wrong I Am
[rl] : [...] My point here is that these are really odious, empty, nasty people who are feasting on their own arrogance. They are power hungry. But, you know what? They've never had a serious debate over ideas. Their goal is to destroy opponents, which is what they're trying to do now. They don't want to engage opponents. Their idea of victory is the destruction of the opponent. They're not for a level playing field. They want to clear the playing field so that their ideas do not have to undergo any scrutiny. So what do they do? They leak stories to The Politico intended to create impressions about their own importance and their brilliance, when in fact they aren't even bit players on the nation's stage. This is Emanuel, and this is Obama.
But I have an idea. If these guys are so impressed with themselves, and if they are so sure of their correctness, why doesn't President Obama come on my show? We will do a one-on-one debate of ideas and policies. Now, his people in this Politico story, it's on the record. They're claiming they wanted me all along. They wanted me to be the focus of attention. So let's have the debate! I am offering President Obama to come on this program -- without staffers, without a teleprompter, without note cards -- to debate me on the issues. Let's talk about free markets versus government control. Let's talk about nationalizing health care and raising taxes on small business.
Let's talk about the New Deal versus Reaganomics. Let's talk about closing Guantanamo Bay, and let's talk about sending $900 million to Hamas. Let's talk about illegal immigration and the lawlessness on the borders. Let's talk about massive deficits and the destroying of opportunities of future generations. Let's talk about ACORN, community agitators, and the unions that represent the government employees which pour millions of dollars into your campaign, President Obama. Let's talk about your elimination of school choice for minority students in the District of Columbia. Let's talk about your efforts to further reduce domestic drilling and refining of oil. Let's talk about your stock market. By the way, Mr. President, I want to help. Yesterday you said you looked at the stock market as no different than a tracking poll that goes up and down. [...]
Just come on this program. Let's have a little debate. You tell me how wrong I am and you can convince the rest of the Americans that don't agree with you how wrong we all are. You're a smart guy, Mr. President. You don't need these hacks to front for you. You've debated the best! You've debated Hillary Clinton. You've debated John Edwards. You've debated Joe Biden. You've debated Dennis Kucinich. You've debated the best out there. You are one of the most gifted public speakers of our age. I would think, Mr. President, you would jump at this opportunity. Don't send lightweights like Begala and Carville to do your bidding -- and forget about the ballerina, Emanuel. He's got things to do in his office. These people, compared to you, Mr. President, are rhetorical chum.
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Recreation of The 'Sully' Hudson River Landing
Professional 3D animation, accurately reconstructed to match the event.
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Provision of the Democrats' Budget Bill Would Kill Scholarship Program
[wsj] Dick Durbin has a nasty surprise for two of Sasha and Malia Obama's new schoolmates. And it puts the president in an awkward position.
The children are Sarah and James Parker. Like the Obama girls, Sarah and James attend the Sidwell Friends School in our nation's capital. Unlike the Obama girls, they could not afford the school without the $7,500 voucher they receive from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Unfortunately, a spending bill the Senate takes up this week includes a poison pill that would kill this program -- and with it perhaps the Parker children's hopes for a Sidwell diploma.
Known as the "Durbin language" after the Illinois Democrat who came up with it last year, the provision mandates that the scholarship program ends after the next school year unless Congress reauthorizes it and the District of Columbia approves. The beauty of this language is that it allows opponents to kill the program simply by doing nothing. Just the sort of sneaky maneuver that's so handy when you don't want inner-city moms and dads to catch on that you are cutting one of their lifelines. [...]
That's the reality that the Parkers and 1,700 other low-income students face if Sen. Durbin and his allies get their way. And it points to perhaps the most odious of double standards in American life today: the way some of our loudest champions of public education vote to keep other people's children -- mostly inner-city blacks and Latinos -- trapped in schools where they'd never let their own kids set foot.
This double standard is largely unchallenged by either the teachers' unions or the press corps. For the teachers' unions, it's a fairly cold-blooded calculation. They're willing to look the other way at lawmakers who chose private or parochial schools for their own kids -- so long as these lawmakers vote in ways that keep the union grip on the public schools intact and an escape hatch like vouchers bolted.
Fumbling Gibbs Gets Asked About Voucher Plan
[powerline] [...] In today's press briefing, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about McGurn's article and Obama's opposition to school choice. He was not able to muster a coherent response:
QUESTION: On education, there's a provision in the omnibus spending bill that would sunset the D.C. voucher plan. And I'm wondering -- there's been a lot of publicity about this brother and sister pair at Sidwell who use their voucher money to -- to pay for tuition at the same school the president chose to send his children. I'm wondering if you could restate the president's opposition to the D.C. voucher plan and why he's...
(CROSSTALK)
GIBBS: Yes, I -- I would -- let me go -- I've not read the article today, if there was one. I think the...
QUESTION: Well, it's just about two kids who use their voucher money to go to Sidwell. I mean...
GIBBS: Right. I mean, I think -- right.
QUESTION: I mean -- I mean, and they would -- in other words, if they cut the voucher program, they couldn't go there.
GIBBS: Why are you even providing me the opportunity to be the middleman? I mean, again...
QUESTION: Well, could you just restate the president's position?
GIBBS: Well, I think the president has concerns about -- concerns about taking large amounts of funding out of the system to -- to address this, that the president obviously believes -- and I think you'll hear him talk about and has talked about -- the need for reform in our educational system, but -- but has not agreed with the program in the past. I'll see if there's anything to update on that.
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Fail? Please Do
[reason] [...] Since when is rooting for the success of an ideologically driven elected official a civic duty, you may wonder? Wonder no more. It merely depends on the politician.
[...]many of us are hoping that all those in power fail, because those in power have a grating habit of being annoyingly self-righteous, hopelessly corrupt, resolutely incompetent and completely apathetic about the freedoms that they have sworn to protect.
Embrace the failure. It's patriotic.
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Useless People Dept. / Brooks Seems Baffled
[nyt] Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”
Moderates now find themselves betwixt and between. On the left, there is a president who appears to be, as Crook says, “a conviction politician, a bold progressive liberal.” On the right, there are the Rush Limbaugh brigades. The only thing more scary than Obama’s experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it.
Those of us in the moderate tradition — the Hamiltonian tradition that believes in limited but energetic government — thus find ourselves facing a void. We moderates are going to have to assert ourselves. We’re going to have to take a centrist tendency that has been politically feckless and intellectually vapid and turn it into an influential force.
The first task will be to block the excesses of unchecked liberalism. In the past weeks, Democrats have legislated provisions to dilute welfare reform, restrict the inflow of skilled immigrants and gut a voucher program designed for poor students. It will be up to moderates to raise the alarms against these ideological outrages.
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Missing US Journalist 'arrested' in Iran
[uktimes] : Iran said today that an Iranian-American journalist whose family have not heard from for three weeks was arrested for engaging in “illegal” activities because she continued to work after the Government revoked her press credentials.
Roxana Saberi, 31, who has reported from Tehran for the BBC and other news organisations, called her father in the United States on February 10, saying that she had been arrested for buying a bottle of wine.
"She called from an unknown place and said she’s been kept in detention,” Mr Saberi said from Fargo, North Dakota, where her family lives.
“She said that she had bought a bottle of wine and the person that sold it had reported it and then they came and arrested her,” he said, adding that the wine purchase was just an excuse to arrest her.
Ms Saberi said that she had already been held for ten days, and called back moments later to say that she would be released in two more days. Neither her family in the US nor her friends in Tehran have heard from her since. Mr Saberi said that he was going public with the information because of fears for his daughter’s safety.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry, which confirmed Ms Saberi’s arrest, did not say why her press credentials had been revoked in 2006, or whether she was still being held. “Her accreditation was over in 2006 after Iranian authorities revoked her press card,” Hasan Qashqavi, a spokesman said. “Her activities since 2006 were completely illegal and unauthorised.”
[nypost] : [...] Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized Iran for arresting journalists and suppressing freedom of speech. The government has arrested several Iranian-Americans in the past few years, citing alleged attempts to overthrow its Islamic regime. The most high-profile case came in 2007, when Iran arrested four Iranian-Americans, including the academic Haleh Esfandiari. The four were imprisoned or had their passports confiscated for several months until they were released and allowed to return to the U.S.
Roxana Saberi is a freelance journalist who has reported for National Public Radio and other media and has lived in Iran for six years. [...]
Saberi's father said his daughter was finishing a book on Iran and had planned to return to the United States this year.
The book is about the culture and the people of Iran, he said. She was hoping to finish it in the next couple of months and come home to have it published.
Roxana Saberi was Miss North Dakota in 1997 and was among 10 finalists in the Miss America pageant that year. She graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., with degrees in mass communication and French and with dreams of being an international correspondent. She said that her goal as Miss North Dakota was to encourage people to appreciate cultural differences.
Saberi's mother, Akiko, is from Japan and her father is from Iran. Roxana was born in the United States and grew up in Fargo. Her father said she was determined to go to Iran.
"I was very worried and I was reluctant for her to go," Reza Saberi said Sunday. "She was very persistent about it."
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Despite Hopes of Hollywood Visit, Iran’s Leaders Stick to the Same Script
[nyt] : An official delegation of Hollywood actors and filmmakers met with their Iranian counterparts in Tehran over the weekend, the first such visit to a country that banned American movies 30 years ago.
But the Iranian government quickly crushed any cinematic illusion of an Obama-era thaw in relations, denouncing the meeting on Sunday and demanding that Hollywood apologize for its “insults and accusations against the Iranian nation.”
The nine members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who arrived in Tehran on Friday as cultural ambassadors were apparently unaware of the official reaction as they sought to improve ties between the nations’ film industries. [...]
The Hollywood movers and shakers “will change the mood here,” said Farhad Tohidi, a screenwriter.[...]
But the warm Hollywood glow of the moviemakers was quickly dampened by geopolitics in the form of an official statement by Javad Shamghadri, the arts adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“Representatives of Iran’s film industry should only have an official meeting with representatives of the academy and Hollywood if they apologize for the insults and accusations against the Iranian nation during the past 30 years,” he said, according to the ISNA news agency.
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Routine : Another Obama Pick Fails With Tax Problems
[dn] : Add former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk to the list of Obama Cabinet picks with tax problems.
The Senate Finance Committee says he underpaid by $9,975 in the last three years.
Senate aides uncovered the shortfall during weeks of vetting, and Kirk – the administration’s designated point person on trade -- has promised to pay the Internal Revenue Service in full.
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1970's : Global Cooling: The Coming Ice Age
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New Era : Spend and Blame
[nyp] : For a guy who talks so much about wanting a new era of re sponsibility, President Obama spends an awful lot of time blaming Republicans for all the wild and reckless spending he crammed into his own budget.
After running a campaign against the $1 trillion deficit he "inherited" from President Bush and the Republicans, Obama quickly matched it. During his first 50 days in office, he and his Democratic-controlled Congress spent $1 billion an hour.
Under Obama's proposed budget, the overall national debt doubles in five years and triples in 10.
Not exactly "moving from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest," as he promised.
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Ignoring The 'Tea Parties'
[ibd] The press need not support every protest it covers. But when it ignores a grass fire movement against government spending while its favored politician watches closely, then there's dereliction of duty.
Five more "tea parties" took place last weekend to protest runaway congressional spending. Showing up with hand-lettered signs were people not often seen at protests. [...]
But the real reason the major media aren't interested in these protests is that they don't agree with them. In the final analysis, these affairs are really taking issue with the political party they helped elect without hiding bias in the last election.
That's why a small scrum of Acorn-financed wackos on a bus tour to intimidate AIG execs last weekend made the news while the tea parties didn't.
But unlike the staged, sparsely attended Acorn event, the tea parties are national, growing and indicative of a shift of public sentiment. If proof is needed, one need look no further than the attention the protests are getting from the Obama administration.
One of the biggest protests so far drew 15,000 on March 8 in Fullerton, Calif. But a Los Angeles Times blogger dismissed the event as "a radio stunt" because it was organized by local radio deejays. There was no explanation why the Times and other media were all over a 2006 immigration protest that was also called by deejays.
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Bush Deficit vs. Obama Deficit
[heritage] : President Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed that his budget would cut the deficit by half by the end of his term. But as Heritage analyst Brian Riedl has pointed out, given that Obama has already helped quadruple the deficit with his stimulus package, pledging to halve it by 2013 is hardly ambitious.
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The 0bama Press Conference
[lat] : [...] At times the president appeared to be mailing in his delivery.
He made no notable news and did so quite smoothly. Unless sticking by his guns over cutting charitable deductions is news.
And the former constitutional law professor did go on in his answers, perhaps not by accident. Holding the floor is another means of control for any president. Like males hold the TV remotes.
The result: only 13 questions in 57 minutes.
And as The Ticket noted during its live blogging, not one single question on either war, including the one the commander in chief recently ordered 17,000 more Americans to march into.
Nothing holding the president to account for the conflicting timelines on who knew what when about the stunning AIG bonuses. Nothing asking him to detail the incredible $40 billion in savings he claims to have discovered in defense spending.
Even when the president was confronted with a blunt question of whether he'd accept the budget without certain favored provisions, he passed up the chance for a clear answer for one re-expressing his confidence that after the legislators have their way with the proposal, he'd get his budget the way he wants it. That's the standard bargaining stance this early in the process, even when the president's own party controls both sides of Capitol Hill.
But claiming "complete confidence" means absolutely nothing.
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Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA
[slshdt] "The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. [...]
Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"
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House GOP obtains e-mails from Countrywide's VIP loan program
[wt] : A new report showcases the lengths executives at Countrywide Financial went to in order to provide below-market mortgage rates to well-connected Washington insiders.
Countrywide's CEO Angelo Mozilo granted sweetheart mortgages to a number of influential lawmakers including Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd, who is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and Democratic Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota. E-mails obtained by government investigators show Countrywide employees often discussed the political influence wielded by "Friends of Angelo" as grounds for granting the discounts. [...]
Countrywide also gave discounts to congressional staffers who served influential members. E-mails about a mortgage for Joyce Brayboy, chief of staff for Rep. Melvin Watt, a Democrat from North Carolina, noted "[Brayboy] reports directly to Congressman Mel Watt who introduced predatory lending legislation to address unscrupulous lending practices, and they do view Countrywide as a trusted advisor."
Other e-mails related to Dodd and Conrad are revealing but not as explicit.
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Drug cartels' new weaponry means war
[lat] : Narcotics traffickers are acquiring firepower more appropriate to an army -- including grenade launchers and antitank rockets -- and the police are feeling outgunned. [...]
Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semiauto- matic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. [...]
How many weapons have been smuggled into Mexico from Central America is not known, and the military-grade munitions are still a small fraction of the larger arsenal in the hands of narcotics traffickers. Mexican officials continue to push Washington to stem the well-documented flow of conventional weapons from the United States, as Congress holds hearings on the role those smuggled guns play in arming Mexican drug cartels.
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Five Signs of a Flailing Presidency
[tws] : You don't have to be an old Washington hand to spot the telltale signs of a presidency and an administration in serious trouble. There's nothing new about these clues. The inability to get their stories straight--that's a hardy perennial of high-level officials caught in the vise of political embarrassment. A president who skips town to avoid the White House press corps and speak directly to the American people--we've sure seen that before. So in a sense the AIG mess has touched off nothing more than business as usual.
What goes on in Washington usually comes across as background noise to the public, but not this time. Bonuses for AIG executives are like the infamous Bridge to Nowhere--an issue that's broken through outside Washington. And we know it's become a major political problem for the president because he and his administration act as if it has. Here are five signs of this:
1. His allies are moving to protect the president [...]
2. The president gets out of town [...]
3. Top spokesmen dismiss the crisis as a distraction [...]
4. Administration figures can't keep their stories straight [...]
5. The president indulges in hyperbole [...]
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Incompetence and Questionable Trivial Pursuit
[wapo] A $14 trillion economy hangs by a thread composed of (a) a comically cynical, pitchfork-wielding Congress, (b) a hopelessly understaffed, stumbling Obama administration, and (c) $165 million.
That's $165 million in bonus money handed out to AIG debt manipulators who may be the only ones who know how to defuse the bomb they themselves built. Now, in the scheme of things, $165 million is a rounding error. It amounts to less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion federal budget. It's less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bailout money given to AIG alone. If Bill Gates were to pay these AIG bonuses every year for the next 100 years, he'd still be left with more than half his personal fortune.
For this we are going to poison the well for any further financial rescues, face the prospect of letting AIG go under (which would make the Lehman Brothers collapse look trivial) and risk a run on the entire world financial system?
And there is such a thing as law. The way to break a contract legally is Chapter 11. Short of that, a contract is a contract. The AIG bonuses were agreed to before the government takeover and are perfectly legal. Is the rule now that when public anger is kindled, Congress will summarily cancel contracts?
Even worse are the clever schemes being cooked up in Congress to retrieve the money by means of some retroactive confiscatory tax. The common law is pretty clear about the impermissibility of ex post facto legislation and bills of attainder. They also happen to be specifically prohibited by the Constitution. We're going to overturn that for $165 million?
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Obama White House Bars Press From Press Award Ceremony
[lat] : We are not making this up:
Barack Obama was elected commander in chief promising to run the most transparent presidential administration in American history.
This achievement and the overall promise of his historic administration caused the National Newspaper Publishers Assn. to name him "Newsmaker of the Year."
The president is to receive the award from the federation of black community newspapers in a White House ceremony this afternoon.
The Obama White House has closed the press award ceremony to the press.
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The Hits Just Keep Coming : Obama Compares His Bowling to Special Olympics
The guy is a one man carnival of laughs. He compares AIG to suicide bombers and now he suggests that his bowling is like someone participating in the Special Olympics. Good one Barry! It's easy to see how you've come as far as you have. What a charade and an impostor. Of course the media suck ups and sycophants call it just a 'gaffe' or say that The Commander of The Politically Correct just had a misspoken moment or some such nonsense. This underscores one of my peeves and the thinking that the PC mindset allows and even enables the liars and phonies. Yes, certainly it's not cool to say many things, but if you're ignorant enough to do so, well, good for you. At least everyone can see that and not be sucked in by a politician-like prattle of sheer BS.
Personally, I'd rather know where I stand and who is the ignoramus, right up front, so they are exposed and I can then choose to avoid them. Say what you like and receive the estrangement that may come with that freedom.
It would seem that this surprisingly growing number of jackass examples expose a mindset and show what the character of the man truly is, how he really thinks. You know, when he's not reading his teleprompter, which is obviously 98% of the time and will probably now get notched up further. Orator supreme!
Yes, the list of these things now seems endless, these 'can you imagine if Bush' had said that examples. This one, or any of the many other verbal ignorances or 'gaffes' would be run every 10 minutes on every station for months. Too many to enumerate, but the reality is only lost on the willingly blind. Keep on keepin' on exposing yourself Barry. It's healthy and ever so cool.
World Leaders Exchange Gifts
Gordon Brown presents the new President with: a pen holder carved from the timbers of HMS Gannett, a sister ship of HMS Resolute; the commissioning certificate of HMS Resolute; and a seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill. In return, the Prime minister gets 25 DVDS, which don't work in Britain.
[telegraph:top10]
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Unbeliveable : Obama AIG-Suicide Bomber Analogy
[csm] : [...] Just two days ago Grassley told an Iowa radio station that AIG executives should consider suicide as an option. He later clarified that his remarks were just rhetorical and they should live.
[...]today, President Obama took that rhetoric in a different direction. He actually upped the ante explaining that AIG is like a suicide bomber.
“We had to step in, it was the right thing to do, even though it is infuriating,” Obama said, explaining why the government needed to bail out the troubled banks.
“The same is true with AIG,” he said. “It was the right thing to do to step in. Here’s the problem. It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.”
What an amazing orator. The guy is just so super cool. It's the height of cool to compare AIG to suicide bombers. You bet.We've barely begun this administration and the hits just keep coming. I honestly expected more, at least some down time and allowing of work to get done, even if at base I disagree with it.
Never mind that this group of Dems are bold faced liars, robbers, incompetents, and the saddest clowns to come down the pike, it's well beyond insult to spout this brain dead nonsense. Get the teleprompter back up jackass.
The ever enlightened, great ideas just keep flowing from the President Teleprompter administration. After it dawned on some Sage that a policy allowing private insurance companies to charge veterans for the treatment of "service and war-related injuries" wasn't the greatest idea we keep going down this path:
Guantanamo Detainees May Be Released in U.S.
[wsj] Attorney General Eric Holder said some detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may end up being released in the U.S. as the Obama administration works with foreign allies to resettle some of the prisoners. [...]
For "people who can be released there are a variety of options that we have and among them is the possibility is that we would release them into this country," Mr. Holder said. "That process is ongoing and we've not made any determinations or made any requests of anybody at this point."
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Funny If It Wasn't Pathetic : Irish PM Starts Reading President Teleprompter's Speech By Mistake
[yahoo] Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was just a few paragraphs into an address at a St. Patrick's Day celebration at the White House when he realized something sounded way too familiar. Turns out, he was repeating the speech President Barack Obama had just given. [...]
But Cowen was 20 seconds into his second address when it dawned on him that he was giving word for word the speech that Obama had just read from the same teleprompter.
Cowen stopped and looked back at the president to say, "That's your speech."
Obama laughed and returned to the podium to offer what might have been Cowen's remarks. In doing so, President Obama thanked President Obama for inviting everyone over.
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The Pathetic Dodd
After blowing smoke and shoveling blatant manure for a solid day, this lowlife tries to spin away his nonsense. "Obviously."
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Dodd Tries to Undo Bonus Protections in the 'Dodd Amendment' Rules
[fox] : Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) on Monday night floated the idea of taxing American International Group (AIG: 1.33, 0.38, 40%) bonus recipients so the government could recoup some or all of the $450 million the company is paying to employees in its financial products unit. Within hours, the idea spread to both houses of Congress, with lawmakers proposing an AIG bonus tax.
While the Senate was constructing the $787 billion stimulus last month, Dodd added an executive-compensation restriction to the bill. The provision, now called “the Dodd Amendment” by the Obama Administration provides an “exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009” -- which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are now seeking to tax.
Dodd’s original amendment did not include that exemption, and the Connecticut Senator denied inserting the provision.
“I can't point a finger at someone who was responsible for putting those dates in,” Dodd told FOX. “I can tell you this much, when my language left the senate, it did not include it. When it came back, it did.”
“Because of negotiations with the Treasury Department and the bill Conferees, several modifications were made,” Dodd Spokesperson Kate Szostak in a response to FOX Business.
The provision excluding those bonus payments made it into the final version of the bill, and is law.
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Got to be Kidding? Seriously...Barney to 'Revamp' Freddies and Fannie
[wsj] Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he hopes to introduce legislation later this year to restructure government-backed mortgage investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
"The current model is broken," the Massachusetts Democrat said in an interview Tuesday. One possibility, he said, is to separate the companies into entities serving two functions: one that would ensure adequate funding for the home-mortgage market as a whole and another that would provide government subsidies for housing low-income people.
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Send Out The Clowns : Treasury and Fed Knew of Bonuses Last Fall
[nyt] [...] The Treasury and Federal Reserve officials said they had known about the bonus program as far back as last fall. The program has provoked public protests from a handful of critics and at least one Democratic lawmaker in Congress — Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, a member of the House Committee on Government Oversight, who demanded without success in December that A.I.G. provide information about the bonuses.
Mr. Cummings said he had been communicating regularly with A.I.G.’s chief executive, Edward M. Liddy, about the bonuses ever since December. Mr. Cummings said he was particularly concerned that the bonuses were supposed to be paid by March 15, adding that he assumed Treasury officials had the same worries.
“I assumed that they were well aware of it and would take appropriate action” before the March 15 deadline, Mr. Cummings said. “In light of the biggest quarterly loss in history, you would think that A.I.G. and Mr. Liddy would have been able to convince folks who were supposed to be getting these retention payments, based at least in part on performance, that they might want to voluntarily not take all or part of them.”
Treasury and Fed officials said they knew that A.I.G. paid $55 million in bonuses in December.
But administration officials said that the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, did not personally become aware until last week that an even bigger round of payments was due on March 15. Administration officials said Mr. Geithner learned of the deadline early last week, when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York alerted him that the bonus payments were coming due.
Mr. Geithner, according to Treasury officials, insisted that the bonus plan was “unacceptable” and called Mr. Liddy on Wednesday to demand changes.
A.I.G. executives said they would never have proceeded with the bonus payments before getting approval from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
The Stimulus Bill Explicitly Guarantees Contractual Bonuses Executed Before February 11
[nro] : Who in their right mind would codify in law that bonus payments to executives at bailed-out companies could not be prohibited?
Well, Chris Dodd.
From page H1412 of the Final Stimulus Bill, “SEC. 111. EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE:
'(iii) The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009, as such valid employment contracts are determined by the Secretary or the designee of the Secretary.”
This amendment provides an exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009, which exempts the very AIG bonuses Obama is condemning every single chance he gets. The amendment is in the final version and is law.
That's the amendment that Dodd got placed in the Obama stimulus bill. You know, the one that passed with no House Republican votes, and only three Senate Republican votes.
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Dem 'Group of 15': Slow It Down Mr. O
[politico] [...] There is rising doubt among Democrats — particularly moderates already concerned about the big costs and deficits called for in Obama’s budget — that either Obama or Washington have enough bandwidth this year to stimulate the economy, overhaul the failed financial sector and move on to a far-reaching domestic agenda.
“From the standpoint of the Congress, there’s only so much that we can absorb and do at one time,” Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, told POLITICO Tuesday. “To maintain a schedule like the one we’ve got at this moment, throughout the year, I don’t know if it will be healthy.”
Democrats’ comments were muted, with few directly criticizing Obama for being too ambitious. But several lawmakers made clear that they have trouble with Obama’s logic that deep economic troubles make it more urgent, not less, to take on expensive projects such as health care and education reform.
“Everybody has to bring something to the table,” said Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, a leader of a 15-member caucus of conservative and centrist Democrats. “That doesn’t mean that you have to postpone your aspirations forever. But until we’re through this crisis and growth has resumed, there’s going to be some belt-tightening that’s necessary.”
These doubts reflect conflicting currents in Obama’s political circumstances just 60 days into his administration.
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Dem groups quietly align
[politico] A broad coalition of left-leaning groups is quietly closing ranks into a new coalition, "Unity '09," aimed at helping President Barack Obama push his agenda through Congress.
Conceived at a New York meeting before the November election, two Democrats familiar with the planning said, Unity '09 will draw together money and grassroots organizations to pressure lawmakers in their home states to back White House legislation and other progressive causes.
The online-based MoveOn.org is a central player in the nascent organization, but other groups involved in planning Unity '09 span a broad spectrum of interests, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Council of La Raza to Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions and environmental groups. [...]
Along with the groups previously mentioned, others involved in planning discussions include the Sierra Club, Media Matters for America, and Health Care for America Now.
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Obama Camp : "Economy is Sound" : People Somehow Find Meaning Different This Time
[yahoo] The economy is fundamentally sound despite the temporary "mess" it's in, the White House said Sunday in the kind of upbeat assessment that Barack Obama had mocked as a presidential candidate.
Obama's Democratic allies pleaded for patience with an administration hitting the two-month mark this week, while Republicans said the White House's plans ignore small business and the immediate need to fix what ails the economy. After weeks projecting a dismal outlook on the economy, administration officials — led by the president himself in recent days — swung their rhetoric toward optimism in what became Wall Street's best stretch since November.
During the fall campaign, Obama relentlessly criticized his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, for declaring, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." Obama's team painted the veteran senator as out of touch and failing to grasp the challenges facing the country.
But on Sunday, that optimistic message came from economic adviser Christina Romer. When asked during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" if the fundamentals of the economy were sound, she replied: "Of course they are sound."
"The fundamentals are sound in the sense that the American workers are sound, we have a good capital stock, we have good technology," she said.
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Honeymoon Bliss Fading...
[nyd] Not long ago, after a string of especially bad days for the Obama administration, a veteran Democratic pol approached me with a pained look on his face and asked, "Do you think they know what they're doing?"
The question caught me off guard because the man is a well-known Obama supporter. As we talked, I quickly realized his asking suggested his own considerable doubts. [...]
Polls show that most people like Obama, but they increasingly don't like his policies. The vast spending hikes and plans for more are provoking the most concern, with 82% telling a Gallup survey they are worried about the deficit and 69% worried about the rapid growth of government under Obama. Most expect their own taxes will go up as a result, despite the President's promises to the contrary.
None other than Warren Buffet, an Obama supporter, has called the administration's message on the economy "muddled." Even China says it is worried about its investments in American Treasury bonds. Ouch.
Much of the blame falls on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whose appalling tax problems softened the ground under him before he took office. After his initial fumbling presentations, he became a butt of jokes on "Saturday Night Live," not a sustainable image for the point man in a recession. And still the market waits for his answer to the banks' toxic assets.
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[H] : [...] Some Democrats have started to worry that voters don’t and won’t understand the link between economic revival and Obama’s huge agenda, which includes saving the banking industry, ending home foreclosures, reforming healthcare and developing a national energy policy, among much else.
While lawmakers debate controversial proposals contained in the new president’s debut budget — cutting farm subsidies, raising taxes on charitable contributions, etc. — there is a growing sense that time is running out faster than expected.
Democrats from states racked by recession say Obama needs to produce an uptick by August or face unpleasant consequences. Others say that there is more time, but that voters need to see improvement by the middle of next year.
The most optimistic say Obama and Democrats in Congress will face a political backlash unless the economy improves by Election Day 2010.
“We’ve got to see an uptick by August or the Democratic majority is in jeopardy,” said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), whose state had an 11.6 percent unemployment rate in January.
Stupak doesn’t fault Obama for pursuing healthcare reform, because high medical costs are intertwined with the economic difficulties, he said.
But Obama must move quickly, he added, saying, “By summer there is no more honeymoon. Period.”
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Yet again....The People Call Bullshit
[wsj] President Barack Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill Wednesday that includes thousands of pet projects inserted by lawmakers, even as he unveiled new rules to restrict such so-called earmarks.
At the same time, after Democrats criticized former President George W. Bush's signing statements, Mr. Obama issued one of his own, declaring five provisions in the spending bill to be unconstitutional and nonbinding, including one aimed at preventing punishment of whistleblowers.
Presidents have employed signing statements to reject provisions of a bill without vetoing the entire legislation. Democrats and some Republicans have complained that Mr. Bush abused such statements by declaring that he would ignore congressional intent on more than 1,200 sections of bills, easily a record. Mr. Obama has ordered a review of his predecessor's signing statements and said he would rein in the practice.
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Did Obama Cause the Stock Slide?
[businessweek] : [...] Polls still show the President has strong popularity among the general U.S. population, and Obama continues to command power in Congress. But among investors, fairly or unfairly, there is griping that the new Obama Administration is at least partly to blame for the recent slide in stocks. Since Nov. 4, Election Day, the broad Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is off about 25%, and since Jan. 20, when Obama took office, the "500" is down 15%.
It's never easy to determine exactly why the stock market moves in a particular direction. Plenty of other factors have influenced stock prices since November. For example.....
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Obama, Geithner : Low Grades From Economists
[wsj] : U.S. President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner received failing grades for their efforts to revive the economy from participants in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey.
The economists' assessment stands in stark contrast with Mr. Obama's popularity with the public, with a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll giving him a 60% approval rating. A majority of the 49 economists polled said they were dissatisfied with the administration's economic policies.
On average, they gave the president a grade of 59 out of 100, and although there was a broad range of marks, 42% of respondents rated Mr. Obama below 60. Mr. Geithner received an average grade of 51. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke scored better, with an average 71.
The economists, many of whom have been continually surprised by the depth of the downturn, also pushed back yet again their forecasts for when a recovery would begin. On average, they expect the downturn to end in October.
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"I've come to see Maher as an anti-intellectual unable to sustain a debate outside the authoritarian context of his comedy routine, he always reminded me of a type of undergrad from my northeastern liberal college days: the lounge-lizard faux erudition, the stockpile of glib phrases, the skills of a class cut-up -- but no staying power. As soon as we broke up into debate groups, the glazed eyes, the lit cigarette, the lost interest." -Raven [bighollywood]
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[msnbc]
This from the MSNBC site? The cheerleadering, leg tinglers of the Obama camp? Why aren't we hearing a mention of this (OK, admittedly, I can't stomach the station at all, so maybe they have mentioned it - yea, sure.) on the station or craptastical CNN or elsewhere? Gee...I wonder. Hey, and what up with John Edwards? Where's he been anyway? Which of his "two Americas' do you think he's living in? Why aren't we hearing the endless drone of this hair cut super-boy and his current life? Surely it's got to be newsworthy, akin to the latest on Britney or puppies and swingsets? Just wondering.::::
Lights Are On : Nobody Home
[dsurber] Barack Obama is too busy posing for magazine covers to actually do the job to which he was elected.
There is a price to be paid when a president throws a party every other night, weekends in Chicago or Camp David and poses for magazine cover after magazine cover.
After 51 days in office, Barack Obama has appointed only 73 people to 1,200 jobs that require Senate confirmation.
If they require Senate approval, they are important jobs.
But Obama is too busy to properly vet the people and appoint them to fill the jobs to get the work done.
Cabinet chief: Obama team 'unreachable'
[independentuk] : Last week, it was all smiles and handshakes as Gordon Brown and President Barack Obama put on a show of unity in Washington.
But yesterday, Sir Gus O'Donnell, Britain's most senior civil servant, exposed transatlantic tension when he protested that Downing Street was finding it "unbelievably difficult" to plan for next month's G20 summit in London because of problems tracking down senior figures in the US administration. "There is nobody there. You cannot believe how difficult it is," the Cabinet Secretary told a civil service conference in Gateshead.
Last night Downing Street insisted the comments – reported on the Whitehall and Westminster World website – had been taken out of context. It added that Britain and the US had established a "very good and close working relationship" in the run-up to the G20 conference in London on 2 April. [...]
The Cabinet Secretary's comments were removed from the website after the Government protested.
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Embarrassing! : Not The O's Fault
[salon] Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing series of flubs that have overshadowed President Obama's first seven weeks in office and given the scattered, demoralized Republicans a huge boost toward regrouping and resurrection. (Michelle, please use those fabulous toned arms to butt some heads!)
First it was that chaotic pig rut of a stimulus package, which let House Democrats throw a thousand crazy kitchen sinks into what should have been a focused blueprint for economic recovery. Then it was the stunt of unnerving Wall Street by sending out a shrill duo of slick geeks (Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag) as the administration's weirdly adolescent spokesmen on economics. Who could ever have confidence in that sorry pair?
And then there was the fiasco of the ham-handed White House reception for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which was evidently lacking the most basic elements of ceremony and protocol. Don't they read the "Iliad" anymore in the Ivy League? Check that out for the all-important ritual of gift giving, which has cemented alliances around the world for 5,000 years.
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[mramirez]
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Murtha's 'Earmark Factory'
[politco] Over the course of the past decade, Rep. John P. Murtha has earmarked millions of dollars for the Electro-Optics Center at Penn State University — money that has, in turn, gone to clients of the PMA Group, the Murtha-linked lobbying shop that was raided in November as part of a federal criminal probe.
Founded in 1999 as a joint enterprise run by Penn State and the Office of Naval Research, the EOC promotes electronic research needed for state-of-the-art military equipment.
But sources familiar with the EOC’s operations say Murtha has used the center as a “front” for PMA and other lobbyists and contractors with ties to the Pennsylvania Democrat.
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Pelosi Unprecedented Demands for Military Aircraft and Wasted Taxpayer Resources
[jw] : Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents from the Department of Defense (DOD) detailing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's multiple requests for military air travel. The documents, obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), include internal DOD email correspondence detailing attempts by DOD staff to accommodate Pelosi's numerous requests for military escorts and military aircraft as well as the speaker's last minute cancellations and changes. The following are a few highlights from the documents, which are linked in full below.....
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Fleischer and "The Tingler" Matthews
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Romney's Prospects Raised
[b] : For a while, it looked like Mitt Romney would become more a figure of ridicule than promise. Stiff, square, and allegedly two-faced, the former Massachusetts governor was a triple-punchline target of late-night comics.
But now, with a more statesmanlike bearing and some measured criticisms of the Obama administration, Romney suddenly seems like the only adult left standing among the 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls.
It's early, of course - ridiculously early - for anyone except potential candidates to be thinking about the next presidential race. But there's been plenty of positioning going on in the now-leaderless GOP, including a head-scratching debut by one promising contender, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and a parade of speeches by some others at the Conservative Political Action Conference late last month.
And while much of the CPAC spotlight went to someone who isn't a candidate for president - radio personality Rush Limbaugh, who came off as either boorish or straight-talking, depending on your political temperature - it was Romney who walked away with the best reviews and victory in the convention's presidential straw poll.
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It Is To Laugh...
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Founding Fathers Would Want Telepromter to Failure
[dcex] : James Madison was not specifically contemplating Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, when he wrote Federalist No. 63. But reading the document — one of the seminal arguments in favor of adopting the U.S. Constitution — it’s clear Madison knew their type. And he knew they would come along again and again in American history, if Americans were lucky enough to have a long history.
Obama and Pelosi, along with their most ardent supporters, are the types to see a crisis, like our current economic mess, as a “great opportunity,” as the president put it last Saturday. They are the types, after a long period out of power, to attempt to use that “great opportunity” to push through far-reaching changes in national policy that had only a tangential connection, if at all, to the crisis at hand. And they are the types the Founding Fathers wanted to stop.
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10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America
[time] 24/7 Wall St. has created a list of the 10 major daily papers that are most likely to fold or shutter their print operations and only publish online. The properties were chosen on the basis of the financial strength of their parent companies, the amount of direct competition they face in their markets and industry information on how much money they are losing. Based on this analysis, it's possible that 8 of the nation's 50 largest daily newspapers could cease publication in the next 18 months
1. The Philadelphia Daily News
2. The Minneapolis Star Tribune
3. The Miami Herald
4. The Detroit News
5. The Boston Globe
6. The San Francisco Chronicle
7. The Chicago Sun-Times
8. The New York Daily News
9. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
10. The Cleveland Plain Dealer
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Smile Charlie : Faces of The "Transparent, Ethical" Democrat Party
What a disgusting piece of slime. As amusing as this video might be, it is definitely not funny.This is the kind of guy that some of you keep electing, time and time again. This is the kind of guy that makes my arguments with some of you so easy.
In case some wayward reader has forgotten or doesn't quite know what Chucko the Clown's current position is:
[wiki] Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means : The Committee of Ways and Means is the chief tax-writing committee of the United States House of Representatives. Members of the Ways and Means Committee cannot serve on any other House Committees, though they can apply for a waiver from their party's congressional leadership. The Committee has jurisdiction over all taxation, tariffs and other revenue-raising measures, as well as a number of other programs including:
* Social Security
* Unemployment benefits
* Medicare
* Enforcement of child support laws
* Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a federal welfare program
* Foster care and adoption programs
The U.S. Constitution requires that all bills regarding taxation must originate in the House of Representatives, and House procedure is that all bills regarding taxation must go through this committee. These stipulations make this House committee particularly powerful, especially in comparison with its Senate counterpart, the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance.
The Ways and Means Committee in the 111th Congress is chaired by Representative Charles Rangel of New York, whose political strength is weakened as the House investigates his alleged ethics violations and calls have increased for him to step down from chairing the powerful committee, at least while the investigation continues. Next in line behind Rangel to chair the Ways and Means Committee is Representative Pete Stark of California, one of the most liberal Democrats in the House.
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Obama to Restore ‘Science Integrity’ as Part of Stem-Cell Shift
bloomberg] President Barack Obama will reverse the U.S. government’s ban on funding stem-cell research today and pledge to “use sound, scientific practice and evidence, instead of dogma” to guide federal policy, an adviser said.
Harold Varmus, co-chair of a science advisory group to the President, said Obama will ask the White House Office of Science and Technology to create guidelines to incorporate ‘scientific integrity’ into decision-making by U.S. agencies. The action on stem cells, which can grow into any kind of tissue, may help speed research into cures for major illness.
Academic laboratories, led by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and companies already using stem-cell technology, led by Geron Corp., of Menlo Park, California, could gain tens of millions of dollars in funding because of the decision. A “significant amount” of $10 billion given the National Institutes of Health in Obama’s stimulus plan will go to this area of research, Varmus said.
Rethink?
[nyt] [...] Members of Congress and advocates for fighting diseases have long spoken of human embryonic stem cell research as if it were a sure avenue to quick cures for intractable afflictions. Scientists have not publicly objected to such high-flown hopes, which have helped fuel new sources of grant money like the $3 billion initiative in California for stem cell research.
In private, however, many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells. Their chief interest is to derive embryonic stem cell lines from patients with specific diseases, and by tracking the cells in the test tube to develop basic knowledge about how the disease develops.
Despite an F.D.A.-approved safety test of embryonic stem cells in spinal cord injury that the Geron Corporation began in January, many scientists believe that putting stem-cell-derived tissues into patients lies a long way off. Embryonic stem cells have their drawbacks. They cause tumors, and the adult cells derived from them may be rejected by the patient’s immune system. Furthermore, whatever disease process caused the patients’ tissue cells to die is likely to kill introduced cells as well. All these problems may be solvable, but so far none have been solved.
Restrictions on embryonic stem cell research originated with Congress, which, each year since in 1996, has forbidden the use of federal financing for any experiment in which a human embryo is destroyed. This includes the derivation of human stem cell lines from surplus fertility clinic embryos, first achieved by Dr. James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin in 1998.
President Clinton contemplated but never implemented a policy that would have allowed N.I.H.-financed researchers to study human embryonic stem cells derived by others. Research was able to begin only in August 2001, when President Bush, seeking a different way around the Congressional restriction, said researchers could use any lines established before that date.
Flashback: Labs Create a Stand-In Without Eggs, Embryos
[wapo] : Researchers in Wisconsin and Japan said yesterday that they have turned ordinary human skin cells into what are effectively embryonic stem cells without using embryos or women's eggs -- the previously essential ingredients that have embroiled the medically promising field in a nearly decade-long political and ethical debate.
The ability to turn adult cells into embryo-like ones capable of morphing into virtually every kind of cell or tissue, described in two scientific journal articles yesterday, has been a major goal of researchers for years. In theory, it would allow people to grow personalized replacement parts for their bodies from their skin cells and give researchers a powerful means of understanding and treating diseases.
Until now, only human egg cells and embryos, both difficult to obtain and laden with legal and ethical issues, had the mysterious power to turn ordinary cells into stem cells. And until this summer, the challenge of mimicking that process in the lab seemed almost insurmountable, leading many to wonder whether stem cell research would ever unload its political baggage.
As news of the success spread in recent days, stem cell scientists seemed almost giddy that their field could suddenly become like other areas of biomedical science: appreciated, eligible for federal funding and wide open for new waves of discovery.
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A View of the Financial Meltdown
Another glance at the financial meltdown.
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Keep 'em' Coming : Two US Treasury Candidates Withdraw
[afp] : Two top US Treasury candidates have withdrawn from consideration, as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's struggles to build up his staff amid the financial crisis, US media reported.
Annette Nazareth, who was expected to be chosen as deputy secretary, and Geithner's choice for undersecretary for international affairs Caroline Atkinson, have withdrawn their names, the Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition, citing people familiar with the matter.
The two candidates "withdrew in part because of the long vetting process, which had dragged on for weeks and included several rounds of intense questioning," the financial newspaper said.
For Nazareth, "there was also some concern on Capitol Hill about her previous role at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)," it added.
She was an SEC commissioner and headed the division that oversees US securities markets.
"The White House doesn't comment on a personnel matter," a White House official told AFP.
The withdrawals dealt a setback to the Treasury as it works to battle the worst US recession in decades. Five weeks since taking the job, Geithner is the only nominated Treasury official in place at the agency.
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President Teleprompter
[politico] President Barack Obama doesn’t go anywhere without his TelePrompter.
The textbook-sized panes of glass holding the president’s prepared remarks follow him wherever he speaks.
Resting on top of a tall, narrow pole, they flank his podium during speeches in the White House’s stately parlors. They stood next to him on the floor of a manufacturing plant in Indiana as he pitched his economic stimulus plan. They traveled to the Department of Transportation this week and were in the Capitol Rotunda last month when he paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln in six-minute prepared remarks.
Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual — not only because he is famous for his oratory, but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events, large and small.
After the teleprompter malfunctioned a few times last summer and Obama delivered some less-than-soaring speeches, reports surfaced that he was training to wean himself off of the device while on vacation in Hawaii. But no such luck. [...]
“It’s just something presidents haven’t done,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a presidential historian who has held court in the White House since December 1975. “It’s jarring to the eye. In a way, it stands in the middle between the audience and the president because his eye is on the teleprompter.” [...]
Obama has relied on a teleprompter through even the shortest announcements and when repeating the same lines on his economic stimulus plan that he's been saying for months — whereas past presidents have mostly worked off of notes on the podium except during major speeches, such as the State of the Union.
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Limbaugh To Obama : Come On My Show : Explain To Everyone How Wrong I Am
[rl] : [...] My point here is that these are really odious, empty, nasty people who are feasting on their own arrogance. They are power hungry. But, you know what? They've never had a serious debate over ideas. Their goal is to destroy opponents, which is what they're trying to do now. They don't want to engage opponents. Their idea of victory is the destruction of the opponent. They're not for a level playing field. They want to clear the playing field so that their ideas do not have to undergo any scrutiny. So what do they do? They leak stories to The Politico intended to create impressions about their own importance and their brilliance, when in fact they aren't even bit players on the nation's stage. This is Emanuel, and this is Obama.
But I have an idea. If these guys are so impressed with themselves, and if they are so sure of their correctness, why doesn't President Obama come on my show? We will do a one-on-one debate of ideas and policies. Now, his people in this Politico story, it's on the record. They're claiming they wanted me all along. They wanted me to be the focus of attention. So let's have the debate! I am offering President Obama to come on this program -- without staffers, without a teleprompter, without note cards -- to debate me on the issues. Let's talk about free markets versus government control. Let's talk about nationalizing health care and raising taxes on small business.
Let's talk about the New Deal versus Reaganomics. Let's talk about closing Guantanamo Bay, and let's talk about sending $900 million to Hamas. Let's talk about illegal immigration and the lawlessness on the borders. Let's talk about massive deficits and the destroying of opportunities of future generations. Let's talk about ACORN, community agitators, and the unions that represent the government employees which pour millions of dollars into your campaign, President Obama. Let's talk about your elimination of school choice for minority students in the District of Columbia. Let's talk about your efforts to further reduce domestic drilling and refining of oil. Let's talk about your stock market. By the way, Mr. President, I want to help. Yesterday you said you looked at the stock market as no different than a tracking poll that goes up and down. [...]
Just come on this program. Let's have a little debate. You tell me how wrong I am and you can convince the rest of the Americans that don't agree with you how wrong we all are. You're a smart guy, Mr. President. You don't need these hacks to front for you. You've debated the best! You've debated Hillary Clinton. You've debated John Edwards. You've debated Joe Biden. You've debated Dennis Kucinich. You've debated the best out there. You are one of the most gifted public speakers of our age. I would think, Mr. President, you would jump at this opportunity. Don't send lightweights like Begala and Carville to do your bidding -- and forget about the ballerina, Emanuel. He's got things to do in his office. These people, compared to you, Mr. President, are rhetorical chum.
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Recreation of The 'Sully' Hudson River Landing
Professional 3D animation, accurately reconstructed to match the event.
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Provision of the Democrats' Budget Bill Would Kill Scholarship Program
[wsj] Dick Durbin has a nasty surprise for two of Sasha and Malia Obama's new schoolmates. And it puts the president in an awkward position.
The children are Sarah and James Parker. Like the Obama girls, Sarah and James attend the Sidwell Friends School in our nation's capital. Unlike the Obama girls, they could not afford the school without the $7,500 voucher they receive from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Unfortunately, a spending bill the Senate takes up this week includes a poison pill that would kill this program -- and with it perhaps the Parker children's hopes for a Sidwell diploma.
Known as the "Durbin language" after the Illinois Democrat who came up with it last year, the provision mandates that the scholarship program ends after the next school year unless Congress reauthorizes it and the District of Columbia approves. The beauty of this language is that it allows opponents to kill the program simply by doing nothing. Just the sort of sneaky maneuver that's so handy when you don't want inner-city moms and dads to catch on that you are cutting one of their lifelines. [...]
That's the reality that the Parkers and 1,700 other low-income students face if Sen. Durbin and his allies get their way. And it points to perhaps the most odious of double standards in American life today: the way some of our loudest champions of public education vote to keep other people's children -- mostly inner-city blacks and Latinos -- trapped in schools where they'd never let their own kids set foot.
This double standard is largely unchallenged by either the teachers' unions or the press corps. For the teachers' unions, it's a fairly cold-blooded calculation. They're willing to look the other way at lawmakers who chose private or parochial schools for their own kids -- so long as these lawmakers vote in ways that keep the union grip on the public schools intact and an escape hatch like vouchers bolted.
Fumbling Gibbs Gets Asked About Voucher Plan
[powerline] [...] In today's press briefing, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about McGurn's article and Obama's opposition to school choice. He was not able to muster a coherent response:
QUESTION: On education, there's a provision in the omnibus spending bill that would sunset the D.C. voucher plan. And I'm wondering -- there's been a lot of publicity about this brother and sister pair at Sidwell who use their voucher money to -- to pay for tuition at the same school the president chose to send his children. I'm wondering if you could restate the president's opposition to the D.C. voucher plan and why he's...
(CROSSTALK)
GIBBS: Yes, I -- I would -- let me go -- I've not read the article today, if there was one. I think the...
QUESTION: Well, it's just about two kids who use their voucher money to go to Sidwell. I mean...
GIBBS: Right. I mean, I think -- right.
QUESTION: I mean -- I mean, and they would -- in other words, if they cut the voucher program, they couldn't go there.
GIBBS: Why are you even providing me the opportunity to be the middleman? I mean, again...
QUESTION: Well, could you just restate the president's position?
GIBBS: Well, I think the president has concerns about -- concerns about taking large amounts of funding out of the system to -- to address this, that the president obviously believes -- and I think you'll hear him talk about and has talked about -- the need for reform in our educational system, but -- but has not agreed with the program in the past. I'll see if there's anything to update on that.
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Fail? Please Do
[reason] [...] Since when is rooting for the success of an ideologically driven elected official a civic duty, you may wonder? Wonder no more. It merely depends on the politician.
[...]many of us are hoping that all those in power fail, because those in power have a grating habit of being annoyingly self-righteous, hopelessly corrupt, resolutely incompetent and completely apathetic about the freedoms that they have sworn to protect.
Embrace the failure. It's patriotic.
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Useless People Dept. / Brooks Seems Baffled
[nyt] Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”
Moderates now find themselves betwixt and between. On the left, there is a president who appears to be, as Crook says, “a conviction politician, a bold progressive liberal.” On the right, there are the Rush Limbaugh brigades. The only thing more scary than Obama’s experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it.
Those of us in the moderate tradition — the Hamiltonian tradition that believes in limited but energetic government — thus find ourselves facing a void. We moderates are going to have to assert ourselves. We’re going to have to take a centrist tendency that has been politically feckless and intellectually vapid and turn it into an influential force.
The first task will be to block the excesses of unchecked liberalism. In the past weeks, Democrats have legislated provisions to dilute welfare reform, restrict the inflow of skilled immigrants and gut a voucher program designed for poor students. It will be up to moderates to raise the alarms against these ideological outrages.
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Missing US Journalist 'arrested' in Iran
[uktimes] : Iran said today that an Iranian-American journalist whose family have not heard from for three weeks was arrested for engaging in “illegal” activities because she continued to work after the Government revoked her press credentials.
Roxana Saberi, 31, who has reported from Tehran for the BBC and other news organisations, called her father in the United States on February 10, saying that she had been arrested for buying a bottle of wine.
"She called from an unknown place and said she’s been kept in detention,” Mr Saberi said from Fargo, North Dakota, where her family lives.
“She said that she had bought a bottle of wine and the person that sold it had reported it and then they came and arrested her,” he said, adding that the wine purchase was just an excuse to arrest her.
Ms Saberi said that she had already been held for ten days, and called back moments later to say that she would be released in two more days. Neither her family in the US nor her friends in Tehran have heard from her since. Mr Saberi said that he was going public with the information because of fears for his daughter’s safety.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry, which confirmed Ms Saberi’s arrest, did not say why her press credentials had been revoked in 2006, or whether she was still being held. “Her accreditation was over in 2006 after Iranian authorities revoked her press card,” Hasan Qashqavi, a spokesman said. “Her activities since 2006 were completely illegal and unauthorised.”
[nypost] : [...] Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized Iran for arresting journalists and suppressing freedom of speech. The government has arrested several Iranian-Americans in the past few years, citing alleged attempts to overthrow its Islamic regime. The most high-profile case came in 2007, when Iran arrested four Iranian-Americans, including the academic Haleh Esfandiari. The four were imprisoned or had their passports confiscated for several months until they were released and allowed to return to the U.S.
Roxana Saberi is a freelance journalist who has reported for National Public Radio and other media and has lived in Iran for six years. [...]
Saberi's father said his daughter was finishing a book on Iran and had planned to return to the United States this year.
The book is about the culture and the people of Iran, he said. She was hoping to finish it in the next couple of months and come home to have it published.
Roxana Saberi was Miss North Dakota in 1997 and was among 10 finalists in the Miss America pageant that year. She graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., with degrees in mass communication and French and with dreams of being an international correspondent. She said that her goal as Miss North Dakota was to encourage people to appreciate cultural differences.
Saberi's mother, Akiko, is from Japan and her father is from Iran. Roxana was born in the United States and grew up in Fargo. Her father said she was determined to go to Iran.
"I was very worried and I was reluctant for her to go," Reza Saberi said Sunday. "She was very persistent about it."
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Despite Hopes of Hollywood Visit, Iran’s Leaders Stick to the Same Script[nyt] : An official delegation of Hollywood actors and filmmakers met with their Iranian counterparts in Tehran over the weekend, the first such visit to a country that banned American movies 30 years ago.
But the Iranian government quickly crushed any cinematic illusion of an Obama-era thaw in relations, denouncing the meeting on Sunday and demanding that Hollywood apologize for its “insults and accusations against the Iranian nation.”
The nine members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who arrived in Tehran on Friday as cultural ambassadors were apparently unaware of the official reaction as they sought to improve ties between the nations’ film industries. [...]
The Hollywood movers and shakers “will change the mood here,” said Farhad Tohidi, a screenwriter.[...]
But the warm Hollywood glow of the moviemakers was quickly dampened by geopolitics in the form of an official statement by Javad Shamghadri, the arts adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“Representatives of Iran’s film industry should only have an official meeting with representatives of the academy and Hollywood if they apologize for the insults and accusations against the Iranian nation during the past 30 years,” he said, according to the ISNA news agency.
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Routine : Another Obama Pick Fails With Tax Problems
[dn] : Add former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk to the list of Obama Cabinet picks with tax problems.
The Senate Finance Committee says he underpaid by $9,975 in the last three years.
Senate aides uncovered the shortfall during weeks of vetting, and Kirk – the administration’s designated point person on trade -- has promised to pay the Internal Revenue Service in full.
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1970's : Global Cooling: The Coming Ice Age
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