…is a teleprompter, and independents, Republicans a public majority and a growing faction of your party is against you, what do you do?

Give another speech? …to my kids?

Obama has lost contact with the American people and is soon to be floating in a political vacuum…talking to himself.

“We gave Congress a charge, we gave them broad outlines, which is the reason we are farther along than any of the five presidents that have tried,” [Rahm] Emanuel said in an interview yesterday.

By what measure? Americans are five times more pissed off at their government? The unsubmitted bill used five times times more paper?

Rahm is in a state of stupor.

“We’re not there yet, and this speech is intended to finish the job.”

…I guess we’ll see what or who will be finished. When a thug from Chicago says “finish the job”…

Being wired as they are – as hive creatures – liberals want the soothing balm of firm-but-benign authority inserted into every conceivable crevice of not only their own lives, but those of everyone around them.

And so they want President Obama to address America’s grade-school kids next Tuesday.

It’s not the dumbest idea this administration’s had, but it’s right down there:

With just four days left until the first day of school for most students, school administrators spent Thursday fielding angry phone calls and e-mails. Some parents and community members are pressuring schools not to show the telecast, arguing that it’s an attempt to advance the president’s political agenda through the public schools.

Here’s your Minnesota tax dollars in action:

“Some parents are calling their superintendent and saying they’re not going to have their kids go to school,” Education Minnesota President Tom Dooher said at a Thursday afternoon news conference. Dooher urged superintendents to show the broadcast anyway, for its educational value.

“The education of our students shouldn’t become a partisan pawn for those who are trying to score political points against the president,” he said.

Dooher – whose job is all about scoring political points (as the head of Minnesota’s most powerful, and most relentlessly DFL-leaning, union – is, of course, being disingenuous.  As is the Strib, for not telling the less-politically-savyy reader that Dooher heads a union whose main function is to tell the Democratic Party when to “jump”, and off what.

But it’s a moot point.  This speech is illegal.

We all know that for many liberals – even many of those that profess some sort of organized religious faith – that liberalism is a substitute for religion, eliciting much of the same zeal that it does among the faithful (and, among the fringe extreme, even some of the same creepy excess).

This was accompanied by plenty of considered religious imagery during Obama’s campaign; his wife said his purpose was the save the nation’s soul; the point was not lost on a fawning media:

So presenting Obama’s speech violates the Separation Clause just as surely as broadcasting the Pope or the Dalai Lama to our kids would.

It was a scratch! [end Seinfeld voice]

The Obama administration has been without a clue as to economic policy and in the vacuum they have fallen back on tried-but-failed liberal policies such as “spending our way” out of The Great Recession.

Yesterday Brack O’Bomba interrupted his uninterruptable vacation to re-appoint Ben Bernanke.

Despite word from the White House that “nobody is looking to make any news” this week, President Obama on Tuesday took a break from vacationing to announce his plans to nominate Ben Bernanke to a second term as head of the Federal Reserve.

While it is not unprecedented for a US President to reappoint the former office-holder’s Federal Reserve head, the fact that Obama didn’t announce this before or after his “off-limits” vacation, coupled with his inability to fill out his cabinet, are subtle clues to his cluelessness and may indicate that he simply has no one of his ilk that will take the job under his watch.

Or maybe he just spaced it? Either way, I’m not going to get all “wee-weed” up about it.

Sometimes, I wonder what things that we accept as normal today, that would have been considered paranoia a few years ago?

Why?

Just because.

Obama says ” Republicans oppose my policies”:

I think early on, a decision was made by the Republican leadership that said, ‘Look, let’s not give him a victory, maybe we can have a replay of 1993, ’94, when Clinton came in, he failed on health care and then we won in the mid-term elections and we got the majority. And I think there are some folks who are taking a page out that playbook,” the president said.

Gosh, who’da thunk it?  An opposition party actually opposing?

Trying to provide an alternative?  Dissenting?

What kind of country does he think this is?

…when the “convential wisdom” among the not-conventionally-wise was that “Dick Cheney ran the Bush administration?”

As in all things – remember Berg’s Seventh Law. 

Because Rahm Emanuel would seem to be the real thing:

The caricature of Mr. Emanuel as a profanity-spewing operative has given way to a more nuanced view: as a profanity-spewing operative with a keen understanding of how to employ power on behalf of a new president with relatively little experience in Washington.

Although relentlessly deferential to the president, Mr. Emanuel is clearly more chief than staff. While some predecessors husbanded their authority, lest it be diluted, friends said he believed the more someone used power, the more power that person had.

He knows how to pull all the levers of influence in Washington — raising money, mobilizing interest groups and harvesting the latest policy ideas from research groups. At the same time, his relentless campaign-style approach sometimes leaves some colleagues worried they spend too much time reacting to events.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Monday:  “If they punch, punch back twice as hard!”

Friday: “Can’t we all just get along?”

Trying to lower the temperature of the health care fight, President Barack Obama on Friday denounced news media emphasis on angry protesters at town-hall meetings.

Obama ventured west for the latest of his own town hall-style events, fielding polite but occasionally tough questions — one man declaring the president couldn’t pay for his plan without raising taxes. Tieless and rolling up his sleeves in campaign mode, Obama pitched his overhaul plan to a crowd in an airport hangar near Bozeman.

The president didn’t deny that there have been angry outbursts by foes of his plan at town halls featuring Democratic lawmakers this month. But he said that was hardly the whole story.

“TV loves a ruckus,” Obama said. “What you haven’t seen on TV and what makes me proud are the many constructive meetings going on all over the country.”

If you fight by Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, don’t be suprise if Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals get used against you.

…and makes the case for privatizing health care.

It good to know I’m not the only one drawing this conclusion these days….

What we’re seeing in Washington these days is beginning to look like Jimmy Carter II.

Carter, like Barack Obama, started out with the idea of stimulating the economy.

His plan was to give every taxpayer $50, then throw in a few billion for tax cuts and public works programs. Simple, right? Wrong: In Washington, this soon became very complicated. Within a month, the package grew from $20 billion to more than $31 billion — a significant amount in the 1970s.

Ah, those were the days. Elitist liberal miscreants like Obama pissed away mere billions instead of trillions.

Obama is losing momentum and spending political capital as fast as stimulus dollars. Will he change course?

In April of his first year in office, Carter finally threw up his hands and scrapped the whole idea. He had dithered for four months. He had nothing to show for the effort. By then he was fatally diminished, his authority substantially eroded.

With the Obama administration, a similar unraveling is well under way and gathering momentum. Voters are increasingly restive. The country is souring on Obama’s gargantuan policy ambitions. The sense is growing that he has grossly overplayed his hand.

Regrettably, I think Obama is more committed than Carter was to government engorgement of the private sector. Let’s not underestimate of the damage Obama, Reid, Pelosi and their posse are prepared to perpetrate on America.

Like Carter, Obama looks increasingly like a president out of step with the times. Like Carter, there is a large gap between what voters expected based on the measured and moderate tone of his campaign and what began unfolding after his inauguration. Obama ran as a centrist, but he is governing from the left.

Surprise! (not)

In an NPR poll, a plurality of Americans opposed Obama’s health care efforts. In a recent Rasmussen poll, those who strongly disapproved of the president’s performance outnumbered those who strongly supported him by 11 percentage points.

Immaterial. Obama is smarter than we are and knows what’s best for us. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Many legitimately fear that if not stopped, Obama and the Democratic Congress will take this country well beyond the point where the public sector starts to “squeeze the life” out of the economy.

Too late. I believe we’re calling it the Great Recession.

It’s not too late for Obama to make a major adjustment. Bill Clinton’s initial months were equally turbulent. He was savvy enough to make a mid-course correction — but it came only after the election of a Republican Congress. On his present course, Obama is making that eventuality increasingly likely.

Then again, Bill Clinton was a fiscal conservative, compared to Obama and Bush.

To: Service Employees Internation Union

CC: President Barack Obama

From:  Mitch Berg Nazi  mobster  part of immense conspiracy   insurance company hack  Citizen

Dear SEIU:

I’ll be attending quite a number of events related to “Obamacare” for the duration of this administration.  I will be speaking out.

I dare you to try to mix it up with me.

Just so you have no excuse, I’m this guy:

Try to get in my face.

I dare you.

That is all.
With no due respect,

Mitch Berg

Twelve years ago, Clinton Derangement Syndrone swept many reaches of the American right.  Fringe-y conservative pundits claimed Clinton had done everything from murdering Vince Foster to giving prisoners AIDS-tainted blood to (I’m getting a little foggy on the story) make money from the hike in blood prices (?).

Over the past eight or so years, the debt was repaid with loan-shark interest; Bush Derangement Syndrome (he brought down the Twin Towers, doncha know) spawned at least two broadast radio networks and most of MSNBC’s current lineup.

But this pathology is evolving into an uglier, more virulent pathology.  Because while distrusting the government is normal (and to a certain degree healthy), when the government and its attendant “elites” start assuming the people are some sort of mass of depraved animals, it’s a very bad thing.

Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winner, is shocked – shocked – that people are upset about Obamacare.

And he just can’t find a historical precedent for the anger he thinks he’s seeing:

That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.

(Because members of Congress, especially those who support Obama, just can’t get heard in this day and age, can they?)

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And, Paul Krugman, you can’t find any examples of union goons beating up dissenters in 2005, either, can you?

What possible difference is there between now and then?  Between the Social Security debate and Obamacare? I’ll let you take a moment and turn that keen, Princeton-trained mind on solving that little riddle as we move on?

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

Paul Krugman:  you seriously claim you can’t find any expression of anger in the past, say, eight and a half years, any expression of rage that overtopped the banks of sanity?

OK – that’s two jobs for that keen, Nobel-prize-winning intellect to tackle.

We’ll take a detour through crummy journalism…:

So this is something new and ugly. What’s behind it?

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, has compared the scenes at health care town halls to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000 — the demonstration that disrupted the vote count in Miami and arguably helped send George W. Bush to the White House. Portrayed at the time as local protesters, many of the rioters were actually G.O.P. staffers flown in from Washington.

But Mr. Gibbs is probably only half right. Yes, well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs. Key organizers include two Astroturf (fake grass-roots) organizations: FreedomWorks, run by the former House majority leader Dick Armey, and a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.

…because goodness knows a movement like Krugman’s, which depends on MoveOn.org, ACORN, the NEA and the SEIU to get crowds out for events can’t stand the thought of political action groups actually…organizing politics!

But with that out of the way, let’s move on to the casual class defamation:

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

Michael Savage told me that the only way Paul Krugman could win a Nobel Prize was by providing sexual favors to Nobel committee members. I think he just might be right.

“Wow”, you might say – “That’s defamatory”.

It would be, if I meant it.  It’d take a bit of scabrous (and in this case fictional) libel from a “source” whose only motivation is hatred for Paul Krugman, and waters it down with just enough weasel words (“he just might be right”) to give myself some ethical wiggle room.
So let’s unpack Krugman’s last paragraph – which is easily the most cynical, stupid paragraph I have ever read in the Old, Gray, Increasingly Demented Lady.

• So Paul Krugman – do the “Birther” “movement” – a paranoid conspiracy theory rejected by the vast majority of Obama’s opponents – and opposition to Obamacare – which is based on an empirical reading of the supply and demand for healthcare, as well as the real-life experiences of healthcare consumers in Canada and the UK – actually share a “driving force”, or do they only “probably” share one?   Because when you say…
• “…we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers”, and you “wouldn’t be surprised” if it was plenty?  That’s called “weasel words”.  You don’t know.  And worse, your only “source” is…
• …Dick “Turban” Durbin, who is one of the weasels being pummeled in public, and whose contempt for the opinion of the American Peasant is summed up by his support for reintroducing the “Fairness” Doctrine, and whose hostility to dissent is famous.

What is the difference, precisely, between Krugman’s real paragraph and my made-up one?

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites…But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.

And in Paul Krugman’s special little world, “right wing intensity” can only come from some depraved, immoral motive.

That is the legacy of the Obama administration, so far; dissent is worse than unpaatriotic; it is depraved.

They hate you.

(Via Mr. D @ TvM)

It’s not exactly what The White House said:

White House: ‘War on terrorism’ is over

…but it is the headline that Americans (and GOP strategists) will remember when the next terrorist attack occurs, here or abroad.

“The President does not describe this as a ‘war on terrorism,'” said John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, who outlined a “new way of seeing” the fight against terrorism.

So its not the end of the war, just the end of calling it a war…on terrorism.

Are we trading in semantics here, or are these people really that effected by Academentia^®?

What a beautiful setup for a campaign slogan – for the other guys: “Remember back in 2009 when the Obama administration said the War on Terrorism is over?”

I shan’t be surprised.

After all, this is an era when borrowing more money to fix a crisis caused by excessive borrowing can be called a “Stimulus Package” and where Success!!! is declared in the wake of a mismanaged program, using yet more borrowed monies to subsidize the purchase of new cars, mostly foreign, for rather marginal improvements in economy and emissions.

Mr. Brennan’s speech was aimed at outlining ways in which the Obama administration intends to undermine the “upstream” factors that create an environment in which terrorists are bred.

Translation: We intend to give them free health care.

As for the “war on terrorism,” Mr. Brennan said the administration is not going to say that “because ‘terrorism’ is but a tactic — a means to an end, which in al Qaedas case is global domination by an Islamic caliphate.”

“You can never fully defeat a tactic like terrorism any more than you can defeat the tactic of war itself,” Mr. Brennan said.

…and yet we can “defeat” the equally abstruse Global Climate Change?

*Title courtesy of The Hives

I was cutting my grass over the weekend when I was approached by a late-fiftysomething couple bearing clipboards and carrying a briefcase.  She was prematurely gray, ponytailed, wearing a faded “Don’t Park The Bus” t-shirt and a peasant skirt.  Come to think of it, so was he.

The following conversation happened:

WOMAN (Prematurely gray, ponytailed, wearing a faded “Don’t Park The Bus” t-shirt and a peasant skirt): “Excuse me, sir…”

MITCH: Yes? 

WOMAN:  Have you heard about the government’s “Moola for Mowers” program? 

MITCH: Er…no?

MAN: We offer…

WOMAN:  SHUT UP!  (Man shinks).  We offer people $5,000 to get rid of their energy-inefficient lawn mowers.

MITCH: Er – Five thousand dollars?  For lawn mowers?  Like this one?

MAN:  Exactly like…

WOMAN:  SHUT UP!  (Man cowers as if he expects to be struck) Yes, sir.  Exactly like that one.

MITCH:  Um…OK?  So what do I do?

(MAN pulls ball-peen hammer from briefcase).

WOMAN:  We give you $5,000 in cash, and Bhill here will destroy it.

MITCH:  But I got this mower at a rummage sale for like $30…

MAN: Not a…

WOMAN:  SHUT UP AND STOP UPSTAGING ME!  (Man falls mute, looking like a dog that’s been beaten too much) Sir, that’s really not the issue here.  We need to get this mower off the street.  Would you like $5,000, or not?

MITCH: Sure!

(WOMAN peels off fifty $100 bills.  MITCH takes them, stuffs them into wallet).

WOMAN: Yes!  The program is a success!  Bhill?

MAN (trudges to mower, like he spends half his time just covering up, and beats it weakly about the cylinder head)

MITCH:  So…you getting a lot of takers?

WOMAN: Oh, yes!  Everyone we’ve talked to has taken the $5,000 for their mower!  Indeed, one man told his neighbors, and the all brought out mowers and snowblowers!  It’s the most successful government program ever!

MITCH:  I’d imagine…

MAN: (Smacks the head until the spark plug breaks off).

WOMAN:  Yaaaaaay!  Total success!  Complete proof that Obama has brought hope and change!

MITCH: Why?  Because I got $5,000 in taxpayer money for a $30 mower?

WOMAN (happily):  Yes!

MITCH: And because all my neighbors got the same for mowers that maybe ran $50-200?

WOMAN (ecstatic): Yes!

MITCH: But whomever is funding this “program” just got ripped off to the tune of about 99.4% of their “investment”, which…

WOMAN (nonplussed):  But…a gas-guzzling mower is off the street!

MITCH: Right – for 100 times what it could have cost!

WOMAN: (Silent for a moment):  Why do you hate children?

MAN (glares at woman demonically)

That’s what the Democrats’ apologists for Obamacare continue to assure us.

As usualy, they’re full of it.

More trouble on the horizon for The Great Society part deux: After thinking it over, many people are coming around to the notion that the current health care system may not be so bad after all.

Forty-eight percent (48%) of U.S. voters now rate the U.S. health care system as good or excellent. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 19% rate it as poor.

These figures reflect a significant increase in support for the health care system over the past few months. In May, just 35% of adults nationwide rated the system as good or excellent. A year ago, just 29% of Likely Voters rated the system in such positive terms.

The new polling also shows that 80% of those with insurance rate their own coverage as good or excellent. That’s up from 70% in May.

Bolding mine, and it’s a doozy. President Obama and his Congressional groupies launched into a bold initiative to reform the nation’s health care system under the premise that people wanted… ahem… change. But how much “change” will really be tolerated by people who already find their health care coverage as, at worst, “good”?

(more…)

“It’s a bad one”, Sergeant Koziolecki said; the flushed look on his face showed that he wasn’t exaggerating.

“Whadda we got?”  I clipped my badge to my belt as we walked through the abandoned warehouse in the Saint Paul Warehouse District, ducking under the yellow “crime scene” tape.

“Four vics; two hispanic males, early twenties; one black male, late twenties; one caucasian female, late teens-early twenties.  Gunned down execution style” Koziolecki recited from fresh memory.

We rounded a dirty, ratty corner to what had been the lobby of a shipping dock, and saw the CSI crew going over the scene.  Four bodies were lined up, face-down, by a grafitti-clogged block wall.  “No kidding”.

“A bullet to the back of each head” Koziolecki read off the notes, pushing his readers up to the bridge of his nose.  The acrid smell of fresh blood was fading as we stood there, replaced by the smell of death.  Death and…I thought for a moment, not quite placing it.

“Killer or killers left a calling card”, Koziolecki continued.  “May I?” he asked the CSI guy, who nodded as he dusted, fruitlessly, for prints.  Koziolecki gently rolled the body of a girl – late teens, with tattooed arms and hair that’d been multicolored even before getting sprayed with her own and her friends’ blood and brains, who looked like a tank grrl or roller-derby chick.

Former roller derby chick.

And she had something in her mouth.

(more…)

The question isn’t so much “why is the President losing ground on healthcare”; socialized healthcare is a dumb idea, and most Americans (especially those of us who’ll be paying for it and losing from it) know it.  It was the shoal that the liberal Bill Clinton of 1992-1993 ran up on; it’ll be proof that the Obama administration is only human, too:

Pluralities now say that the president’s health care plan is a bad idea, and that it will result in the quality of their care getting worse. What’s more, just four in 10 approve of his handling on the issue.The poll also finds that Obama’s overall job-approval rating has dropped to 53 percent. And it shows a public that has grown increasingly concerned about the federal government’s spending as the administration defends its $787 billion economic stimulus and supports a $1 trillion-plus health-care bill.

No, the question is this:  Given that grassroots support for socialized medicine is falling faster than Nancy Pelosi’s jawline, the question is, how does this lack of support make middle-America racist?

A year ago, Obama was being hailed as a “light worker”, the salvor of our nation’s soul; a man, but not just a man.

Today, of course, his poll numbers are gratifyingly human:

The nation is close to evenly split in its assessment of the president’s policies to date, and there is great intensity on both sides of the debate with dwindling numbers in the middle.Those are the chief findings of the latest NPR poll of 850 registered voters conducted nationwide Wednesday through Sunday by a bipartisan team. The pollsters found 53 percent approving of the president’s handling of his job, while 42 percent disapproved — the narrowest gap of the Obama presidency to date. Most of the approving group said they approved strongly, and an even greater majority of the disapproving group said they disapproved strongly.

Poll respondents liked a Democratic statement on solving health care problems better than a Republican statement (51 percent to 42 percent). However, when asked about the plan now moving through Congress, a plurality of 47 percent was opposed and 42 percent said they were in favor, based on what they had heard about the plan so far.

Presidential poll numbers are the most fungible transient asset in American politics, of course; Ronald Reagan’s numbers were abysmal in 1982, but jumped enough to give him re-election in 1984 and a Republican house of Congress in 1986.  So don’t start writing Obama’s political epitaph yet.

Because poll numbers aren’t forever.

I’m not so much saying this to the Republican and Conservative readers, though.  It’s not them I’m worried about.

No, it’s the readers on the left that concerned me.  Because while poll numbers change with the breeze, hatred just smolders on; Eric Kleefeld is finding racists under rocks.

He addresses the “racism” between the lines (it must be between the lines) from, in this case, Rush Limbaugh (with commentary inset):

So let’s take a look at some of those recent racially-charged attacks that have circulated against Obama, both right before and after the Gates incident.

• Above all others, the real celebrity here has been Rush Limbaugh. He’s done this kind of thing before — remember the “Barack, The Magic Negro” song? [which, while un-PC, was a takeoff on a line by a liberal commentator; certainly not a commentary on Limbaugh’s approach to race – Ed.] But in the wake of the Gates incident, he’s managed to become even more hard-edged about it. “Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman,” Limbaugh declared this past Friday. [which would have been pretty below-the-belt, had it not been for the fact that that’s exactly how Gates played it – as a racial issue- Ed.] Yesterday, he shared a dream he’s had about the dangers to capitalism: “I had a dream that I was a slave building a sphinx in a desert that looked like Obama.” [Remember when dissent was the highest virtue?  Now, it’s apparently “racist”- Ed.] And he joked that food-safety advocates will go after all the unhealthy foods people like to eat, one by one — but they’ll have to wait until Obama is out of office to ban Oreos. [I suppose it would have been safer to say “Starbucks” or “Volvo” or “Patagonia”…- Ed.]

How much intellectual seed corn is the left willing to burn to prop up The One?  Poll numbers come and go,  but assaults on the integrity of half of ones’ fellow countrymen – defamatory, specious, intellectually vacuous attacks, of course – are gifts that just keep on giving.

One controversy after another dogs El Presidente as he pours a cold one with his new-found beer buddies.

Earlier this week the White House indicated each man would drink the beer of their choice — Bud Light for President Obama, Blue Moon for the police officer, and perhaps Red Stripe or Beck’s for Gates.

But one Massachusetts congressman thinks another beer entirely should be served: Boston’s own Sam Adams.

In a letter to Obama dated Wednesday, Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal strongly urges the president not to drink Budweiser, now owned by a Belgian company. Nor should the White House consider serving Miller or Coors, Neal writes, both owned by a United Kingdom conglomerate.

These are weighty issues. This is behavior unbecoming the leader of the free world. I think the President should just resign.

(I glad that I created our new “Beer” tag because it appears to be well positioned for heavy use in the immediate future)

But in the mean time and in light of Congressman Neal’s push to elevate one’s choice of beer to the national stage, we can speak up, be heard, and tell our President what beer we think he should drink for the betterment of our nation (these are all real beers).

Posted by Johnny Roosh in Beer, President Obama| 17 Comments »