Category Archives: Cabinet
Sharpton In Hagel Out
Just another day at the White House. Al Sharpton – in, Chuck Hagel – out.
Hagel was hired as Secretary of Defense because he’s a Republican who shared Obama’s views on ending war. Things went south for Hagel when he proved unable to end war and begin war with ISIS at the same time.
Tax deadbeat Reverend Al Sharpton was invited to the White House to end racism…
Hagel Gone
Chuck Hagel is gone as Secretary of Defense. He was Obama’s third bird. All three complained about interference from the White House staff. They were ok with the cooks and butlers but not so much Susan Rice, McDonough, and Ben Rhodes. Here’s an example from Bloomberg.
Like his immediate predecessors at the Pentagon, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, Hagel chafed at the way a small cadre of Obama loyalists centralized power in the White House. When Obama backed off a threat to bomb Syria last year, he made the decision on a walk with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough. Hagel was informed of the decision later.
Hagel is is flying the coop, but not just yet. He’ll stay on until Secretary of Defense IV is found.
DEA NFL
Here’s a new headache for the NFL, and this time it’s not from concussions.
DEA agents raided traveling NFL team docs and trainers last Sunday. They snooped through their bags searching for painkillers. The idea being that since they were traveling from out of state, the docs might be prescribing drugs without a license.
Interestingly, being out of state doesn’t prevent the players from being hit with local taxes in the state where a game is played.
Not About Him
Well, it’s finally not about him. That was President Obama’s reaction to the Republican wave that swept Democratic governors and senators out to sea.
He said the voters’ message is that they want to “get stuff done” and “make Washington work”.
Daniel Henninger sees it differently. He thinks the “labor force participation rate” killed the Dems:
Read between the lines of this paragraph in the federal government’s October employment report, on the eve of the election:
“In September, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.”
Henninger says the average economic growth rate since WWII is 3.3%:
Here are the growth rates for each year of the Obama presidency (World Bank data):
2009: -2.8%; 2010: 2.5%; 2011: 1.8%; 2012: 2.8%; 2013: 1.9%
You preside over that performance, you lose. The 2014 growth uptick arrived too late to save the Democrats.
About Him
Before the election Obama said it would be about him, his policies, actually. Now he says it was about Republicans working with him. My friend Steve Kelly nailed the Obamian Attitude with this cartoon. Click the thumbnail.
Chickenshit
An article in the Atlantic reveals that an anonymous White House staffer wanted it known he thinks Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “chickenshit“. Seemed like a chickenshit thing to do.
The White House is making no effort to identify the chicken.
According to Politico staffers have also said Secretary of State John Kerry is tumbling untethered through space like Sandra Bullock in the movie “Gravity”. Meanwhile, President Obama has become so untethered from popular support chances are he’ll lose the Senate on Tuesday.
Another Politico story says that the administration is so worried about the midterms it sent forth cabinet members like flying monkeys to scare up votes. Alas:
Their efforts do not appear to have done any good. Obama’s numbers, if anything, have gone down, and the only question Democrats are going into Tuesday with is how many losses they’re going to suffer.
Could be his cabinet secretaries were unenthusiastic after losing influence to the White House staff. (From the first Politico piece)
Earlier, Obama’s first two secretaries of defense, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, published books criticizing his decisions on national security. Specifically, they complained that Obama has brought so much responsibility into the executive office of the president that it has paralyzed the White House’s ability to think strategically.
The National Security Council itself has grown from about 50 people under President George W. Bush to just under 400 people under Obama, Reuters reported.
Chickenshit
Many of whom are young and inexperienced.
