According to Drew “Don’t Call Me Michael” Westen, Obama’s problem is that he wasn’t interventionistic, imperial, demigogic…progressive enough!

No, I’m not going to quote it.  Read it.  On an empty stomach.

It’s no secret – Obama’s priority isn’t the economy.  All that “I’ll be fine being a one-term president” was so much baked wind; he wants four more years to get his addled agenda across.

The guy’s got a nation to destroy:

Of course, this by no means is an indication the President has lost the Huffington Post. Arianna, Alex, and everyone at this liberal abomination will be campaigning for the former junior senator from Illinois next year as if he’s a close relative.

But the disappointment on the left is palpable, and if the economy really is double-dipping, it will be interesting to see whether the rats leave the ship or figure out a way to blame it on Republicans.

And it’s in this cycle that the Tea Party, and all of those millions of newly-minted fiscalcons, needs to earn its bones.

As NewsBusters previously reported, there already is an effort underway to use the debt ceiling agreement as the culprit for any downturn.

Whether or not the American people will buy it is another thing altogether.

The media is already working overtime try to rig that part the equation.

I’ve been listening to some of my fellow conservatives – especially Tea Partiers – complaining about the debt ceiling deal, in terms that start with “it’s awful” and often as not end with “well, it was a great run – time to start hiding gold under the mattress”.

To which I answer, as appropriate, “what did you expect when we only control the House?” and “if you’re not storing gold, ammo and food even in the good times, you’re nuts”.  But I digress.

Ed Morrissey – with whom I co-host a radio show every Saturday on AM1280 – notes in The Week that it wasn’t a perfect victory for the Tea Party – there was no way for that victory to happen, at least not via democratic means, in this Congress with this President – but it was a victory nevertheless:

Who won, and who lost? Did anyone win? If we gauge winners and losers by the reaction from politicians and activists across the political spectrum, no one was satisfied with the deal reached between Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress and President Obama. Though it is arguably true that few actually advanced their agenda much in the deal, that doesn’t mean everyone came out of this deal equally worse off. Indeed, despite some dissatisfied rumblings from within the Tea Party, one lesson is clear: They succeeded in transforming Washington.

The codecil to that – one that the Tea Party needs to remember?  Politics is not like a championship game, with a final end result that stands for all time.  It’s a season – one that never actually ends.  It’s one where everything that happens in this game – hurt quarterbacks, momentum gained and lost, everything – affects the next game, and the game after that, and games played after your children take things over.

The example I keep coming back to: handgun carry reform in Minnesota.  When Concealed Carry Reform Now first formed, and started trying to change Minnesota’s racist, sexist, patriarchal weapon carry laws, they couldn’t even get time to talk with legislators – with “friendly”, Republican ones.

I can’t help but feel that some of the Tea Party conservatives who are complaining about the debt ceiling deal today would have fumed about the unfairness of it all back then, thrown in the towel and spent the next six years silently stewing.  But I’d hope it’d be a teaching moment.

Because the next year…well, only a few legislators talked with CCRN.  But it was more than the previous year.  And CCRN’s mailing list bloomed, and outstate voters started paying attention.

And the next year?  A few more legislators opened their doors.  And CCRN’s mailing list started having an effect – legislators started hearing from more people, which opened still more doors.

And the next year?  There was talk of a bill.  It never happened, but legislators were getting the message in droves; CCRN’s volunteer lobbyists were getting audiences with key legislators.

And the next year?  Well, the CCRN mailing list grew some more, and the DFL had to start playing defense.

And the next year?  And the following?  More of the same.  The DFL – and their point man on the issue, Wes “Lying Sack of Garbage” Skoglund – had to crank the smear and lie machine up into full force, since it was becoming clear they had no basis in fact.

And the next year?  There was a bill – and it died on the table (as I recall – I could very well have the specifics wrong, but it doesn’t really detract from the point).  And CCRN’s mailing list told voters which legislators voted against it.  And they got an earful, and a few of them – outstate DFLers who’d voted against the bill – lost their return tickets to Saint Paul.

And the next year?  We won.

(And two years later, we won again, after a DFL-pet judge struck down the law on ludicrously selective grounds).

Viewed from the perspective of 1995, and 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002, we lost, lost, lost, lost, lost, lost, lost and lost again.

And yet without all the effort – and there was a lot of effort – expended from 1005 through 2002, there would have been no victory.

And the victory wasn’t won by simply wanting it badly enough – although you gotta have that.  It was won by playing grassroots politics better than the other side.  We – the pro-Second-Amendment movement – had to win over a lot of hearts and minds in the legislature, the media, and on Mainstreet Minnesota.

The Tea Party did transform American politics – once. It did it by convincing the American people last Fall that they had the best ideas for taking this nation forward.

And now they need to do it again – to win the Senate, the White House, and a bunch of State Houses and Legislatures, enough to really, seriously, totally revamp the way this nation views the relationship between The People and government.

And it’s not a sprint, or a single game; it’s a marathon, an endless season.  Something that’ll challenge many Americans’ addled attention spans.

All the better.

We really did.

“Socializing 1/7 of the economy”, we tried to tell the other 52-odd-% of you,”will screw up the economy even worse than it already is”.

And we were right:

Private-sector job creation initially recovered from the recession at a normal rate, leading to predictions last year of a “Recovery Summer.” Since April 2010, however, net private-sector job creation has stalled. Within two months of the passage of Obamacare, the job market stopped improving. This suggests that businesses are not exaggerating when they tell pollsters that the new health care law is holding back hiring. The law significantly raises business costs and creates considerable uncertainty about the future. To encourage hiring, Congress should repeal Obamacare.

Some of us are trying.  We really are.

Boehner’s response to the President’s communal scolding was short and to the point.

Still, this one would have worked just fine:

(Via Brad “The Closer” Carlson)

Obama’s support is crumbing – among Tea Partiers Liberals:

The Post-ABC poll found that the number of liberal Democrats who strongly support Obama’s record on jobs plunged 22 points from 53 percent last year to 31 percent. The number of African Americans who believe the president’s actions have helped the economy has dropped from 77 percent in October to just over half of those surveyed.

As longtime friend of this blog Duke Powell tweeted this morning:

Forget who the GOP Presidential Candidate will be…. Who will the Democrats run? #p2 #stribpol

I’d love to see Pelosi run…

UPDATE: Let’s be clear here; I think Obama is going to be hard to beat in 2012. Lots can go right, as well as wrong, between now and then.  Let’s never forget that incumbency counts for a lot.  Indeed, if Obama doesn’t win re-election by at least five points, and if the Dems don’t retake the House and extend their lead by five seats in the Senate, they should take it as another grievous drubbing.

Just saying – he can’t be happy with the news.

Throuigh the simple expedient of remembering why they were went there, and staying with it against a full-court media press, the House GOP majority has prevailed on Harry Reid to cave on the budget.

…now that Harry Reid is developing a proposal with $2.7 trillion in cuts and nothing in revenues, it’s a safe bet that it won’t include any tax increases. Which means that whether Republicans realize it or not, they’ve won. The question now is whether they can stop.

Originally, the Democratic position was that we should simply raise the debt ceiling. Republicans said “no.” There would have to be a deal that reduced the deficit by at least $2.4 trillion — which is the size of the debt ceiling increase needed to get us into 2013.

Then the Democratic position was that we should raise the debt ceiling through a deal that reduced the deficit by about $2.4 trillion, with $2 trillion of that coming from spending cuts and $400 billion coming from taxes. Republicans said “no.” There would have to be a deal that disavowed taxes.

Sound familiar to Minnesotans?

If you’re a conservative, neither the Minnesota budget nor the various GOP proposals in Congress are perfect.   Neither can be; both faced Democrat chief executives, and in Congress a Democrat-controlled Senate.  Let’s be honest; the GOP at the federal level is doing its darnedest to shake off a decade-old habit of going along to get along with the establishment and its craving for spending.   Viewed through a conservative purist’s lens, it’s not good enough; viewed from the perspective of a GOP that, six years ago, was spending money like an Orange County sweet-sixteen with dadders’ platinum card, it’s well-nigh miraculous.

Ditto the Minnesota GOP.  Again – the MN budget deal isn’t perfect, and the MNGOP admits it.  They had to compromise to get past the Governor.  But the job in Minnesota isn’t just getting a budget passed; it’s reversing five decades of “government first” inertia among the state’s governing class, against a DFL phalanx of lavishly-funded special interests who would leave no mound of slime unturned to protect the status quo.

The GOP went to DC and Saint Paul with a clear mandate; don’t be that GOP, the one that played ball with the DFL on a wink and a backslap from 1969 through 1998, the one that went inside-the-beltway native after 1994.

There’s a lot of work to be done.  But it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you remember your mission.

100% of sitting presidents seem to have a problem with making stuff up as he goes along.  Last week, he claimed 80% of Americans support tax hikes – which would seem to be an epic turnaround in eight months, if it were true.

If it were true:

Where is he getting this 80% figure? How about “out of his hind end.” Gallup doesn’t back him up. Neither does Rasmussen. Gallup gets you closest, but you have do get a little creative with the numbers and even it shows that 50% would prefer a deal with no “revenues” at all (Ras shows 55% on that side).

Obama’s just scattin’ and be-boppin’ and makin’ stuff up.

Where is Snopes?  Politicfact?  All of our legions of journalistic “fact-checkers?”

Of course you’re not.

And Marco Rubio knows it:

“Every aspect of life in America today is worse than it was when [President Obama] took over. Unemployment higher. Interest rates. The only thing that has gone down in America over the last two years is the value of your home. This president has mismanaged this economy. He has been incompetent in his management of this economy,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said on “Hannity.”

Oh, incomes have dropped.  Don’t forget that.

The only thing Obama has done better than Carter so far?  Interest rates haven’t ballooned yet – and that’s likely coming if we don’t get the deficit under control.

It’s time for change.

I’ve restrained myself ably, if I say so myself.

But after the better part of a decade of reading peoples’ bumper stickers, I just gotta way it.

I’m already against Obama’s next war. .

Nate Silver talks a little history, noting that well into the 1980 campaign, Jimmy Carter seemed to be defying the bad economy.  Carter was…:

…holding his own against Ronald Reagan. Some polls, even well after Labor Day (that’s Labor Day 1980, not 1979), showed the horse race to be tied or even had Mr. Carter with a slim lead.

Mr. Reagan would win overwhelmingly, however, claiming 44 states (even Massachusetts and New York) while limiting Mr. Carter to just 41 percent of the vote. He surged in the final week of the campaign after he posed the following question to Americans in the presidential debate of October 28, the first and only such event in which he and Mr. Carter participated together:

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Where was the unemployment rate four years ago? Four points lower.

Where was our national debt? Bad, but not this bad.

Where was our budget? Settled, and while waaaaay too big (Bad Bush!), much smaller than today.

How was our standing in the world? Leftymedia yammering aside, about the same as it’d always been.

One could argue in a macroeconomic sense that I’m better off because my house doesn’t have all that mortgage-bubble-based false valuation on it. Someday I’ll look back on that had laugh.

Otherwise?

Nope. Worse off.

ABC/WaPo poll shows Romney in a dead heat with Obama:

New Post-ABC numbers show Obama leading five of six potential Republican presidential rivals tested in the poll. But he is in a dead heat with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who formally announced his 2012 candidacy last week, making jobs and the economy the central issues in his campaign.

Among all Americans, Obama and Romney are knotted at 47 percent each, and among registered voters, the former governor is numerically ahead, 49 percent to 46 percent.

As with all leftymedia polls, the results need to be scrutinized; the mainstream media will always try to build up the GOP contender they think they can either beat outright, or effectively marginalize (see McCain).   Romney is weak among the conservative base…

…although pressure from the likes of Gingrich, Palin and Bachmann in the primary chase can only help that.  And given my belief that “perfect is the enemy of good enough”, I think a Romney that’d had to move hard to the right, a la Pawlenty in 2002, would be a huge step up from what we have.

This bit – the one in bold – puzzles me:

In another indicator of rapidly shifting views on economic issues, 45 percent trust congressional Republicans over the president when it comes to dealing with the economy, an 11-point improvement for the GOP since March. Still, nearly as many, 42 percent, side with Obama on this issue.

Who are these people? And do they read the news…

…oh, yeah.  Never mind.

Number of federally-owned limousines Limous soars on Obama’s watcha;

Limousines, the very symbol of wealth and excess, are usually the domain of corporate executives and the rich. But the number of limos owned by Uncle Sam increased by 73 percent during the first two years of the Obama administration, according to an analysis of records by iWatch News.

In related news; Strib still biased.

Here’s Israel today:

Note the brown glob of the West Bank and the little strip between Gaza and Rafah – owned by Israel, with sizeable Palestinian populations.  These populations are largely highly hostile to Israel.

Here was Israel in 1967:

Doens’t look much different, does it?  And it’s not – except for the fact that there are Israeli troops securing the West Bank.  Note the numbers.  They’re distances to Israel’s major population and economic centers.   When Arabs controlled the West Bank before 1967, every major population center in Israel was threatened.  Today, with Iran supplying Hamas and Hezb’allah with more modern rockets, terrorists can scourge most of Israel at will, if the “peace process” breaks down.

As it will, inevitably.

Obama is insane if he thinks this is a rational solution while the Palestinians are controlled by people who still reject the idea that Israel has a right to exist.   The Israelis are right to reject it out of hand.

Regular commenter Golfdoc50 suggested that we put our rhetorical money where our literal mouths are as re my post this morning predicting the eventual release of the Bin Laden snuff pix.

You think Labor Day 2012? Let’s make some sport and have a pool to predict the day the first pictures leak. I don’t believe it will take that long, especially if the economy is in the toilet at the end of this year

Intrigueing and plausible theory.  One of many.

So post your predictions here; dates, along with your reasons in the comment section.  I’ll make a note to revisit this before election time.

The credit for the news of the deqth of Bin Laden fairly goes (in addition to the intelligence, military and even some local Pakistanis)  to the President.  If it’d failed, it would have rested on his shoulders; it’s only fair that we credit him for the risk he took –  different though that risk is from the ones the SEALs, the Army chopper pilots and the rest of the guys on the ground took.  To be honest, given his record so far, I’d have expected him to have launched a Predator strike – something that would have killed him (or someone) without the political risk – but also without the certainty.

Now, here’s the part I’m looking forward to; watching the left walk back the fact that so much of the policies – and so many, I suspect, of the discrete military and intelligence activities that led to this day – were continued under the Bush administration.

Which, again, is no knock on Obama.

But I’m looking forward to seeing the reactions of the elements of the Twin Cities media who, 24 months ago, were acting like a bunch of 15 year old girls who’d just gotten Justin Bieber tickets after having been allowed into the presence of Seymour Hersh, who was talking (along with Walter Mondale) about a story from “upcoming book”:

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

According to Hersh, this mattered  because…:

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

It was JSOC troops – officially SEALs, along with Army Special Operations Aviation, but JSOC missions reportedly mix in other troops, Rangers and “Delta” and other units pretty liberally – that carried on the “execution”.

Just saying.

There are many, many reasons Barack Obama is not qualified or fit to serve as President.

Let’s focus on the ones that matter; he’s a socialist; his background for office was never adequate; he oozes contempt for everyone who’s not like him; many of his supporters are reprehensible scumbags; he’s incompetent; he ran on a platform of “restoring Respect” for America, and then went on to lose it; his meddling has multiplied a national debt that already had us on the road to ruin; he’s at the head of one of the most corrosive movements in American history.

Put another way – what if his Birth Certificate is fake? Even if it’s fake, and even if an impeachment movement got him removed from office, it wouldn’t undo the damage he caused.

There is no miracle “get out of hell free” card with Barack Obama or the socialists; we have to get rid of them the hard way.  At the polls.  One vote at a time.

While there’s still time.

OK, but how about his law school admission?  Oh, there’s a shocker – a lawyer or petty academic who got where he wanted by paper-chasing, up-sucking and ass-kissing!  That’s never happened!

I’ll say it again; you don’t get rid of Barack Obama and the detritus of his administration by niggling about with paperwork.  You do it by getting the American people to vote him out of office.

We’ve got a year and a half.

The President serves up liberal leftovers in an effort the wrest the national fiscal agenda from Congressman Paul Ryan in his campaign speech this week.

Just one thing Mr. President:

According to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans—most of whom are far from wealthy—were taxed at 100%, it wouldn’t cover Mr. Obama’s deficit for this year.

These are desperate times for a Democratic President that can’t even keep Pennsylvania in the fold, a state where the last Republican who won it was George H. W. Bush.

At least Jimmy Carter had the good sense to turn apologetic, rather than imperious, when his policies tipped over the cliff.

Perhaps it’ll be Obama’s “Oberstar Moment”.

Hm.  Just in time for the Tea Party Tax Day Rally!

When he got invited to the President’s speech yesterday, he thought the President was going to exercise some of that “reaching across the aisle” and “new tone in politics” that the President and his media are always yapping about.  According to NRO’s Andrew Stiles:

Ryan says he was “excited” to received an invitation to the president’s speech, and thought it was a potential “olive branch” to the GOP signaling the start of meaningful negotiations over the deficit.

We all saw how it really worked:

I imagine being forced to sit through a smug lecture explaining how the serious plan you’ve just proposed to save America from a debt crisis is actually, in fact, fundamentally un-American, is not a very pleasant experience.

But it is part of the left’s, and in particular this President’s; our leaders are professors; everyone who agrees with him are the good students; the ones who don’t are the ones on double-dog academic probation.

President Obama may be taking a break from his busy schedule of, apparently, breaks – assuming they avoid the shutdown.

And I found this more than a little bit ominous (emphasis added):

On Thursday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration established a no-fly zone over Williamsburg that will be in place from Friday through Monday.

Not a plane will fly over Williamsburg for month.  And civilian casualties could get quickly out of hand…

When Barack Obama was running for and/or fairly new in office, the left – and others who are impressed with such things – were all dewy-eyed over Barack Obama’s “intelligence” – as measured by the toniness of the diplomas on his wall.

He was an Ivy Leaguer, of course – ending the long national nightmare of our presidential Ivy League drought.

But as I pointed out at the time, not only is the toniness of ones’ degree utterly immaterial to ones suitability for the Presidency, there’s a case to be made that an Ivy League degree (other than in, say, medicine, hard sciences or physics) is a liability in the real world.

P.J. O’Rourke – one of the people who turned me conservative, and a fellow grad of an obscure school (he: Miami of Ohio) – agrees:

Barack Obama went to an Ivy League school, not that he’s doing very well in his career at the moment. Let’s check on the most successful people in America. Sarah Palin went to the University of Idaho. Warren Buffet went to Nebraska. John Boehner went to Xavier. Glenn Beck didn’t go to college at all [to say nothing of Limbaugh – Ed.]. And I’m not sure whether Justin Bieber’s mother even finished high school. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates did go to Harvard but​…​they dropped out.

O’Rouke is actually responding to Amy Chua, Ivy League professor and author of Tiger Mom, a manifesto on raising children to take up more space in the Ivy League.   But the larger point – the one that applies to our President – is…:

Amy Chua, I’ve got bad news. “A” students work for “B” students. Or not even. A businessman friend of mine corrected me. “No, P. J.,” he said, “ ‘B’ students work for ‘C’ students. ‘A’ students teach.”

And that, really, sums up The One.  He came; he studied; he punched the tickets one must punch to be a Chicago Democrat.

And as with an awful lot of Ivy Leaguers whose main stated qualification is that they were Ivy Leaguers, not a whole lot else.

The editorial page at the Pittsburgh New Tribune is noticing President Obama’s disconnect:

Much of the Middle East is ablaze in revolution, the thuggery of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi being the highlight of how low megalomaniacs will go to stay in power.

And, of course, the nuclear tragedy unfolding in Japan, following the devastating earthquake and tsunami, is reeling the world.

Then there’s that little matter of a looming government shutdown.

But what’s the leader of the free world been up to?

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama appeared on ESPN to announce his picks for the NCAA basketball tournament.

Earlier in the week, he gave “exclusive” interviews to TV stations from around the country — including Pittsburgh’s KDKA — on “education reform.” (KDKA’s story catapulted pro forma local TV video stenography to news lows.)

Saturday last, when not giving his weekly radio address on the critically important issue of Women’s History Month, Obama was playing golf — reported to be the 61st round of his presidency — joking that it was not “playing” at all but an “investment.”

That was fast on the heels of his riveting summit on “bullying.”

Can you imagine how the mainstream media would have reacted to such disconnected behavior had it been a Republican president?

As re the Middle East, Japan and the budget?  We’ve had an entire month of “My Little Goat”.

This isn’t a matter of “optics” but one of judgment. This president is woefully out of touch with reality and how a leader should behave in such trying times.

Bring on 2012.

Americans don’t need to stock up on potassium iodide to prevent radiation damage to the thyroid, says California:

State and county officials spent much of Tuesday trying to keep people calm by saying that getting the pills wasn’t necessary, but then the United States surgeon general supported the idea as a worthy “precaution.”

Americans do need to stock up on potassium iodide to prevent radiation damage to the thyroid, says…

…U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin was in the Bay Area touring a peninsula hospital. NBC Bay Area reporter Damian Trujillo asked her about the run on tablets and Dr. Benjamin said although she wasn’t aware of people stocking up, she did not think that would be an overreaction. She said it was right to be prepared.

Like all Obama Administration pronouncements, Benjamin’s will likely have a shelf-life shorter than that of the tablets on which she just caused a run.

I predicted it.

I reiterated the prediction.

And, as per usual, it’s happened; the Obama Administration rule fining airlines for keeping passengers waiting on the tarmac over three hours is causing a huge spike in flight cancellations:

A Star-Ledger analysis of federal DOT figures reveals airlines are simply canceling more flights, presumably to avoid idling on the tarmac and exposing themselves to the whopping fines. In fact, the cancellation rate at the nation’s major airports surged 24 percent during the eight months after the rule went into effect.

There is no breakdown by airport, and there was a noticeable spike in cancellations during the wicked December weather. But over the course of the eight-month period, 7,095 more flights were ditched.

Put another way: Nearly 900 more flights a month are being scrubbed..

At 100 passengers per flight, that’s 90,000 a month having to change their plans on the fly – usually with a lot more than three hours’ delay.

“They’ve exchanged inconvenience for a relatively few number of people for an inconvenience for a tremendous number of people,” said David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, a passengers advocacy group.

Jennifer Sutherland, 46, a gymnastics coach and Cedar Grove native now living in Clarksville, Ohio, was among the thousands of air travelers whose flights were canceled at Newark Liberty International Airport after the Dec. 26 blizzard. Sutherland has no way of knowing if the tarmac rule came into play in her case, but she was angry that airlines could be canceling flights as an easy, sure way to eliminate their risk of penalties.

“The airlines are saving the massive fines from the tarmac rule and at the same time forcing passengers into the impossible situation of waiting days or weeks to re-book or simply purchase another ticket,” she said.

Unintended consequences…