Earlier this week, a reporter asked President Obama about MIT Prof. Jonathan Gruber. Specifically, the reporter asked whether the Obamacare architect was correct that the law passed only through deception. The president answered, We had a yearlong debate. I mean, go back and look at your stories. The one thing we can’t say is that, […]
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Obama should quickly agree to the following immigration bill. Why? Because it applies the identical logical underpinning of his ‘Climate Deal’ with China. Preview Open
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Article II of the US constitution begins: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” From this comes the theory of the unitary executive. As described by the Annenberg Institute, This theory holds that Congress cannot limit the president’s control of the executive branch because the Constitution sets […]
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On Wednesday, as the dust was settling, George Will published a column that deserves attention. In it, he suggested a number of measures that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell should press as soon as the new Congress meets.
Some of his suggestions are obvious: the Republicans should repeal the tax on medical devices, authorize construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, mandate completion of the nuclear waste respository in Nevada’s Yucca mountain. Passing these will place President Obama in the awkward position of following their lead or vetoing these popular and sensible measures.
President Obama will hold a press conference today in the wake of last night’s tidal wave of Republican Senate and Congressional victories. His reality-distortion field will be in overdrive; the humiliating defeat of an election defined almost entirely by opposition to his agenda will be bullishly reinterpreted as an opportunity for America to realize — once again — just how much they’ve disappointed him.
First, you’ll see his barely-contained contempt for the voters. After the briefest nod to their unhappiness, they’ll be described as angry, disaffected, and easily fooled by dark money and deceptive television ads. If only America was smart enough to understand his vision. If only they had his advantages of godlike wisdom and preternatural intelligence they’d understand what a terrible mistake they’ve just made. He’ll be very sad for them, really.
On December 24, 2009, sixty US Senators — all Democrats or independents caucusing with them — voted for the Affordable Care & Patient Protection Act. A scant five years later, only 33 (55%) of them are still in office. That’s an attrition rate of 45%, 15% per election, among members of body famously designed to be insulated from popular whim.
To be fair, there are a number of reasons for this that have nothing to do with ObamaCare: some senators have died; some have taken appointments in the Obama administration and been replaced by ideological clones; others elected during the last major wave reached their natural age of retirement. Still, it’s a historically high number.
Contrast that with the 39 Republicans who voted against ObamaCare: 27 (69%) of them are still in office; 9 (23%) retired; two lost primaries; and one resigned. In all, Republican attrition during the same period has been about 11% per election (see below for details).
Hmmmm. Let’s just say I have extremely mixed feelings about this picture: Preview Open
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Even The New York Times is piling on Susan Rice for this — so perhaps it’s unnecessary to pose the question — but her comments strike me as so wondrously stupid and terrifying that I’ve got to wonder whether there could be any charitable or vaguely reassuring way of reading it:
[Rice] was peppered with critiques of the president’s Syria and China policies, as well as the White House’s delays in releasing a national security strategy, a congressionally mandated document that sets out foreign policy goals. On that last point, Ms. Rice had a sardonic reply.
“If we had put it out in February or April or July,” she said, according to two people who were in the room, “it would have been overtaken by events two weeks later, in any one of those months.”
A few days ago, an article appeared in Pravda-on-the-Hudson reporting that pollsters had told the White House that if there is not a huge African-American turnout on the first Tuesday this November, the Democrats are cooked.
In the meantime, there have been leaks from the Ferguson, Missouri grand jury investigation. Darren Wilson is said to have testified that Michael Brown attacked him in his police car and went for his gun, that he fired at him twice at that time, and that, when he emptied his gun into Brown, the young man was charging at him on the street.
Things are becoming dire . . . not necessarily for those of us who fear that Ebola may spread to the US, but for Barack Obama and the Democrats. If things were not becoming really, really dire, the President would not have done what he just did — which is to appoint — drum roll, please — an “Ebola czar.”
That this is a-made-for television drama is clear from the most impressive fact about Ron Klain, the new Ebola czar. He knows nothing about medicine or epidemiology — nothing more, that is, than you or I know.
I have lived long enough, now, to have seen it again and again. Something goes badly wrong involving a corporation, a university, a religious denomination, or a branch of government, and the executive in charge or a designated minion goes before the press to engage in what is euphemistically called “damage control.” The spokesman does not level with the public. He or she tries to be reassuring and — more often than not — by lying, succeeds in undermining confidence in the institution he or she represents.
This is what is now going on with the Centers for Disease Control. In recent years, this well-respected outfit has branched out, opining in a politically correct manner on one issue after another outside its proper remit. Now it is faced with a matter absolutely central to its responsibilities — actual disease control — and it flips and flops and flounders because the ultimate boss, the President of the United States, cannot bring himself to put limits on contacts between Americans and the citizens of the countries in Africa where there is an Ebola epidemic.
Speaking at the at the Islamic Center of Washington, DC in 2001, George W. Bush said that “Islam is peace.”
During his 2010 trip to India nine years later, Barack Obama said Islam “teaches peace, justice, fairness and tolerance. All of us recognize that this great religion cannot justify violence.”
Rev. James V. Schall, S.J., retired professor of political philosophy at Georgetown, last month in Crisis magazine:
You might think that a cabinet-level intelligence officer who learns about terror plots from the news, lies to Congress about domestic spying, mistakenly characterizes an Islamist political movement taking power in a nation that’s a strategic ally as “largely secular,” and then fails to warn the President of the United States about the rise of a terror group unlike any seen since al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center, might lose his job. In the Obama administration, you would be wrong.
On Sunday’s 60 Minutes, President Obama blamed “the intelligence community” for failing to assess the threat from ISIS, a/k/a “the JV team.” Passing the buck to the Director of National Intelligence, the president said: “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria” (my emphasis).
Now, you will recall, James Clapper, the overlord of our great virtual panopticon, is the fellow who learned about the London subway bombing arrests from Diane Sawyer, who misled Congress about the scope of the NSA’s electronic surveillance programs, and who infamously declared the Muslim Brotherhood (since overthrown by the Egyptian Army) to be “largely secular.”
We now have on our hands Barack Obama’s War, for our latest Middle Eastern war belongs entirely to him. And someone — let it be me! — should alert Sen. Rand Paul to this teachable moment, for Obama’s War (which Rand Paul supports) was brought on by the very policy of non-intervention that he, his father, and the Cato Institute all championed. As Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has testified in word and deed, there is essentially no difference on foreign affairs between left-wing Democratics and arch-libertarians who sometimes vote Republican.
This war might have been avoided. Had Obama taken the trouble to arrange for a few thousand American soldiers to remain in Iraq — as he easily could have — the Iraqi’s coalition government between Shia, Sunni, and Kurd would have held, despite Maliki’s perfidy. That, in turn, would have prevented al-Qaeda’s reemergence in the Sunni-dominated provinces of Iraq. Moreover, ISIS would not be in control of great swathes of Syria had the president followed the advice of his advisors and allies and backed the secular-minded opposition to Bashar al-Assad from the start.
As you may have noticed, there is “a mystery virus” sweeping America. Or so we are told, for there is no mystery as to the identity of this virus. As internist Chris Foley, out in Minnesota, told Scott Johnson of Powerline:
This is basically the same virus commonly seen in the equatorial Americas and South America. The very odd emergence of this virus at this time – especially just prior to the new school year and now fueled by the congregation of children in schools – demands an explanation. The only plausible one is that this has been brought here from south of the – now non-existent – border.
Like many other auditors, Howie Carr of The Boston Herald was perplexed after he listened to Barack Obama’s televised address on Wednesday night. He cannot understand, any more than can you or I, how the President can deny that ISIS — the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — is Islamic. He could have added that it was also rather odd that the President of the United States denied that ISIS is a state. “What,” we might ask, “does a state do that ISIS does not now do?” And Carr was no less nonplussed when Secretary of State John Kerry denied that we were going to war against ISIS, resorted to euphemism, and asserted that what we are about to become engaged in is “a very important counter-terrorism operation.”
“Does that,” Carr asks, “make it … a police action? Will we have to destroy the village in order to save it?”
President Obama on Wednesday night — the eve of the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — said Islamic religious instruction is wholly irrelevant to the cause of ISIS … which stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. ISIS, I suspect, would disagree.
But that is not to say that there aren’t elements of foreign policy in which the Obama administration thinks religion — even Islam — is a key component. Secretary of State John Kerry stated on Sept. 3 that “religion matters,” and he’s made it “a mantra” in his State Department and his foreign policy stance.
I don’t normally watch presidential addresses. I try to tune out any time a politician is flapping their gums, especially on television. However, if I’m going to write about this kind of thing, I guess I have a responsibility to watch them.
I have a few thoughts, in no particular order:
Last night, President Obama announced that American forces would “will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy,” largely constituting an air campaign in both Iraq and Syria, and in coordination with the Iraqis and other allies.
