May 21, 2012
FSM HOT TOPICS
Exclusive: Saturday, February 14
by OVAL OFFICE WATCH February 14, 2009
The World Just Doesn't Understand the Genius of Obama - SEE HERE.
So Far, Amateur Hour
Kathleen Parker, JWR.com
The first however-many days of Barack Obama's presidency have been a study in amateurism.
Many suspected that Obama wasn't quite ready, but kept their fingers crossed. Optimistic disappointment is the new holding pattern.
What's missing from Obama's performance isn't the intelligence that voters acknowledged in electing him. It's the experience they tried to pretend didn't really matter. Experienced politicians, after all, got us into this mess.
Absent is maturity — that grown-up quality of leadership that is palpable when the real deal enters a room. There's a reason why elders are respected. They have something the rest of us don't have — yet — because we haven't lived long enough. We haven't made the really tough decisions, the ones that are often unpopular.
There was a time last week when Obama looked younger than usual. Not youthful so much as not fully formed.
Or had he looked across the table into the eyes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and realized that he was not among friends? Read article.
Are Bush's secrets safe with Obama?
Josh Gerstein, Politico.com
For years, Democrats in Congress and open government groups battled, with little success, to expose many of the most closely guarded secrets of President George W. Bush’s time in office.
Now President Barack Obama holds the power to reveal them, but some of his allies may be disappointed when he doesn’t pull back the curtain as far — or as fast — as they would like.
The documents still under wraps stem from the hottest scandals and controversies of the Bush era: warrantless wiretapping, alleged torture of prisoners in the war on terror, the abrupt dismissal of a batch of U.S. attorneys in 2006 and a criminal investigation into the White House’s involvement in the leak of a CIA operative’s identity.
Obama signed two orders calling for government openness but also said he’d rather turn the page on some Bush-era fights than rehash them. Still, he and his aides may feel pressure to lay the cupboards bare — all in the name of transparency, the mantra of his presidential campaign.
But what Obama must remember is this: Whatever he releases retroactively about Bush might well be released someday about his own administration’s inner workings and private debates. And that’s enough to give any president pause. Read article.
Trade, not pork, is the key
John Fogle, BlueRidgeNow.com
A consistently ignored factor, one with significant economic consequences, is the possibility of another major terrorist attack. President Obama has announced policies that make it more likely that we will be attacked, to wit, the cessation of aggressive interrogation of captured terrorists, and shutting down the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
The attack on 9/11 cost our economy a trillion dollars, and the next attack could do the same or more. In these economic times, we should be increasing our efforts to stop terrorism, not decreasing them and hoping terrorists will suddenly stop hating us. Weakness, even perceived weakness, invites attack.
And experts say that government spending does nothing to stimulate the economy; a dollar spent by the government simply results in a dollar less for the public to spend. According to Dr. Walter Williams, economics professor at George Mason “… if Congress spends $4 trillion, we (the public) must privately spend $4 trillion less whether it is accomplished through taxation, inflation or borrowing.” Read article.
Richard Daley, The President's Mayor
Collin Levy, Online WSJ.com
Richard Daley is rarely sick, and he doesn't believe in snow days. Sitting in an office high above his frozen city this week, the über mayor is fighting a flu and talking about Chicago's image. The city has been under the klieg lights lately as the hometown of President Obama, and because of its bid for the 2016 Olympics.
Chicago is one of the nation's great media cynosures, and has been since the riotous heyday of Colonel McCormick and the Chicago Tribune. Lately, it has been a national focus as the latest place where Barack Obama got his political education. His postcollege work as a community organizer was done in the Altgeld Gardens public-housing project on the city's south side. He served as a city lawyer and a professor at the University of Chicago. He became a state senator representing areas surrounding Hyde Park.
In other words, his political rise came in the dappled light of the shadow cast by Mayor Daley, whose personality and history are inseparable from Chicago political culture. Read article.
Obamania Short Lived
Lynn Stuter, NWV.com
Three weeks into his term, the illegitimate usurper, Also Known As (AKA) Obama, is already losing ground in the polls. Boyish good looks, a slim physique, and flashing pearly whites only go so far. Not even great oratory skills can save the day when there is nothing behind the façade that is of merit and the teleprompter isn’t around. The obvious lack of experience is glaringly evident as is the communist agenda.
Swooping into Washington, DC on the genie’s magic carpet, spouting “hope and change,” AKA promised those gullible enough to listen to empty promises spoken on the wings of smooth oratory, such that they would vote for him, that his Administration would not be conducting business as usual.
Running on an agenda of “change”, the nebulous term obviously does not apply to those who will run the “change” agenda; which means, of course, that the “change” agenda will be nothing new, nothing better; just something old, and more of it. Read article.
Why Bernie Goldberg Has It Right
Dick Morris, Vote.com
Theodore White wrote The Making of the President: 1960, a book which fascinated all political junkies as it recounted the ways and methods of the Kennedy triumph. He followed that volume with successor books each four years. The premise of each book was that by following what was happening in the two campaigns, he could fully cover all that was taking place in the election. Newsweek Magazine seeks to perpetuate his methodology in its quadrennial summaries of the election campaigns published shortly after Election Day.
But such summaries miss the essential point: The reality of modern campaigns cannot be covered by discussing what the candidates, managers, and staff are doing. It can only be fully understood by covering what the media is doing during the campaigns. That is why Bernie Goldberg's new book A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media, despite its long title, is so important to read. It is not a supply side treatment of the campaign - focusing on what the candidates were putting out to the public. Rather, it is a demand side treatment, covering what the public was absorbing through the media. Read article.
Mr. Obama, Speak First at Touro
Andrew G. Bostom, American Thinker.com
As if to underscore the primacy of this outreach effort to the Islamic world, Obama characterized America itself as a country of "Muslims, Christians, Jews" -- having in his earlier inaugural address -- disregarding actual US demography (i.e., recent Pew Data indicating the number of US Muslims are half, or less, the number of US Jews) -- only accorded Muslims second position, after American Christians, but before American Jews, Hindus, and others.
While several commentators, particularly Charles Krauthammer have noted how Mr. Obama's self-flagellating apologetics distort and sully the actual historical record of US actions vis a vis the Muslim world over the past three decades, I was struck by another alarming incongruity: the complete absence of any comparably expressed concerns by the new President for a much more beleaguered and vulnerable people, worldwide -- the Jews. Read article.
U.S. antiwar legislators worry over Obama's plan for Afghanistan - Gates: "Let's not turn it into a Central Asian Valhalla."
Anne Flaherty, Edmonton Sun.com
Afghanistan poses a foreign policy challenge unlike no other. The country is one of the poorest in the world. Opium production has given way to Columbia-like drug cartels trafficking heroin. Corruption is rampant. Terrorist fighters move freely across the Pakistan border.
And in the latest twist, the U.S. is now scrambling to find an alternative to flying troops and supplies into the landlocked country because of threats by nearby Kyrgyzstan that it plans to shut down the U.S. base there.
“The complexities just mount — and you have to bring yourself back to what I hope we’re going to ask, which is ’what is the goal?’ ” said Rep. John Tierney, in an interview after returning from his third trip to Afghanistan.
“And I just think we need to be extremely careful about signing ourselves up to escalating to the point where we can’t pullback. . Because once you own the problem, you own it,” said David Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Read article.
Wanted: Corporate CEOs
Dave Hoffman, CapitolHillCoffeeHouse.com
Corporate compensation has become quite an issue for the Obama administration. One issue is the amount of pay received by a CEO; the other is the bonus payout. The government, in an excess of zeal, wants to place controls on both. It’s not surprising that a liberal government, tending to lean towards socialism and unions, would want to do so.
What IS surprising is that no one on the conservative side seems to understand how a simple “fix” can eliminate most possible arguments against government control whilst maintaining relative freedom to let the marketplace determine executive compensation…
I won’t pretend that the process won’t be annoying, even painful for the greedier CEOs, but I’d like the major corporations to at least consider the military. General Officers are paid by their rank and time-in-grade, a method (probably with a higher pay scale) that could be used with CEOs. The bigger the company you’ve managed, and the more years you’ve managed it, the larger the pay scale.
The thing about a plan like this, if put together by the 100 or so top corporations in the United States is that it would provide a measurable way to determine salary that could be touted as proof that corporate America does NOT need government interference or programs to determine CEO pay.
Make no mistake, the government wants involvement, as part of the liberal program of socializing America. The unions, too, would rejoice at the “comeuppance” of the corporate hierarchy. Read article.
Ouch! “Largely a Joyless Society” with an “Illusory Stimulus Package”
The Much Deeper Meanings Of Wall Street’s Wild Ride
Louis Rene’ Beres, Professor of International Law, Purdue University
Israel-commentary.org
In figuring out the core weaknesses of our troubled financial markets, there is far more than meets the eye. On the surface, Wall Street’s seemingly interminable wild ride is the obvious outcome of purely economic factors. Yet, at a deeper level, the problem of market weakness and volatility is not really fiscal, but human. Sure, the interrelated banking and housing and credit crises have played havoc with securities, but these crises are themselves epiphenominal. That is, they are a mere reflection of something “underneath” and much more fundamental.
Even in that very large segment of Main Street that still knows little of Wall Street, there is deepening anxiety and considerable unhappiness. Taught that respect and success lien high salaries and corollary patterns of consumption, the American public dutifully worships the commonplace. Why should it be otherwise? Galvanized by mostly patronizing and vulgar entertainments this lonely American crowd thoughtlessly follows a flamboyant but impotent ringmaster. However well-intentioned and capable our newly elected president, he can never save us from ourselves. Read article.
Protect the Prisoner, Punish the Unborn
Bobby Eberle, GOPUSA.com
Obama's first two executive orders have drawn the ire of Americans across the country. These two presidential acts show a stark contrast in Obama's priorities and provide a window into the mind of the far left.
Protect the prisoner, punish the unborn. With all the problems facing America today, President Obama felt that his first official acts should be to make America less safe and to put more innocent human lives at risk. The American people have responded in a recent poll, but unfortunately, Obama and the far left aren't listening.
In a newly released Gallup poll, Americans voiced their disapproval of Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay prisoner facility. Fifty-percent of those polled said they disapprove of the action, while 44% approved. Even more unpopular -- do you hear that, liberals??? -- is Obama's decision to end the ban on funding for overseas abortions. There will always be a debate in this country as to how far we should go and what laws should be in place to protect the unborn. Let's have that debate! But America should not do ANYTHING that promotes abortion. That is one of the most un-America acts I can think of, and it's one of the acts that President Obama performed first.
Even more unpopular -- do you hear that, liberals??? -- is Obama's decision to end the ban on funding for overseas abortions. There will always be a debate in this country as to how far we should go and what laws should be in place to protect the unborn. Let's have that debate! But America should not do ANYTHING that promotes abortion. That is one of the most un-America acts I can think of, and it's one of the acts that President Obama performed first. Read article.
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Occupy Chicago freakout: The LRAD is coming, the LRAD is coming!
May 21, 2012 00:57 AM
Here is an LRAD. It’s a Long Range Acoustic Device better known as a sound cannon and it’s used to disperse unruly crowds. Here is an Occupy Chicago freakout over the LRAD (led by the same livestreamer who freaked out last night over a brief police stop): Two #LRAD s spotted heading to march.— Tim [...]
Michael Moore spreads hysterical, anti-police fable from his Occupy comrades
May 21, 2012 00:37 AM
The crockumentary film-maker should have read Twitchy first. As we told you Saturday night, the trio of Occupy Chicago livestreamers who freaked out over a brief, Chicago police pullover didn’t have their apartment raided, didn’t have any of their equipment damaged, were not “held at gunpoint,” and had none of their high-priced cameras, phones, and [...]
It will rain: Awww, Occupy Chicago's all wet; finally, free showers for all!
May 20, 2012 11:09 PM
Mother Nature is Chicago law enforcement’s best friend. Tonight, the rabble-rousers’ plans for anarchy got spoiled by rain. Twitter had fun as the Occupiers and their fearless livestream crews ran for cover, while a few of the mobsters hung around to harass officers on duty and break out in senseless chants: Fkin Streamers afraid of [...]
Marion Barry has change of heart after being saved by Filipino hospital staff
May 20, 2012 10:00 PM
In what reads like a bad Hollywood movie script Marion Barry has changed his mind about Filipino nurses. Just a few weeks after complaining about how many Filipino nurses work in Washington DC Barry's life was saved by Filipino nurses. That's right, the same people he wanted to push our of DC hospitals ended up treating his potentially life threatening blood clot.
May 20, 2012 06:15 PM
Violence erupts at the end of the NATO Summit protests. Earlier today, members of Black Bloc were arrested for plotting to attack police stations, Mayor Emanuel's home and President Obama's campaign headquarters. Their violence then turned to the protest; police in riot gear move in, wearing gas masks. Protesters are throwing things at police according to video, live photos and reports from on the ground in Chicago.
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