Tuesday Reads

Posted: February 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Central Intelligence Agency, Egypt, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

Oh no! Not another giant snowstorm!

Good Morning!!

Have you heard about the gigantic winter storm that is affecting 29 states?

From the Washington Post:

National Weather Service advisories and warnings are in effect in more than 20 states as a powerful storm gets organized in the Midwest. A blizzard warning is in effect for Chicago, where 12 to 20 inches of snow is possible. Other cities which may experience blizzard conditions include Tulsa, Wichita, Kansas City, and Detroit. Snow is expected to begin tonight and tomorrow from southwest to northeast and continue into early Wednesday.

The Chicago Tribune’s Weather Center cautions: “Snowfall totals in excess of 12 inches coupled with winds of 25 to 40 mph will make long distance travel extremely dangerous if not impossible.”

Wednesday morning into Thursday, the heavy snow moves through central New York, northern Massachusetts,southern Vermont, New Hampshire and southeast Maine.

Weather.com says the storm may be historic, due to the areal coverage of snow forecast – with upwards of 1 foot likely across a “2100-mile long swath from the Southern Plains to coastal New England.”

We’re supposed to get 18 inches in the Boston area, plus it will be mixed with ice pellets on Wednesday. I can’t take it anymore!!!!! All this snow is really getting to me.

In other news, the Republicans are all a-twitter over some guy named Jon Huntsman who is probably going to run for President. I admit I never heard of him and couldn’t care less what he does, but it seems to be the talk of the Village. To top it off, this guy has been working for Obama. Does he have any Democrats working for him?

Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the U.S. ambassador to China, sent a resignation letter to President Barack Obama on Monday, the White House said. Huntsman now is likely to explore a Republican presidential bid, according to supporters.

In a letter hand-delivered to the White House, the former Utah governor said that he wants to return to the United States by May. The letter thanks Obama for the opportunity to serve the country and praises the U.S. embassy staff in Beijing.

If Huntsman won the GOP nomination, he would be challenging the reelection of his former boss. White House officials are furious at what they consider an audacious betrayal, but know that any public criticism would be likely to benefit Huntsman if he enters the primaries.

Huntsman boasts the most foreign policy experience of any of the likely GOP candidates, and would be a formidable entry to the unformed GOP field. He had a fiscally conservative record as governor, opposes abortion and is a strong supporter of gun owners’ rights.

Yep, sounds like Obama’s type.

If you haven’t read Joseph Cannon’s latest, you should rush right over and do so. He has a fascinating, well-researched post up about Ali Abdul Saoud, a.k.a. Ali A. Mohammed, a muslim double agent who worked for both the CIA and al Qaeda and may have been involved (along with Omar Suleiman?) in the assassination of Anwar Sadat.

It’s a fascinating read, and I’m not just saying that because Cannon linked to my post on Suleiman.

This is a frightening story out of Egypt: Google Executive Missing in Wake of Egypt Protests.

An executive for Google Inc. is missing in the wake of Egypt’s tumultuous protests, according to his brother. Wael Ghonim, whose LinkedIn profile says he is head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa at Google, hasn’t been heard from since Friday at 6 p.m., his brother Hazem said.

[….]

Wael Ghonim’s web postings suggest a deepening engagement with politics. His Facebook page lists opposition figure Mohamed ElBaradei as a person he admires, along with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs. In mid-January he tweeted that he was traveling to Qatar to participate at an Internet freedom forum hosted by network Al Jazeera.

Later, he sent a tweet that said he was going to join the Egyptian protests despite “all the warnings I got from my relative and friends.”

[….]

On Friday, he tweeted: “Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to die.”

I think a lot more people are probably dead and missing in Egypt than we are being told. I hope Ghonim will be found.

The Christian Science Monitor asks, “Did Jimmy Carter just throw Obama under the bus?”

Commenting on the week’s tumultuous events in Egypt from the Maranatha Baptist Church near his home in Plains, Ga., the former president who brokered the 1979 peace accord between Egypt and Israel gave a candid personal assessment of Egypt’s embattled leader and said his “guess is Mubarak will have to go.”

President Mubarak has “become more politically corrupt” in recent years and has “perpetuated himself in office,” he told a Sunday school class of 300, according to the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. Assessing the popular uprisings sweeping across the region, he said: “This is the most profound situation in the Middle East since I left office” more than 30 years ago.

I sure hope it’s a different bus than the one we’re under, because I don’t want Obama down here with us.

Speaking of throwing people under the bus, Tom Brokaw made a critical reference to Keith Olbermann in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. Here’s Huffpo’s gossipy take on it.

He told the Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal that NBC was better placed than its rivals because of MSNBC.

“Where it got sticky is when our commentators were anchoring political coverage,” he said, in a clear reference to Olbermann. Brokaw was widely known to have complained about Olbermann’s anchoring of campaign coverage during the 2008 race. “Those are, in some ways, incompatible roles,” Brokaw continued. “We worked our way through that.”

Rosenthal then asked Brokaw what he thought of Olbermann’s exit. “You’re not going to get me to go there,” Brokaw said. But when pushed, he said that MSNBC will weather the storm.

He went there.

Did you hear that Mayor Bloomberg arranged for an undercover investigation of the recent Arizona gun show? The New York Times has the skinny.

The investigation, part of an effort by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration to crack down on illegal gun sales nationwide, took place Jan. 23 at the Crossroads of the West Gun Show in Phoenix, officials said.

“The background check system failed in Arizona, it failed in Virginia and it fails in states around the country,” said John Feinblatt, an adviser to Mr. Bloomberg. “If we don’t fix it now, the question is not whether another massacre will occur, but when.”

Private, unlicensed sellers are not required to run federal background checks, but it is a violation of federal law to sell guns to people if sellers suspect they are felons or mentally ill or are otherwise prohibited from buying. In the case of Jared L. Loughner, who is accused of opening fire on the crowd in Tucson on Jan. 8, the gun used in the shootings was bought at a licensed gun dealer, and he passed a background check, the authorities said.

In two instances, the New York undercover officers specifically said before buying a gun, “I probably couldn’t pass a background check,” but were still sold guns, city officials said.

Finally, here’s a fluffy story to go along with the white stuff that a lot of us will be seeing outside our windows today and tomorrow: How Meditation May Change the Brain

…researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.

I’m not particularly surprised, but the woman who wrote the article is. Check it out.

Sooooo…. What are you reading and blogging about this morning? Please share!

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?

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