We are one week into Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan. A number of polls are coming out telling a variety of stories about what it means. But one thing is clear: Barack Obama’s campaign has had several significant strategic failures this summer. And they failed to define Paul Ryan out of the gate with their Mediscare tactics. And they failed to define Mitt Romney | Read More »
I applaud House Speaker John Boehner for his letter to President Barack Obama on Russia. I also applaud him for holding fire on Obama while he was abroad at an important security summit. It much more clearly articulated Obama’s shocking behavior with respect to Russia than any other criticism to date: The Russian government has not lived up to its obligations to support the world | Read More »
Last night President Barack Obama spoke at two “star-studded” Hollywood fundraisers. And, according to Politco, he noted to a group of people who make their quite nice livings in theatrics that “people … like … poetry” rather than the “prose” of governing. Mentioning former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s quip that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose, Obama said he’s written more of | Read More »
Getting a candidate on the ballot in Indiana is not easy. I know, from first hand experience, that many campaigns struggle to do it. But it now appears that in 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton took a short-cut. They just cheated. It turns out that someone appears to have forged the signature of former Democratic Governor Joe Kernan on the petition to get Barack | Read More »
Obviously, Barack Obama had a bad day in Copenhagen today with the failure of Chicago’s bid for the Olympics. Of course, many Chicagoans were mixed. (I was negative for a variety of reasons including the inability of the South Side, where I lived for 8 years, to handle the infrastructural requirements) But it is worth pointing out that this story will not go away. In | Read More »
Tonight, President Barack Obama goes to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago to get the Olympics. And incidentally, if he succeeds, Chicago real estate developers, like many of his donors, will get zillions in development contracts from the city. The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass noted that Obama is “asking the IOC to make Mayor Richard Daley the king of Chicago for life.” It turns out that | Read More »
Wonderful reporting today in the Politico by David Rogers. Basically, The Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, wants to change the rules for the way that government tells Congress and the American people how much money it spends at the IMF. Orszag, is claiming that a $100 billion dollars check that we send to the IMF should be reported as $0. | Read More »
When Barack Obama released, his budget, he claimed that it didn’t contain “gimmicks” and that he cost of the budget was so high because he fully funded Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget and didn’t use gimmicks. Jackie Calmes of the New York Times swallowed the line so completely that she called her story “Obama bans gimmicks, deficits will rise”. (Never mind that the ever | Read More »
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 | Read More »
No, I am not referring to the snubbing of the Brazilian President. That’s just amateur hour, something we have come to expect. This is truly a problem. I am referring to Barack Obama’s bungling of Latin American countries expelling US diplomats and officials. First, in Ecuador: The Ecuadorian government today expelled Max Sullivan, first secretary of the U.S. embassy in Quito, for interfering in the | Read More »
FT’s Maverecon has it and the quotes are pretty clear: There is little doubt that if the Buy American provisions of the Economic Stimulus Package were to become law, this would amount to an economic declaration of war on the rest of the world. The response of the assembled non-US finance ministers in Davos made this clear. Retaliation from the EU countries and the rest | Read More »
Watching the news suggests that everyone’s legs are tingling. Everyone is praising Barack Obama’s smooth transition. That seems odd considering what a miserable ethical disaster it has been. Consider this list: Obama’s governor, Rod Blagojevich, was arrested for trying to sell his US Senate seat. He tried to involve the SEIU, one of Obama’s key supporters. Obama appointed a Secretary of Commerce, Bill Richardson, who | Read More »
This story in the Wall Street Journal has not been given enough attention. Basically, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus created an entity to advocate for subprime loans to their constituents in exchange for donations to members of the Caucus. [...] The caucus launched a housing initiative called Hogar — Spanish for home — to work with industry and community groups to increase mortgage lending to Latinos. | Read More »
Hilda Solis and Xavier Becerra were both picked for Barack Obama’s cabinet in positions that are intensely important to the labor movement, Secretary of Labor and US Trade Representative, respectively. Both also come from Los Angeles, the home of the largest and most systematic case of labor crime currently being investigated, that of Tyone Freeman, formerly the head of the LA chapter of SEIU. This | Read More »
Somehow, in the debate over globalization and geopolitical strategy, India has been a sort of bastard step-child. Due to understandable economic concerns — China holds much of our debt, produces much of our consumer goods, and has had eye-popping foreign direct investment driven growth — our focus has been on China. Yet India’s population is still growing, its universities are first tier, and it is | Read More »
Cross-posted from Election Journal. Palestra.net finds that Barack Obama campaign staffer (described on an Obama site as a field organizer and at a Zoroastrian site as Obama staff) Minwalla Farah is registered to vote in 3 states. Meet Farah Minwalla, an Obama field organizer in North Carolina. She registered to vote in Mecklenburg County, NC on October 4. According to county auditor reports, the address | Read More »
Below, Moe writes on some shocking statements by Barack Obama about “bankrupting the coal industry” in order to address global warming. Obama has it in for another industry: agriculture. Check out these statements from an interview he gave with Time’s Joe Klein: As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating | Read More »
My friend and colleague, Patrick Ottenhoff, had an interesting analysis of Virginia back in June that could be on the money: Major federal contractors set up shop in Northern Virginia and, in turn, subcontracted work to technology firms that hired accountants and lawyers. The young professionals who work at those firms in Tysons Corner, Reston and Ashburn are part of Obama’s core constituency. But the | Read More »
In this morning’s Washington Post, EJ Dionne, in a screed against the right, asks: Yet McCain’s own campaign is playing with powerful extremist themes to denigrate Obama. When his running mate, Sarah Palin, first brought up Obama’s association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, who has become a centerpiece of McCain’s attacks, she accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” What other “terrorists” was she thinking | Read More »
Barack Obama’s campaign demonstrated what shameless hypocrites they are. This morning, they went up with an ad calling John McCain dishonorable and sleazy. Yet on Friday, they released an ad that accused him of not using a computer (a strange accusation). When it turned out that his well-known mobility problem is part of the reason, what do they do? Change the subject by quoting him | Read More »
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