Victor Davis Hanson has as detailed an accounting of the chickens Obama has sent forth, foreign-policy wise, that are now coming home to roost, as any I’ve seen.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The largest airplane in the world is Russian.  They also have a working space program from which we beg rides, and they just took over the Crimea when we abandoned Eastern Europe.

 Does it seem to you that the America-Russia pendulum is swinging, and not in a good way?

 Joe Doakes

I’m a little upset that Obama seems to want to make so many of our sacrifices during the Cold War vain.

No, I’m not being funny.

A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 33 percent of Americans pick Obama as the worst President since World War 2.  Dubya comes in second at 28 percent. 

So let’s try it this way:  Let’s rank the presidents since WW2.

In the comments, respond with your rankings of the presidents since WW2, in order from worst to best. 

Here’s the complete list:  Re-order them and leave them in the comments.

• Truman
• Eisenhower
• Kennedy
• Lyndon Johnson
• Nixon
• Ford
• Carter
• Reagan
• George HW Bush
• Clinton
• George W Bush
• Obama.

My vote is below the fold.

(more…)

A friend of mine from South Minneapolis emails.  The bad news?  :

Oh great, my favorite local bar and burger place where I have taken many of you is now world famous. The POTUS just had a “Jucy Lucy” at Matt’s. Crap. We’ve been going to this place for decades and now…the place will be known in every corner of the earth. Best kept secret burger joint now will be even more busy. Dang.

The good news?  At least he didn’t go to The Nook.  You thought it was hard to get into Matt’s even before the POTUS’ visit?

I was driving north on 35E yesterday afternoon, when I saw there was no traffic on the southbound side coming out of Saint Paul.

Then came about 10 cop cars, whoopie lights a-blazin’.

Then the Presidential limo.

Then about a dozen or two other SUVs, limos, an ambulance, and cop cars.

Then I turned up Ayd Mill Road – a tributary arterial road that’s sort of a hidden four-lane freeway through the middle of Merriam Park, Crocus Hill and Highland before connecting to 35E – and saw traffic backed up from 35 almost all the way back to Hamline. That’s about two miles.

This being Saint Paul, I figured most of them probably voted for him, and it served them right.

The “Obama Recovery” still isn’t. 

The U.S. economy shrank at an annual rate of 2.9 percent during the first three months of 2014, government bean counters announced this morning. That matches the worst non-recession contraction of the U.S. economy in over 40 years.

Perhaps, taking a cue from minimum wage hike laws, the Administration could issue a decree for everyone to build, spend and borrow more?
 

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

At least one federal government program is shutting down.

President Obama is quietly releasing terrorists.  First the Taliban Five from Gitmo, now a dozen more in Pakistan.

 Joe Doakes

Maybe there were rehabilitated?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember a couple of months ago, when President Obama was on his Far East World Adulation Tour, he promised Japan and the Philippines that the good old US of A would be their big brother against mean old China?

Considering he can’t even manage to abandon Iraq without dithering about pulling troops and then sending them back in again . . . do you think the Prime Ministers of our new allies are feeling all warm and fuzzy about Barak Hussein Obama having their backs?

Joe Doakes

I’m guessing that whole “contain the Japanese military” thing is eroding fast these days.

Now the Administration is claiming that Lois Lerner’s hard drive was lost, destroyed or recycled, so her emails may be lost forever. 

I’m not a networking guy, but I still call BS.

Perhaps if…

• Lois Lerner’s hard drive
• Lerner’s work-group’s email server’s hard drive
• The RAID (large redundant hard-disk) array(s) and/or backup tape(s) to which Lerner’s work group email server backed up its emails
• Any of the number of tapes, and/or mirrors of RAID arrays, to which the emails had been backed up in the interest of “disaster recovery”…

…(in other words, the exact same level of backup to which any private entity would be required to adhere to by law, or face default judgment in the event of litigation, including (especially!) from the IRS, and the level of backup all levels of all serious business practice to make sure they can respond to legal action, to say nothing of things like, well, hard drives going bad)…

…had all been “lost, destroyed or recycled”, they’d have a point. 

Odds?

INCIDENTAL NOTE:  This post is #11,000 since November, 2006.  Apropos nothing.

In which we learn from our “President” that gun violence (which has dropped by half in the past twenty years) “has never been worse”, but that the world “has never been less violent” (as the Middle East spirals toward a general conflagration). 

Even Jimmy Carter knew better than to look at a bowl full of crap and call it organic sherbet.

But Jimmy Carter was targeting an electorate that was paying attention.  Obama never has.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In 2008, Candidate Obama assured us the war in Iraq was the wrong war. He wanted to fight the right war in Afghanistan, against the Taliban.
In 2014, President Obama surrendered the Taliban high leadership back to the enemy and announced American troops will be leaving Afghanistan.
He picked the war. He lost it. His legacy.
Joe Doakes

Even those of us who tacitly agreed that Afghanistan needed the most emphasis have to be disappointed by Obama’s performance.

Jonathan Turley:  Obama has become the president that a Nixon wanted to be – but never had the raw power to actually pull off:

What’s troubling is that we have a system that has been stable precisely because these are limited and shared powers. This president has indicated that he’s just not willing to comply with some of those aspects. He told Congress he would go it alone and in our system you’re not allowed to go it alone.

Nixon was ruthless at exercising power – but Obama has one thing Nixon could never dream of; a media that has taken it as a mission to serve as his praetorian guard.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In 2010, President Obama told NASA chief Charles Bolden that his foremost job was to: “ . . . find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.” But last month, NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan said the agency’s primary focus is humans on Mars by 2035.

Is this another one of President Obama’s famous pivots?  Are we pivoting to Mars, now?

Joe Doakes

We’re lucky he hasn’t pushed an expedition to land on the Sun.

Real economic growth…didn’t exist in the first quarter:

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property

located in the United States — decreased at an annual rate of 1.0 percent in the first quarter according to

the “second” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP

increased 2.6 percent.

The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for

the “advance” estimate issued last month. In the advance estimate, real GDP was estimated to have

increased 0.1 percent. With this second estimate for the first quarter, the decline in private inventory

investment was larger than previously estimated.

Some lefty pundits are blaming the “tough winter”.

I remember some tough winters in ’83-85.  The economy kept on recovering, somehow.  Perhaps shovel and snowblower factories and shoveling crews were hiring?

The real answer?  It goes beyond President Obama.  “Progressivism” destroys economies and lives.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This is an interesting set of questions.  Too bad there’s not a chance in Hell they’ll ever get straight answers.

Joe Doakes

We’re close enough to 2016 where I’m sure Obama figures he can run out the clock.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

You don’t need to see our appointment logs to check VA wait times; we’ve carefully checked our records and confirmed we were right all along.   So that’s settled.

 

This is the level of investigative journalism that meets the standards of the MSM.  The VA said they don’t have secret lists, so they don’t.  Because if the VA had secret stuff they would say so.  You know, like secret surveillance of citizens, secret monitoring of phone calls of world leaders and Joe the Plumber.  Secret targeting of undesirable political opposition by the IRS, the INS, the EPA, the Dept of the Interior, etc.

 

If they had a secret, the responsible people in the government would fess up at once, without doubt.  Since they haven’t, there’s nothing to see here: move along.

Takes me back to the days when Obama ordered the oceans closed.  Yeah, remember, what, a year ago, he closed the ocean off Florida to punish the voters for the shut-down?  He does so much outrageous, blatantly illegal and stupid crap that you forgot about that one, didn’t you?

 

This is what Fernandez means by “dense pack.”  Obama has so many scandals occurring so quickly that we never get a chance to investigate one before it’s old news and we must move on to the next.  Thus, no scandal ever sticks to him.

It’s the equivalent of a lawyer answering a discovery motion by dumping triplicate copies of every piece of paper in their client’s office on the petitioner, in hopes that anything incriminating gets lost in the blizzard of paper.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The President campaigned for re-election on the grounds that General Motors was alive but Osama Bin Laden was dead.

Except . . . if Global Warming threatens the very existence of human life on this planet, and autos cause Global Warming, shouldn’t he have let General Motors die?

And if Islamic Terror is merely a law enforcement nuisance, shouldn’t he have let Osama Bin Laden live?

Maybe he read the articles in the newspaper out of order and got confused?

Joe Doakes

Polar Bears don’t vote.

We warned you.

But did you listen?  No!  You said that jobs would not be lost as pay for low-skill jobs was forced upward by government fiat, and that there’d be no unintended consequences – because all consequences, presumably, would be forestalled by foo-foo dust brought down from the skies on the backs of unicorns. 

But there is no foo-foo dust, there are no unicorns, and when you force someone to pay more or less than the free market will bear for something, there will be consequences.

And so there are.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals are so convinced that the Personal is Political, and they have had such success using that tactic to damage our constitutional republic from within, that they think the rule is of universal application. It is not. If it were, the most revered man in history would be Pontius Pilate, who ordered the execution of that rabble-rouser Jesus Christ, to put an end to the religious movement known as Christianity.

Pilate did not succeed, nor will President Obama succeed in putting an end to Islamic Fundamentalism by ordering the execution of Osama Bin Laden. The more Liberals celebrate that act as Obama’s signature achievement, the more they emphasize the poverty of his list of accomplishments.

Joe Doakes

Wasn’t that a scene in 1984?

The IRS Scandal has been dragging on for a solid year now.

Democrats chant in near-unison “It’s just low-level employees!  You have no evidence that it’s tied to the White House!”

Which brings up two additional questions.

Gone Rogue: Let’s say that the Democrats are right – that suppressing conservative activist groups (who, without tax exempt status, have their First Amendment rights hobbled by campaign finance laws) is entirely a product of low-ranking IRS officials exercising their own, peculiar, organic biases. 

That’s the good news? That the IRS is intrinsically politicized and doesn’t need orders from above to play political favorites?  That it feels perfectly empowered to give de facto support to Democrats by harassing conservative organizations? 

Somehow that doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better.

Smokeless Powder:  When a cop or prosecutor says about some bit of government intrusion “If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be worried”, we all know we’re talking about a “public servant” who doesn’t really get what America is supposed to be about, and who needs to retire for everyone’s own good.

But I don’t extend that same courtesy to official institutions.  Bureaucracies – the DMV, the IRS, Congress, the Pentagon, even the President himself – answer (in theory) to us. 

The Administration has been stonewalling releasing details about their involvment, or lack of it, for a solid year now. 

If they have nothing to hide, they’re showing it in a pretty convoluted way.  Either they think they can blow this up into a Clinton-Impeachment-style backfire, or…they’re hiding something.

I suggest “both”.

A report from the center-left Brookings Institution shows that not only is busines dynamism – the pace of new business openings and old business closings – the slowest it’s been, but during the Obama “Recovery” the pace of closings has far outrun the pace of new business creation, for the first time in post-Great-Depression history:

Says Brookings:

Research has firmly established that this dynamic process is vital to productivity and sustained economic growth. Entrepreneurs play a critical role in this process, and in net job creation.But recent research shows that dynamism is slowing down. Business churning and new firm formations have been on a persistent decline during the last few decades, and the pace of net job creation has been subdued. This decline has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech. …

While the reasons explaining this decline are still unknown, if it persists, it implies a continuation of slow growth for the indefinite future, unless for equally unknown reasons or by virtue of entrepreneurship enhancing policies (such as liberalized entry of high-skilled immigrants), these trends are reversed.

Why has America become less entrepreneurial? 

I’m going to suggest it’s two things; the constant accretion of new regulations atop old regulations, which continually make new businesses harder and harder to launch, and a culture – especially a school system – that is slowly leaching the desire independence out of the citizenry.

(Via Ed)

To: President Obama
From: Mitch Berg
Re:  The Goal, Here

Mr. President,

This is a feature.  Not a bug.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Here is a long-lost photo of President George Washington performing his duties under Article 1 of the Constitution, dealing with The Whiskey Rebellion by intimidating rebels with passages from . . . “Where The Wild Things Are.”

No? Well, maybe it’s Abraham Lincoln urging his generals to fight The War To Save The Union, using tactics from . . . “Where The Wild Things Are.”

Not him, either? Well, it must be someone doing something Presidential. It can’t be someone posing for a silly photo op when there is so much important work the President should be doing.

Oh wait, I know: it’s President Obama, who brought peace to the Middle East, ended aggression in Eastern Europe, resolved territorial disputes in the Far East, balanced the budget and brought prosperity to all Americans, so he now has time to read stories to children.

My bad.

Joe Doakes

Liberals are still yapping about President Bush reading “My Pet Goat” as the terrorists attacked New York.

Of course, when he opened the book, the US had been at peace for ten years, we were at the tail end (we now know) of the Peace Dividend boom, and people were talking about “permanent prosperity”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama isn’t just the First Black President, he may also be the Most Belligerent. Aside from the ordinary garrison troops at US bases and embassies around the world, and not counting bombing sorties flown by drones, this President has dispatched American troops to put boots on the ground in conflicts in:

Iraq

Afghanistan

Pakistan

Kyrgyzstan

Egypt

Libya

Yeman

Sudan

Uganda

Central African Republic

Poland

and with this week’s the new agreement, the Philippines.

Can he get another Nobel Peace Prize, please? Because for a man this devoted to peace, one just doesn’t seem like enough.

To be fair, he didn’t start all of these conflicts, and wasn’t the first to send US troops to all of them.

To be even more fair, he got elected promising a foreign policy that relied less on military force and breaking things and making them go boom.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

US sent 300 paratroopers to Poland to serve as a trip-wire against Russian aggression. Washington Post explains the reasoning.

It’s a dumb idea.

The trip-wire concept is simple: if the Russians attack and kill our 300 guys, the American public will be so outraged that Congress will Declare War as young people run to the recruiting offices and the sleeping American giant will roar to life to crush the Russians in a savage but fully justified act of revenge.

Never happen. Not in modern America. Democrats won’t declare war, Code Pinkers won’t support war, Millennials won’t go to war. Instead, the public consensus will be “Those paratroopers volunteered to serve in the armed forces so they assumed the risk of being killed. We’re not going to suffer for their bad career choice.”

Now, here’s the scary part: are SITD readers the only people who understand this? Does the US military command know those troops are twisting in the wind but they’re sending them anyway because the WaPo foreign policy wallahs want it? Seems like a major breach of faith to me.

Worse, do the Russians know it’s a bluff? Are they already planning how to invade around our people, knowing there only risk is a scolding from the Teleprompter in Chief or his lurching Secretary of State?

It was bad enough when the President’s idiotic foreign policy got our Ambassador killed. We don’t need another 300 bodies to confirm his error.

Joe Doakes

Reading history, it’s hard to avoid a key fact; most wars are backed into.