Choice of verb deliberate, there: Craig doesn’t seem all that happy to be pursuing a new and exciting career as a data point in the November unemployment statistics.

Tokyo (CNN) – In the first major shakeup among President Barack Obama’s senior staff, White House Counsel Greg Craig is being pushed out in favor of veteran Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer because of a dispute over plans to close the U.S. military prison in Cuba, CNN has learned.

The move will be announced by the White House in the coming days, a senior administration official and a senior Democratic source confirmed. The sources said it could be announced as early as Friday while the president will be in Japan starting a four-nation tour of Asia, which would make it likely the staff change will be overshadowed by other events.

Craig declined to comment and hang up when reached by CNN late Thursday evening.

Oh. I think somebody needs a hug.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The Speaker of the House and the President have two options right now: hold and lose the vote in the House, or wait and vote after the Senate.

By my own count the Speaker and the President are light at least ten votes — and could be light as many as twenty three — depending on the dynamic on the House floor.

The problem is that some yes votes could get changed to no as the loss becomes apparent — why take a beating for a tough vote when the thing is going down?

Members of Congress will not take a beating, just for the sake of taking a beating. They will switch votes, and that is how you get to the fifty to fifty-five House Dems voting no.

The smart play for the Speaker is to don the robes of Mother Protector — I will save my House Members from Walking the Plank — we are waiting for the Senate to vote first. That way her House Members are protected against the bill dying in the Senate, without having taken a tough vote.

As one Senate Dem lobbyist told me yesterday, “Reid can get on the bill, he just can’t get off.” Translating from Washington-speak: Senator Reid can get past the filibuster of the motion to proceed, he just cannot end the filibuster against the bill itself. It is like Senator Reid’s own version of Hotel California hell — he can check in but he can never leave.

This is why the smart play for the Speaker and the White House is to punt. And Harry Reid’s offense takes the field.

Reid then takes the blame if he can’t get into the end zone. The Speaker merely points out the obvious: I was acting in the best political interest of my members. Why should we take tough votes on Medicare cuts, guns, immigration, abortion, taxes, spending, mandates (government control) and watch the Senate fail? (Again.)

But the continued forever quest for the holy-health care grail is making her look like Captain Ahab and the search for the Great White Whale — which in the end he found — it killed him, his ship and all but one of his crew.

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I confess, it makes zero sense to me.

I’ve done the math and the political calculus keeps coming back a broken equation.

In general, if the strategic political forces are aligned properly, then the tactical level concerns resolve themselves. This mathematical rule in politics (it is very close to applied chaos theory) regularly produces victory for those applying the rule.

There are oh so very many outright political violations that irrationalism – an identifiable and documented strain of ideologies, among them, fascism — can only explain the behavior of the White House and the House and Senate leadership.

The following political actions are simply not rational:

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You know, new broom sweeping clean, cleaning out the Augean stables, generally showing those people in Washington who was who and what was what - and how there was going to be a new boss, with new rules and expectations on behavior. Well, meet the new boss:

During his first nine months in office, President Obama has quietly rewarded scores of top Democratic donors with VIP access to the White House, private briefings with administration advisers and invitations to important speeches and town-hall meetings.

High-dollar fundraisers have been promised access to senior White House officials in exchange for pledges to donate $30,400 personally or to bundle $300,000 in contributions ahead of the 2010 midterm elections, according to internal Democratic National Committee documents obtained by The Washington Times.

H/T: The Conservatives. Note that none of this is actually illegal; it’s just… business. This is how things are done in Washington. People willing to give money to politicians will be generally treated better by those politicians than people who are not, all other things being equal. This may disappoint supporters of the President, who (rightfully) may be feeling that they were at least misled about this administration’s intentions, but that’s not exactly the fault of everybody else. Of course, one way of controlling the underlying problem is by encouraging negative feedback mechanisms; for example, transparency…

Since taking office, Mr. Obama has pledged that his administration will be “the most open and transparent administration in history” and has agreed to make public the names of those who sign into White House visitor logs, though a request from The Times for logs that show visits from his top 45 bundlers has so far gone unfilled.

Requests for guest lists to various White House events, such as a recent cocktail reception surrounding the celebration of the Pittsburgh Penguins’ National Hockey League Stanley Cup victory or the Latin music concert last week, have also been denied repeatedly.

Ah. Never mind.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The White House’s attacks on Fox News, the Chamber of Commerce, Rush Limbaugh, etc. are making Democrats on Capitol Hill nervous. In particular, the Democrats who sit in districts John McCain won are incredibly nervous about these attacks. Jonathan Allen has an article today on it. This is perfect timing.

Several of us were thinking it’d be fun to get these Democrats on record with their thoughts. Who wants to help?

Below is a list of Congressmen and their phone numbers. Call and ask:

1. Does the Congressman agree with the President’s attacks on Fox News and the Chamber of Commerce?
2. Will the Congressman adhere to MoveOn.org’s call to boycott Fox News?

Yes or no is all they have to say. You just make the calls and leave the answers in the comments section here. If the President wants to stir up trouble for Fox and the Chamber of Commerce, let’s make it as painful as possible for his own team.

The list is below the fold. We’ll make sure local media in their home districts know whether they agree with Obama’s attacks on Fox and the business community.

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While the cognoscenti of the Western financial world is attempting to spin the recent fall in the dollar as a stylish financial mystery play with a journalist based in the Middle East as its star, the Whodunit spin is a red herring: the facts are that the dollar is weak, and getting weaker.

The world is awash in dollars. There is a massive oversupply. We are electronically creating (printing in another era) hundreds of billions of dollars to buy our own T-Bills. Our deficit and spending has soared.

Kudlow, in his column, “Save the Greenback, Mr. President” explains that solution is to remove the excess dollars from the market and to stop “printing so much debt:”

for therapy, the Fed should begin moving excess cash from the economy….And they need to stop printing so much debt from Congress. All this massive spending and borrowing is killing us.

Instead, the Democrats in Congress and the White House are planning more spending: a second spending bill is on the table — ironically tagged as the second stimulus bill, which ought to stimulate the dollar tanking — and of course, President Obama’s $1 trillion health care spending boondoggle.

When town hall meetings are interrupted with shouts of “stop printing money” the jig is up. Note to the White House: in the age of the internet, you cannot hide printing $600 Billion a year from the world.

Until the Federal Reserve stops printing money to buy our own T-Bills, and the Democrats in Congress stop spending on new programs and we lower our deficit the dollar will continue to drop. End of story, no other outcome is possible.

Simply put, the Dems are killing the dollar.

Last week we showed how Barack Obama is connected to ACORN by his White House Political Director, Patrick Gaspard.

The Missouri blog 24thstate.com has built on those ties and has a look at Sara Howard, Russ Carnahan’s spokesgal. Howard and Gaspard both worked for Americans Coming Together (”ACT”) in 2004. In that year, ACT sent out a sensational, hate filled political flier showing white men spraying black people with fire hoses in the sixties. The ACT flier claimed Republicans were trying to intimidate blacks into not voting.

Turns out the printer of the flier, along with Gaspard and Howard, is in the rolodex.

But the Editor of 24thstate.com brought to my attention another name on the list I had missed — another White House worker and one in a critical position to tie ACORN and the SEIU into the White House and entire Executive Branch.

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I just had this forwarded by one of my RS colleagues who doesn’t have time to hit this right now. Turns out that the Axelrod spam did happen, and it’s all because of all those awful “outside groups of all political stripes“:

After insisting no one was receiving unsolicited e-mails from the White House, officials reversed their story Monday night and blamed outside political groups for the unwanted messages from the tech-savvy operation.

White House online director Macon Phillips said in a blog posting that independent groups—he didn’t name them—had signed-up their members to receive regular updates about Obama’s projects, priorities and speeches.

The White House had consistently denied that anyone who hadn’t sought the e-mails had received them.

But we can believe them when they now tell us that it’s not their fault. Because nothing, of course, is ever this administration’s fault.

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Interesting.

I’m hearing from more and more doctors and from pharmaceutical sales representatives that the sales reps are rapidly becoming persona non grata in the doctors’ offices.

Here’s the thing — PhrMA and the American Medical Association both have thrown doctors under the bus. Doctors are supposed to be represented by the AMA, a majority of doctors oppose Obamacare, but the AMA has decided to support Obamacare.

PhrMA, has gone all in with the White House funding an advertising campaign in favor of Obamacare in exchange for favorable terms.

The doctors are caught in the middle and made a bad guy for the White House. Twice now Barack Obama has attacked doctors publicly while refusing to add tort reform to healthcare reform — a necessity to get costs down in healthcare.

More doctors should begin banning pharmaceutical sales reps from their offices. If PhrMA is going to work against doctors and, inevitably, ruin doctors’ livelihoods, doctors should reciprocate and go after pharmaceutical companies. The easiest way to do that is shut down office visits.

By the way, I don’t know a single drug rep who supports the plan. It sounds like PhrMA is going the route of the AMA — screwing their own to stay in the White House’s good graces.

See it for yourself below, as Bill Burton, a spokesman for Barack Obama’s White House, says:

I don’t think that Speaker Pelosi was just claiming that people were wearing swastikas [at health care town hall meetings]; people are showing up to events with swastikas, dressed up as Hitler, with signs invoking Nazi Germany, so that’s not something that’s being made up.

Video:

The DC Examiner’s David Freddoso tried to run down this claim, and hit a stone wall:

White House spokesman Bill Burton’s statement on television earlier today that people are showing up at health care town halls dressed up as Hitler was outlandish enough that I had to call the White House and ask if there is anything to substantiate it.

As of this evening, the White House has offered no explanation for this bizarre claim.

By the way, the laugher line of Burton’s interview was the seven-word claim, “We’re trying to have a constructive debate.”

Calling your opponents a dangerous mob of swastika-wearing Hitlers and calling out SEIU thugs to beat them into submissive silence (not to mention setting up an informant tipline by which those who question Obama’s health plan in “casual conversation” can be turned in to the government) is one heck of a way to “have a constructive debate,” there, Bill. Well done.

UPDATE: According to The Hill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has now taken to referring to those who question Obamacare as “evil-mongers.” Classy, Senator.

As Jeff noted yesterday, the White House is asking individuals to report misinformation to the White House on healthcare.

Specifically, the White House said

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Emphasis added. Given the near certainty that no one will be stripping from emails the names of the people forwarding on the information, the White House is most likely engaged in unlawful activity.

According to 5 U.S.C. § 552a, United States agencies, including the Executive Office of the President shall, “maintain no record describing how any individual exercises rights guaranteed by the First Amendment unless expressly authorized by statute or by the individual about whom the record is maintained or unless pertinent to and within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity.”

The White House may take the position that certain of its offices aren’t subject to the Privacy Act (that is a longstanding Office of Legal Counsel position, see here), but most Presidents instruct their staffs to comply. This will be a the first significant time the White House has ignored the Privacy Act and may open President Obama up to litigation.

This is another example of the Obama administration ignoring long time precedent when it is no longer convenient for them. And ignoring this precedent lets them collect data on and potential harass individual American citizens.

The flag@whitehouse.gov email address is not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. Some enterprising legislator should introduce legislation to make it subject to the FOIA.

You remember: back in April the President called on the Cabinet to reduce the budget by 100 million. True, it was immediately pointed out that this would be roughly equivalent to… well, we’ll let Political Math explain it*:

…still, every little - every very, very, very little - bit helps, right? So, today’s the day that we hear about those cuts!

White House misses deadline on spending cuts report

Asked about the spending cuts, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday that information still was being compiled.

…or not. Via Berman Post, via Instapundit.

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Well, they’re claiming that it was, and there’s evidence that it happened in the form of an earthquake,so that’s how everyone is betting.  Japan is calling for an emergency UNSC meeting; South Korea, dealing simultaneously with this and the suddenly-more-murky suicide of its former President, is doing the same.  The White House hasn’t put up the President’s official statement on this yet, but you can read it here - it differs from the White House statement in 2006 most notably in its unconscious reliance on the UNSC to resolve this situation.  Also missing is any indication that the President has personally consulted with our allies in the region, but no doubt he’ll address that when he holds a press conference this morning on the North Korean crisis.  Note that I am merely assuming at this point that there will be one, and that it will take place before noon.

Meanwhile, John Bolton predicted that this test was going to happen last week; he also noted last week that the administration wasn’t taking the possibility of a second test all that seriously.  Compare the White House statements from today and 2006 again and ask yourself, Which one sounds like it was written by people taken by surprise? Also ask yourself, Is Bolton right when he suggests that not taking even a soft line on this will merely encourage North Korea - and Iran - to proceed?

Please also note that we are in a situation where two of the biggest current, active, and intractable threats to world peace are rogue nations simultaneously pursuing nuclear weapons and missile technology.  Successful creation of both will put at immediate risk our regional allies; allies that we have spent a lifetime cultivating; and who are genuinely alarmed at the activities of their neighbors.  And in both cases, the enemies of said rogue nations were picked for essentially irrational reasons, meaning that normal rules of deterrence may or may not work.

Meanwhile, President Obama wants to gut missile defense programs*.

Um, no.  That’s stupid.

Moe Lane

*Via FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog, via Michelle Malkin.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(Via Drudge) Who do they have in charge of visitor relations for that place, anyway?

…Actually, do they have somebody in place for visitor relations?

Sobbing Kindergarteners Snubbed for Steelers?

Thursday was supposed to be the highlight of the year for more than 100 kindergarteners from Stafford County, Va. They got up early and took a chartered bus to the White House for a school field trip. But when they arrived, all the 5-year-olds got was a lesson in disappointment.
The buses from Conway Elementary arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a little later than planned, and they were locked out.

“We were going to the White House, but we couldn’t get in so I felt sad,” 5-year-old Cameron Stine said.

Parents say they were just 10 minutes late for their scheduled tour. School officials say White House staff said they needed to get ready for the president’s luncheon with the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, so they couldn’t come in.

Incredibly, White House staffers attempted to push back on this story, in flagrant ignorance of the elementary political truth that a politician cannot win any argument with a crying five-year-old child. I will be merciful and not reproduce their justification, although I will note that it strongly implies that the parents of a busload of crying five-year-olds are all liars.

Video after the fold.

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As Jim Geraghty notes, all of Obama’s promises come with an expiration date. All of them.

Obama Opposes Releasing Photos of U.S. Detainee Abuse
President Obama has decided not to release photos which the Pentagon had planned to released by May 28 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

President Obama has decided not to release hundreds of photos potentially showing U.S. military personnel abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.

A senior administration official told FOX News that Obama met with his legal team last week and told them that he did not feel comfortable with the release of the photos because he believes they would endanger U.S. troops, and that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.

Last week.

President Obama Reverses Course on Releasing More Detainee Abuse Photographs

President Obama met with White House counsel Greg Craig and other members of the White House counsel team last week and told them that he had second thoughts about the decision to hand over photographs of detainee abuse to the ACLU, per a judge’s order, and had changed his mind.

The president “believes their release would endanger our troops,” a White House official says, adding that the president “believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.”

They decided this last week. One wonders why it took them this long to mention it. Even the usual “new polls came in” excuse won’t fly, this time: we knew Friday that the Democrats were losing the initiative in this argument.

All very odd.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Sometimes you have to wonder if reporters just do dictation for Democrat Press Secretaries. Check out this story by Politico’s Andy Barr. He invented a debate between Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal and former Vice President Dick Cheney to make sure that it had the White House’s framing, no matter how far from the truth it was, excluding all sorts of essential facts.

You see, Jindal was on Good Morning America, Jindal came on right after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who had just attacked Cheney. The GMA host asked Jindal to respond to Napolitano about Cheney. Jindal ducked and attacked Obama’s policies. Watch it:

But look at how Barr reported it:

“I think Democrat or Republican, we should all agree that our current president, our former president would obviously want to do everything they could to keep us safe,” he said. “Let’s give the new administration a chance. Let’s not question their intentions. Let’s have a real debate on their policies.”

The Republican governor praised Obama for “showing more flexibility when it comes to Iraq than maybe some of the campaign rhetoric suggested.”

“I am, quite honestly, pleasantly surprised,” he said. “That’s the kind of pragmatism, listening to the commanders on the ground, I think is very important.”

Jindal did offer some criticism of the president, pointing out that it is “fine to have an honest disagreement on the policies that both administrations would choose to try to keep us safe.”

Somehow Barr’s report manages to exclude Jindal’s criticism over Guantanamo prisoners, which was one of Cheney’s specific attacks. He also excluded the fact that the question asked was explicitly in response to Napolitano’s attack on Cheney. Or even that Jindal didn’t even mention “Cheney”, “Vice President”, or anything like that.

And that tells you really what you need to know. Like with Rush Limbaugh, the White House is trying to pick their opponents. They want to be debating Dick Cheney, not Bobby Jindal. GMA didn’t give the White House’s framing by asking Jindal to respond to Napolitano. So Barr stepped in to frame it up with the White House’s preferred story-line, points of disagreement. What was “Cheney attacks Obama”, “Napolitano attacks Cheney”, and “Jindal attacks Obama” was twisted into “Jindal attacks Cheney” by aggressive editing and removal of context.

This is just a reporter taking dictation for the White House. Nothing more complicated.

That’s Hillary. Mrs. Clinton if you’re nasty.

Yesterday, in what is the latest in a long, hard series of bungles by the White House, reporters who called for an “on-the-record briefing call with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton” were offered the opportunity to provide a credit card if they felt like “getting nasty.”

According to Fox News, the White House distributed an email to the press announcing a conference call, but included the number for a phone sex line rather than the conference call number. Asked for comment White House Press Secretary Bill Burton said the mistake was “one of the stupider things FOX News has covered lately.” I couldn’t agree more Bill, it is one of the stupid things Obama’s administration has done lately and that the press has subsequently covered or, as in this case, not covered.

This may sound cliché at this point, but fantasize with me for moment. Imagine that this conference call had been scheduled for Condi Rice. Are you there with me, baby? You’re calling for Condi and you get Candi? The press would have gone NUTS. Bush would have been bound, gagged, and whipped for it over the course of days. It would have been a press orgy and, what’s more, the one-time thing would have come back to haunt the Bush team for years after. Every time they sent out a press release about Condi … oh, they’d stick with their own phone numbers, sure. But everyone would remember the other number. From that one time. It would be awkward.

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Let’s be clear. Barack Obama has an agenda. He wants to tax our energy and put the government in control of our health care. Given all the damage that Obama wants to do to our economy through these, card check just isn’t that high on his priority list. MSNBC has it:

*** Card check’s death? Did the legislative battle over the Employee Free Choice Act (a.k.a. “card check”) end before it truly began? GOP Sen. Arlen Specter’s decision yesterday to oppose the bill, even though he voted for cloture on the measure in ’07, dealt a blow to organized labor, denying them the 60 votes they need to end debate — even if Al Franken ends up joining the Senate. We can tell you this: The White House appears to be happy (but very quietly so) to have this debate out of the way. No doubt they were for it. But it was always more of a Biden cause than a Barack cause. At this point in time, with everything else on their plate, sticking a finger in business’ eye wasn’t something the White House was looking forward to. Would Obama have signed it? Yes. But he doesn’t have to worry about it now, at least maybe not until 2011.

Here’s an interesting, if unsurprising, little tidbit about the photos of President Obama on display at WhiteHouse.gov: they’re all uploaded to a folder called “hero.”

Take the one below for example:

If you’re using FireFox, right click on the photo and select “View Image.” Then, take a look at the url in your address bar, which should read: http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/hero/624×351/P023009PS_dng_1.jpg (For those of you who can’t do this little exercise, I’ve grabbed a copy of the picture and posted it here with url properties displayed).

This is consistent for all of the featured photos of Obama on the new WH.gov site. For another example, here is Our Hero announcing former New Hampshire Senator Jim Jeffords Judd Gregg as his second nominee for Commerce Secretary (after the epic Bill Richardson whoopsie): http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/hero/624×351/gregg_announcement.jpg

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It was Mary Katherine Ham’s article that tipped me to the problem:

Barack Obama’s administration may be promising the “greatest ethical standard ever administered to an executive branch,” and increased transparency over his predecessor, but it seems to be forgoing at least one transparency practice that was routine in the Bush White House— transcripts of the daily press briefing.

It’s been four days since Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ first (and widely panned) appearance before the White House press corps, but no transcript, summary, or video of the event has shown up on WhiteHouse.gov. The delay could be forgiven in a less tech-savvy bunch, but given the Obama team’s considerable online skill, the omission of the the transcript is clearly intentional.

The decision to withhold transcripts is not a departure from the Obama Team’s online posture during the campaign, and signals that’s exactly the posture they intend to take for the next four years. Team Obama got a lot of credit for being an active online presence, which indeed it was, but that presence was built for message control, not openness. (My.BarackObama, the campaign’s social networking platform, is a different story, but it was cordoned off from the official campaign material, which was pretty tightly controlled.)

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