Thursday Reads

Posted: November 11, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Global Financial Crisis, WE TOLD THEM SO | Tags: , , , , , | 39 Comments

Good Morning!! Today is Veterans Day.

The big news of the day is the draft report of the co-chairs President’s Catfood Commission, which is not going over too well even with the other members of the commission. Below are a few more reactions to yesterday’s announcement by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles–beyond the ones in Dakinikat’s post yesterday.

BTW, have you ever seen men who looked more dead inside than those two? As you would expect from such soulless men, they didn’t hesitate to advocate cuts to veterans’ benefits along with their attacks on the middle class, the poor, and old people.

So, on to those reactions.

At Huffpo, Dan Froomkin lists “Ten Flash Points In The Fiscal Commission Chairmen’s Proposal”

…taken as a whole, the plan authored by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson would have devastating effects on the government and its ability to help the most vulnerable in our society, and it would put the squeeze on the middle class, veterans, the elderly and the sick – all in the name of an abstract goal that ultimately only a bond-trader could love.

For a summary of the attack on veterans, Froomkin links to David Dayen at FDL:

They want to add co-pays to the Veterans’ Administration and TRICARE, as well as pushing individuals covered by TRICARE into an employer policy. They also want to freeze noncombat military pay for three years. And, they want to end schools for families on military bases, instead reintegrating soldier’s kids into the public school system (because that’s so easy for a military family that moves every other year).

The attack on old people and future retirement benefits for everyone:

Deficit Comm. Chairs’ Social Security Cuts Mean Seniors Pay for Wall Street Instead of Their Own Retirement, Says Bob Weiner, Ex-House Aging Committee Chief of Staff

The Deficit Commission “Chairmen’s Mark” proposal today for Social Security cuts, including raising the retirement age and reducing the cost of living, means that “Seniors will be paying for Wall Street instead of their own retirement, will be forced to work longer, and will be squeezed into poverty, despite the fact that the Social Security system has no debt for 30+ years based on what seniors have paid into it,” says former House Aging Committee Chief of Staff Robert Weiner.

“Social Security adds not a dime to the national debt for at least 30 years. What is really happening is cuts advocates are using the Social Security funds literally paid for by seniors to reverse other federal programs that do have deficits or are unpaid, and to pay for the tax breaks for the wealthy,” Weiner continues.

Michael Hiltzik: The deficit commission chairs’ lies about Social Security

Look out — the enemies of Social Security are locked and loaded for a renewed attack on the program.

The new volley comes from the co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the so-called deficit commission ginned up by the White House as a sop to conservatives. The co-chairs are the profoundly clownish former Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, a Democrat with his feet firmly implanted on Wall Street….

The co-chairs propose to gut Social Security under the guise of “saving” it, eliminate federal funding for services and programs that heavily benefit the middle- and working classes, and — surprise — steer even more income tax cuts to the wealthy.

The cuts to Social Security are subtle, and for that reason worthy of close scrutiny. The co-chairs’ key proposal is to raise the regular retirement age to as high as 69, and raise the minimum retirement age to 64. This imposes disproportionate harm on lower-income workers, whose working lives tend to be shorter than others’. They also want to reduce relative benefits for better-paid workers, and change the formula for cost-of-living increases to one that looks like it would customarily produce lower COLAs.

Bloomberg summarized a range of reactions: U.S. Debt Proposal Would Cut Social Security, Taxes, Medicare A few quotes:
Read the rest of this entry »

What happens when a country elects a President with no ideology or core values?

Posted: November 8, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: A My Pet Goat Moment, Elections, president teleprompter jesus, WE TOLD THEM SO | Tags: , , , , | 65 Comments

We’re seeing what happens. People voted for “the audacity of hope” and “change we can believe in” — empty slogans with no real meaning. Now our country is in desperate straits, and the man who was elected to lead us has no idea what to do. He can’t even work himself up to make an inspiring speech to encourage us to have a little hope for the future.

Last Tuesday, we saw the Democratic Party experience an epic beating in the midterm elections, and what is our President’s reaction? He gives an interview to Steve Kroft of CBS’ 60 Minutes and, to quote Peter Daou, “apologizes for being a Democrat.” And then he leaves the country before the interview airs. And he goes to a country that, fairly or unfairly, symbolizes the outsourcing of American jobs.

Peter Daou really lets Obama have it for once:

The aftermath of the GOP’s midterm triumph perfectly illustrates this problem: Obama is falling over himself seeking compromise with Republicans, ceding to their frames, while Republican leaders say they will stick to their principles and try to destroy his presidency and legacy. Here’s how I put it a couple of days ago: If one side offers “compromise” and the other claims to stand firmly on principle, which one appears more principled to voters?

Astonishingly, in a 60 Minutes piece that just aired, Obama goes one step further. During the course of the entire interview he only once mentions having the courage of one’s convictions. And he attributes it not to himself or Democrats, but to Tom Coburn, a staunch conservative!

“There are some sincere Republicans in the Senate like Tom Coburn, Oklahoma, who is about as conservative as they come, but a real friend of mine and somebody who has always had the courage of his convictions and not, you know, bringing pork projects back to Oklahoma. And it may be that that’s an example of where, on a bipartisan basis, we can work together to change practices in Washington that generate a lot of the distrust of government.”

How can anyone claim that Obama is a Democrat? At the Atlantic, Derek Thompson asks “Why Did Obama Do the 60 Mintues Interview? Good question! He sure didn’t do it to advance the goals of the party he pretends to belong to and, yes, lead. Thompson:

Five days after a demoralizing midterm election, President Obama appeared on 60 Minutes to make the case that … wait, why did the president appear on 60 Minutes, exactly?

He told Americans that the economy might never fully recover. He said the White House is discouraged about the election and the economy. He admitted that he made mistakes, knowingly committed an unforced political error in health care reform, and got too heated with his rhetoric during the midterm campaign. He prepared Americans for the “hard, long slog” ahead. That the president is his own harshest critic is admirable, but CBS interviews aren’t required at the halfway point like a midterm exam. The president sat down in that chair to make a point. So what was the point?

Beats the hell out me.

Back in 1979, President Jimmy Carter gave a famous speech that is often referred to as “the malaise speech,” even though it didn’t contain the word “malaise.” That speech is often seen as Carter’s Waterloo. And yet Carter’s speech was inspiring and upbeat in comparison to the Obama’s whiny, sad sack performance on 60 Minutes.

This man sold himself as a transformational leader–an agent of change who would inspire all of us to be all we can be and to work together to accomplish great things. But what has he done since January 2009 to transform government or inspire Americans to reach for greatness? Zippo, as far as I can see.

Yesterday, the Washington Post highlighted this cheery bit from the 60 Minutes interview:

“What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high,” he said in an interview aired Sunday night on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “People who have jobs see their incomes go up. Businesses make big profits. But they’ve learned to do more with less. And so they don’t hire. And as a consequence, we keep on seeing growth that is just too slow to bring back the 8 million jobs that were lost.”

[….]

He lamented his inability to make more headway in creating jobs, conceding that “I do get discouraged.”

“I thought the economy would have gotten better by now,” he said. “One of the things I think you understand as president is you’re held responsible for everything. But you don’t always have control of everything.”

[….]

“Some of this is going to be just a matter of the economy healing,” he said. “Especially an economy this big, there are limited tools to encourage the kind of job growth that we need.

Will someone please get Obama to sit down and watch a PBS special on FDR’s responses to the Great Depression? He sounds too down in the dumps to read a book. Has this man never heard of the WPA or the CCC?

Roosevelt created the CCC with an executive order. He didn’t wait around for Congress to do something about unemployment–he went way out on a limb and did it himself. And it worked. Obama won’t do anything but wait around for Congress to act so he doesn’t have to take any responsibility.

Some of us expected this based on his history of “voting present.” But a hell of a lot of people fell for his con game, and now we’re stuck with him for at least two more years. Somehow we have to light a fire under this guy, but how?

At Huffpo, Katherine Reardon compares our predicament to “Waiting for Godot.”

Perhaps we are like Samuel Beckett’s characters Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting For Godot. These men wait for a man they admit to hardly knowing but nonetheless someone they expect to change their lives. They anticipate he will sort out their problems. Yet as they wait and wait, they decide that when he arrives he will do “nothing very definite.” Still, they wait.

I waited last night for the confident Democratic President of the United States to appear on 60 Minutes but he never quite arrived. In fact, the president who did arrive said when asked by Steve Croft about his promise to change Washington:

“That’s one of the dangers of assuming power. And you know, when you’re campaigning, you, I think you’re liberated to say things without thinking about, ‘Okay, how am I gonna actually practically implement this.'”

What? Nah! He didn’t say that, did he?

Yes, Katherine, he did. This is the “lightworker” that all the “progressives” foisted on us. More from Reardon’s piece:

Croft later asked about Social Security and Medicare — “things that the American people really think are important.” In his response, the president actually referred to “entitlements,” which the Republicans — who love that word by the way — are going to have to “confront in a serious way.” Excuse me?

Why not say:

Republicans like to talk about earning what you get. That’s exactly what people do every every pay period when they contribute to Social Security. That’s their money. They earned it. That’s their nest egg and while I’m president nobody is going to steal it from them.

Or,

Let’s be very clear. Diminishing social security in any way is income redistribution. Yes, that’s what I said — exactly what the Republicans say they hate. It’s distributing hard-working Americans’ income to the rich by way of tax cuts for the wealthy.

And of course you know what our great leader had to say about tax cuts for the wealthy: he’s open to compromising with the Republicans on that. Yes, once again, our President has capitulated before the bargaining even begins.

We’ve got to get through two more years with this guy in charge. Does anyone have any ideas about how we can either get him to act like an old-style FDR Democrat or else put someone in charge who can?

Sunday Reads

Posted: November 7, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: president teleprompter jesus | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 78 Comments

Good Morning and Happy Sunday!!! I hope everyone remembered to “fall back” last night.

I’m not really recovered from my thousand-mile drive yet, so my reading suggestions might be a little scattered.

Let’s start out with the most controversial story I’ve come across. Via George Washington at Zero Hedge, Noam Chomsky, as is his wont, has come right out and said something the powers that be do not want to hear: there is no real evidence that al Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks. Sacrilege, right? Let’s see:

“The explicit and declared motive of the [Afghanistan] war was to compel the Taliban to turn over to the United States, the people who they accused of having been involved in World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist acts. The Taliban…they requested evidence…and the Bush administration refused to provide any,” the 81-year-old senior academic made the remarks on Press TV’s program a Simple Question.

“We later discovered one of the reasons why they did not bring evidence: they did not have any.” [….]

“The head of FBI, after the most intense international investigation in history, informed the press that the FBI believed that the plot may have been hatched in Afghanistan, but was probably implemented in the United Arab Emirates and Germany.”

Chomsky added that three weeks into the war, “a British officer announced that the US and Britain would continue bombing, until the people of Afghanistan overthrew the Taliban… That was later turned into the official justification for the war.”

“All of this was totally illegal. It was more, criminal,” Chomsky said.

But in the post-9/11 world, we no longer need evidence, do we? Nowadays our President can order the assassination of American citizens secretly, with no probable cause and no legal recourse.

Regarding Osama bin Laden’s supposed responsibility for 9/11, George Washington also points to this 2001 story in Wired.

President Bush has said he has evidence that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks, so it would seem obvious that the FBI would include him and other suspects on its 10 most wanted fugitives Web page.

Think again.

Bin Laden is listed, but only for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. There is no mention of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or the attacks on the USS Cole in October 2000, both of which he is widely believed to have orchestrated. And forget about Sept. 11.
The reason? Fugitives on the list must be formally charged with a crime, and bin Laden is still only a suspect in the recent attacks in New York City and Washington.

“There’s going to be a considerable amount of time before anyone associated with the attacks is actually charged,” said Rex Tomb, who is head of the FBI’s chief fugitive publicity unit and helps decide which fugitives appear on the list. “To be charged with a crime, this means we have found evidence to confirm our suspicions, and a prosecutor has said we will pursue this case in court.”

Nearly nine years later, bin Laden still has not been charged in the 9/11 attacks. This is the world that George W. Bush brought us and Barack Obama seems very comfortable in. As the Zero Hedge post points out, Obama is still using the al Quaeda excuse for continuing his bloody war in Afghanistan.

Speaking of terrorist attacks, can someone please lock Mark Penn up in a padded room somewhere and throw away the key? Penn has once again opened his big fat mouth and said something completely unacceptable.

Appearing on television recently, former Hillary Clinton campaign adviser and current public relations executive Mark Penn suggested that President Obama needs a moment “similar” to the tragic terrorist attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, in order to “reconnect” with voters.

He didn’t even seem to flinch in making the comment. [….]

“Remember, President Clinton reconnected through Oklahoma, right?” Penn said, appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball on Thursday. “And the president right now seems removed. It wasn’t until that speech [after the bombing] that [Clinton] really clicked with the American public. Obama needs a similar — a similar kind of … Yeah.

Isn’t that nice? And we’ll probably be treated to lots of CDS as a result of Penn’s idiotic statements too. Anyway, Obama already had the underwear bomber, and that didn’t seem to do anything for his approval ratings. And then there’s this guy:

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Saturday that the case of a young Chinese man who boarded a flight to Canada elaborately disguised as an elderly white male raises concerns about a security breach that terrorists might exploit.

Authorities have not suggested any terrorist link to the case of the man who boarded the Air Canada flight in Hong Kong on Oct. 29 wearing a remarkably detailed silicone mask to make him look like an elderly man. An internal intelligence alert from the Canadian Border Services Agency shows before-and-after photos, and says the man removed the mask in a washroom mid-flight.

Air Canada confirmed a passenger on board flight AC018 had altered his appearance and had been met by border services officials in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Chinese man is seeking refugee status in Canada in what border officials are calling an “unbelievable case of concealment.” Canadian authorities did not release any information about the passenger’s identity.

I highly recommend this reader diary by David Swanson at FDL: “One Place to Cut Spending: Kidnapping and Torture.”

I know it seems like more of a noble sacrifice to cut spending on things people less fortunate than ourselves need, but can somebody explain to me why it wouldn’t be at least that noble to eliminate the budget of the CIA, which serves no one?

The Washington Post and the Obama administration have been busy telling us that it’s legal to kidnap people and send them to countries that torture. They may call it “renditioning” to nations that use “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but a new book details what this means in English.

A man was walking near his home in Milano, Italy, and was stopped and questioned by a policeman. When they had been engaged in conversation for some minutes, the side door of a van parked behind the man crashed open with a thunderous sound, two extremely large and strong men grabbed the civilian and hauled him inside, and the door slammed shut three seconds after it had opened, as the van accelerated and the two men hit and kicked their victim repeatedly in the dark of the van’s interior, pounding his head, chest, stomach, and legs. They stopped. They stuffed a gag in his mouth and put a hood over his head, as they cinched cords tight around his wrists and ankles. Hours later they threw him into another vehicle. An hour later they took him out, stood him up, cut his clothes off, shoved something hard up his anus, stuck a diaper and pajamas on him, wrapped his head almost entirely with duct tape, and tossed him in an airplane.

The torture he received when he got where he was going left him nearly dead, prematurely aged, and barely able to walk. It was US-sponsored and Egyptian administered. And it is described in all of its almost unbearable detail in Steve Hendricks’ “A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial.”

That sounds like a book that should be on President Obama’s reading list. On the other hand, maybe someone should buy it for Michelle. Maybe she might see the light and talk some sense into her husband.

Mother Jones has a great article on the meaning of the midterm election results.

The most widely accepted narrative to emerge from the 2010 midterm elections, in which Democrats took a “shellacking” [There’s that buzzword again!] and lost the most congressional seats since World War II, was this: Sick of liberal overreach, voters—especially independents—shifted their favor to the right, choosing Republican candidates in huge numbers.

Not so, according to a new exit poll by the firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. The firm’s findings, released Friday, show that voters weren’t necessarily allying themselves with the GOP, but rather were voicing their disapproval with Washington as a whole, and especially with the federal government’s inability to restart America’s economic engine. To wit, voters polled gave equally poor favorability ratings to both parties as well as the tea party, the poll found. Twenty-six percent of voters said their vote was a message to “both parties,” while 20 percent said it was a rebuke of Obama and 15 percent said it was a rebuke of congressional Democrats. Voters’ chief complaint was “too much bickering in Washington”—a charge directed at both parties.

What matters most to voters isn’t political nit-picking or Washington drama but the economy, plain and simple.

IOW, jobs, jobs, jobs!! I’m not holding my breath waiting for the corporate media and the political elites to get it, though.

Here’s a breaking news story [snark font] from the Hindustan Times on President Obama’s trip: Obama to use teleprompter for Hindi speech

According to parliament sources, a technical team from the US has helped the Lok Sabha secretariat install textbook-sized panes of glass around the podium that will give cues to Obama on his prepared remarks to 780 Indian MPs on the evening of Nov 8….

Obama will make history for more than one reason during the Nov 6-9 visit. This will be the first time a teleprompter will be used in the nearly 100-feet high dome-shaped hall that has portraits of eminent national leaders adorning its walls.

Indian politicians are known for making impromptu long speeches and perhaps that is why some parliament officials, who did not wish to be named, sounded rather surprised with the idea of a teleprompter for Obama.

“We thought Obama is a trained orator and skilled in the art of mass address with his continuous eye contact,” an official, who did not wish to be identified because of security restrictions, said.

Obama is known to captivate audiences with his one-liners that sound like extempore and his deep gaze. But few in India know that the US president always carries the teleprompter with him wherever he speaks.

How sad it is to see yet another country disillusioned by the man of “hope ‘n’ change.”

[MABlue here] Frank Rich has a pretty good column today.  He has a decent list of the faux pas of the Obama administration so far.
Barack Obama, Phone Home

AFTER his “shellacking,” President Obama had to do something. But who had the bright idea of scheduling his visit to India for right after this election? The Democrats’ failure to create jobs was at the heart of the shellacking. Nothing says “outsourcing” to the American public more succinctly than India. But the White House didn’t figure this out until the eve of Obama’s Friday departure, when it hastily rebranded his trip as a jobs mission. Perhaps the president should visit one of the Indian call centers policing Americans’ credit-card debts to feel our pain.

Oh! Good luck Texas!

Texas Considers Medicaid Withdrawal

Some Republican lawmakers — still reveling in Tuesday’s statewide election sweep — are proposing an unprecedented solution to the state’s estimated $25 billion budget shortfall: dropping out of the federal Medicaid program.

I thought we were looking for ways to save. You’ve all heard about these horrible deficits  and how we have to “cut spending” ad nauseum. But look here, we keep finding new ways to throw boatloads away:

US seeks to expand military presence in Asia

On his way to Australia for annual security talks, Mr Gates said closer ties with Australia would help the US expand its role in South East Asia.

The US would focus on fighting piracy, improving counter-terrorism, disaster aid and cyber-security, he said.

I thought we had resolved all the problems in “that part of the world”:

Church leader urges Iraqi Christians to quit country

A senior Iraqi Christian is to call on believers to quit the country, after gunmen targeted a church in Baghdad.

Wow! This guy got big brass ones:

Man arrested after exposing self to deputy

A 48-year-old man parked his car in the front row facing the courthouse midday Thursday, pulled down his shorts in front of a Pasco County Sheriff’s Office detective and began masturbating

Talk about “having balls”.

That’s about it for me. What’s on your reading list this morning?

The Latest Annoying Media Buzzword: Shellacking

Posted: November 5, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Team Obama, The Media SUCKS | Tags: , , , | 88 Comments

From the transcript of President Obama’s press conference, November 3, 2010:

…I’m not recommending for every future President that they take a shellacking… like I did last night. (Laughter.) I’m sure there are easier ways to learn these lessons. But I do think that this is a growth process and an evolution. And the relationship that I’ve had with the American people is one that built slowly, peaked at this incredible high, and then during the course of the last two years, as we’ve, together, gone through some very difficult times, has gotten rockier and tougher. And it’s going to, I’m sure, have some more ups and downs during the course of me being in this office.

Apparently the media just loved the word the President used to describe the results of the midterm elections, because they just can’t stop repeating it. Over and over and over again. Some examples:

Christian Science Monitor: After ‘shellacking,’ can foreign policy be a bright spot for Obama?

USA Today: Obama’s ‘shellacking’ — how badly will it bruise his agenda?

Fox News: Despite the shellacking, Obama keeping his team intact

Yesterday, on NPR’s All Things Considered, Robert Siegel and Michele Norris discussed the word “shellacking” and tried to determine how the word came to mean “a decisive defeat.”

ROBERT SIEGEL: A shellacking – that is, a decisive defeat, according to Merriam-Webster’s. The term has an old-timey feel to it, like something used by a stern father decades ago.

MICHELLE NORRIS: Maybe that’s because it has an older meaning: a finish for furniture made with lac – L-A-C – as in lacquer.

SIEGEL: You mean lac, a resinous secretion of an insect deposited on trees and used in making shellac, a varnish.

NORRIS: Thanks, Random House.

SIEGEL: So how did shellac make the linguistic leap to defeat? Jesse Sheidlower, of the Oxford English Dictionary, was half-expecting our call about this today. But he didn’t find a definitive answer. He ruled out origins in sports. And he said shellac smelled of alcohol and became slang for drunk. He says it was prison slang.

NORRIS: From crime to politics, meaning washed up or trounced – which is, in case you missed it, exactly what happened to the Democratic Party in Tuesday’s elections.

I don’t know about you, but I’m already really sick of the word “shellacking.” I do think Robert Siegel had interesting point, though, when he said the word had “an old-timey feel to it, like something used by a stern father decades ago.”

During the campaign, Obama was painted as being “cool,” but his use of language since he became President does come across as old-fashioned and very uncool–as with his frequent use of the term “folks” to refer to ordinary Americans.

It would be interesting to know where Obama gets these words. Do they come from speechwriter Jon Favreau or from the President himself? If they are Obama’s own words, where did he pick them up? Did they come from his grandfather or grandmother?

In any case, we are likely to keep reading and hearing this new buzzword for some time to come. It will even get more widespread publicity Sunday night, since Obama has taped an interview with 60 Minutes, and the “shellacking” will be discussed at length.

Unfortunately the President’s rationalization for the “shellacking” is either deliberately obtuse or utterly tone-deaf, as usual. Nevertheless, we’ll probably be hearing his ridiculous explanation repeated again and again too. He told 60 Minutes’ Steve Croft that the big problem was not his policies, but his failure to explain his policies to us.

Obama: What I didn’t effectively, I think, drive home, because we were in such a rush to get this stuff done, is that we were taking these steps not because of some theory that we wanted to expand government. It was because we had an emergency situation and we wanted to make sure the economy didn’t go off a cliff.

The president also tells Kroft that one of the reasons the electorate has become disenchanted with him was his failure to properly explain his policies and persuade people to agree with them.

It was, in effect, a breakdown in leadership: “Leadership isn’t just legislation,” he tells Kroft.

Supposedly, if the President had only explained all of his policies to us poor clueless voters, we would have understood that he knew what was best for us and would gladly have rushed to the polls to vote for Democrats. Here’s another quote from the interview:

“You know, I think that over the course of two years we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that we stopped paying attention to the fact that leadership isn’t just legislation. That it’s a matter of persuading people. And giving them confidence and bringing them together. And setting a tone. And making an argument that people can understand. And I think that we haven’t always been successful at that. And I take personal responsibility for that. And it’s something that I’ve got to examine carefully as I go forward.”

See, if he had very clearly spelled out why it was so important to keep a public option out of the health care bill, and why it was vital that the bill should prevent women from getting abortions in the future, everything would have been hunky-dory. And if he had more clearly explained why we needed to stay in Iraq instead of withdrawing as he had repeatedly promised, and why we needed a “surge” in Afghanistan and lots more civilian and military deaths, then voters would have seen things completely differently.

In his press conference, Obama also argued that one message of the midterm results is that he needs to get out of the White House more often. In response to a question about his leadership style, the President said:

There is a inherent danger in being in the White House and being in the bubble. I mean, folks didn’t have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa for a year. And they got a pretty good look at me up close and personal, and they were able to lift the hood and kick the tires, and I think they understood that my story was theirs. I might have a funny name, I might have lived in some different places, but the values of hard work and responsibility and honesty and looking out for one another that had been instilled in them by their parents, those were the same values that I took from my mom and my grandparents.

And so the track record has been that when I’m out of this place, that’s not an issue. When you’re in this place, it is hard not to seem removed. And one of the challenges that we’ve got to think about is how do I meet my responsibilities here in the White House, which require a lot of hours and a lot of work, but still have that opportunity to engage with the American people on a day-to-day basis, and know — give them confidence that I’m listening to them.

There’s another clueless rationalization! So he’s going to try to get out of Washington even more than he did in the first two years of his presidency? It’s hard for me to imagine how he could get away any more than he already has. But if Obama does actually appear at more town hall meetings, it might be helpful if he actually listened to some real Americans instead of lecturing them endlessly on how stupid they are not to see the wonderfulness of his policies.

What I haven’t seen so far is any sign that Obama intends to make any substantive changes following the “shellacking” Democrats received at the polls on Tuesday. The “core” group of White House staffers will stay on, even though many Democrats have been pushing for a real shakeup of Obama’s primary advisers.

A Democratic strategist characterized the lack of change at the White House as “willful defiance.” The strategist, who discussed the issue on condition of anonymity, said, “The political operation from top to bottom, north to south, east to west, needs to be really carefully looked at.”

Even within the White House, some aides have objected to what they see as an insular culture. Obama’s practice of grooming understudies to fill big White House jobs is also under fire.

“The president needs a broader range of views on a daily basis than he’s gotten up till now,” said William Galston, a onetime aide to President Clinton and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “One reason that Ronald Reagan succeeded as president was that he got out of his comfort zone when he appointed senior people, and I think this president needs some people around him who are prepared to challenge not only his policy instincts but his political instincts. The idea of constructing the White House simply by promoting from within is simply ridiculous.”

At the Financial Times, Anna Fifield writes that even after the famous “shellacking,”

…“No Drama Obama” has maintained his generally cool demeanour – no Bill Clinton-style emoting for him – and given little indication that he intends significantly to alter his modus operandi.

Although the president said he was “doing a whole lot of reflecting” on the electoral rout, he suggested the problem was with communications, rather than his core policies.

As long as Obama claims the only problem has been his failure to communicate the wonderfulness of his policies, I guess we aren’t going to see any real changes.

Fifield also reveals that President Obama has been reading Taylor Branch’s book about the Clinton years.

“President Clinton was very aggressive – he did a series of bipartisan accords and turned things around,” said Mark Penn, the pollster who helped Mr Clinton recover from the 1994 rout.

Mr Obama revealed that he has been reading historian Taylor Branch’s book about Mr Clinton’s years in the White House, although it remains to be seen whether he will follow suit.

“The real question is whether or not the president [Obama] will learn from what the voters are saying, because two years is a long time in politics,” Mr Penn said.

Aaaak!!! Why do I think Obama will learn the wrong lessons from that book? I think he may be headed for another “shellacking” in 2012.

What is Wrong with Barack Obama?

Posted: July 26, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, John McCain, psychology, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , | Comments Off on What is Wrong with Barack Obama?

Well, in the first place he is incredibly arrogant, haughty, full-of-himself, and entitled. He appears to have almost no empathy for other people. On the other hand, he is very good at using people as long as he wants something from them, and then throwing them under the bus when he no longer needs them. For starters, just ask Rev. Wright, Rev., Pfleger, the members of Trinity United Church of Christ, “former” advisors Samantha Power and Austen Goolsbee, Jim Johnson (former VP committe member), whoever created the “Great Possum Seal,” the “progressive” bloggers who supported him unstintingly for months, and his own grandmother. In fact Obama has added a new cliche to the American vernacular, “He (or she) wasn’t the person I once knew.”

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