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November 18, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Wednesday, November 18
A Deathblow for Obamacare - CLICK HERE.
ROVE: 'A Referendum on This White House' - Obama's plan to nationalize the midterm elections may backfire. CLICK HERE.
Obama's Man-Caused Disaster Chickens Come Home to Roost - SEE HERE.
Survivor of Socialism Has Warning for America - GO HERE.
The Clock is Ticking, Mr. President
Calvin Freiburger, NewsRealBlog.com
Obama assigned McChrystal to Afghanistan in June, presumably because he had at least some faith in his judgment. Has the President suddenly decided he can’t trust McChrystal after all? Furthermore, while presidents obviously must carefully consider every piece of advice they receive, one would think the most enlightened statesman of our age could come to a conclusion within three months—especially a president convinced that widespread overhauls of the private sector are too urgent to take the time to read the legislation in detail.
The Founding Fathers believed that careful deliberation, not impatient emotion, should dominate domestic policy making, but understood that the defense of the nation in times of war would require prompt action and “energy in the executive.” For the sake of America’s men & women in uniform, former constituitonal law professor Obama ought to re-read his Federalist Papers—the sooner, the better. Read article.
The buck stops nowhere
Cokie and Steve Roberts, JWR.com
The good news: Both parties finally agree on an important element of public policy.
The bad news: What they agree on is doing nothing real about the deficit. True, the country is still staggering from the hammer blows of a severe recession. With unemployment at 10.2 percent, the administration's first moral — and political — priority should be kick-starting the economy and creating jobs.
But that's in the short run. In the long run, deficits matter. A lot. And the numbers are truly shocking. The budget shortfall reached $1.4 trillion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, by far the largest in history. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the national debt will snowball by a total of $9.1 trillion over the next decade.
Listen to Laura Tyson, former economic adviser to Bill Clinton, writing in BusinessWeek: "Persistent deficits of this size will put upward pressure on long-term interest rates, crowding out investment and stunting long-term growth." Interest payments will continue to grow, she warns, rivaling defense expenditures by 2019; investor anxiety could rise, the dollar's value could fall, and another global crisis could explode.
Neither party is taking these warnings seriously enough. Read article.
Much To Remember – Much to Think About
Galganov.com
During Obama’s November 10, 2009 passive address at the Fort Hood Memorial, Barack Hussein Obama called the murder of 13 Americans an act of extremism.
He also called this horror a tragedy.
What is most remarkable about Obama’s speech was the absolute lack of conviction coming from someone who is a firebrand speaker, who during the Presidential campaign was good enough to make people swoon.
What was also missing from his speech was the word TERRORISM. Even more succinctly, Islamo TERRORISM.
I wonder what Obama meant in his Cairo speech when he spoke about the incredible contributions Moslems have made to the fabric of America, because when he free wheels his words on Islam, they are beyond generous.
But, when 13 people are murdered in cold blood, with 30 others wounded in an attack on an American Military base by a Moslem officer (major) yelling ALLAH AKBAR (Allah is great), there is all of a sudden silence about the man who pulled the trigger and why he did it. Read article.
How Could It All Get Worse?
Claudia Rosett, Pajamas Media.com
So How Could It All Get Worse?
The Fort Hood shooting, the goverment and mass media denial that this was jihadi terrorism, while President Obama urges us not to rush to judgment, dithers over Afghanistan, declines to attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, panders to Iran, and astride an exploding federal budget and tanking dollar is busy pushing socialized medicine…. So, what next?
Right on cue, here comes the United Nations, with its “climate change” plans to operate as the global toll booth for the process of combustion itself — never mind the questionable and politicized science, the Nobel-bedecked quackery, and the UN’s chronic tendencies toward corruption, nepotism, bad ideas, abused mandates, feather-bedding bureaucracies and stages and sugarplums for tyrants. Read article.
Publius vs. Obamacare: Let the Senate be the Senate.
Rich Lowry, NRO.com
Supporters of Obamacare have their next target for obloquy and shame. It’s the United States Senate, an institution whose villainy will almost match that of the insurers and Fox News if the health-care bill sinks there.
The anti-senatorial campaign is already revving up. Liberal columnist Harold Meyerson stamped his feet in frustration yesterday in the Washington Post at the cussed balkiness of the Senate: “Dithering Heights.” “Proceeds glacially and produces next to nothing.”
This amounts to raging at the Senate for its very nature and purpose. It’s supposed to be slow-paced and unproductive. Everyone has their moments of frustration at the Senate (I’ve had plenty) because it is designed to be frustrating, especially when a majority in the House is electric with ideological excitement. Conservatives spent most of 1995 hurling epithets at the Senate.
So it’s not surprising that the Left is upset at it at a time when “Iron Nancy” is using her solid majority to muscle massive pieces of legislation through the House by a handful of votes. Why can’t the Senate do the same, goes the cry, entirely missing the point. It’s not just that the Senate is built differently from the House: It won’t truly be fulfilling its role in our constitutional scheme if doesn’t deep-six Obamacare. Read article.
Can Sarah Palin Make a Comeback?
Matthew Continetti, Online WSJ.com
After last year's brutal presidential campaign, Ms. Palin is now reintroducing herself to the American public. Nothing less than her future in American politics—and a possible run for the White House in 2012—hangs in the balance.
Ms. Palin has two problems. The first is that she's become one of the most polarizing figures in the country. The second is that voters continue to worry about her qualifications for the presidency, a concern that her abrupt resignation from office last July intensified.
Lucky for her, both problems are solvable. Since Ms. Palin appeared on the national stage, the left has unfairly demonized her. Blockbuster interviews and book tours will humanize her.
More important than these public appearances is Ms. Palin's message. She needs to adopt a market-friendly populist agenda to strengthen her policy credentials and make her seem less partisan to independent voters. A bipartisan, center-right approach should come easily to her. That's how she won her race for governor in 2006.
Ms. Palin's unpopularity—the result of horrendous media coverage and her role as the McCain campaign's pitbull—is a major political obstacle. Her unfavorable rating hovers around 50%, the point at which most politicians would reach for the Valium.
An October Gallup poll put Ms. Palin's favorable number at 40%, her lowest rating to date. In a November Gallup survey, 63% of all voters said they wouldn't seriously consider supporting her for the presidency. Read article.
Obama’s Attack Dog Bows Out
Jacob Laksin, FrontPageMag.com
If White House communications director Anita Dunn leaves behind a legacy when she resigns her post at the end of this month, it will likely be for her dubious role in dividing the country as part of an administration that so grandly promised to bring it together.
When Dunn took over the job last May, she was presented as a longtime Obama confidant who whose pull with the president and his inner circle would help the administration craft its governing message. But, in what has become a pattern within the administration, the message that emerged was unabashedly partisan and aggressively polarizing – a stark contrast to the hopeful tone of political unity and national reconciliation that Obama sounded during the presidential campaign.
Dunn herself, meanwhile, became the latest exemplar of the ideological extremism that time and again has surfaced within the administration, making a mockery of its centrist conceit to represent all Americans.
Ironically, given her role of shaping the administration’s image in the media, Dunn’s tenure in the White House will be most remembered for her high-profile fight with the country’s leading cable news outlet. Indeed, the administration has yet to recover from Dunn’s bare-knuckled campaign against FOX News. Read article.
The Repugnant Obama Paradigm
Constancio Asumen, Jr., NMJ.us
I deem it pointless to dwell again on the litany of liberal media sins. Aside from having peripherally dealt with it earlier elsewhere myself, the internet literature alone is replete with brilliant and incisive documentation. To single out the most notable few I recently found: Victor Davis Hanson has repeatedly analyzed Obama’s lapses in judgment. Thomas Sowell pointed out with unmistakable emphasis how ruinous Obama’s czaring of America is to the country. Joan Swirsky pushed the envelope even further by delving into who could possibly be calling the shots.
The enablers demand revisiting because they, too, constitute a pattern. It requires getting to the forest without being distracted by the trees. The so-called main stream media, exemplified to notoriety by the “tingling legs” of Chris Matthews, being blatantly functioning as a de facto propaganda outlet for Obama does not need any journalistic sourcing. That the “hope and change” mantra took political traction, thanks to the acolyte media has become a common knowledge.
It is however usually under-appreciated that the Clinton Paradigm ushered in with facility the arrival of the Obama Paradigm. The ultimate political insider Richard Morris architected triangulation as an effective tactical maneuver to attain the strategy of political survival. This enabled the Clinton presidency to recalibrate its bearings, to survive Newt’s “Contract for America” revolution and introduce a new standard for Presidential behavior. The Clinton era effectively corroded the nation’s sensibilities.
After the nation have accepted the mantra that the Lewinsky Affair was about “only just sex,” “everybody does it,” “does not amount to impeachable behavior,” the crush and burn methodology of Rahm Emanuel became as benign to the nation as a cub scouts fire drill. On his inauguration speech, Obama enjoined the nation to help him remake America and more than half of the nation gave him a standing ovation.
Little did the applauders suspect that what he had in mind was to convert America to be the leading debtor nation after a long tradition of being a reliable creditor nation. Little did the nation suspect that what he had in mind was to downsize the private sector, the very dependable engine of wealth creation, in order that union and government bureaucracies, become the undisputed purveyor of the perverted “golden rule,” that he who has the gold makes the rules. Read article.
Hillary in 2012?
Tony Blankley, JWR.com
Only God knows what will happen to America in the next year and a half (and he hasn't told me), but it is not implausible that by 2012, the Democratic Party will see Hillary Clinton's nomination as its best chance for keeping the White House.
Of course, if the economy comes booming back, unemployment is cut in half and there are no foreign policy disasters, President Barack Obama surely will get an unopposed nomination and probably his re-election. But if current estimates are right, that unemployment still may be close to double digits at the end of next year — and particularly if foreign affairs go badly — Hillary just might be the one.
It seems odd that a failed foreign policy might be the basis for a president's secretary of state to replace him on the presidential ticket, but it is beginning to set up that way.
Of course, as secretary of state, Hillary cannot plausibly be assigned any responsibility for a bad economy and high unemployment. Nor, perhaps ironically, would her fingerprints be on a stunningly unpopular health care plan that increases the national debt by trillions, increases the cost of health care premiums for the middle class and increases taxes on the middle class while also reducing the benefits to the middle class.
Nor, curiously, is she likely to be seen as responsible for the Obama administration's foreign policy. It has been reported repeatedly in major newspapers that she is one of the most marginalized secretaries of state in modern times. The White House has made little effort to disabuse the press and the public of that view. She was not even included in the president's Moscow summit. She is seen as the good soldier and team player with little voice in policy. Read article.
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