The major controversy right now in the GOP presidential primaries is over Rick Perry’s contention that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that can’t deliver on its promises under its current structure. Mitt Romney doesn’t exactly dispute this – in fact, Romney himself said the same thing in his book, but then Romney always did like to attack other Republicans for things he himself has | Read More »
This anonymously-sourced report from The Hill, which clearly derives in good part from Republican sources, is pretty damning about President Obama’s leadership, if it turns out to be accurate: GOP aides and lawmakers, speaking on background, portrayed Boehner as the calm negotiator who repeatedly exasperated President Obama. Boehner last month asked the networks to televise his response to Obama’s address to the nation, a request | Read More »
In case you missed it, Jay Cost had a great piece on Friday on “the Food Stamp recovery”, laying out the ways in which the currently-underway “recovery” is the weakest in memory. His bracing conclusion? [I]f the economic recovery does not begin to show substantial improvement, the likes of which we have not really seen in the last two years, and if the GOP nominates | Read More »
The problem with hiring a guy because of his race is, it gets very hard if you have to fire him. Barack Obama is likely to face a primary challenge in 2012, but the question of the day is whether it will be some minor fringe-like protest candidate like Dennis Kucinich or Mike Gravel or a more serious challenger like Howard Dean or Russ Feingold. | Read More »
What will happen to Barack Obama’s presidency if his tax compromise is shot down with the help of his own party? The House Democratic caucus just voted against it, which puts the deal on life support, at best. Can Obama recover from that? One of the great questions of the past two years, ever since it became obvious that Democrats would suffer significant setbacks in | Read More »
Let’s talk just a little about the 2012 presidential election. I’d like to make three related points: (1) Nobody should be touting Scott Brown as a 2012 presidential candidate. (2) The GOP is going to be picking from a bench that is short on candidates with the experience we need. (3) It’s a good thing that Ron Paul won the “straw poll” of 2012 candidates | Read More »
The New York Daily News under the management of Mort Zuckerman is a fairly reliable weathervane of a particular stripe of moderate, Northeastern Democrat opinion, broadly liberal in inclination but more cold-eyed and hawkish when it comes to crime, national security, and in particular the threat of Islamic extremism to the U.S. and Israel – your basic Ed Koch-type Democrat (this is not an exclusively | Read More »
Pardon me if I am seeing red this morning: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and four others accused in the attacks will be put on criminal trial in New York, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce later Friday. WHAT IN THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? So, Barack Obama will be staging his own New | Read More »
There will be much debate in the morning about whether or not the bad results for Democrats in the Governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey – both states where Barack Obama campaigned for the Democrat and the Democrat sought to join himself at the hip with Obama – reflect public anger at Obama and his Administration. This is an interesting debate, but let us | Read More »
The major decision the Obama Administration continues to procrastinate is whether to continue the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Victory in Afghanistan was, as you will recall, one of Obama’s main campaign themes – one he used to convince people that he wasn’t the dyed-in-the-tie-dyes peacenik his left-wing record, background and positions on other issues suggested. Under President Bush, America’s war aims in Afghanistan | Read More »
So, Chicago was eliminated in the first round of bidding for the 2016 Summer Olympics, despite (I assume despite) President Obama’s personal lobbying for the Games. Now, as a New Yorker, I really would not want the Olympics anywhere near my city, and the Olympics don’t exactly have a grand history of making money for the host city (ask Montreal) or necessarily good press (ask | Read More »
One of the most elusive concepts in politics is the notion of a mandate. Presidents love to claim them to bulldoze opposition (“the American people elected me to do this!”), but they can evaporate with astonishing speed, most famously in the case of the backlash against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Court-packing” plan after FDR had won the most sweeping electoral endorsement for any party in a | Read More »
This is from Obama’s press conference yesterday: President Barack Obama on Tuesday squared off with the insurance lobby over industry charges that a government health plan he backs would dismantle the employer coverage Americans have relied on for a half-century and overtake the system…. “If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care … then why is it that the government, | Read More »
Because they usually lack the organization, training, funding, numbers and suicidal ideology of international terrorists, it can at times be difficult to distinguish domestic terrorists from ordinary psychopaths. But domestic terrorism has been a sporadic presence in the United States since at least radical Kansas abolitionist John Brown in the 1850s, running through the likes of Leon Czolgosz, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Black Panthers, Tim | Read More »
At this writing, we do not know who President Obama will nominate to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court, and so it’s impossible to anticipate precisely how much Republican opposition his pick will meet with, or for that matter whether any Democrats will be opposed. Nonetheless, of this much we can be sure, from Obama’s own history and prior statements as well as that | Read More »
You may remember the flap over the Secret Service limitations on where protestors could set up near George W. Bush, and the wailing about “free speech zones” being an unconscionable restriction, etc. I have yet to hear anybody (1) complain about the Secret Service’s policy since Obama took over or (2) explain how the policy changed, as I suspect it has not. Like so many | Read More »
Next time the United States captures some hardened, mass-murdering terrorists, the CIA should tell President Obama that we captured some unborn children, and he’ll let them do whatever they want.
She’s not taking it sitting down: “This was a degrading remark about our world’s most precious and unique people, coming from the most powerful position in the world,” fumed former GOP veep pick and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whose youngest son, Trig, has Down syndrome. “These athletes overcome more challenges, discrimination and adversity than most of us ever will,” she added. Obama’s better off sticking | Read More »
One of the more laughable notions during the campaign was Obama’s claim to represent some sort of “new politics”; one of the sillier fictions of the last several years was that Democrats were less prone to dirty tricks and bending the apparatus of government to narrow partisan interests than Republicans. But of course, in any election season there are people eager to lie to themselves | Read More »
Jake Tapper notices that Obama’s nominee for US Trade Representative, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, worked as a state and local lobbyist in Dallas; Tapper notes that he’s at least the fifth lobbyist picked for a significant position in the Obama Administration (and that’s before we consider family members like Joe Biden’s son or Tom Daschle’s wife). Here’s the Administration’s defense: “Ron Kirk has never | Read More »
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